The soldier looked up at Pearson, and then let his head drop, staring at the fuel oil that formed rainbows on his boots. Pearson raised his hand, about to hit him with the back of his fist. Then the sounds of gunfire on the motorbridge were lost in the overhead whoom of a shell. Coming across the river, the heavy 120 mm soared over the meadow and plunged into the woods below the hill-crest. Pearson crouched behind the memorial, hoping the shell was a stray. Then Sergeant Tulloch signalled that two more had started on their way. The next fell without exploding into the water-meadow. The third landed fifty feet below the memorial, spattering its surface with broken earth.

When it was quiet again Pearson waited as Corporal Benson pulled the knapsack away from the young soldier and emptied its contents. He slit the captain’s pockets with his bayonet and jerked off his ID tag.

There was little to be gained from any formal interrogation. American weapons technology had advanced to the point where it made almost no sense at all to the rebel commanders. Artillery fire, battle dispositions and helicopter raids were now computer-directed, patrols and sorties programmed ahead. The American equipment was so sophisticated that even the wristwatches stripped off dead prisoners were too complicated to read.

Pearson reached down to the clutter of coins and keys beside the private. He opened a leather-bound diary. Inside was a series of illegible entries, and a folded letter from a friend, evidently a draft-dodger, about the anti-war movement at home. Pearson tossed them into the pool of water leaking below the plinth of the memorial. He picked up an oilstained book, one of a paperback educational series, Charles Olsen’s Call Me Ishmael.

As he held the book in his hands, Pearson glanced back to where Sergeant Tulloch stood over the field radio, well aware that the sergeant would disapprove of this unfading strand of literacy in his own character. He wiped the oil off the American eagle. What an army, whose privates were no longer encouraged to carry field-marshals’ batons in their knapsacks but books like this.

To the captain he said: ‘The US Army must be the most literate since Xenophon’s.’ Pearson slipped the book into his pocket. The captain was looking down over his shoulder at the river. ‘Do you know where we are?’ Pearson asked him.

The captain turned himself round, trying to ease the wounds on his wrists. He looked up at Pearson with his sharp eyes. ‘I guess so. Runnymede, on the Thames River.’

Surprised, Pearson said ungrudgingly: ‘You’re better informed than my own men. I used to live about ten miles from here. Near one of the pacified villages.’

‘Maybe you’ll go back one day.’

‘I dare say, Captain. And maybe we’ll sign a new Magna Carta into the bargain. How long have you been out here?’

The captain hesitated, sizing up Pearson’s interest. ‘Just over a month.’

‘And you’re in combat already? I thought you had a three-month acclimatization period. You must be as badly off as we are.’

‘I’m not a combat soldier, Major. I’m an architect, with US Army Graves Commission. Looking after memorials all over the world.’

‘That’s quite a job., The way things are going, it has almost unlimited prospects.’

‘I hate to have to agree with you, Major.’ The American’s manner had become noticeably more ingratiating, but Pearson was too preoccupied to care. ‘Believe me, a lot of us back home feel the war’s achieved absolutely nothing.’

‘Nothing…?’ Pearson repeated. ‘It’s achieved everything.’ An armoured helicopter soared across the hill-crest, its heavy fans beating at the foliage over their heads. For one thing, the war had turned the entire population of Europe into an armed peasantry, the first intelligent agrarian community since the eighteenth century. That peasantry had produced the Industrial Revolution. This one, literally burrowing like some advanced species of termite into the sub-soil of the twentieth century, might in time produce something greater. Fortunately, the Americans were protected from any hope of success by their own good intentions, their refusal, whatever the cost in their own casualties, to use nuclear weapons.

Two tanks had moved on to the parapet of the bridge, firing their machine-guns along the roadway. A scout helicopter shot down into the fields across the river was burning fiercely, the flames twisting the metal blades.

‘Major!’ Corporal Benson ran to the tunnel mouth. Tulloch was crouched over the radio, headphones on, beckoning towards Pearson. ‘They’re through to Command, sir.’

Ten minutes later, when Pearson passed the memorial on his way to the forward post, the American captain had managed to lift himself on to his knees. Wrists clamped together in front of his chest, he looked as if he were praying at some ruined wayside shrine. The wounded Negro had opened his eyes, shallow breaths breaking through the caked blood on his lips. The young private slept against the plinth of the memorial.

The captain pointed with his wired hands at the men strapping up their packs. Pearson ignored him, and was about to move on. Then something about the American’s posture, and their shared community of fatigue and hopelessness, made him stop.

‘We’re going forward.’

Eyes half-closing, the American stared down at his wrists, as if aware of the effort he had wasted in trying to prevent the abrasions from opening. ‘That’s bad luck. Not my day.’ His face grew stiff and wooden as the blood emptied from his cheeks.

Pearson watched Sergeant Tulloch supervise the stowage of the radio and begin his rounds of the men, waiting with weapons at the ready. ‘Why did you come up the river?’

The captain tapped the memorial stone with his wrists. ‘We wanted to see about moving this. The Kennedy Memorial.’

‘Kennedy…?’ Pearson turned and stared down at the broken lettering on the stone. Vaguely he remembered the memorial built by a previous British government at Runnymede to commemorate the assassinated President. In an amiable, if sentimental, gesture an acre of English ground had been given to the American people overlooking Magna Carta island. The President’s widow had been present at the unveiling.

The American was feeling the broken lettering. He pulled off his cap and dipped it in the pool of oil-stained water beside the plinth. He began to work away at the memorial, scraping off the mud, as Pearson moved down through the trees to the forward post.

When Pearson returned shortly afterwards the American was still working away at the memorial with his wired hands. Below the surface dirt were the residues of earlier defacements, slogans marked in engine grease or cut with bayonets. There was even one, ‘Stop US Atrocities in Vietnam’, almost as old as the monument itself. Pearson remembered that the memorial had been regularly defaced since its unveiling, a favourite target of vandals and agitators.

‘Major, we’re ready to move off, sir.’ Tulloch saluted him smartly, for the first time that day. The American was still scraping at the stone, and had managed to clean at least half of the front surface.

The lead platoon moved down the slope. As the captain dropped his cap and sat down, Pearson signalled to Sergeant Tulloch.

‘Okay, Charlie — off your backside!’ Tulloch had drawn his.45 automatic. The rear platoon was filing past, the men’s eyes fixed on the gaps in the trees, none of them paying any attention to the prisoners.

The American stood up, his eyes almost closed. He joined the two prisoners lying behind the memorial. As he began to sit down again Tulloch stepped behind him and shot him through the head. The American fell on to the sleeping private. Tulloch straddled his body with one leg. Like a farmer expertly shearing a sheep he shot the other two men, holding them as they struggled. They lay together at the base of the memorial, their legs streaming with blood.