Tom lights a cigarette and curls up against the cold. He is still in tropical uniform beneath his scrounged greatcoat; the thin trousers and Aertex shirt are little better than pyjamas. Sergeant Duffield has promised to find him a woolly jumper but so far it has not appeared. The cold is savage. It has taken him by surprise – taken everyone by surprise, because it is meant to be hot in Greece. He keeps hearing these words muttered like a catechism: ‘I thought it was meant to be sunny in Greece, sir, boiling ’ot,’ over and over in Australian, New Zealand, Devon and Midlands accents, as if the mere dogged repetition will make date palms sprout up out of these frostbitten fields.

It has been snowing off and on for two days and there is a thin, hard crust of frozen snow on the ground. He stares at the ridge to the north, wondering at the familiarity of it all, at the village of Vevi on the crest, occupied since yesterday by a brigade of the Waffen-SS. So far, his war has been quite predictable. A few variations on themes of boredom and the drudgery: boarding school reinvented by one of Lucifer’s minor secretaries. To pass the time, he tries to imagine how he would paint all this. Landscape by Moonlight, after Samuel Palmer. Tom shuts his eyes and tries to imagine it. But Samuel Palmer couldn’t make this place anything other than it is: bland and freezing.

Just after dawn, Sergeant Duffield slides around the nearest truck and squats down next to him.

‘All right if the men brew up, sir?’

‘Of course, Sergeant.’

The sergeant shouts across the road and there is a muted, sarcastic cheer. The acrid smell of burning solid fuel, oddly comforting, rises over the dead grass and leafless almond trees. Duffield coughs and spits thickly into the bottom of the ditch.

‘I expect it was colder in Norway,’ Tom says through clenched teeth. His sergeant has been through it – Dunkirk, Norway, Libya. He volunteered this information yesterday over a cup of lukewarm cocoa in which the sugar had failed to mask the taste of petrol. He seemed to have decided to give the young subaltern the benefit of the doubt, though, after Tom had corrected the troop’s field of fire and gone out for a reconnaissance on his own, a cautious stroll among the stunted trees that accomplished nothing except to chill him even more thoroughly. Tom hasn’t told Sergeant Duffield that he used to be an art student, and that so far his war has consisted of nothing worse than an infected mosquito bite in Alexandria. On the other hand, Tom suspects all this is bloody obvious.

‘Oh, yes, sir. Much colder,’ agrees the sergeant. ‘Much colder than this. Mind you, sir, you expect it to be cold, don’t you – Norway? Not Greece, though. Bit of a swizz, if you ask me.’