‘Why?’ Norman spoke without conviction. ‘The battalion’s done every job he’s given it. You’re a good commander. The men like you.’

‘I like the men,’ said Colonel Pothecary, ‘that’s the trouble.’

In his heart Norman agreed with the Brigadier. For weeks past he had watched the colonel, racked by his responsibilities and by his private griefs, ageing and tiring under the strain.

There were two worlds in which men lived, Norman had come to realise; the world which was summed up in the word ‘home’; and the world of the soldier, to enter which a man had to cast out from himself the luxury of feeling, the world in which death had become a trivial incident, a tedious matter of report forms and burial fatigues.

A shell kills half a dozen men. In the soldier’s world the men are forgotten. They leave nothing behind them. A truck-load of rations lost causes more stir. But away in the other world half a dozen families, perhaps a hundred human beings, are rocked with grief. To each of them the one dead man is their whole horizon. For each of them the world is plunged into blackness.

Colonel Pothecary lived in both worlds at once. Outwardly stolid and resolute, moving cheerfully among his men, he ached behind the mask for his missing son; he waited for every delivery of mail in terror and suspense; and at the same time he could not banish from his imagination the fathers, the families of the men whose lives were in his hands. Each time he sent a platoon to clear a farmhouse or comb a wood, each time the report came to him of three or six or ten men killed, he felt as if the news of his own son’s death had come to him three or six or ten times over.

It was more than sympathy that he felt for the families of his men; it was a complete and terrible identity with them. Marching through the night or lying wrapped in his greatcoat he imagined them waiting in their silent kitchens, and as he thought of their hearts turning over at the postman’s knock so his heart turned over, too.

The conflict was becoming too much for him, the burden more than he could bear. To the men he showed nothing of this, but to his superiors, when they came day after day with fresh orders, fresh demands, he became short-tempered and dispirited. His work had given them nothing to complain of; but they were expert drivers of men, old hands at calculating the last straw; and they knew his breaking-point was near.

‘Jerry’s beginning to crack,’ said Norman. ‘In a week or two we’ll have finished the job. And then…’

‘And then another battle.’

‘And then,’ Norman went on, ‘we’ll get some rest and we’ll all feel better.’