The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times. Ian Brunskill

at the officers. The two men at the front of the police column reacted faster. Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai were shot dead before they could pull the triggers on their Kalashnikovs.

      It was 12.20am and the siege had ended.

      An hour or so later Professor Philippe Juvin, head of the accident and emergency department at Georges Pompidou Hospital, learnt that the wounded were being evacuated. He was told to expect a large number of casualties.

      Juvin had already asked the usual Friday night array of patients waiting in A&E — the drunks, the hypochondriacs, the footballers who had sprained their ankles — to go home unless they were critical. All but two did. He had summoned all available staff and put out a Twitter message asking for help from doctors or nurses in the vicinity.

      Juvin, 52, is a slim, energetic doctor who speaks with a quietly reassuring certainty. He does not look like the sort to panic in a crisis and he is used to dealing with bullet wounds inflicted by combat rifles. Not only did he spend eight months with the French army in Afghanistan, but his A&E department regularly receives gangsters injured in gunfights.

      The wounds are not pretty — “If a pistol bullet hits the foot it goes in and out,” he says. “With a Kalashnikov bullet, there is no foot left” — but at least they rarely get more than one victim at a time.

      That night, his department treated 53 patients with Kalashnikov wounds. “The big difference is that the people we get with bullet wounds are usually the bad guys. We treat them because it’s our job but we don’t necessarily have much sympathy for them.

      “On November 13, we were getting people like you and me, or like our children. We could identify with them. There was an emotional load.”

      It was a frantic night. There were too many ambulances — 30 or so — for the A&E reception area. No one had imagined so many turning up at once. They created a traffic jam and Juvin had to go into the street to cast an eye over the casualties in the ambulances. Signs of an internal haemorrhage? He waved the ambulance on. A bullet in the arm? He told the patient to do the last 50m on a stretcher.

      Juvin and his improvised team — the hospital’s doctors and nurses and those who had turned up to help — checked pulse, blood pressure, wounds. Who needed an immediate operation? Who could wait until the next day?

      They flew down corridors, bandaged injuries, made rapid life-or-death decisions. Yet Juvin’s abiding memory of that night is of silence. “They had debilitating wounds that were probably very painful, and nobody spoke.

      “Usually people tell you when it’s hurting. There, everyone was in a state of stupefaction. I went into a cubicle and there was a man with a badly damaged leg. I think he was in pain, but he was saying nothing. I said to the doctor treating him to give him morphine anyway.

      “He was somewhere else and could not express his pain. When you have experienced something like that, you enter a dimension that no one can describe.”

      By 6.30am A&E was empty, the patients all having been dispatched to operating theatres or to other departments. None had died in care during the night.

      Juvin went home to sleep. He couldn’t. He came back to the hospital. There was a queue of people waiting to give blood and families turning up to ask whether their relatives had been hospitalised at Georges Pompidou. Among them was Georges Salines, a doctor who heads the Environmental and Health Office at the Paris council. He had gone to bed the previous evening unaware that Lola, his 28-year-old daughter, was at the Bataclan. He had not watched the television and had no idea that anything untoward was going on.

      At midnight Lola’s brother called. He knew about her plans and knew what had happened at the concert hall. He had tried to call her. There had been no answer.

      Salines, 59, a slender, fit-looking man with a welcoming smile and a precise discourse, telephoned the emergency helpline set up by the authorities after the attacks. He could not get through. He phoned again, and again, and again. The operator who responded at last — hours later — had no information about Lola and advised him to get in touch with the Paris hospitals. Hospital receptionists said they would phone back. None did.

      Somebody told Salines that Georges Pompidou Hospital had patients whose identities had not been established. But when the family arrived, managers said that was untrue. The patients had been identified. Lola was not among them.

      “It was only at the end of the afternoon that we discovered her death in very painful circumstances,” said Salines. A friend had telephoned the emergency helpline, which was functioning correctly by now, and the operator disclosed that Lola’s name was on the list of the dead.

      Word got around. It appeared on the internet. There was a denial and confusion. Salines called the emergency number himself. The operator confirmed Lola’s death.

      “My daughter died for nothing, for an illusion, for a folly. It’s absurd,” Salines said in L’Indicible de A à Z (The Unspeakable from A to Z), a book about his reaction to the attacks.

      In it, he describes Lola, who worked in the children’s books department of a publisher, in these terms: “You liked books, films, drawing, travelling, rock music, children, Billy the Cat, lemon tart, Belgian beer, brunch at the Bouillon Belge bar, singing while playing the ukulele, roller derbies, your friends, your mum, your brothers, your boyfriend, your girlfriends, a kiss on the cheek, making love. You loved life. And all those who knew you liked you.”

      The months have passed and the scars remain — physical or psychological — for those involved.

      Sophie needed two operations, three general anaesthetics — the third to change her bandages — and 43 stitches. She has a bullet in her pelvis and fears that grip her day and night.

      “When I go to sleep, I still see what happened almost every night. Either I see them or I hear them. There is the fear. For a long time it was very complicated to leave home. I still don’t take the métro or commuter trains. I only take the bus.

      “Before, it was simple to make plans. Now I advance day by day. When I go to bed I wonder what will happen tomorrow and what will I see on the news.”

      Christophe Molmy has been affected, too: “You don’t emerge unscathed from an intervention like the Bataclan. It’s impossible.”

      He organised sessions with psychologists for his brigade and gave them and their families the opportunity to make appointments on a one-to-one basis. Some did; the majority did not. “We are still in a macho culture where we say, ‘Nah, I don’t need that,’ but in fact we need it,” he says. “I saw the psychologist.”

      We meet in his office at the end of a warren of corridors in the 19th-century building that is the Parisian equivalent of Scotland Yard. He had never confronted terrorism before 2015. Now he lives permanently with the threat — a phone at his side at all times, in the shower, everywhere — and admits it has changed his job. “We always used to intervene against gangsters whom we tried not to kill. Today if we go in against terrorists, we go to kill the terrorists. We won’t manage to get them to put their hands up.

      “We are becoming a little like paramilitaries. We are training and equipping ourselves like soldiers to fight a war.”

      He talks about the old days of fighting criminals with a certain fondness. “We arrested them; they behaved well; we understood each other. We could have a bite to eat together. But what am I supposed to do with people who come to die? The human relationship is not the same. I don’t even know if there is a human relationship.”

      Surprisingly, perhaps, Georges Salines seems almost the most sanguine of all, despite the loss of his daughter. When we meet in his office, he looks bright-eyed, and says in his book, “I am sad from time to time, I sometimes cry, but I sleep, I work, I talk and I sometimes laugh. You can’t avoid the suffering but resilience is possible, particularly in a family whose members love each other.”

      Salines is head of 13 Novembre: Fraternité et Vérité, an association set up by victims two months after the attacks, and he has used the