Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler

Frankfurt-on-Main. It wasa patrician paper in a patrician town. She remembered her father as a frail, middle-aged man with gout-bent fingers, a very soft voice and a pointed greyish beard, pacing up and down the worn path on the carpet in the library which one could only enter on tiptoe, or writing with his back to the room at an old-fashioned standing-desk. He had published books on Federal Union, Pan-Europa, against militarism in general, and in his own country in particular; he had been a delegate at various disarmament conferences and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Peace. He fought nationalism in every form and disguise, adhered to no Church or religious community, and regarded his race as an accident of birth. When the National Socialists came into power he refused to go abroad, but was persuaded by his friends to hide. Dina, then seventeen, was to join her mother, who lived, separated from her husband, in the south of France. She was arrested at the frontier and kept for six months, during which they tried to find out from her her father’s whereabouts. When they let her out she was told that her father had given himself up to obtain her release and had died shortly afterwards in a non-specified way.—During those six months, when they kept on trying, methodically, scientifically, ingeniously, to make her betray her father’s hide-out, happened the things to forget.
    On the whole she was gay and composed. Somewhere inside her the memory of those things lay encrusted, like a bullet which had not been extracted, in its cocoon of insulating tissue. Normally the injured is unconscious of it except when touched near the scar; and Dina’s scar expanded over the whole immaculate surface of her body.

10
    The first volley came shortly after midnight. It found them mentally unprepared. Although the probability of an attack had been the whole day at the back of their minds, the tensionhad gradually relaxed as the night wore on. The horra had come to an end about an hour earlier, as abruptly as it had started, and those not on guard duty had tottered to their palliasses in complete exhaustion. When the shooting woke them, they had the feeling of having closed their eyes only a minute ago.
    They ran towards their assigned posts, still dazed by sleep but automatically keeping their heads down. After the first salvo it had become quiet again; the men in the dug-outs had orders to fire only when they saw the attackers, and for the time being they could see nothing. The trouble was that the hill had the wrong shape. It was shaped rather like the back of a camel, but with three instead of two humps. They sat on top of the southern or rear hump with the two others in front of them, the camel’s head pointing north as it were. For this reason they had built two dug-outs facing north side by side, and only one each facing in the other three directions. The northern communicating trench was also the deepest.
    In front of the northern trench ran the barbed wire, and immediately beyond it the ground sloped down into a hollow, and beyond that hollow came the second hump less than a hundred yards away; and another hundred yards further the third. The height of each hillock was only about fifty feet, but this was quite enough to hide and protect the raiders. Bauman had thought of putting observation posts on each of the other two humps, but he had dropped the idea. There had been no time to fortify them, and the outposts, exposed from all directions, would have been bumped off at once.
    As was to be expected, the salvo had been fired from the north, either from behind the second or the third hump.
    The moon was due to rise in about an hour, and the sky was heavily clouded. The beam of the searchlight crept slowly along the top of the second hillock, then swept with equal care through the hollow, stopping here and there at a suspect bush of thistle or camel-thorn which grew in clusters out of the rock like ugly tufts of