'I'm sorry.' His voice was very dry, cracking. 'Mind you, I've not been at a picnic myself, I can tell you that.' He turned his head to Hilda, who was suffering that odd silent sobbing again, and he stroked her face. George, standing massively, rested a hand on his daughter's shoulder.

'He got off lightly,' Ben Kamen murmured. 'Believe it or not. The troops are turning up raw off the beaches of France. When they come in it's more like a battlefield dressing station here than a hospital.'

'And you,' Hilda said, stroking Gary's brow, 'look as if you need more sleep.'

'Yeah.' But he faced his mother, wanting to tell her. 'Listen, Mom. They tore across the country in those tanks of theirs. There was nothing to stop them. We did nothing but retreat – a fighting retreat, but a retreat. The Brits just weren't prepared for what hit them. I heard some of them bitching that it wasn't like this in India. And, Christ, the things we saw. Women and kids mown down from the air-'

'It's all right,' Mary said.

'Well, we got to the coast. The Germans had us pinned. And then we heard that Guderian was coming, with his First Panzers. We all knew what that bastard had done in Poland. They say he reached Gravelines, and secured bridgeheads over the river there. He waited one day. This was last Friday. I don't know why he paused. It let us start the evacuation. But then, on the Saturday, he came for us.

'Mom, we set up a perimeter. We fought back. But it was a slaughter. You had the Panzers ripping into our flanks, and the damn Luftwaffe coming at us from overhead, and we just couldn't get on those ships fast enough. I was in a line for three days, a typical goddamn English queue, waiting for a place on a destroyer. No food, no water, nothing.

'I got away. I was lucky. The scuttlebutt here is that ten per cent might make it home, out of four hundred thousand on those beaches. That's half the damn English army, Mom. I can't see how much of a fight they can put up after that.'

'Hush,' Mary said, for he was becoming agitated; she tried to calm him, smoothing his brow.

'He didn't sleep for five nights, I think,' Kamen murmured. 'He has a lot of healing to do.'

But Gary was still distressed. 'I think maybe the English have lost their war already, Mom. Lost it, on the beaches of France. Next thing you know they will be here. The Nazis.'

George shook his head. 'They won't come. Hitler wants an armistice. That's what they say.'

Gary actually laughed, though it hurt him. 'An armistice? After all this?'

A nurse came then, and a doctor; they administered a sedative. Mary sat with her son until he slept.

The strange medical volunteer, Ben Kamen, waited for his chance to speak to her.

17 July

It was another glorious day in this long, glorious summer. And in occupied France there was nothing more glorious than to be a soldier of the Reich.

Ernst Trojan was on a rest day, and he wanted to use it well. He would have come here to Claudine's little apartment even if not for the sex; sooner the sweet breath of Claudine than the gusty farts of some fat Bavarian pig of an obergefreiter in the Wehrmacht's tent city – or, worse, a few more hours of drunken mockery by his elder brother and his drinking partners in the SS. And yet, as the heat climbed in the middle of the day, as he lay naked with Claudine on her bed and the light slanted through the shutter slats into the dusty, scented room, he longed to be out in the world.

'Get dressed,' he told Claudine with a grin. He threw a bundle of clothes at her, and hunted for his pants.

She lay there watching him. Claudine Rimmer was tall, taller than he was in fact, her limbs long and her torso slim; she lay naked on her bed, her legs parted slightly in unconscious, unafraid invitation. Her dusky complexion and rich black hair would have made him think more of a girl of the Mediterranean than of Boulogne, of the northern coast. That was how he would have thought two or three months ago anyhow, but he had never even left Germany back then, and now he was learning fast. And when they made love, he had learned that she was not as delicate as she looked.

When she saw he was serious she sat up with a sigh, hunted through her clothes, and found a bra of impossible delicacy. 'Getting bored with me, are you, Gefreiter Trojan? We're not running out of sheaths, not yet.' She brushed her hand over a pile of the things on her bedside table. They were actually English army issue, the spoils of war, far better quality than the standard Wehrmacht supply.

'Of course not. It's just that it's such a beautiful day – here we are in the middle of history – even love can wait!'

She pulled her blouse over her head, but she kept arguing. 'Are the hours unsuitable for you? I can be flexible.' Her German was good, though her accent sometimes made him pause. 'I am a teacher, but quite junior, Ernst. I can find cover. It's not as if there is any great enthusiasm for education just now, and soon the summer vacation will come. My timetable is subordinate to yours.'

She always spoke to him briskly, challengingly, with no hint of weakness or dependency in her voice. He told himself that he would not have chosen any girl if he could not have had that. But was this some subtle rejection? His old inadequacies bubbled up inside him. Suddenly he was no longer a soldier of the all-conquering German army, but just poor foolish Ernst Trojan from Munich, he of the spiky hair and sticking-out ears. 'You seem troubled,' he said. 'Do you think I would be ashamed to be seen out with you?'

'Not that. It's just that what we have – whatever that is – others might not see it the same way, Ernst.'

'If others judge us, into the sea with them! All that matters is us, and what we have together. And we know what that is, do we not, Claudine?'

'If you say so,' she said evenly. She pulled on the stockings he had given her, and rummaged for the cosmetics he had bought her, and tucked the pile of marks he had given her into her purse.

They walked through the old town, heading towards the sea. The district was surrounded by walls left by the Romans. Ernst had grown up in a place the empire had never reached; his imagination was caught by such antiquity. And today there were Party flags everywhere, red with a bold black swastika on a circle of white. He commented on the splashes of colour they lent to the buildings from which they were draped, the Hotel de Ville, the wall gates. Claudine said nothing. Ernst held Claudine's hand, and as they walked her body swayed against his, brushing easily. She was so beautiful, he thought, suffused with the summer light that shone through the fabric of her blouse. He felt proud to be walking with her, he in his Wehrmacht uniform, his cap on his head. Yet he could never forget, even on this beautiful morning, that she was taller than he was, taller and older.

They walked down to the coast road, the Quai Gambetta, and set off north, heading towards the harbour and ultimately the road to Calais. And here they saw the most remarkable sight in town: the invasion fleet.

The harbour was full of river and canal barges, drafted for the purpose and floated down the Seine and the Rhine. They were lined up like logs on a river, jammed so close that you could have walked across the harbour from one sea wall to the other without getting your feet wet. These clumsy vessels would not provide a comfortable ride across the Channel; they would have to be towed, and looked horribly vulnerable to attack. But the crossing would be short, he had been assured by his superiors, over in less than half a day. Out at sea heavier craft, motor transports and others, stood at anchor, grey shadows on the bright water.

They walked further, reaching the beaches north of the town, where the men were going through landing exercises. The landing boats ran onto the beach, one after another, and the infantrymen jumped out into the shallow water and waded to the shore, laden with packs and weapons. One squad of men was struggling to haul a field gun up the beach. Elsewhere unhappy horses were being led through the shallow water. Despite the sudden fame of the Panzers, the German Army was basically horse-drawn; there would be one horse for every four men, so that twenty-four thousand of the animals would be shipped across the Channel in the first three days alone.