The Brigadier puffed at his pipe. ‘I’ll see you later today,’ he said harshly. ‘I’ll have transport waiting to take you out.’

Norman smiled wearily. ‘Poor man,’ he said gently, ‘you mean well, don’t you?’

The Brigadier looked at him unflinchingly.

Major Norman laughed. ‘Those men of mine,’ he said loudly, ‘I’ll have to pick them up one by one and prop them up like skittles.’

‘Good luck,’ said the Brigadier.

‘Well,’ said Major Norman, ‘this won’t buy the frock a new baby.’ He threw his cigarette away. ‘You can tell those tanks of yours to start their engines up.’

He picked up his helmet and machine carbine.

‘Bye-bye,’ he said.

The Brigadier watched him go.

‘God forgive me,’ said the Brigadier aloud, and walked back to his jeep.

An hour later the tanks began to move. The Shermans came lumbering out of the woods and lurched up, one by one, on to the metalled surface of the main road. The earth shook to their weight and their clattering roar as they gathered speed and passed majestically through the silent village.

One after another the great steel monsters rumbled between the broken walls, their commanders standing like conquerors in their open turrets, the long snouts of their guns questing angrily to left and right; each tank with a name, ribald, challenging or nostalgic, white-painted on its dark green flanks.

WINNIE FROM WIGAN

EL ALAMEIN

THE ALDGATE BOYS

The last splinters of glass fell tinkling from shattered windowpanes; fragments of plaster rained from gaping ceilings.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

CLAN MACDONALD

HORACE HORSECOLLAR

Among the rubble, beneath the smoking ruins, the dead of the Fifth Battalion sprawled around the guns which they had silenced; dusty, crumpled and utterly without dignity; a pair of boots protruding from a roadside ditch; a body blackened and bent like a chicken burnt in the stove; a face pressed into the dirt; a hand reaching up out of a mass of brick and timbers; a rump thrust ludicrously towards the sky. The living lay among them, speechless, exhausted, beyond grief or triumph, drawing at broken cigarettes and watching with sunken eyes the tanks go by.

OUR LASS

GEORDIE HINNIE

JOE STALIN’S CHICKABIDDIES

The earth and the air shook with their passing. The upflung dust rolled away, to right and left, in two white screens, and settled, in fine, grey veils, upon the upturned faces of the dead.

The humped, crouching silhouettes of the tanks covered the white road for miles. Still gathering speed they rumbled on, a black, dotted line reaching out across the map, towards Germany.

‘Always’

Words & Music by Irving Berlin

© Copyright 1925 Berlin Irving Music Corporation.

All rights administered by Universal Music

Copyright Secured. Used by permission

of Hal Leonard Europe Limited.

‘Beer Barrel Polka’ (‘Roll Out the Barrel’)

Words and Music by Lee Brown, Vladamir Timm,

Jaromir Vejvoda and Vasek Zeman

© Used by permission of Shapiro Bernstein

& Co. Inc/ © 1939, Keith Prowse Music Publishing Co Ltd.

‘Lili Marleen’