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even really know what it was about. Did anyone?
    What he felt, he realized, was revulsion. He tried to imagine himself pointing a gun at some man, looking him in the eye, deliberately pulling the trigger and killing him. He tried to imagine himself hating someone he didn’t even know. None of it seemed real or possible.
    In front of him a young boy was trying to catch his little boat, that had floated out of his reach, and he looked to be in danger of falling in. Charlie got up and fished it out for him. The child’s mother smiled and thanked him. He remembered, with a shock, that the Government was already arranging to give out gas-masks for children.

Chapter Two
    1938
    D an scrubbed up at the sink in the small room beside the operating theatre. The first patient was probably an appendicectomy, then two inguinal hernias, then an exploratory laparotomy that might take some time. He scrubbed the soap up his arms, around his nails and between his fingers.
    He did this several times almost every working day. The routine of it had calmed his memories, but now and again they would edge back in, subtle and undermining, knowing they were unwelcome. Sometimes a faint whiff of infection as he opened an abdomen, or sometimes the brutal wounds of a road accident would revive it all, and for a few seconds he would be back in the sickening horror of the war in 1914, in the overwhelmed and spirit-numbing hospitals in France.
    It happened less frequently now, but Amy’s distress this morning had brought it back. He remembered holding her in his arms at the war’s end, the day she said she would marry him. He remembered what she said: ‘At least we know that our children will never have to go through that hell.’ Now that happy assurance was thinning and fading. He would not admit to her that he was worried too, that the prospect of another war filled him with dread: dread on Charlie’s account, and for everyone, women and children included. It would not be confined to the military any more – the advances in aircraft design, the newest bombers, would see to that. German bombers had bombed the defenceless town of Guernica in Spain and killed a thousand helpless civilians. The Germans seemed to regard that as some kind of successful experiment. If killing and intimidation and submission were what you were after, he supposed that it was.
    Bob Reed, his registrar, appeared beside him and began to scrub up. ‘Morning, Dan,’ he said.
    Dan nodded in reply, ‘Morning.’
    ‘The appendix needs doing,’ Bob said. ‘He’s pyrexial and has definite rebound tenderness this morning, so I put him first on the list.’
    ‘Fine,’ Dan said.
    There was a silence as they scrubbed, then Bob said, ‘what do you think’s happening, Dan? They brought round gas-masks for my kids yesterday. My wife’s in a bit of a state. Gas-masks! For children! Good God!’
    ‘They say it’s just a precaution.’ Dan glanced at Bob, who was concentrating on his hands, frowning. ‘I don’t believe they would use gas on civilians. The repercussions would be terrible for them too.’
    ‘You could say that about everything, couldn’t you? The prospect of them winning would be bad enough. God knows what they might do if they were losing.’
    ‘I don’t think even they would use gas,’ Dan said. He almost believed it.
    ‘You were in the last lot, weren’t you?’
    ‘Yes,’ Dan said shortly. ‘I was in a hospital at Etaples.’
    There was another silence. ‘Bad?’ Bob said.
    There was no use in playing it down, especially to Bob, who was young enough to be conscripted. ‘Yes,’ Dan said. ‘It was bad enough.’
    ‘You know what the Ministry is saying?’ Bob went on. ‘If there’s another war they’re expecting at least a million civilians dead in air raids. They’re stockpiling thousands of cardboard coffins, planning to dig lime-pits. I’m wondering whether to move my wife and kids out of London, but where could they go to be safe?’
    Dan