She held out her two sandwiches and the man pushed one into his pocket and the other between his ruined teeth in bleeding gums. He chewed and muttered. Marius tried to help Aimee understand.

‘He says all the men – even the officers – have been eating bread that is as damp as a bath sponge. The food is fried in butter that’s as old and rotten as war-fever. They’ve had to dig green potatoes out of the fields – not new potatoes, but green roots. The flu and the Flanders Fever are leaving us too sick to march or fight.’

‘But he’s behind British lines. Where is he going?’ Aimee asked.

‘He says British tanks rolled over his dugout and buried him. By the time he’d dug his way out they had all passed him by. He’s going to surrender – hand himself over to the British if we can tell him which way to go.’

‘But he could escape back to Germany with you,’ Aimee said.

When Marius told the soldier the man laughed till he coughed. Marius nodded. ‘He says there is nothing in Germany but hunger and anger. The war is lost. Our soldiers have lost hope. Our troops are thin, the horses have not had a grain of oats for days. The men live on dry barley-bread. But what makes it worse is we know what’s coming... thousands of tanks, tens of thousands of airmen, hundreds of thousands of fit, new men from America.’

‘Es ist fertig,’ the man breathed. ‘Wir leben, um den Frieden zu sehen.’

The boy looked at Aimee. ‘He says it’s over. All we can hope for is to live to see the peace.’

Aimee walked to the door and pointed towards the woods they’d walked through the day before. With signs she made him understand that was the way he had to go. ‘Bray,’ she said. ‘Bray-on-Somme.’

The man stumbled towards the wood and left Aimee to return and cook a little more of her precious food.

At the edge of the wood the watcher quickly pulled down the tent and rolled it up when he saw the German soldier head up the track towards him. The man in the black cloak had watched as Aimee had pointed the way back to Bray, so he knew the soldier hadn’t harmed her.

The watcher hid behind the stump of a shell-shattered tree until he heard the soldier splash past.

27 August 1918: The Somme airfield

Silver Hand woke to the smell of oil and wood, sweat and sausages. The aircraft mechanics were already out of bed and frying their breakfast on a stove in their tent.

He took no part in their talk of sprockets and notches, flanges and cogs, pistons, pipes, pilots and plugs. He chewed silently on the single sausage and bread they gave him.