The truck swerved, jolted, potholes as deep as craters filled with oily black water, bulbous grey clouds reflected in the surface. A few isolated houses began to appear, to cluster, become a street, a village with a cobblestone square and high-pitched wooden frame houses, not a tile out of place, not a mortared road, not a blackened ruin. A fairy-tale village, like the picture of one in the Baedeker guide to Northern Germany he’d found in the school library. How had this place been spared the war? There were spring flowers in the window boxes, narcissus and primroses, and some of the windows were open, their white lace curtains blowing in the breeze, the shutters secured to the walls. People must have been living in the houses, hiding inside, the streets and the square deserted save for a thin, mangy brown dog that sniffed the gutter, limping.

John sat in the back of the truck, its canvas cover taut at the sides. It was damp to the touch, spat their musty breath back to them in cold, hard droplets, let in the wind through the webbing. He was next to a private with dusty ankle gaiters and shining boots, sitting at the end of the bench closest to the opening, his rifle across his knees, his hand poised over the trigger, looking out. Private Nash, 5th King’s. John hardly knew him. He didn’t talk much.

‘I like dogs,’ he said. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. ‘Here, boy.’ The dog looked up, pricked its ears and Private Nash clicked his fingers. ‘Here, boy.’

Opposite John was his sergeant and the other men, a ragbag of regimental leftovers in John’s charge. Second Lieutenant John Harris. Six weeks at Pirbright brushing up his school German, six weeks square-bashing at Caterham. Commission. What the fuck did he know? He was eighteen years old. The sergeant was twice his age.

‘With a bit of luck,’ his father had said, ‘this bally war will be over and you’ll never hear a shot fired in anger.’

Only it wasn’t over, was it? John pulled out his cigarettes and, leaning forward, offered one to the sergeant. Arthur. His name was Arthur. Sergeant Arthur Gambol. North Africa. Normandy. Now Nordhausen, with a bit of luck. Pushing his way across Germany with this motley crew. He must have a guardian angel, John thought, some high-up with God’s ear because John couldn’t see for the life of him how he’d survived all of that. He was married to an infant teacher, John knew, with a son conceived when he was on leave. Arthur took a cigarette, lit it, and sat with it in his mouth, smoke curling into his eyes. They must have developed a second lid, John thought, they never watered once. The other soldiers sat holding their rifles, faces blank, tense.