A tank accelerated to climb the hill into the village, with a foot or two to spare on each side between its racing tracks and the cottage walls. Infantrymen scattered, cursing, or flattened themselves against the walls; re-formed their files and scattered again for the next tank; ducked into doorways and emerged with silly little pilfered trinkets which they threw away five minutes later; drew back to let the next tank go by, and formed their ranks again.

Sergeant-Major McBean stood at the crossroads and watched the battalion marching by. He was worried. These men were not like the Highlanders with whom he had fought before. With the exception of the men from the Green Howards, scattered here and there along the battalion’s ranks, they were new to battle, and by God, he thought, they couldn’t look less like soldiers. Big, awkward country boys with flat fair hair poking raggedly from under their helmets; red, round faces that were frightened faces, empty faces now; bewildered as lost children, looking around them for the sleek Wessex valleys, the dairy herds and the great shire horses that they knew, finding instead the clamour and confusion of a multitude of men, hearing the sickening reverberations of the guns, wandering in a wilderness they could not recognise. They wore long fighting knives sheathed in leather at their belts but they did not look warlike. They had bandoliers of spare ammunition slung over their shoulders and anti-tank grenades tied to their equipment with untidy bits of string; they carried machine carbines and bayoneted rifles; but they only looked like overburdened errand boys.

There was a quick, cut-off shriek from along one of the lanes. A tank swerving too close to a cottage wall had caught one of the riflemen, some slow-moving country boy day-dreaming perhaps of trout in a clear, cold stream, and nudged him against the wall. The thirty tons of steel lumbered on. The boy slid down the wall leaving a long smear of blood and filth; he huddled in a mound at its foot, a bundle burst in its rags. The tank was out of the lane and across the road junction: its crew would never even know what had happened. The riflemen, too, moved on. No one had more than a curious glance for the huddled body. Like a bug, thought the sergeant-major. Killed in action; what a joke. The last rifle company was coming up, and he fell in with its commander.

There was a group of houses where two roads came together. The leading section of riflemen, moving cautiously up towards them, drew fire from the houses on the left and hit the ground, huddling behind the low stone wall that surrounded the war memorial which stood in the fork of the road.