The first infantry attack went in from the south-west, with a group of tanks in support. Close orchards and woods, and irregular ground, made the going terribly heavy. The narrow tracks imprisoned the tanks. The area had been widely mined and there was a river in their path, meandering across the lower slopes, over which the bridge had already been blown up. Pioneers, working under enemy fire, rooted up mines like potatoes and strove to build a tank crossing across the river bed with the rubble of the demolished bridge. In a half-hour they had nearly all been killed and the tanks, grinding desperately forward, were hit one by one and burned fiercely. Meanwhile the Germans shelled and mortared the British infantry. Hidden observation posts reported every movement to the enemy artillery. Each time the infantry surged up out of the folds in the ground in which they crouched they were met by intense shelling. Only here and there were men able to get forward, moving in twos and threes, sprinting forward in short bounds separated by long periods during which they were pinned tight to the ground. In vain the tanks tried to get across the river. Only the first few outposts of the enemy had yet been encountered, but already the assaulting battalion had suffered heavy casualties.

Late on the first evening the Brigadier switched his plan of attack. Two other battalions – one of them the Fifth Wessex – moved forward during the night to take up their position for an assault across the river from due west.

The men lying along the sunken lanes felt the morning breezes die away, and as the sun rose in the sky the daylight grew radiant and the summer’s heat became intense. The chill and the fatigue fell away from them and they felt a momentary surge of confidence as their own artillery opened fire on the ridge with high explosive and smoke-shells that wrapped the enemy positions in a blinding white screen.

Then they moved forward.

They advanced across the meadows, unchallenged for the first few yards and filled suddenly, as they always were at such moments, with the wild, unreasoning hope that this time it was going to be easy; until the first shell quavered down on them and they were out there, soft, human flesh clad only in khaki serge, with the angry splinters of steel whining among them, searching the ground, seeking them out, cutting them down, widening the gaps in their scattered ranks, and each man found himself suddenly alone amid the noise and the smoke, lurching blindly forward to gamble with blind death; doubly bewildered because the enemy machine guns were firing not only from the front but from the flanks.