Tom is walking with a platoon of paratroopers behind a Sherman tank as it grinds along a street near the gasworks of Gazi District. The Division has been pushing out from its bases on the Acropolis and around Syntagma now that Churchill’s promised reinforcements have arrived. Although the fighting has not let up – if anything, it has got worse – since Christmas, something has shifted. Tom believes that the Greeks have, at long last, reached their breaking point. After the occupation, the famine, the round-ups and shootings, this new horror, this civil war that is destroying the city that the Germans at least left intact, has been too much. People say, ‘We just want the king to come back,’ even though the words sound like they are choking them. The hated king is at least a known quantity. The British Army have become a necessary evil. Just yesterday, Tom was out with a patrol probing north into Metaxourgeiou when one of the men was hit in the leg by a sniper. While the rest of the patrol took care of the gunman, the wounded man was left lying in the road with the platoon’s medic and Tom. A middle-aged woman ran out from her house with a basin of hot water and a roll of bandages and began to dress the wound with a sort of angry efficiency which took the medic, and the wounded man, by surprise. The woman seemed furious – with the sniper, with Tom, with the man who had been shot – but also confused. One minute she berated the poor man while wrapping his thigh with bandages, the next she was clucking over him as if he were her own son.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Tom asked her.

‘Because God cannot stand it any longer!’ she snapped at him, and crossed herself angrily. The war is no longer just a fight to stay alive. It has become an offence against Heaven itself. The woman tied the bandage with a viciously tight knot, then burst into tears, her trembling hands stroking the wounded man’s cheek with a tenderness that was almost unbearable to watch. She was going to ask Tom something, he was sure, but she didn’t say anything else. He could imagine her question, though: why are you doing this? But he has no answer to that any more.

The tank expels a gout of black exhaust and stops. The commander calls down to the platoon leader. ‘There’s a report of civilian bodies in a courtyard near here, sir. Orders from HQ to investigate and collect identification.’