He sits on a bollard, trying to understand what has happened. He is stranded. And the colonel’s order had been nonsense. There is no order here at all. Downwind, the row of dead is creating a faint but unmistakably sweet tang. He smokes, and walks along the quay. The long, sculpted keel of the Hellas looks as sleek as a whale’s back, too beautiful to be holding the cargo that must be drifting in its guts. Out to sea, warships are steaming away, past the low islands that drift between the harbour and the horizon. The sun leans westward and everything becomes flat, a scene painted roughly in two or three colours: grey, ochre, black. The Austin does not reappear.

Time for me to get out of here, he decides. There are plenty of abandoned trucks and Bren carriers. He chooses a Morris truck, the same type used by his troop. The thing won’t start, though, and when he looks under the bonnet he finds that the distributor has been ripped out. He goes from vehicle to vehicle, but every one has been sabotaged or damaged by bombs. In one of them he finds bundles of clothing. He pulls out a pair of trousers in his size and a raincoat, all brand new, and he throws away his makeshift shorts and changes into his loot. As he pulls on the raincoat he realises how cold he is. It is an officer’s coat, much nicer than the one he left behind in Alexandria. ‘Fortunes of war,’ he mutters to himself, rifling through the contents of a half-looted Catering Corps lorry and filling his pockets with biscuits, tins of fish, chocolate and cigarettes.

It gets dark suddenly in Greece. The sun is going down. Tom looks at his watch: it has stopped at 2.14. He remembers winding it this morning but then, perhaps it was yesterday? He hasn’t slept for at least two days and time is beginning to slip and slide. And he is starving. He eats two cans of sardines, watching a gang of Greek children who have emerged from an alley to fish with pieces of string in the oily water. Tom waves and they wave back, but otherwise they ignore him. An air-raid siren starts to howl and a formation of German planes roars over, very low. They drop their loads out in the bay but they don’t seem to have hit anything. There are more people moving around in the shadows: civilians quietly looting the trucks. They don’t pay any attention to him at all. He wonders if any of them know the woman, the singer. Zoë. I’m glad we parted as friends, he thinks. I hope she survives all this. The thought that she might not hits him with surprising force. To escape it, he sets off again across the debris, his ruined kingdom.