Either 21 Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing. Read this extract from Tyres (by Adam Thorpe), and then answer the question that follows it: Then the village, one Sunday, was crossed with the darkest shadow of war that of blood. We were sitting down to eat when the rumble of a convoy sounded. 'Bloody Boche,' murmured my father, followed by something ruder, in patois. A few minutes later there was shouting, and sounds of gunfire from the northern end of the village, near the little crossroads. There was lots of banging on doors, and we were all told to pay a visit to the Mairie. In the larger room, on the big table there used for the meetings of the Conseil Municipal, were laid three bodies. Their guts were literally looped and dripping almost to the floor, ripped open by that brief burst of gunfire. One of them was a local man, the son of the butcher, a little older than myself. The other two I did not know. They looked surprised in death, and it was said later that, though all three members were of the Maquis, no one knew why they had taken that road slap-bang into the German convoy, and then reversed in such panic. I know why: because, for all their bravery, they were mortals, and felt mortal fear. I was sick in the gutter, immediately afterwards, to my shame. We all – the whole village - filed past the bodies and came out silent and pale. A few of us cried. I had never seen anything like it before, the only dead person I had ever looked at being my poor mother, at peace in her bed. The following week they looped a rope around the long neck of Petit Ours, whom they'd caught in a botched raid on the gendarmerie, and pushed him from the town bridge - over which the schoolchildren were forced to walk class by class in the afternoon, while the body swayed in the wind. The Mayor had to give a speech, thanking the Boche for keeping public order and so forth. The atmosphere was terrible. It crept up the road and cast my father and I, and most of our clients, into a deep gloom. But some of our clients, of course, were Germans. One, in particular, was a large, friendly man and probably the very chap, as an officer of the Gestapo, keeping an eye on things out here, who had ordered the execution of Petit Ours. His huge, soft-topped Maybach (of which he was very proud, and with good reason) needed a change of tyre about a fortnight later: a sharp stone had finally wormed its way in, on his way to the town. Both spare wheels, carried on each side of the bonnet, had been stolen, but we found the right fit. I remembered the words of the fellow in the café, and the ripped stomachs of the three good men, and the swaying body of Petit Ours, three days after his death, sending foul whiffs of gas up the river. In a shadowy corner of the shed, out of the bright sunlight, I took a brand new inner tube and quietly (though my father was in the office, talking with the fellow) shaved its rubber with a small steel file on a certain spot, until it looked frayed, but still just airtight. I placed this inner tube in the new tyre. The officer's chauffeur and some other armed minion watched me fit it onto the wheel - the nearside front one but I could scarcely stop my hands from trembling. In those days we tightened the bolts by hand with a box spanner, not a gun, so there was no risk of over-tightening, but I kept dropping the tommy bar with a big clatter. Anyway, I was giving the disk chrome a little polish by the time the big man himself stepped out of the office. I saw him, in the mirror-finish of the chrome, advance towards me, all distorted, looming over my shoulder like a big bat, and I composed my face and stood up. He pumped my hand and boomed at me about the state of the roads, and my father handed him the bill, which startled him. The fellow patted the bonnet and began to discuss the future of the automobile, while the two minions leaned on the sweeping mud-guard and smoked. His black gloves did a little dance while he talked. He must have been some sort of technical engineer before the war, for he was full of this idea that would avoid ‘grovelling in the road' with a jack and getting your knees dirty: some sort of crowbar lever that would work a fitting under the bonnet, and put up either set of wheels as desired, and bring the whole car into suspension with a final twist. (A few years later, in about '48, a British couple in sunglasses stopped for a puncture-repair in a 1.25 litre MG, and laughed when I searched for the jack. It had exactly the same system as the Gestapo officer had described, and I all but burst into tears. They did not understand my upset: they said something about the French having 'a different sense of humour' – which really means none at all, perhaps.) In what ways does Thorpe make this extract such a shocking depiction of life in war time?