Soon they are near enough to see that the smoke is rising from a wrecked car, which is burning upside down in a patch of flowering broom. ‘Someone’s still alive,’ says Taylor. Sure enough, a man in a bloodstained white shirt is standing at the side of the road, waving his arms at them. ‘Looks like another one as well. A girl.’ Tom shields his eyes to get a better look. The man, thickset and dark, with a heavy moustache, is staggering drunkenly, zig-zagging across the narrow road. Tom sees that, yes, there is another person, a young woman, crouching next to what looks like a body propped against a small tree. Hearing the car, she looks up and gets painfully to her feet. In the dazzling light she is a smear of dark cloth and a blurred, deathly pale face. Head down, she limps towards the white-shirted man.

‘Poor bastards,’ Sergeant Taylor mutters. Can’t be helped, Tom thinks. They are making good time at last and, according to his map, they are only another half hour from Marathon. But the sergeant is braking. ‘I’d rather not run this bugger over, sir. He’s all over the place.’ The man is staggering across the road, flailing his arms, and Taylor has to slow right down to avoid him, enough for the man to catch hold of the passenger door. He starts bellowing into Tom’s face.

‘Inglesi? Inglis? ’

‘English, yes,’ says Tom wearily. ‘Stop the car, then, Sergeant Taylor. I suppose we might be able to do something.’

Tom steps out. He has seen enough in the past two weeks to confirm that the man in front of him isn’t wounded. Shocked, of course, quite badly, but the blood must belong to someone else. Not the young woman: she wouldn’t be walking if she’d lost that much. The man against the tree over there … Strangely, he seems to be holding what looks like a sort of mandolin.

‘Do you speak English?’ he asks the man in front of him, who is blinking and licking his lips. ‘Here, old chap,’ he adds, holding out his tin of ration cigarettes. The man pulls one out and Tom lights it for him, holding the bloodied hand steady.

‘Efcharistó …’

‘How many of you are there? How many hurt?’ Tom wants to be patient, he really does, but there isn’t time for this. Something in the wrecked car’s engine explodes with a small bang and he flinches. He sees Taylor flinch as well. ‘Has anyone been killed?’ he asks, louder. The man just shakes his head, disbelief in his face.

‘Νεκρόζ,’ he rasps. ‘Νεκρόζ.’

Nekros: Tom knows that word at least, from the last days in the mountains, when his battery had been in action alongside a Greek unit. ‘Dead?’ Tom says. ‘How many?’