Tanks rumbled across the fields, the infantry moving behind them in scattered groups. As the daylight crept across the countryside the enemy artillery and mortars came into action. Exploding shells flung their pillars of smoke up towards the black, low-bellied rainclouds. Tanks were hit, heeling into the soft ground on their broken tracks, burning fiercely, so that the fog of smoke ahead of the infantrymen thickened into a dense wall out of which, as some burning tank exploded, would come sailing ribbons of white smoke and bright coloured lights that vanished in the driving rain. The riflemen, plodding across the broad ploughlands, seemed to ignore the din, the explosions that leaped about them, the rising crackle of small arms fire. These things were only incidental – the real burdens that oppressed them were the rain that trickled on to their collars from the rims of their helmets, the slippery ground on which they tried to keep their balance, the muck that clung in great, clotted masses to their boots, making them as heavy to lift from the furrows as if they were soled with lead.

The leading platoons were moving towards the gentle, wooded slopes on which waited the first German outposts, little groups of men dug cunningly in among the trees and bushes, crouching unseen in narrow pits under the hedges behind the thin barrels of their machine guns. The British infantrymen came trudging in among the trees, miserable and sodden; bewildered at first as the mines with which the ground was sown exploded beneath their comrades’ feet and the bullets came whining among them; then spreading out rapidly and moving from tree-trunk to splintered tree-trunk, crouching, alert, angry; angry with the rain, with the mud, with boredom and fatigue, and closing in to vent their anger on the enemy. To many of the Germans who tried to surrender at the last possible moment they gave short shrift; others were fortunate enough to escape with a kick in the stomach or a blow in the teeth with a rifle butt before they were sent stumbling to the rear, while the rest of the Fifth Battalion came streaming past.

It took an hour for them to clear the slopes and the rest of the morning before they had moved down the narrow lanes beyond the crest to take the village which nestled in the next hollow; an eternity of weary marching and of lying in the ditches, under the dripping hedgerows, in strange, sudden lulls when each man was assailed by an unutterable loneliness, a feeling of timeless unreality, a sense of muddy, sodden desolation, when the patter of rain sounded louder than the thudding guns; until the obstacle ahead had been battered into the ground by tanks or artillery and the infantrymen were able to heave themselves up out of the mire and trudge onward.