On January 3rd there was a medical examination for the whole battalion. On January 5th ninety-four men – the sick, the lame and the incurably lazy, the post corporal among them – left the battalion. On January 10th fifty replacements arrived from Infantry Training Centre, beefy, ruddy, awkward lads, none more than twenty years old. On January 15th a training cadre of forty-four battle-hardened desert veterans arrived from the Green Howards.

The Fifth Battalion of the Wessex Regiment was at war strength.

‘Good night, sentry.’

The sentry by the road, muffled in scarf and cap-comforter and bowed over his rifle, jolted himself to attention. He recognised the broad, stocky figure of the battalion commander at his side.

‘Good night, sir.’ He relaxed again over his rifle as he heard the colonel’s boots plodding off behind him down the lane. This was routine. Every sentry knew that he had to expect a visit from the Old Man at eight o’clock in the evening, after the officers had dined. It was all right, they would tell a newcomer going on his first spell of guard duty, the Old Man was no snooper, ‘not like some’. It was just his way, to walk round the camp every night, in the bitterest winter weather, to say good night to the sentries, to poke his head into the blue fug of the NAAFI for a moment (and only his head, for he scrupulously respected the sanctity of the NAAFI, the only inviolable retreat permitted to the other ranks), to chat in the cookhouse with the night cooks and boilermen before returning, pipe in mouth, greatcoat collar turned up, hands deep in pockets, to his hut. He was a good ’un, was the Old Man. ‘Our Dad’, they called him.

Colonel Pothecary blinked at the light as he stepped into his hut and banged the door behind him. He was a square man with a square face, with greying hair parted in the middle. In civilian clothes he would have passed as a master builder with a small but prospering business, a plain man, plain speaking, with no nonsense about him; all of which he was.

‘Hello, Noel,’ he said to his second-in-command, who was sprawling deep in an armchair by the stove. ‘Higgs brought in the coffee yet?’

Higgs emerged from the bedroom partitioned off at the end of the hut. ‘On the other stove, sir,’ he announced ingratiatingly. ‘Coming right up.’ He was a wizened little runt of a man in canvas slippers; he had been on the list of unfit men to leave the battalion, but he had pleaded himself off it.