He sighed. He walked over, boots squelching with each step, and dragged the chair upright, kicking a piece of broken mirror away as he did so. The woman was hanging slackly, but he knew she was faking. He manoeuvred the chair into the centre of the small room. He watched the woman carefully as he did this, and kept out of the way of her head; earlier when he'd been tying her up she'd butted him in the face, very nearly breaking his nose.

He looked at her bonds. The rope that bound her hands behind the back of the chair was frayed; she had been trying to cut through the bindings using the broken hand-mirror from the top of the set of drawers.

He left her hanging inertly in the middle of the room, where he could see her, then went over to the small bed cut into one thick wall of the cottage, and fell heavily into it. It was dirty, but he was exhausted and too wet to care.

He listened to the rain hammering on the roof, and listened to the wind whining through the door and the shuttered windows, and listened to the steady plopping of drops coming through the leaking roof and dropping onto the flagstones. He listened for the noise of helicopters, but there were no helicopters. He had no radio and he wasn't sure they knew where to look anyway. They would be searching as well as the weather allowed, but they'd be looking for his staff car, and it was gone; washed away by the brown avalanche of river. Probably, it would take days.

He closed his eyes, and started to fall asleep almost immediately, but it was as though the consciousness of defeat would not let him escape, and found him even there, filling his nearly sleeping mind with images of inundation and defeat, and harried him out of his rest, back into the continuing pain and dejection of wakefulness. He rubbed his eyes, but the scummy water on his hands ground grains of sand and earth into his eyes. He cleaned one finger as best he could on the filthy rags on the bed, and rubbed some spit into his eyes, because he thought if he allowed himself to cry, he might not be able to stop.

He looked at the woman. She was pretending to come round. He wished he had the strength and the inclination to go over and hit her, but he was too tired, and too conscious that he would be taking out on her the defeat of an entire army. Belting any one individual — let alone a helpless, cross-eyed woman — would be so pathetically petty a way of trying to find recompense for a downfall of that magnitude that even if he did live, he would be ashamed forever that he had done such a thing.

She moaned dramatically. A thin strand of snot detached itself from her nose and fell onto the heavy coat she wore.

He looked away, disgusted.

He heard her sniff, loudly. When he looked back, her eyes were open, and she was staring malevolently at him. She was only slightly cross-eyed, but the imperfection annoyed him more than it should have. Given a bath and a decent set of clothes, he thought, the woman might almost have looked pretty. But right now she was buried inside a greasy green greatcoat smudged all over with mud, and her dirty face was almost completely hidden; partially by the collar of the heavy coat, and partially by her long, filthy hair, which was attached to the green greatcoat in various places by glistening blobs of mud. She moved oddly in the chair, as though scratching her back against the chair. He could not decide whether she was testing the ropes that bound her, or was just troubled by fleas.

He doubted she had been sent to kill him; almost certainly she was what she was dressed as; an auxiliary. Probably she had been left behind in a retreat and had wandered about too frightened or proud or stupid to surrender until she had seen the staff car in difficulties in the storm-washed hollow. Her attempt at killing him had been brave but laughable. By sheer luck she'd killed his driver with one shot; a second had struck him a glancing blow on the side of the head, making him groggy while she threw the empty gun away and leapt into the car with her knife. The driverless car had slid down a greasy grass slope into the brown torrent of the river.

Such a stupid act. Sometimes, heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination; the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn't win medals but wars.

Still dazed from the bullet-graze, he had fallen into the car's rear footwell as it pitched and yawed, caught in the swollen force of the river. The woman had nearly buried him in the voluminous thick coat. Stuck like that, head still ringing from the shot that had grazed his skull, he'd been unable to get a good swing at her. For those absurd, confined, frustrating minutes, the struggle with the girl had seemed like a microcosm of the plain-wide muddle his army was now embroiled in; he had the strength to knock her out cold, but the cramped battleground and the hiding weight of her enveloping coat had muffled him and imprisoned him until it was too late.

The car had hit the concrete island and tipped right over, throwing them both out onto the corroded grey surface. The woman had given a little scream; she'd raised the knife that had been caught in the folds of the green greatcoat all that time, but he had finally got his clear punch, and connected satisfyingly with her chin.

She'd thumped back to the concrete; he'd turned round to see the car scraping off the slipway, torn away by the surging brown tide. Still on its side, it had sunk almost immediately.

He'd turned back, and felt tempted to kick the unconscious woman. He'd kicked the knife instead, sending it whirling away into the river, following the drowned staff car.

"You won't win," the woman said, spitting. "You can't win, against us." She shook the little chair, angrily.

"What?" he said, shaken from his reverie.

"We'll win," she said, giving a furious shake that rattled the chair's legs on the stone floor.

Why did I tie the silly fool to a chair, of all things? he thought. "You could well be right," he told her, tiredly. "Things are looking… damp at the moment. Make you feel any better?"

"You're going to die," the woman said, staring.

"Nothing more certain than that," he agreed, gazing at the leaking roof above the rag bed.

"We are invincible. We will never give up."

"Well, you've proved fairly vincible before." He sighed, remembering the history of this place.

"We were betrayed!" the woman shouted. "Our armies never were defeated; we were —»

"Stabbed in the back; I know."

"Yes! But our spirit will never die. We —»

"Aw, shut up!" He said, swinging his legs off the narrow bed and facing the woman. "I've heard that shit before. "We was robbed." "The folks back home let us down." "The media were against us." Shit…" He ran a hand through his wet hair. "Only the very young or the very stupid think wars are waged just by the military. As soon as news travels faster than a despatch rider or a bird's leg the whole… nation… whatever… is fighting. That's your spirit; your will. Not the grunt on the ground. If you lose, you lose. Don't whine about it. You'd have lost this time too if it hadn't been for this fucking rain." He held up a hand as the woman drew breath. "And no, I don't believe God is on your side."

"Heretic!"

"Thank you."

"I hope your children die! Slowly!"

"Hmm," he said, "I'm not sure I qualify, but if I do it'd be a long spit." He collapsed back on the bed, then looked aghast, and levered himself back up again. "Shit; they really must get to you people young; that's a terrible thing for anybody to say, let alone a woman."

"Our women are more manly than your men," the woman sneered.

"And still you breed. Choice must be limited, I suppose."

"May your children suffer and die horribly!" the woman shrieked.