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body. Her face was black with soot, her open wailing mouth a round pink hole, and one eye hung out on her cheek like a bloody ping-pong ball. Of her uncle there was no sign.

    The British soldiers reached the village with their guns as her aunt died the following afternoon. They’d fought all the way back from Belgium and they were grimy, stinking and struggling under the dead weight of weariness. No one welcomed them because they’d soon learned that soldiers brought bombers, and Marie-Josephine spent a whole day and night in a cellar, shivering, hungry and frightened, her mind revolving again and again round the question, ‘Where shall I go now?’ The only other relation she knew of was an aunt in La Panne on the Belgian coast.
    As she’d set off again, the road, its borders green with the first colours of spring, was already crammed with demoralised and distressed humanity toiling in the sunshine. In the distance the horizon was shrouded with smoke clouds from burning villages, and to the south she could hear the continuous rumble of guns, bombs and aircraft. In the fields beyond the crossroads there were dead cattle and broken trees.
    Just ahead of her a woman was pushing a perambulator full of small children like pink baby mice in a nest. Alongside the woman a man stumbled along, bent under a load of bedding and blankets, and a sorry-looking mule trudged head-down between the shafts of a broken cart whose wheels shrieked for lack of grease.
    They’d not gone more than half a mile beyond Bout-Dassons when a man just ahead turned and glanced up at the sky. His expression changed as he pointed and, swinging round, she saw the glint of sun on metal wings over Vitry where half a dozen aeroplanes nosed into a dive. Horrified, she heard the distant scream of the sirens and recognised them as dive-bombers, the symbol of treachery and mutilation; then the column broke like chaff before a wind. The man with the blankets headed for the ditch but the woman with the perambulator was running ahead in a wild erratic scamper, the perambulator bouncing and rocking on the rough surface of the road. As the bullets passed her, chirping in a high strange note as they whined away, Marie-Josephine saw one of the children fall out of the perambulator and lie on its back, screaming. The woman didn’t seem to notice inher panic and went on running, then Marie-Josephine saw her stagger and her knees go limp almost as if they’d turned to rubber. Her hands dropped limply and the perambulator went rolling on by itself, curving slowly off the crown of the road towards the ditch. As it disappeared the woman stared after it, her hands at her side, her knees gradually giving way, then she collapsed in a puff of dust, and Marie-Josephine started running.
    The man with the pile of blankets was there first. He appeared from the ditch, a sturdy working man in a cap and a ragged jacket, who scooped up the fallen child as he went. He arrived by his wife at the same time as Marie-Josephine and, as he turned her over, her head fell back and Marie-Josephine saw there were small welling patches of blood all over her clothing. The man was sobbing as Marie-Josephine turned to the ditch where the perambulator had disappeared.
    It lay on its side and as she stopped on the road above it, she saw there were splintered holes in its side. The amount of blood turned her stomach over and she swung away abruptly and vomited weakly into the grass.

    As the Stukas lifted into the sky again, Major Karl Schmesser was frowning deeply. The army was pleased with the confusion and dismay that was being spread by the policy of attacking the roads, but to Schmesser it seemed like sheer slaughter and, try as he might, he couldn’t fit it into the rules of civilised warfare. Holding the Stuka in a nose-up attitude he was narrow-eyed with self-disgust and decided that perhaps he should let Stoos fly after all, because this was the sort of work he was fitted for.
    He glanced