“If we don’t, the French will.” The Lieutenant had a slash of a scar on his left cheek that gave him a broodingly savage face. “You want the French to start killing us with our own gunpowder?”

Cooper did not much care what the French did. At this moment he cared about a drunken girl who lay in the yard’s corner. “Pity to kill her, sir. She’s a nice little thing.”

“Leave her for the French.”

Cooper stooped to pull open the girl’s bodice to reveal her breasts. She stirred in the cold air, but did not waken. Her hair was stained with vomit, her dress with wine, yet she was a pretty girl. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, she had married a soldier and followed him to the wars. Now she was drunk and the French would have her. “Wake up!” he said.

“Leave her!” All the same the Lieutenant could not resist crossing the yard to look down at the girl’s nakedness. “Stupid bitch,” he said sourly.

A Major appeared in the yard’s entrance. “Quartermaster?”

The Lieutenant turned. “Sir?”

The Major had a small wipy moustache and a malevolent expression. “When you’ve finished undressing women, Quartermaster, perhaps you’d be good enough to join the rest of us?”

“I was going to burn these crates first, sir.”

“Bugger the crates, Quartermaster. Just hurry up!”

“Yes, sir;‘

“Unless you’d prefer to stay here? I doubt the army would miss you?”

The Lieutenant did not reply. Six months ago, when he had joined this Battalion, no officer would have spoken thus in front of the men, but the retreat had jaded tempers and brought hidden antagonisms to the surface. Men who would normally have treated each other with wary respect or even a forced cordiality, now snapped like rabid dogs. And Major Warren Dunnett hated the Quartermaster. It was a livid, irrational and consuming hatred, and the Quartermaster’s annoying response was to ignore it. That, and his air of competence, could provoke Major Dunnett into a livid anger. “Who in Christ’s holy name does he think he is?” he exploded to Captain Murray outside the tavern. “Does he think the whole bloody army will wait for him?”