Then they saw what the Goons were doing.

A line of men had formed up in extended order across their front, at the foot of Little Ridge. On a word of command they turned to face towards MacConnachie and Ansell, fixed bayonets and, at the next bark, moved slowly towards them, fanning out, thrusting the steel into every patch of brush and scrub.

Behind this line there was another, some yards up the ridge still, and after that a third. These, in their turn, would form up when they reached the valley floor and, by following in the wake of the first, create a lateral sweep, three layers deep, of searching steel. MacConnachie murmured,

‘Christ!’

‘That is awkward.’

‘Yes.’

MacConnachie was twisting his head this way and that, looking urgently to right and left and behind him. Ansell said,

‘Which way?’

‘We’ll have to go back!’

‘Surely not?’

‘What then?’

It seemed to Ansell there was a new element in MacConnachie suddenly, not of fear exactly, but of desperation. He himself felt startlingly calm. He looked along the line of approaching men, left and right. They were about a hundred yards away, but he and MacConnachie were much closer to the right-hand end of the line than they were to the centre. He said,

‘Let’s try to get round the end.’

‘Which one?’

‘Right flank.’

MacConnachie looked and said,

‘We’d never make it.’

‘Well, where do we go, if we go backwards?’

Again MacConnachie looked, blinking the sweat out of his eyes. The Goons kept appearing and disappearing in different places, always closer to them, as they worked their way over the humpback of the terrain. At length, snappishly, MacConnachie said,

‘We’d be going closer to the enemy!’

‘For Christ’s sake – we’re surrounded! We can’t do anything else!’

All the time the net drew tighter, their chances diminished, and MacConnachie hesitated. Ansell couldn’t understand it. He was about to break forth in rage, when MacConnachie said, quietly,

‘What do we do if we don’t make it?’

There was such sadness in his tone that Ansell looked at him closely.

‘We lie still and hope for the best.’

MacConnachie nodded.

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said.

And now Ansell understood, and felt pity for the older man, who lay staring glumly at the safety to their right. He had immeasurable courage to stand and fight, to pit his strength against mountains and rivers and sun. But to lie and wait, to leave his death to chance, deliberately to relinquish the initiative, and with it his dignity as a fighter, was beyond him. Ansell didn’t know what to do.

‘Mac, we’ve got to move!’

‘I know.’

MacConnachie was unable to look at him.

Ansell said, ‘Come on,’ and immediately scrambled away to his right, not looking back to see if MacConnachie followed. For ten minutes he didn’t look back; it became a point of honour. He concentrated solely on the job in hand, an immensely difficult manoeuvre complicated by the fact that he never knew at what point a Goon face might suddenly appear above him. At a half-crouch he hobbled along, wallowing in tacky sweat, stopping again and again to peer gropingly, to wait, to listen, sometimes seeing many men, sometimes none. Now he was afraid; the unnatural calm had left him, and he felt intensely alone. The heat bore down and the earth pressed up to meet him.