It was strange, he thought, this feeling of anti-climax, of weary flatness that had descended on them now that the battle was at its height.

They had fought since the landing, through the rain and the mud, with hope and savage confidence. They had looked ahead and spoken of ‘the big push’, ‘the breakthrough’, of a time of joy when they would reap in victory the harvest of battle. Now the time had come. In the warm, golden days of this first week of August the great Allied offensive had at last got under way. Far to the west the Americans had broken through and for days past their armour had been rumbling south, leaving the ruined battlegrounds of June and July behind them, thundering away into the blue – fast-moving columns of tanks, lorry-borne infantry, huge ammunition and petrol trucks travelling at top speed across the enemy’s flanks in great clouds of blinding, choking dust. In the centre the British had concentrated secretly at Caumont, had struck southwards with terrific force and now, after battering forward day and night through the hills, were on the move and gathering speed. As the great wheeling move developed, the British left flank began to move forward too. The troops of this flank – the Fifth Wessex among them – had seen more and harder fighting than any others in the entire campaign. For two months they had pinned down most of the enemy’s crack divisions. When the offensive began they were already weary with the endless routine of marching and fighting, they were already punch-drunk with battle; so that for them there was no elation, no feeling of the great and wonderful days that had come at last; only the determination to stick it out a little longer, to conquer the numbing weariness, the fear that grew suddenly a hundredfold at the prospect of dying at the moment of victory. Tired, deafened men in filthy uniforms forced themselves each day to march once more, to attack once more the succession of tiny, stupid objectives into which the battle resolved itself, went forward in night attacks that were truly like nightmares to them, with the darkness torn apart by the thunder and the flashes and the earthquaking vibrations of artillery, with the searchlights flooding the clouds with ghostly grey light and the rockets and tracers drawing mad patterns of colour across the sky.

‘I wonder,’ said Colonel Pothecary, ‘if we’ll get a full night’s rest?’ The battalion had been lying up in a wood for five hours, since seven o’clock in the evening, ready to move again at a half-hour’s notice. ‘There’s nothing from Brigade.’

‘Here’s the tea,’ said Norman.

Higgs came padding in with a bucket of tea. He filled their mugs and one for himself.

‘Mister Cutbush come in with the rations, sir,’ he said to the colonel. ‘Sack of mail in as well.’

‘Anything for me?’ asked the colonel. ‘Have they sorted it yet?’