Twenty yards to the rear another boy from the shires licked his gummy lips and drew up to his Bren. The wispy smoke of the explosion cleared and the grey-green giants disappeared as his machine gun rapped briefly and severely. They were grey-green humps in the uneven ground now, crawling forward flattened against the turf. A half a dozen of them rose and came in with a rush; the machine gun drove them to ground. Another group were up and moving forward. Now they were stumbling up on to their feet all about him, looming again to the stature of giants, more and more of them. The boy from the shires struggled more closely up to the butt of his Bren. He waited for a second as the grey-green giants came crowding into his sights. Gently he squeezed the trigger.

‘My bumpkins. My poor bumpkins,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Pothecary. He was standing on a hillside with the R.S.M. The pale blue sky was radiant with sunlight, the larks were singing, the countryside below was a lovely summer panorama, and in the cornfield at the foot of the hill a platoon of the Fifth Battalion was moving forward in open order to clear a village.

The men moved forward through the tall corn, breasting it with their rifles held high across their chests. They must feel at home in the corn, thought the colonel; these boys ought to be harvesting, not fighting, these bewildered, red-faced boys and their tired schoolmasterly officer.

The sound of small arms fire came to him through the dizzy summer heat, less near and less real than the song of the larks. Men were hit and disappeared in the corn, drowned in a golden sea. The others moved on, tiny, scattered little figures bobbing up and down in the billowing corn. The officer, the tired man with fear in the corners of his eyes who had stood before the colonel ten minutes ago and who was now moving out there in front of them, toppled to one side; the corn parted for a second, then closed in, rustling, where he had been. The platoon sergeant went down. Now, thought the colonel, with a strange dread which was half full of longing, now they’re without leaders, now they’ll come streaming back, now they’re finished; but the little black figures went bobbing forward through the corn, through the dizzy sunlight, towards the distant, woodpecking machine guns.

The counter-attacks grew less frequent, the mortaring less murderous. One morning the men of the Fifth Battalion, stirring sleep-sodden in their shallow slit trenches, heard the birds shrilling in the pale, vast sky, listened to their own aircraft droning in the cloudless infinity above and, wondering, puffed their cigarettes in peace. Their ears were ringing with the quietness.