For four and a half years the battalion had led its own placid life, moving from one village to another, guarding bridges that no one ever crossed and defending dumps which even the War Office appeared to have forgotten; men joined the battalion, went on their leaves, got girls into trouble, punched their sergeants’ noses and went to jail, did legendary deeds in public houses and left the battalion. The most memorable events in the battalion’s history were a pitched battle with the Irish Guards in the streets of Andover in 1941, the winning of the Divisional football championship in 1942 and an all-night booze-up out of regimental funds in 1943. The battalion trained and route marched and manoeuvred, sent droves of men to battle school, and dozed on NAAFI benches in disciplined silence in front of a succession of Ministry of Information lecturers, in a spirit of cheerful absent-mindedness, of bewildered resignation at the inconsiderateness of their commanders in ordering such things, and in utter disregard of the fact that somewhere ahead of them lay battle, murder and sudden death. The march of great events had left them, on the whole, unmoved. Only from time to time, when fighters thundered overhead, tiny splinters of silver moving in wide-flung patterns out across the Channel; when they heard the guns of Alamein, recorded by the B.B.C., reverberating in their huts; when they waited each morning at the sentry-box by the main road for the newspaper-boy on his bicycle to bring the latest news from Stalingrad, did they stir with excitement.

On Christmas night, when they had crawled into their blankets gorged with pork and belching beerily, all this had ended. Every day since then fresh sheets of orders on the company notice boards had plunged the battalion more deeply into a chaos of activity, rumour and speculation; and politics – the speeches of statesmen, the prophecies of military correspondents, the leading articles and the paragraphs of war news – had become their first concern.

A lorry load of new Bren guns arrived and groups of men gathered in the canteen talking about the Second Front; a score of jeep trailers – little two-wheeled contraptions like boy scouts’ trek carts – were delivered, and in dozens of Nissen huts men crowded round the red-hot stoves arguing about the strength and weakness of Fortress Europe.

On New Year’s Day the battalion post corporal, a lean and sceptical old sweat with North-West Frontier ribbons on his tunic, leaned back in his chair in his little office behind the armoury, and, carving the air contemptuously with the stem of his pipe, informed a circle of lance-corporals (all waiting for their sections’ mail) that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. ‘I ’eard the colonel tell the ord’ly room sar’nt we was ’ere for the duration. An’ besides, there’s me with my varicose veins and ’ow many more like me? They don’t send a battalion like that into action.’

They don’t.