I understood when I went to a convent in Amiens and saw a crowd of young mothers with flaxen-haired babies, just arrived from the liberated districts. “All those are the children of German fathers,” said the old Reverend Mother. “That is the worst tragedy of war. How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the guilty.”

Eighteen months later, or thereabouts, I went into a house in Cologne, where a British outpost was on the Hohenzollern bridge. There was a babies’ crèche in an upper room, and a German lady was tending thirty little ones whose chorus of “ Guten Tag! Guten Tag! ” was like the quacking of ducks.

“After tomorrow there will be no more milk for them,” she said.

“And then?” I asked.

“And then many of them will die.”