They rested for four hours; then, in the late evening, they clambered up out of their holes and stood in groups in the roadway, exercising numbed arms and legs, and exchanging rumours, as they waited to move off again. The enemy were pulling out; a million airborne troops had landed in his rear; an invasion of Holland was taking place simultaneously with this offensive; Caen had fallen to an attack from the other side of the Orne; Hitler had been seen at the front; Hitler was wounded; Hitler was dead; the battalion was waiting for requisitioned motor buses to come up and carry it deep into the territory from which the enemy was fleeing; a chateau full of cognac had been captured and the divisional commander had ordered the issue of one bottle per man to the infantry; and leave to Blighty was going to start in ten days’ time. At this stage of an attack the rumours always reached their height. The men, standing in the gathering darkness, not knowing where they were, where they were going or when, wondering how many miles of marching lay ahead of them, and how many hours would pass before the next assault, nourished their hopes on every fantasy that reached their ears.

Darkness had fallen by the time the battalion was on the move again. They marched through the night, following the narrow lanes up and down hill. It was a strange, maddening thing, this marching through the darkness for hour after hour, with nothing visible but the dark mass of another man’s back bobbing in front of you, lurching and stumbling in the deep, soft ruts, sloshing through puddles you could not see, feeling the road slope sickeningly away beneath you into the black pit of another valley and feeling the burden of your weapons, equipment and ammunition dragging at your shoulders as you slogged up the far slope. This was so different from the route marches at home, when you could set your teeth and tick off the miles one by one; here there was no end to the road, no way out of the tunnel of darkness; you just had to go on, for hour after hour, pulling your leaden boots up out of the mud and setting them down again.

Hour after hour crept by in the darkness; until each man, marching with as little consciousness as a machine, had lost all touch with everything outside himself and trudged on, wrapped in his thoughts, or his dreams, or the strange, waking sleep of the soldier.

***