‘No. I met a soldier on the road. He was running away... a deserter. He swapped clothes with me.’

The soldier nodded his head and a dark fringe of hair flopped over his eyes; pale eyes that glowed bright. He had a tiny moustache like a small paintbrush. ‘We need more brave lads like you... and fewer of the cowards that run from the fight. If they were all like you – and me – we’d have won this war years ago.’ He patted Marius on the shoulder. ‘Brave lad.’

‘I don’t want to kill anyone – just help our injured countrymen. I’ve seen a few that came home wounded.’

‘Just a few? Then you’re lucky,’ the soldier said. ‘I’ve been in and out of these trenches for four years and seen things that will haunt me for the rest of my life.’

‘What sort of things?’ Marius asked, wide-eyed and pale.

The man just shook his head. ‘It’s over now. This trench war is over. We’re moving west. We’re moving fast. We’ll drive the British into the sea and send them back to their puny little island. Four years of mud and blood and we’re on the move at last. They’re running away like trench rats,’ he snorted.

Marius stepped forward. ‘I’d better get after them. The hospital is packed and ready to follow our great army.’

The soldier just nodded. ‘They say we drove the British back fifteen kilometres yesterday. Get your running boots on, lad.’ He hefted a pack on to his bony shoulder, gripped his rifle and headed to the road where lorries full of soldiers trundled westwards.

‘See you,’ Marius called after him.

The man turned and scowled. ‘I hope not. If I see you then it means I’ll be wounded in hospital. I’ve been there once and don’t want to see you nurses again.’

Marius grinned. ‘I suppose so, Corporal.’

The soldier stared towards the sinking sun in the west. His pale eyes glowed icicle-blue. ‘When we have beaten the British we’ll take their empire, then crush the French and rule the world.’

Marius blinked. ‘You think so?’

The soldier sniffed the rank, dank air. ‘I know so... or my name isn’t Hitler. Adolf Hitler.’ He turned on his heel and marched off.

Marius picked up his own pack of bandages, potions and pills and set off over no man’s land. For four years this ground between the British trenches and the German trenches had been gashed and gouged, shaped, scraped and scored by shells from the big guns. The boy knew the sour smell of the killing ground from the bodies and the clothes of the soldiers he’d patched up, back in the Saint Quentin hospital.

He stepped carefully on to the softened soil. In the watery shell-holes there was a green metal-sheen of slime made by the poison gases the armies had fired at one another.