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He couldn’t ignore it anymore – neither his conscience nor Teyber would let him. The general was watching him like a boy about to pull off a fly’s wings.

‘It gives the men a sense of purpose, does it? Well that’s an interesting view, and one that leaves you so beautifully untouched.

And as for innocent women? Does such a thing exist?

’ He smiled round at the officers, who obligingly laughed along with him.

‘Have you seen the females fighting with the partisans and with the Russian army? They’re as bloodthirsty as the men.

And as for the brats they breed…’ He shook his head slowly as if Pascal was the child.

‘Think for a moment. Why would we let Jewish, or Bolshevik, children live? They’re the next generation of the plague – they have to be stamped out.

If you really had read the guidance notes, or listened in your racial science classes, you’d know that, wouldn’t you?

And yet apparently you don’t. In fact, you question it.

Do you have some suspect blood of your own – is that it?

Should we be throwing you into a pit too? ’

Teyber started to laugh as Pascal’s knees buckled and he crumpled to the floor.

‘For God’s sake, pick him up before he says yes.’ He nodded to two men who dragged Pascal back onto his feet. ‘Go and see that my order is carried out. Spare nobody. And take the captain with you – if he tries to interfere and stop it, tie him to a post where he can watch the place burn.’

They had to tie him up at the first flames and the first shots or he would have thrown himself to his death. But he watched it all after that. He forced himself to. He had to finally see.

Five hundred and twenty-two civilians were murdered that day.

Five-hundred and twenty-two innocents were thrown into pits and shot as they tried to climb out, or locked inside burning buildings and reduced to ashes.

One hundred and nine children, including a baby just moments old, were shot in front of their hysterical mothers before they were killed too.

Entire families were annihilated. Pascal knew the numbers because Teyber made sure to tell him the final total when the massacre was done.

‘You chose this cause, Captain Lindiger. You chose this fight. Nobody lied to you about what would happen to our enemies. No one lied to you about the fate waiting for the Jews or the communists. Everyone who marches under the swastika understands what pure blood means, and no one gets to choose who lives or who dies because they have a moment of weakness. That’s been set in stone from the start. ’

Good Jews and bad Jews. His ignorant words haunted him harder than ever because Doli Pivski had given the ‘vermin’ faces he would never not see. The disgust in the general’s voice was an echo of Noemi’s when she’d asked him if he understood how many lives would be ruined.

He did now. There would never be any turning away from the truth again.

There would never be any more pretending that hatred came with distinctions and without cruelty.

Pascal had stood at the post they’d tied him to and saw the man he’d been through the flames’ flickering light: a fool who’d filled his head with medals and glory and stopped up his eyes and his ears to the rest. His only consolation on the night of the massacre was the thought of the firing squad that would greet him in the morning.

But Teyber had seen through him as clearly as Noemi, and he refused to deliver such a simple way out.

‘You thought you could pick and choose which bits to believe in, didn’t you?

You thought all the talk of plague and preserving the blood was a sop to the thugs and not intended for brave heroes like you.

Well your eyes are open now, although I’m sure you wish they weren’t.

So I’m not going to give your newly awakened conscience a coward’s exit or waste bullets on you.

You can take all your self-loathing back into battle and take your chances there.

Perhaps one of our side will shoot you faster than the enemy.

I don’t care. But if you survive this fight or the next?

Don’t think you’ll escape. I’ll be keeping my eye on you. ’

The bullet which took Pascal away from the battlefield with a badly damaged shoulder hit him three days later.

He didn’t fire it himself – he was watched too closely for that.

It wasn’t the fatal one that he wanted. Because he wanted death like he’d never wanted anything before.

Which was why he prayed for the searing pain or the field hospital’s rough treatment or the bone-shaking journey back to Germany to kill him.

And was sorrier than he could express when nothing did.

Unterwald wanted a hero to cheer back into its midst; so did his father.

Pascal wanted… Punishment was one possibility, oblivion was another.

The only reason he didn’t take that path was because he couldn’t put his father through the scandal of a suicide.

He retreated instead and bitterly missed his mother.

He became a recluse under the excuse of convalescing.

He refused to talk to anyone about his war, not even his father.

He begged Viktor to take his copy of the Mount Elbrus photograph off the wall, but – when he tried to explain what a lie that had become, which was another truth he’d been loath to accept – Viktor told him to be quiet.

Viktor had hardened even more in the years since Pascal had left.

He ran the town on military lines, and his best friend was the bottle.

He told Pascal to be quiet on an almost daily basis, particularly when he tried to ask about his mother’s illness and death, or uncover what he called the truth about the war and Viktor called vicious lies.

Pascal became obsessed with finding out how many other villages had suffered the same fate as Doli Pivski.

He became obsessed with finding out what exactly went on in camps like Che?mno and Treblinka and Auschwitz, names he’d kept on the edge of his thinking for years.

He pored over the newspapers, scanning the war reports looking for clues, looking for any reference to a specific policy designed to bring about the end of the Jews.

Desperately hoping he’d never find it. His constant, ‘But that’s a lie,’ when he found a spun story nearly drove Viktor to violence more than once.

Nothing in the newspapers Pascal scoured tallied with the truth he was now so painfully aware of.

The brave partisans taking up arms across Poland and Yugoslavia were dismissed as ‘an easy-to-defeat irritant’.

The ferocious Russian fighters who Pascal knew would battle on to their last drop of blood were mentioned only in passing as ‘not worth our concern’.

Even the scale of the German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad and the terrible death toll sustained there had been buried.

Nobody mentioned the Jews, except to promise that Germany would soon be free of them.

And nobody questioned anything. Life had continued in Unterwald as if war was still a sport played by heroes.

Pascal watched the young boys lining up across the street for the regular Sunday morning marches and wanted to weep and warn them what war really meant.

He wanted to call a town meeting and tell the townspeople whose losses were already mounting to start pushing for an end to a war no one would ultimately win.

But when he tried to explain his misery and confusion and guilt to his father, the man who’d taught him about honour and glory, Viktor threatened to have him committed rather than live with a coward in the family.

‘What is wrong with you? Did the bullet hit your brain, not your shoulder? Do you want Germany to lose?’

The argument ran round in circles, never changing its course no matter how many times it flared.

‘No, I don’t think so. I certainly never wanted Germans to suffer. But given the things we’ve done, given the terrible atrocities we’ve committed, and the worse ones I’m almost afraid to imagine, maybe losing is what we deserve.’

Viktor’s fists clenched. Pascal braced himself for a blow he’d promised himself as a good son he wouldn’t return. But some remnant of paternal feeling always stopped Viktor’s hand, if not his tongue.

‘Atrocities? What kind of a soldier uses a word like that? Surely you’ve learned by now that war isn’t a Sunday picnic? That bad things get done by both sides in battle, and then it’s over and both sides move on.’

Bad things. Pascal shook his head, wishing he hadn’t spent so many years treating his father like an oracle.

‘I’m not talking about what’s done on a battlefield. I’m?—’

But Viktor was always a step ahead of him.

‘You’re talking about things that aren’t your concern.

’ He shook his head as Pascal tried to argue back.

‘I’ve seen you combing through the papers, muttering about death camps as if you don’t quite believe in them.

They exist – of course they do. What did you expect?

The Führer said himself that a war in Europe would spell the end of the Jews.

How did you think that would happen without some way to get rid of them? ’

He could have been General Teyber, except Viktor had a more personal sting in his tail.

‘You were always soft. I used to watch you tying yourself in knots over the Drachmann girl. Trying to persuade yourself that she was a different kind of Jew, a good one, as if such an idiotic idea existed. Acting as if you could bend the rules – and Hitler’s plans – to fit around her.

She turned you into a fool; she could have been the end of you.

Well, hopefully she’s at least got what she deserved by now and a bullet or the gas has done for her. ’

Pascal wasn’t back to full strength. Viktor had him in a stranglehold that sent a sheet of pain knifing through his left shoulder the second he stopped trying to hold on to his temper and leapt to his feet. And his father’s tongue was as brutal as his grip.

‘Don’t get clever with me. I know far more about what’s gone on than you think.

And I’m the one who’s in charge here, I’m the one who’s respected in this town, not you, especially after this apology for a homecoming.

If you threaten my position with your talk of atrocities and who deserves what, I’ll deny you as a son and hand you over to the Gestapo as a traitor myself. And I’ll get a medal for doing it.’

I’ll deny you as a son broke the last tie between them. Pascal looked at Viktor and finally saw the bully he’d always been. He knew Viktor looked at him and saw failure. That would have destroyed him once; now, he no longer cared.

The two men avoided each other after that bout, although I know far more added itself to the dark clouds of suspicion whirling round Pascal’s head. They didn’t speak again until the envelope with its embossed swastika arrived.

‘Here.’ Viktor flung the letter onto the newspaper Pascal was painstakingly combing through. ‘It’s about time they called you back in and let me be done with you.’

Pascal waited for Viktor to leave before he opened it.

He’d been expecting the summons – his shoulder was stiff and painful and his arm tired easily, but the bullet hadn’t done enough damage to keep him permanently out of a war that needed every man it could get.

He didn’t know what he was hoping for. He couldn’t bear the thought of putting on a uniform again, not now he hated what it stood for.

He couldn’t go back to the Balkans and watch babies die.

For all Viktor’s faults, he didn’t want to shame him and desert.

The best solution would be a training position at the Garmisch barracks, but he doubted that would come his way – soldiers gossiped worse than old women at the market; he assumed the entire mountain brigade would have heard about his stand-off with Teyber by now and labelled him as a coward.

Maybe it’s a discharge; maybe they won’t want a man like me back.

He brushed away that hope in the same second it came to him. Whatever the papers said about Germany’s successes, he knew how stretched the battlefronts where. Any soldier still breathing would be found a post.

In light of your injuries, we have been advised by your previous commander that a return to active service is not the best use of your abilities. You have therefore been reassigned.

Pascal almost admired his previous commander as he read through the rest of the letter.

Teyber had kept his promise and kept an eye on him, and he’d had the last twisted laugh.

The captain who’d refused to massacre a village full of people who definitely weren’t a threat, and probably weren’t communists or Jews but were simply ‘other’, was being redeployed to a command post at Dachau.