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they had sailed for Spain so much had happened that political confusion could be forgiven. The war had made them tolerant towards every sect and party in Europe except the Nazi Party. They had even lost much of their resentment for Italian Fascists after the mass surrenders in North Africa.
    Rawlinson emerged from the kitchen carrying two pint mugs of tea and set them down on an empty table near the pot-bellied stove. Simon’s battledress began to steam. Without comment he handed the telegram to Rawlinson who read it, handed it back, and looked down at the stained table top.
    ‘Bastards!’ he said, and waited for endorsement.
    Simon lifted his shoulders. He had inherited his mother’s political fanaticism and his father’s obstinacy but few of their physical characteristics. At thirty-eight he was spare and loose-jointed. He had narrow, thoughtful features and what his father would have called ‘an authentic Cassius look’ produced by dark hair, deepset eyes and prominent cheek-bones. He did not share his friend’s blanket assessment of the German nation.
    ‘It probably happens regularly over there, Rawley. If it hasn’t already it will as soon as Bomber Command steps up its offensive.’
    ‘Fair enough,’ Rawlinson said, ‘but they began it. Bastards! Every bloody one of them! You’ll be putting in for compassionate?’
    ‘I don’t know, I shall want to think about it.’
    Rawlinson, once a Lancashire shoeshop clerk, whistled through teeth, shocked because the rich panoply of death had been built into his personality from earliest childhood. In the back streets of Burnley, with a father and two brothers on the dole, a good funeral was about all one ever got in the way of ceremony or spectacle.
    ‘You’ll have to go! You can’t let your wife be buried by strangers!’
    ‘There won’t be a stranger present,’ Simon told him. ‘The entire bloody Valley will be there. She was born on one of the farms and it will be the best-attended funeral in local history. My entry passes out on Friday and some of them need watching. It would take me all of three days to get there and back and I daresay the adj. would insist on me taking a week to sort things out. That’s the usual drill. What sense is there to it when I’m up to my neck in work here? They got Rachel. OK.’
    Rawlinson regarded him warily. He admired Simon Craddock but he had never understood him, and that despite sharing bivouacs in Spain with other volunteers from what he still regarded as The Upper Crust.
    ‘I don’t get it,’ he muttered. ‘You implied it was six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, didn’t you?’
    ‘No I didn’t, Rawley. It’s a question of time, don’t you see? If we don’t get this bloody war finished in a couple of years Europe will fall apart at the seams, win or lose. The dead can’t help one way or the other.’
    Fanaticism of any kind impressed Rawlinson but he was still unconvinced. ‘If it was my missus I’d want to be there. OK, so it’s cant, all that cock they say over an open grave. But she’s your missus and she was one of us! You owe her that much! Just to be there!’ When Simon did not reply but quietly sipped his tea, he added, ‘How long you been married?’
    ‘More than ten years.’
    ‘You hit it off, didn’t you?’
    ‘At first, and even when we split over this business we still respected one another. I saw her point of view but I don’t think she ever saw mine, not after Spain anyhow. She thought we had all been marching up a wrong turning so she packed in. Just like that. She went right back to the Sermon on the Mount. Love conquers all! But she didn’t know the first damn thing about love as most women understand it. We haven’t even slept together since I got survivor’s leave after Dunkirk. No, Rawley, she wasn’t one of us. It was a different kind of love she meant. Leper-colonies, the Untouchables, prison and hospital visiting.’
    Rawlinson pondered on whether or not this put