‘I never went near them again. I got plastered every night for the rest of my leave. I never worried about the furniture. I haven’t even done anything about her allowance yet.

‘The cow,’ he said. ‘Oh, the rotten, bleeding cow.’

‘I loved that girl,’ he said. ‘I loved that bloody girl.’

He watched the rain streaming down the window. ‘Half a man,’ he said, wonderingly.

On his left breast, among his campaign ribbons, was the red, white and blue strip of the Military Medal.

‘Half a bloody man,’ he mused.

A whistle shrieked. The men swayed with the speeding train. The carriage was full of smoke and the smell of wet uniforms drying. The rain streamed down the windows.

CHAPTER TWO

The Fifth Battalion

THE FIFTH BATTALION, Wessex Regiment (Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Pothecary, commanding) lived on the bleak flanks of a hill looking down on the English Channel.

Across a waste of sodden turf, wrapped in winter mists, lay Nissen huts like rows of slumbering black beetles. Cinder paths veined the hillside, at the foot of which ran a rutted, muddy lane leading to a sentry post and to the main road.

Beyond the lane was a cinder parade ground from which the battalion, on its morning parades, looked out over the fields and woodlands which fell away, in a pastoral pattern, towards the sea. The battalion commander, facing his men each morning, stood before a backcloth of grey sky and white-combed grey sea.

Away to the west the veils of mist thickened into a darker haze of smoke beneath which a great seaport lay.

Here lived the soldiers of the Fifth Battalion, six hundred men with mud on their boots, their faces whipped red-raw by the stabbing wind and the icy, thousand-needled rain. They listened day and night to the undertones of the wind, to the creak and groan of corrugated iron roofing and the mutter of loose doors. Before their eyes as they stepped shivering from their huts each morning was the Channel, the grey Channel, and beyond it – the grey mist.

The Fifth Battalion of the Wessex Regiment was talking politics.