From the timbered loopholes of a dugout amid the under-growth that clothed the steep sides of a winding lane, a German machine gun rapped. The British riflemen tried to rush the slope to get in close with machine carbines and grenades. Twice they tried; their dead littered the rain-dappled puddles in the narrow roadway. The rest crouched back behind the bend; they watched the sappers crawling along the bank with the fat, coiled flamethrower on their backs; they watched the liquid leap from the flamethrower’s nozzle and spread in two great breaths of fire across the dugout; then they marched on, past the trees that burned in the rain, past the serpents of flaming liquid that still blazed on the timbers of the dugout, past the stench of burned flesh that hung heavily, for a few seconds, in the sweet, rain-washed air.

Aircraft muttered in the sky above them; the first they had heard during the day. They did not even look up; so great was the confidence they had acquired in their own air support; until the mumble of engines swelled suddenly to a rising thunder, and they heard the stutter of machine guns.

The Messerschmitts swept over their heads like great shadows. The infantrymen grovelled in ditches. Major Norman stood, feet astride, in the middle of the roadway shouting, ‘Get down, there! Get down!’ His high-pitched voice, clearly audible amid the roar of engines as the aircraft streaked past him, was as hard and compelling as the whistle of a lashing whip. ‘Get down, there! Get down!’ But Major Norman did not get down. When the enemy aircraft finally dwindled away up into the grey haze, and the first anti-aircraft guns began vainly to bang shells after them, he was still standing in the middle of the roadway, feet astride, looking up into the dismal sky.

Throughout the day they trudged on, soaked and tired, sickened and stunned by the smoke and the din, until in the evening, with the German defences broken behind them, they halted. Numbed with fatigue, they pulled the spades from beneath their packs and began to dig. Later, while a relieving battalion passed forward through them to continue the attack, they sat in their shallow pits at the roadsides, huddled in their waterproof gas-capes, while on the little tommy-cookers that they sheltered between their feet they brewed boiling, life-preserving tea in their mess tins.

They had been on their feet for ten hours, marching and fighting. On the map, their advance measured precisely three miles.