Eight out of every ten who were brought through the town on their way to the hospital in Oxford, where the post-mortems were done, had been killed by the tribesmen’s bombs. Doug Bentley didn’t know about war, and his military service as a conscript had been about ledgers, officers’ expenses and other ranks’ salaries, but men in the branch in his village, who had been in the paras or the marines, spoke of the bombs and what they did to a body. Just eighteen years old the guardsman had been, and the picture on the T-shirts showed a face that was immature, arms and legs that had most likely been skeleton thin, all ripped apart by a bomb.

He saw the mother of the boy soldier, and the middle-aged man with her stood back a half-pace. He saw the father, with a woman in black behind him… It always struck him how few of the dead soldiers had parents who still lived together – he and Beryl had been together for forty-six years, had reared two kids and… Flowers, single roses, little posies of the season’s last daffodils and pretty sprays of chrysanthemums were being laid on the bonnet of the hearse, against the windscreen and on the roof. The grief was naked and raw. It hurt Doug Bentley to watch. Some of the family had laid their open hands on the glass sides as if in that way they might touch the body in the coffin.

How long were they there? A little more than half a minute.

The funeral director, who had faced the hearse, now swung round, as if he had been a military man in his time, and waved his stick dramatically. He had the top hat back on his head and started to walk forward, up the empty High Street. The hearse nudged along after him, a few of the flowers sliding into the road.

The hearse left the relatives, friends and supporters clutching each other, wiping eyes and sniffling.