‘Where to begin …? In the final weeks of the war I was in Correze. That is where I am from, Fairfax. A quiet, pretty place, not unlike your own little part of the world. Such horrors had been committed there, mon ami. The people were dying. The Nazis, Das Reich were sweeping through like disease. My unit was sent to liberate the town of Tulle. We blew up a bridge. We engaged the occupying SS and we defeated them. And then the Nazis came back. I was captured by the Milice. Do you know the Milice by reputation, Fairfax? These men were zealots. They were criminals and madmen who believed in Hitlerism as much as any German. They scared us more than the SS. How were we to know which among us was a traitor? They were our neighbours. Our brothers and sisters. Among them was a man called Favre. He had been a leatherworker before the war. He had been in prison when the Nazis invaded. The story was that he had been imprisoned for taking the skin from a young man’s back after a dispute over a girl. He was picked out by the Milice as a man with special skills. He became their interrogator.

‘Favre was set to work on me, Fairfax. He hurt me in ways I could not imagine. I was stretched across the bonnet of a German military vehicle and in the centre of Tulle, as the whole village watched, he heated a handful of coins in a brazier. These he placed upon my skin, one at a time, as he softly asked questions about Maquis movements. I smelled my skin cooking. The pattern of the coins ate into my skin. I heard women and children sobbing and men pleading for mercy. I told him I knew nothing and he did not seem to care. Eventually I gave him a name. A town I knew had no Maquis. A safe haven that the Germans would soon see as no threat. He seemed pleased with my choice. He told his commander. They left me there to watch what happened next. I still see them. See those ninety-nine men hanging from the lampposts in the square.