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scythe.
    The meeting with Atkins had happened too quickly for George to think on the consequences yet. His head was light, open, and he swung his scythe with a renewed energy. He felt exposed, as if a layer of skin had been shaved from him, bringing him into closer contact with the world. The blade’s edge against the young stalks of bracken, the calligraphy of the swallows above him. Everything seemed clearer, brought into a sharper focus. Just over an hour ago the war was a different country, the contours of which he’d traced through the newspapers, in radio reports. But now he was involved, connected. He had the strange sensation of his life simultaneously diminishing and expanding under the impression of Atkins’s words, and for the second time that week, he felt older than his seventeen years.
    “George! George, you lazy bastard! Get up!”
    His father. His father who had slept, snoring all night, while he was out running messages. His father who now thought his twenty-one-year-old son was a lazy good for nothing as well as a coward, always yawning, tripping over his boots, and knocking things over.
    He got out of bed, nausea swelling through his belly. His eyelids felt lined with sandpaper.
    “I’m coming! Be down now in a minute!”
    Dropping to his knees he reached under the bed. He pulled out some bags of old clothes, a train set he’d had as a boy. Then he put his arm deep under again, his head resting on the mattress, like a farmer feeling for the hooves of a lamb in the womb. His fingers groped about the knots and cracks of the wooden floorboards before touching the smoother polish of the case. He drew it out. It was long and narrow, like the cue cases of the snooker players he’d seen waiting at the bus stop to go into the club in town. Flicking the latches with his thumbs, he opened the lid slowly, as if it was a music box, pulled away the oily rag inside, and lifted out the rifle. Hetested its mechanism, the slide of the bolt, the trigger weight, then took a narrow brush from inside the case and pulled it through the barrel. Resting it across his knee, he fitted the telescopic sight and silencer, then lifted the stock to his shoulder. With one elbow resting on the bed he bent his head to the eyepiece of the scope. The crosshairs wavered for a moment, the view through the telescopic sight swinging from half, to crescent, to full moon before coming to rest on the pencil mark he’d drawn on the far wall of his bedroom. He held them there, counting in his head. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. Relaxing his thumb he squeezed his finger until he felt the click of the trigger. The crosshairs trembled slightly as if shaken in a breeze, but kept their bearing on the pencil mark on the wall. He breathed out slowly, just as he’d been instructed. Not by Atkins, who didn’t like guns, he knew that now, but as the other man from British Intelligence had taught him. The other man who’d also come to visit George one day that long hot summer four years ago.

GUIDE ON HOW TROOPS ARE TO BEHAVE IN ENGLAND
    1. A firm and cautious attitude towards the civilian population is to be adopted; correct soldierly behaviour is a self-evident duty.
    2. Strict reticence will be observed when conversing with the local population. Enemy intelligence will be particularly active in occupied territory, endeavouring to obtain information on installations and measures of military importance. Any thoughtlessness, boasting, or misplaced confidences may, therefore, have the direst consequences.
    3. Acts of violence against orderly members of the population and looting will incur the severest penalties under military law; the death sentence may be imposed.
    4. Works of art and historic monuments are to be preserved and protected. Any disparagement of the religious practices of the country will be punished.
    5. The soldier will be provided with all essentials by his unit. Unnecessary purchases are to be avoided.