Harry Bastable didn’t see them in that first photographic flash of shock, when the scene imprinted itself on his memory: what one concentrated, uninterrupted aerial bombardment could do to one small unprotected town on one summer’s afternoon — His first unendurable thought, the stuff of nightmares ever after, was that he was looking down Old Town into Eastbourne, past St Mary’s—St Mary’s had no spire, but then neither did Colembert’s church now; for bombs are great equalisers, and ruins have no distinguishing glories —past St Mary’s, down that narrow road to the sedate Goffs —except that the Goffs were mounds of rubble now, and unrecognizable … He didn’t see the dead British soldiers in that first vision of ruined town, amongst the smashed and burned and fragmented litter of buildings and possessions and vehicles which choked the main street: khaki is designed to be dustily unobtrusive, and these dead soldiers were doubly well-camouflaged in their deaths. He saw a dog—a thin, sharp-muzzled mongrel—sniff at something in the rubble and then look up alertly.
