This must be temporary. Maximilian had a plan. She should trust him.

The Revier had two wards. One, no more than a cupboard, at the rear of the building, had two bunk beds and was for women too weak or ill to work. Those with VD or TB or who were deemed too difficult were packed off to France. Dora hated signing that form, as if it was a death warrant. Replacements would arrive by the next ship. Dora’s number was two hundred and seventy-one. They were up to three hundred and eighty-eight already.

The other, in the front, was the ward reserved for soldiers who had contracted venereal disease. Bright and airy, it could accommodate up to ten soldiers and one officer, staying for weeks at a time. Dora had to scrub the floors and walls, wash the men and change their beds. It was heavy work and hard, in her condition, lifting and bending. It could bring on a hernia, or worse. She had to treat the chancres and lesions, fearful lest she contract the disease too, reporting back to Nurse Hoffmann, who wrote the notes and made Dora copy them out in triplicate.

‘You make no mistakes,’ Nurse Hoffmann said. ‘It’s as if you knew German.’

‘Anyone can copy,’ Dora said.

Working with Nurse Hoffmann was hard. There was something about her that made Dora especially wary. She had a temper and was free with her fists if Dora’s work was not up to scratch. That didn’t worry Dora. It was her spite, as if she resented Dora, was in some absurd way, jealous of her. Dora lived on a knife-edge, one false step, kaputt. But for all that, it was better than the brothel, and even though Maximilian List had not yet brought her to Alderney, he had rescued her from the whorehouse.

‘Do you miss your boyfriend?’ Nurse Hoffmann was injecting one of the men with Salvarsan. It was a painful injection, Dora knew, deep into the gluteus muscle and sometimes the men howled like babies. It was February. It had rained all day, and now it was hailing, thick globs of ice that smashed against the window-panes and turned the light to a sodden gloom.