During such quiet spells as this he was used to enjoying the company of his friend. He and Corporal Warne had survived two years of front-line service together. In Africa and Sicily their platoon commander had always known where to find them when they were free from their duties as leaders of rifle-sections; together, always together, sitting facing each other knee-to-knee in a slit trench or sprawling side by side under a tree; perhaps brewing up some tea, perhaps smoking, perhaps sharing a newspaper, but talking little.

Two nights ago, however, Warne had gone quietly down into the valley at the head of a patrol. He and his men had not returned; and now Corporal Meadows was spending his leisure time alone.

It was not that he grieved. The men of the Fifth Battalion had already learned – and Corporal Meadows had learned long ago – that it did not pay to grieve for absent friends. There were too many of them; a man who let their passing hurt him would carry more unhealed wounds than he could bear; and so the riflemen of the Fifth Battalion had grown, as all soldiers grow, into a state of mind in which a friend killed yesterday became as remote in the memory as some half-forgotten schoolmate, to be talked of with the same detachment.

For instance, the platoon sergeant, talking to him earlier in the day about ammunition requirements, had remarked quite suddenly, ‘Pity about Warne. Nice bloke.’

Corporal Meadows had answered, ‘Yes, he was.’

They had gone on talking about ammunition.

There was another occasion, too, when Meadows was sitting with his men against the bank of a sunken lane, eating stew from his mess tin.

Someone had begun to talk about Warne, recalling some episode in which he had made himself ridiculous, talking as soldiers often talk of their dead, not out of heartlessness, but because the telling of these stories and the brief merriment they evoked helped to forget the fact of the man’s death.

There was a gust of noisy laughter; then someone looked quickly at Meadows, apprehensively. He, too, was laughing.

But now, in the evening, he was not laughing. He was listening to the shrilling of the birds and watching the smoke from his cigarette climb the brown wall of the trench, writhe among the hawthorn branches and lose itself in the blue of the sky.

Noises of life came from other trenches hidden along the hedge; laughter from one, the clatter of mess tins from another, the soft whistling of a tune from another. These sounds he hardly heard.

Nor did he hear the rustle of boots in the grass, so that he was startled when the light was blotted out from above him by the shape of a man, and unready for the voice of the man speaking to him.

‘So there you are.’