A week after D-Day the Fifth Battalion was dug in along the gentle hillsides towards Caen. The frightened country boys crouched in their slit trenches listening to the blasting crack of mortars and watching the black plumes of smoke leap up all around them. The ground rocked and quaked with the explosions of eighty-eight millimetre shells as the German artillery searched the folds in the ground in which they were entrenched and blotted out their shallow weapon pits one by one. At night snipers crept in through their positions, to open fire in the morning with rifle and machine gun on parties coming up from the rear. Dozens of bloody little battles were fought behind the forward positions. The snipers were everywhere. Officers, their chosen prey, learned to conceal all distinguishing marks, to carry rifles like their men instead of their accustomed pistols, not to carry maps or field glasses, to wear their pips on their sleeves instead of conspicuously on their shoulders.

The counter-attacks came in one after another. Panzer grenadiers came creeping like cats through the corn and swarming in from the surrounding woods. A forward platoon was overrun. A field was lost. A company was forced out of a village, went stumbling forward to win it again, huddled in the ruins under ceaseless mortar fire, was driven out and won it back once more. The frightened country boys were facing troops who, man for man, were craftier and better trained, who had been reared as warriors; they were outfought at every turn; but they managed, somehow they managed, heaven only knew how they managed, to stay where they were.

A straw-haired boy lay in a crater watching the green-clad giants moving crouched among the apple trees towards him. He was livid, twitching, trembling, dribbling with fear. Inside him thought had ceased and there was only the great yearning of a child for a mother a million miles away. But he stayed where he was; and each time his rifle leaped against his shoulder another of the giants stealing up among the trees clawed air and crashed to the ground. They were coming up closer now, all round him. His eyes watched them like the eyes of a trapped kitten; but every few seconds his rifle jerked again in his shoulder and another of them toppled. A stick grenade sailed up in a lazy arc against the white daylight, turned over and came spinning down towards him. He did not move. His eyes were fixed on the grenade as it came down, turning over and over, hurtling down bigger and bigger until its explosion blotted out the daylight for ever.