The devastation, during that year, of two moderate sized cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a foretaste of the increasingly bleak chances of human survival with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons far more destructive than the fission bombs used on the two Japanese cities.

It was then close on two o'clock of an unusually bleak November afternoon.

There was a vista bounded by a stretch of one of those unutterably bleak backways of a small and shabby French town.