Now, towards dawn, the barrage was slackening. The men moved over the last hilltop that faced their objective and walked quietly downhill, their rifles at the trail or slung, hidden from view by the milky, white mist that clung to the hillsides.

Their start line lay along the valley between the two hills, and as they filed down to it, the mist that shrouded their objective began slowly to recede, heaving and billowing, like a glacier in a dream. As the mist crept down towards the valley it revealed the meadows and woods that clothed the hillside, still sombre in the dawn.

The infantrymen filed silently into their positions along the valley, sinking down out of sight against the banks of sunken lanes. The icy dew soaked through their trousers; the chill of the dawn lay like cold steel against their cheeks.

The first light, stealing over the ridge, touched the black fringe of treetops up on the hillside, and a multitude of birds awoke to shrill song.

There was no other sound in the morning.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The hill

ON THE MAP THE RIDGE was easy to distinguish; a little bar of chocolate brown set in a nimbus of lighter shades. Many times in the preceding weeks it had attracted the attention of the commanders of the brigades and battalions moving south towards it.

Now that they faced it, it looked less distinctive, less dangerous, a ridge of woodland and meadow looking less than its actual twelve hundred feet, a false horizon beyond the lines of gentler hills.

It lay athwart several roads vital to the British advance. With the hilltop in their hands the Germans were in a position to paralyse any movement by the British for several miles in almost any direction. Possession of this feature was the key to the communications of a wide area on this sector of the front.

The hill rose rather more steeply from the west than from the east, where the approach was across fairly open ground. On the western side the ground was close, covered with orchards and woods, and with streams cutting irregular gullies across the main approach roads.

The Germans, with every advantage of ground, could drench with fire any force that tried to establish a footing on the lower slopes. The wooded banks on either side of the road from the west offered ideal machine-gun positions from which a withering cross-fire could be poured across the bridge bottlenecks. With whatever superiority in numbers an assault might be made, this country called for the greatest staunchness and courage by the infantry, since the difficult slopes would extend to the full their staying power.

So it turned out.

The assault was launched at brigade strength, with the Fifth Battalion of the Wessex Regiment in reserve during the first phase.