The road was straight and the convoy was slow and the countryside on either side had the flat, wet stillness of a place that had recently been fought over and was now waiting to be fought over again.
Forty ambulances. He had counted them that morning at Étaples, counted them as he counted everything, with the automatic precision of a man trained to observe. Forty ambulances carrying five hundred wounded men, the wounded stacked in tiers, the column stretching a quarter-mile along the road to Boulogne and moving at the speed of a man walking, which was slow enough that the hedgerows and the abandoned farmhouses passed with the unhurried progression of a landscape that did not know it was about to end.
May 1940. The roads were choked. Not with military traffic, with everything. Families in horse carts piled with mattresses and kitchen pots. A woman carrying a sewing machine on her back, bent double, the machine’s iron treadle swinging with each step. Children who had stopped crying because crying required energy they no longer had. An old man leading a cow. The cow was calm. The cow did not know about the Germans.
He was standing in the lead ambulance with the driver, a corporal from Wolverhampton whose name he had known that morning and would not remember by evening. The road ahead was clear for two hundred yards, then curved left around a copse of trees. Beyond the copse the road continued toward Boulogne. Beyond Boulogne was England.
The tanks came from the trees.
Twenty Panzers. They emerged from the copse on the left side of the road the way weather emerges from a horizon, not suddenly but inevitably, the tree line producing them as though the trees had been concealing not tanks but the idea of tanks, the possibility that had been present since the convoy left Étaples and that now resolved itself into steel and noise and the smell of diesel exhaust that would, for the rest of his life, arrive without warning and produce a contraction in his chest that lasted two seconds.
The first shell hit the third ambulance. The sound was not what he expected, a compression rather than an explosion, the air folding inward and then releasing, and the release was the fire. Men inside. He could hear them. The sounds they made were not screams, screams require breath and coordination. These sounds were simpler. The sounds a body makes when it is no longer a body’s to make.
Seven seconds later, the seventh ambulance. The convoy stopped. Men were running: drivers, orderlies, walking wounded. Because running was the body’s answer to the question the shells were asking and the answer was wrong but the body did not know this.
Boots on the road. He did not remember deciding to get out. The road was soft from rain and his boots sank slightly with each step and he felt this, the mud gripping the soles, the slight resistance, precise, clinical, belonging to the part of his mind that would never stop observing even when the relevant thing was to move.
Heat at twenty yards, not gradually but as a wall, a surface he walked through, and on the other side the air was a different substance, thicker, tasting of petrol and singed hair. He reached into the third ambulance. A hand gripped his wrist. He pulled. The hand belonged to an arm and the arm belonged to a man whose face was not a face, he pulled the man free and laid him on the road and did not look at the face because looking would have cost time.
Three men from the third ambulance. Two from the seventh. He laid them on the verge, on the wet grass, and his hands moved over them with the automatic competence of training: cadavers in London, surgical theatre in Edinburgh, wounded in France. The training held because training was designed to hold.
The tanks had stopped firing. He did not know when, the silence registered retroactively, as pain registers after the injury. The tanks were still there. Twenty of them, arranged in a loose crescent, their turrets pointed at the convoy with the patient certainty of machines that had achieved their purpose.
Silence. He straightened. His shirt was wet: rain, sweat, fluid from the ambulance he did not pause to identify. His hands were black to the wrists. The convoy: forty ambulances, two burning, the drivers crouching behind their doors, the orderlies flat on the ground, the walking wounded in the ditch. No one was moving toward the tanks.
In his pocket, the handkerchief was there, khaki cotton, regulation issue, folded into a square that his fingers found without searching. He unfolded it. He took the baton from under his arm and tied the handkerchief to it. The knot was a reef knot, left over right, right over left, and his fingers made it without trembling: thousands of knots, surgical knots, knots that held arteries shut and skin together, and this was the same knot.
He walked.
Mud gripped his boots. Each step sank and each step required the small effort of extraction, the pulling-free.
Closer now, the tanks. The turrets, the treads, the mud on the undercarriages, the hatches closed, the machine gun barrels tracking him with the slow mechanical patience of instruments that did not know he was a man. He walked toward the lead tank. The handkerchief above his head.
A hatch opened. A man appeared, shoulders first, then head, then hands gripping the turret rim as he pulled himself up and stood on the hull and looked down at the Indian officer walking toward him through the mud with a khaki handkerchief tied to a stick.
The Panzer commander was young. Mid-twenties. Clean-shaven, his uniform pressed. His English was perfect, a native speaker’s English, someone who understood the weight the English placed on courtesy and had adopted it as genuine practice.
He climbed down from the tank. He stood in the road. The mud did not seem to trouble him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was quiet. “I’m afraid you won’t reach Boulogne.”
Mazumdar stopped. The handkerchief hung from the baton. The two men stood on the road, the German officer and the Indian officer, and between them was the distance that would, for the next seven years, define his life, the distance between a man who has power and a man who has a handkerchief.
“And please,” the commander said. “Don’t try to escape.”
Please. The German had said please. Mazumdar heard the word and filed it — in the place that was deeper than memory and more durable than emotion, the place that would hold this word for fifty years and produce it, intact, in a room in Devon when he was old and speaking into a machine that recorded sound, and the wordpleasewould be among the things he had never said to anyone, this small German courtesy extended on a road in France while the ambulances burned behind him and the war, his war, the war that would cost him everything and give him nothing except the knowledge that he had not broken, began.
They took him. They took the convoy. They took the wounded and the drivers and the dead. They took his baton and his handkerchief and later they would take his sacred thread and his name and replace it with a number.
He walked with the column. The mud had dried on his hands. He could feel it tightening on his skin, the contraction, the stiffness, the thin crust that cracked when he flexed his fingers. He flexed them. The cracking was small and precise and he heard it the way he heard everything: completely, uselessly.
Past hedgerows and fields the column moved, and past the cow, still there, still calm, still eating grass beside the road while the column passed.
He walked. The road was long and the convoy was slow and the countryside on either side had the flat, wet stillness of a place whose future had arrived.