Through an open window of the chapel just above my head their voices, as they chanted the responses between the sonorous Latin phrases of the priest who had come to lead them in their devotions, floated out in clear sweet snatches, like the songs of vesper sparrows.

Behind me, in a paved courtyard, were perhaps twenty wounded men lying on cots.

They had been brought out of the building and put in the sunshine.

They were on the way to recovery; at least most of them were.

I sat facing a triangular-shaped square, which was flanked on one of its faces by a row of shuttered private houses and on another by the principal church of the town, a fifteenth-century structure with outdoor shrines snuggled up under its eaves.