Paterson searched his impassive face, in vain, for a hint of feeling. ‘Now?’ he asked.

‘Now.’

Paterson looked at him for a moment with smouldering eyes; then he signalled to his men and began to move forward.

One or two of them rose. The others looked up, hesitant.

‘Come on, my pretty pets,’ called Mister Paterson. His voice was hard, high, desperate. ‘Come to daddy.’

The platoon straggled forward and topped the slight rise ahead.

From the mist the Spandaus began to rap. One of the men toppled headlong backward, his legs astride, his body braced rigidly. His helmet rolled away and he lay staring up at the sky, his mottled, bald head gleaming downhill towards the major.

Norman stood looking into the mist for a few moments, then stumbled down the hill to the crossroads.

All the evening the remnants of the battalion clung to the hillside, while a pitiless fire, like waves sweeping away the clusters of men clinging to the mainmast of a sinking ship, obliterated one group after another.

All through the evening little parties of men went stumbling up the hill, to be beaten down into the ground again.

And each time there came a few moments of quiet and the men rested their heads in their arms in blessed relief, Major Norman, half-mad with despair, his eyes burning, lurched in among them, goading them to open fire again and draw down upon themselves the nightmare fire from the crest.

A man under fire, sickened by the unending din, shaken by the detonations that come jolting one after another through the ground, with great domes of smoke and flame blossoming around him, his eyes seared by the leaping, white flashes, the explosions flinging great fistfuls of earth into the air all about, does one of two things.

Either he surrenders to fear and becomes useless; not fear of death – fear at such a time is not a process of the brain, but a frightful, physical seizure. The frightened man wants only to escape from his ordeal, but he is robbed of his will, he is unable to go forward or back, he is death’s easiest prey; and he welcomes death. In his fear he does not shrink from death, but sees it as a deliverance, as an end to the pain and the terror.

Either this, then, or he cultivates the ability to withdraw himself from his surroundings; to crouch in his trench or lie pressing himself against the turf like a child against its mother, with his soldier’s faculties alive and alert but with all the rest of his being sealed off in a private world of dream or memory.

Private Rabinowitz, crouching in his hole, was stubbornly whistling to himself a Jewish lullaby, ‘Almonds and Raisins’. His head was cradled in his arms, his eyes were closed. Immured in an anguish of memories he could only half-hear the uproar of battle.