They were relieved that day, and as they sprawled along the roadsides, too tired to feel or to remember, waiting for transport to take them to the rear, they watched the newly-landed support troops who were moving up the line and jeered at their freshness and their frightened, vacant faces.

‘Garn,’ yelled Charlie Venable, as the men of another county battalion trudged by, ‘you ain’t arf bleedin’ late. We been ’ere since D-Day.’

‘You haven’t got very far then!’ flung back one of the relieving infantrymen.

‘No,’ Charlie Venable shouted back to him. ‘An’ there’s a lot of bloody good lads never got this far.’

There was a placid meadow, rich with clover and tall, wet grass. The Fifth Battalion had gone but its dead remained, littered about the field, staring up at the sky with the flies buzzing over them and their big boots poking up in the long grass.

They were silent and still. All the field was dreadfully still. Nothing stirred in the field but the petals of the pink hedge roses which fluttered in the helmets of the dead.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

No bloody fags

THERE WAS A CLUTTER of signboards where the two roads met; rough box-tops with the emblems daubed on them of battalions and brigades blazing a trail across the countryside for their rear echelons to follow; neatly-painted diagrams put up by the military police to guide the thundering convoys to their destinations; arrows, figures, initials, hieroglyphics indicating the distance and direction to dumps, headquarters, assembly areas, transport parks; and above them all, the warning: TO THE FORWARD AREA.

In the ditch by the road junction, four men of the Fifth Battalion crouched in a tangle of weeds and bracken. They watched the great supply trucks come lumbering up to the fork, slow down, swing on to the main road to the front and gather speed again.

A convoy went by. The men in the ditch waited, keeping down out of sight, until a lorry came towards them, three hundred yards after the others and with none behind it – a straggler, probably, trying to regain its place in the column.

As the lorry passed them, slowing down, one of the men leaped up from his hiding-place, hurled himself at the tailboard and swung nimbly up into the lorry. He put his arms round one of the stacked packing-cases in the lorry, tipped it over the side, and – as his companions reached forward to pull the box down out of sight – slipped over the tailboard and dropped back on to the roadway. The lorry accelerated and raced away down the road.

The men looked about them; there was no one in sight. They rolled the box through a gap in the hedge and crawled after it.

‘Gold Flakes,’ grunted Sergeant Bender, as he inspected the box. ‘No bloody fags, eh? – we’ll show ’em.’