A hundred yards in front of them was the stream and across the stream a narrow, stone-walled bridge, too small for tanks but treacherously inviting for infantry. There was no room in their minds for the enemy waiting on the upper slopes; now there was only one objective – to cross the bridge, to put the stream behind them. Men goad themselves on with strange illusions, with mad freaks of fancy, and their illusion was that somehow this field they were now crossing was the source of all their peril, that the bridge was a bridge to safety, that life lay on the far bank of the stream They stumbled forward against the machine guns and toppled forward, faces upturned in agony, hands clawing at the sunlight; more men came sprinting on, without even a downward glance at the littered dead, and fell writhing among them.

A half a dozen men reached the bridge; none of them got across. There were no more men moving across the open ground now. Only the dead and wounded sprawled in the open; the rest of the battalion was scattered in little groups, cowering in ditches, in gullies, against the backs of sunken sun-baked lanes, in shallow folds in the ground, under the probing machine-gun fire.

Colonel Pothecary crouched among his men. He had gone forward with the leading platoons, a prey to changing moods. On the start line he had felt at first only the awful responsibility of this moment; he alone, of all these men, knew exactly what they were facing. Then the very weight of the burden had aroused in him, as they moved off, a feeling of complete, almost light-hearted abandon, a determination to absolve himself by being the first to dare, the first to gamble. Now, as he tried to steady the whirling confusion of his thoughts, to clear his mind so that he could work out the next step, he felt drained of resolution. He longed for someone to tell him what to do; he envied the riflemen who lay, passive but expectant, waiting for the next order.

He wondered what was happening to the other battalion. If only, he thought, they would get forward across the stream and open the way for his battalion. If only someone else would take the initiative. If only someone else would lift the burden from his back.

The other battalion, in fact, had suffered even more heavily. It had reached the stream, after losing most of its officers; and the survivors had abandoned the attempt to get across and were fighting their way upstream, not going forward against the crest but pushing out towards the left flank in order to try to reduce the murderous fire that came from this quarter.

Colonel Pothecary lay wondering what was happening to the other battalion. If only, he thought, if only. He watched the second hand of his watch crawling round; an object of attention, an alternative to thought.