THE INFANTRYMEN PLODDED along at the roadside while the tanks, each enveloped in its own clattering roar, hurried past them. The men were dusty and sodden with sweat, marching in straggling single files, each man keeping his own uneven step.

For miles across the meadows and ploughlands that sloped down to the Channel thousands of little files of men were moving inland; from the air it must have looked less like a battle than the advance of a multitude of little worms across the face of the land. Every little file was the same: six, eight or ten tired men, more aware of the weight of their packs than of the enemy who awaited them; looking idly across the silent fields on either side with the lethargic unconcern of the early workman’s bus: not talking, not singing, unstirred by the thudding artillery but waiting, always waiting and alert, for the crack of small arms fire and the quick squeal of bullets. There was no drama, no earthquaking bombardment, no masses in conflict; only the ten men plodding along a lane in single file, tired and out of step, the ten men multiplied ten thousand times.

A shell would burst in the fields a hundred yards away and the earth come pattering down on the helmets of the men sprawled in the dust, and on the backs of their necks. Then they would be up on their feet again and raggedly marching. A shell would explode across the roadway, obliterating half a dozen men; but the files, dispersed, would coalesce again and plod onwards past the shallow crater and through the vanishing brown smoke.

A wood echoed with the nervous clamour of machine guns; a farmhouse burned. Desperate little fights flared up and ended suddenly, for a barn, for a hedgerow honeycombed with weapon pits, for a roadside cottage, section against section, platoon against platoon; ten, perhaps twenty men on each side, rarely more. Wary riflemen hunted snipers in the cool gloom of vaulted cellars among the great cobwebbed cider barrels. Men died on the warm dungheaps with hens fluttering a panic about them. An old French peasant woman lugged a dead German on to her cabbage patch and began to dig his grave there, ‘to enrich the earth, m’sieu’. This was the battle on D-Day Plus One.

The Fifth Battalion was moving up through a village. The unpaved road climbed steeply between the splinter-pitted grey walls of the cottages and turned sharply into a tangled, five-forked junction. Here there was chaos, with platoons of riflemen in file threading in and out of each other and of the slow-moving columns of tanks and guns that filtered across the road junction.