Charlie Venable was thirsty. Sticky and sodden with rain, marching in four inches of water, he was frantic with thirst. Deep in a foggy, swirling reverie he had lost for hours all consciousness of the needs and discomforts of his body; until he had become aware, remotely at first, then more and more unpleasantly, of his parched throat and gummy lips, of the sickening metallic taste in his mouth. There was a half-filled water-bottle strapped to his belt. Feeble with sleep, he fumbled at straps in the darkness. Marching, marching, not daring to stop for a moment in the darkness, he stumbled and cursed and groped at straps, without result. Maddened by failure yet too weary to persist, he leaned forward again to the weight of his rifle and pack, hooked his thumbs once more into the webbing straps on his chest to ease the strain on his shoulders and marched on, trying to ignore the itch of impatience that now tantalised him and made the night crawl by more slowly than before. He dreamed of a whirling spray on the sleek lawns of a park, flinging a cool mist of water against his face, hurling its glittering droplets high into the sunlight. He listened to his own feet sloshing in the waterlogged ruts. A sound battered vaguely at his consciousness; he shut it out; then another; there was a faint echo of recognition inside him; then another, this time deafening and jolting him into awareness like a blow in the face – the ear-splitting banging of a battery of field guns firing in rapid succession close by.

He was awake now, and he felt a stir of awareness running down the column of men in front of him. Away in the fields to their left British twenty-five pounders were coming into action. The night was riven by the white lightning of their muzzle flashes. Guns were firing away to the right now. Charlie saw the flashes spreading away into the darkness as if a trail of powder had been touched off.

Someone asked what time it was. Charlie lifted the face of his wristwatch; he was surprised to see that it was after four in the morning already.

Along the whole front the field batteries were firing, with a noise like hundreds of great steel doors banging in a vast, high-roofed corridor. From the rear came the thud and rumble of the mediums and heavies joining in.

‘Barrage,’ shouted Charlie above the uproar to the man in front of him. ‘Must be the Third Battalion getting ready to go in.’

Somewhere ahead of them the battalion that had passed through them the evening before was waiting along its start line to launch a fresh assault; this was the preliminary barrage.