The Sec had moved across the maps, as inexorably as it had moved across the consciousness of those who knew it.  At one time, it had been a place for sentimentality, a faithful old monk immersed in silence, stubborn in its integrity to the faithful and the lost.  You might never have been inside its robust white walls, but you were glad to see it still standing, when you passed.  But now, its name was uttered in black humour.  "We'll end up in The Sec" had become the group motto for any dreaded mission, any irreversible path towards your fate.  If your best outcome was to be carried through the barbed wire avenue, across the bare, starched grass, to the tired mercy of The Sec, then you might as well wish for oblivion.  How sad that The Sec should have lost its nobility so ingloriously in the intervening years.  Just as the battle lines had crept up behind it, and metre by metre marooned it in the chaos of war, so a tramp might take shelter in a ruin, catching the sympathetic gazes of travellers, none of whom would ever think to comfort the wretched creature.