The others joined him: Dickie Crawford, Scannock, MacGuinness. Two of them lifted the box and they trudged across the fields to the orchard in which the Fifth Battalion was resting.

They put the box down by a tree. Bender smashed the lid in with a spade.

‘Look nippy,’ he said. ‘Let’s split these up and get ’em out of sight.’

‘Just a minute, Sergeant.’

Scannock pushed him aside and stood over the box.

‘These is for the lads.’

Bender swore derisively.

‘These is for the lads,’ said Scannock stubbornly. ‘The lads is goin’ mad for a smoke.’

The battalion had been short of cigarettes since D-Day. Its rear transport echelon, which should have joined it by now, but which was still somewhere in England, held up by the bad weather, contained a truck loaded with the month’s free ration of cigarettes which the NAAFI had given to every man in the invading army. Meanwhile, although the battalion was resting, although mail and newspapers were reaching the men regularly from home, although they each received seven cigarettes a day in their composite ration packs, they were bitterly dissatisfied.

‘Get off that box,’ said Bender, ‘before I crown you with this shovel. What you think I done this for? Charity?’

Scannock did not move. ‘You never done it. I jumped that wagon an’ slung the box off, not you.’

‘Don’t argue. You’re wasting time. Gettin’ soft in your old age, aren’t you? Never used to be no love lost between you an’ the lads.’

What had happened to Scannock during his first week in action was something for which he could not find words, something his foggy brain was not even able to define.

‘These is for the lads,’ he said.

Dickie Crawford spoke, after a moment’s silence, ‘The boy’s right. Got brains, ’e ’as. We’ll never smoke all these fags ourselves, nor sell ’em while we’re ’ere. If we ’ave to move orf we won’t be able to carry ’em, an’ Gawd ’elp us if there’s a search. Me, I’ll settle for five ’undred, an’ share the rest out.’

Each of them stowed a carton of five hundred cigarettes inside his battle blouse. Then Dickie Crawford called to the men who, all around them, had been watching in silence from the dug-outs and bivouacs under the apple trees.

‘Fags up, my lads. Come an’ get ’em.’

In five minutes the cigarettes were gone, the crate and the litter of cartons burned.

‘Scannock,’ said Corporal Meadows later, carefully packing cigarettes into a little tin box, ‘you’re a bloody great thievin’ old bastard – bless your little cotton socks.’