It was early doors and besides me there was only the landlord and Donna the Barmaid. I sat at my usual corner table with a pouch of tobacco, a pint of foul tasting lager and a copy of Private Eye for company. I was never one for drinking this early but I was on holiday and the thought of having a drink while it should have been my tea break was somewhat appealing.

I had only had the one roll up when Donna had already descended on the ashtray I was using to empty it. Obviously she was bored out of her mind. I couldn't but wonder why she didn't clean out the pumps if she was that bored, the beer tasted like ear wax at best.

"On holiday then?" she asked idly

"Yes, I'm off for a..." she walked away before I could finish the sentence, she never was one for listening. So I returned to reading my Private Eye in peace.

But the peace was soon disrupted when I became aware of a presence. A man, who must have been in his eighties at least and sporting a pipe and a flat cap, had managed to park himself opposite me at my table.

"This bitter tastes like piss today." He proclaimed with a mumble through pipe clenched teeth.

"The lager isn't any better either." I replied

"I haven't been in this pub for 25 years and I think I know why now." He continued with a wheezy laugh in his voice "Oh yes, my names Don."

He offered out his hand for me to shake and I responded. His grip was tight and I put this down to a probably case of arthritis.

"My names Brian" I answered

We sat there for an hour and he told me stories of when he was in the war, like most men of his age usually do. It turned out he had been in Italy during the war, a D-Day deserter, and was there when the volcano went off and when they strung Mussolini and his wife up from lampposts. Hell, he even had a photo of the latter event that he had taken himself. It really was an interesting chat, especially when he told me the stories of when him and the lads raided vineyards for their wine .

Pretty soon he got around to talking about the baseness of all he had seen, friends falling, limbs blown off and their own cruelty inflicted on captured enemy. The descriptions he gave me were both very horrific and very saddening. It got to one point where I saw tears fall from his eyes as he described the death of a close childhood friend, Ginger, who had joined up the same time as him.

But as his tears subsided Don gave me a grin and said "Thank you for taking the time to talk with an old fogey like me, will you take a gift from me?"

"Please, no. You don't have to." I replied "It was a joy chatting with you" I said it, but my inner self wouldn't have minded a hand out, especially if it was a pint of piss, no matter how bad it tasted. But that wasn't what he had in mind. He pulled out, from the inside pocket of his baggy tweed jacket, another photograph. It was a picture of him and his childhood friend Ginger, both standing in front of a British tank. Both were stood in front of a tank and both were smiling.

"Now go save him." he said

I wasn't allowed to figure out what he meant by that because as soon as he said it I felt an immense pain around my body like there were many pairs of pliers attached to my flesh, pulling me down to the photograph. The pull was so much my head slammed against the table and it bounced back up again. My eyes tried focusing on what was going on around me, but something was wrong with my eyes. They had lost all purpose of color, everything was donned in shades of grey and for some unknown reason I was now standing up and feeling a breeze. My senses were reeling for a few seconds until a voice said to me "Don, you OK?"

It didn't take a breaking Einstein to work out what had happened, only an Einstein to work out how. I had been drawn into the photo and was now living in Dons younger body.

Don told me how Ginger had died. The pair of them were both manning a tank and were quite literally entering Italy through some open fields of long grass. Some fascist sympathizers had been waiting in the long grass, waiting to stick explosives on the underneath of the incoming British tanks. Their tank had got off lightly, but Ginger hadn't. He died immediately and Don had taken heavy shrapnel in the left thigh, Don had told me that it all had happened the day after the picture had been taken. Now the words "Go save him" were making sense. He had given me the power to go back in time and save his best friend.

"Ginger," I said "tomorrow, we have to find a different route"

"Bloody hell Don, we aint raiding any vineyards, we got orders and a f*cking route." he laughed

"Listen, the route we take is dangerous. There's long grass and we know what that means, don't we? I just don't want to see us hurt."

"Don, you been at the fuel again? You sound pissed." he laughed aloud "It's war my little friend, no one said it was ever going to be safe."

It wasn't going to be easy to change the past, future or what ever the bloody hell it was.

We got ourselves ready for a night of sleep and I was put on dogwatch (overnight lookout) and I spent the time trying to figure out how I was going to do this. My eyes kept dropping, but I kept forcing them open, but I didn't need to do it for long.

It was 4am and a glowing mist came rolling in, it was so glowing it was ghostly. I stood at my post mesmerized by this site, it was far more eerie than I could possibly even attempt to describe. As I stared at the mist I made out two figures, I raised my rifle (which I didn't even know how to use) and cried out "Friend or foe?" No answer came back. I called out back to my, Dons, friends for help, no reply there. I was scared, so scared I felt a warm patch spread across the front of my army issue trousers.

It got worse when I saw the two figures come into view.

Both were taller than the average person, I estimated them both to be close to 7 foot tall. I could just make out one as being hooded, the other wearing a helmet. The helmet wearer was over weight and was wearing what I could only call a sheepskin waistcoat, he also sported a long beard that ran right down to his navel. The other was of pale complexion, his cheeks were sallow and his eyes the pitch side of dark black.

My instinct was to run, but my legs were working by the same rules as my bladder, they wouldn't do what they were supposed to do. I was frozen.

"You don't belong here." Said helmet

"His fate is written." Spoke the sallow one, boney finger pointing to where Ginger slept

"There are rules that not even WE are not allowed to break, so why do you try to do it?" Added helmet

I managed to stutter a few words "Wh-who are you?"

"War". replied helmet

"Death" replied sallow

This whole experience could only have been a joke, the old man must have spiked my drink and the bar staff must have got a few friends in just to do the best wind up ever....No, this was real no matter how logically I tried looking at it.

"Those who cheat the rules pay...." War

"....the price" Death

"I was tricked, I didn't know what was happening." I bawled in glorious fear.

"No Excuse, your punishment is clear." Proclaimed war with a voice that seemed to echo like a dull thud in a cave

"That body is yours now, history will remain the same." Death added and then both vanished into the mist from whence they came.

Bad dream, the whole thing is a bad dream and I'll wake up in a comfortable bed back at my flat any minute, that's all I kept repeating to myself.

All I will say is that history ran its normal course and I am now in present day. All I have to do is go down the pub tomorrow, find a young man with a copy of Private Eye and show him a photograph. I'm not getting any younger and my leg is really playing up.