They lay there for a few moments, listening as the bullets shrieked off the granite of the memorial. One machine gun, noted Corporal Meadows, in one house on the left; with a couple of riflemen covering it. He eased himself round the end of the wall and fixed a short burst with his machine carbine. The quick wheep-wheep of bullets close by answered him and he drew back. He lay, crouching uncomfortably, with his men waiting behind him. He felt trapped, irresolute, foolish. The passing seconds and his men behind him seemed to accuse him of indecision.

‘Bugger this for a lark.’

It was Scannock the Scouse. Scannock the lousy, the drunken, the shiftless. Scannock heaved himself to his feet and stepped quite deliberately over the wall. He walked across in front of the war memorial and stepped over the wall into the roadway on the other side. A light machine gun and two rifles were firing at him across the width of a country lane. Nothing hit him. He walked unhurriedly across the lane, pulling the pin from a grenade. He put the grenade in at the window as if he were posting a letter, and flattened himself against the wall of the house.

‘What youse all waitin’ for?’ he jeered as the grenade exploded. ‘Openin’ time?’

There were roses growing in the Norman hedges, pink, wild roses; and roses straggling round the cottage doorways.

A rifleman stopped to pick a rose, and fixed it in the netting of his helmet. All down the ranks men stooped to pluck flowers. They passed through another village. There were people here, peasants, old men and old women who stood impassively and watched the soldiers march by. Inside a cottage children squealed and came tumbling suddenly into the roadway between the legs of their grandparents.

‘Maman! Les soldats! Les Anglais, les Anglais!’

A pallid little girl in a black smock ran alongside the ranks and gave a soldier, a sturdy English soldier, a pink Normandy rose. Now the children, hidden for days in the cellars during the shelling, came swarming into the road, laughing and shrieking, pursuing the soldiers with flowers and running back to their parents crazy with delight and clutching fistfuls of chocolate.

The soldiers marched on, with the pink roses twined in the netting of their helmets.

Corporal Gonigle sat on a grassy bank reading Voltaire. He was excited; he had no desire to read; the print would not take shape before his eyes. But he had always dreamed of sprawling languidly on a grassy bank and reading Voltaire during a battle: and here he was doing it.

‘Hallo, Corporal.’ It was Mister Challis, his platoon officer, stocky and aggressive. ‘Having fun?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What’s the book?’

‘Candide.’

‘Ah,’ Challis was pleased with himself. ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Gonigle’s bubble of affectation was pricked. He felt intensely disgusted with himself.