Applause; then the hush again. The battalion waited, listening to the distant rumble of the convoys and the thud of the guns from the forward area; then the noises of war swam away out of their consciousness and there was only the sweet, tenor voice in the darkness, singing ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’.

When Dickie Crawford tried to leave the platform, the men in the front ranks rose to bar his way, and the whole battalion began to chant again, this time the one word: ‘More. More. More. More.’

He sang, ‘When the Lights go on Again’. The men sat in the darkness rocking to the sad, sweet, silly words. Then one more song; this time, he told them, the last one.

I’ll be loving you,

Always,

With a love that’s true,

Always –

All over the orchard men were joining in, humming softly with him, or singing tenderly.

When the things you’ve planned

Need a helping hand

I shall understand,

Always –

A fragile tune, soft and nostalgic and heartbreaking; and the darkness, the warm, summer breeze and the sweet scent of apples.

Days may not be fair,

Always,

That’s when I’ll be there,

Always,

Not for just an hour, not for just a day,

Not for just a year,

But always.

Next morning the villagers stood in silence and watched the men climbing into the lorries that waited to take them forward again. The men in each lorry sat facing each other in two rows, their packs piled along the middle at their feet, their rifles propped between their knees, their cheeks resting against the muzzles of their rifles.

One by one the lorries shuddered and jerked into movement; from each of them, as they moved into line, could be heard the same nostalgic chorus:

Not for just an hour, not for just a day,

Not for just a year,

But always.

CHAPTER TWENTY

There was some activity

UNDER THE SUMMER mists the front lay silent. As the last days of July slipped by, the men of the Fifth Battalion looked out over the parapets of their trenches, watchful as cats, and wondered at the breathless quiet that was only broken from time to time by the crack of a sniper’s rifle, the flutter of a shell passing overhead or – back at headquarters – the rattle of farmhouse windows as the guns on some distant sector opened fire.

Each day the weather changed; one day it was hot and close, heavy with storm; the next, cold and cloudy; the next, rainy; the next brilliant. The roads lay under swirling, white dust clouds one day and were rutted with deep troughs of water the next.