The jeep skidded perilously on the icy surface and Sergeant Willis stopped to put on the chains While he fitted them, Major Mark Hanlon looked through his field glasses at the mountains Then he saw the skier, gathering speed in a suicidal plunge down the dazzling hillside He came onward, faster and faster, until they could see the grey of his uniform and the green flashes of the alpenjaeger regiment and the rifle slung between his shoulderblades An Austrian soldier, armed and in battledress, yet the war had been over for months now