I count up to five. Then I take hold of a bottle, aim, and heave it through the door into the corridor. It smashes into a thousand pieces. The praying stops. A swarm of sisters appear and reproach us in concert.

“Shut the door!” we yell.

They withdraw. The little one who came first is the last to go. “Heathen,” she chirps but shuts the door all the same. We have won.

At noon the hospital inspector arrives and abuses us. He threatens us with clink and all the rest of it. But a hospital inspector is just the same as a commissariat inspector, or anyone else who wears a long sword and shoulder straps, but is really a clerk, and is never considered even by a recruit as a real officer. So we let him talk. What could they do to us anyway⁠—

“Who threw the bottle?” he asks.

Before I can think whether I should report myself, someone says: “I did.”