New grass was already beginning to grow over the ruined earth and, high above him, a skylark sang. It seemed to sing what the soldier had said: ‘It’s over now, it’s over now.’ Marius walked another hundred metres and reached the trenches that had just been deserted by the British. This was where men had crouched below their sandbags and had burrowed shelters into the sides of the trenches.

The boy stepped down on to the damp boards of the trench and peered into one of the dugouts. The mud walls were lined with old waterproof capes and pieces of boxwood. A crate made a table and the enemy had found a shabby old horsehair chair to sit on.

A soot-black kettle sat on a rusting paraffin stove, its water cold as Christmas now. Marius shook his head at the misery the British had suffered here. No wonder they had fled down the road home. The German trenches – the ones he’d seen a hundred metres away – were dug deep and snug.

He felt brighter after what that little corporal had said. He stepped back into the evening air and turned west to catch up with his troops who were striding forward and driving the British like cattle before them. Marius whistled a tune of a song from an earlier war...

‘Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine, dear Fatherland, no fear be thine,

Firm and true stands the Watch, the Watch at the Rhine.’

He hurried through the evening air and his heavy pack now felt light as a butterfly. ‘Firm and true, that’s me. Firm and true.’

21 March 1918: Bray

There was a clatter and a rattle of tumbling chairs as a dozen children fled to the corner of the room. Aimee sighed. The number of children in Bray school had fallen since the war started – now there were only enough to make a single class – and she was the oldest. Sometimes she felt like a mother hen to the little chicks.

The soldier tapped on the glass and opened the door. Master DuPont swallowed so hard his stiff collar creaked.

‘Do you speak English?’ the soldier asked, tugging off his cap and tucking it under his arm.

The teacher stared and his mouth opened but no sound came out. The whimpering children fell silent.

‘I speak English,’ Aimee said quietly. Then she turned to her classmates. ‘It’s all right. He’s British. He’s a friend. Go back to your seats.’ The children slipped back shy as smoke and watched wide-eyed.

For four years they had lived with the distant trembling of the mighty war guns to the east. Most of the younger ones still had nightmare memories of the days, back in 1914, when the Germans had arrived and taken over their homes. They remembered the hard-faced, stone-faced, grey-faced men with bayonets glinting in the sun.