The ground was frozen so hard we couldn't get a real grave dug.

Arya noticed the first grave that same day; a small mound beside the road, dug for a child.

The panzers rolled through the detritus of battle, past graves hastily dug in the rich dark soil of the Ukraine; past stinking, bloated Russian corpses still unburied; past wrecked trucks and tanks of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army.

As a result albinos have been persecuted, killed and dismembered, and graves of albinistic people dug up and desecrated.

At the peak of the famine last summer, 10 to 15 children a day were dying at the orphanage, their graves dug in the red soil around the building.

These hundreds were buried not in the graveyard, but in graves hastily dug amid squatters' huts.

"Dug his own grave," one of the crowd echoed caustically.

There were also hastily dug graves, for an army on the march suffers constant attrition.

In a dramatic gesture, Coehoorn ordered his own grave dug to symbolise his commitment to defend the position to the end, but although his grave was not needed, the Dutch engineer was wounded in the head by a shell that killed his valet.

The graves were quickly and expertly dug, and the victims were wrapped in leaves, in spite of the driving rain.