They were moving parallel to a road which ran on lower ground; the roar of armour came to them from the road and they saw tanks scuttling inland like a procession of beetles. Aircraft muttered high above their heads in the pale sky.

‘Never seen nothing like this before,’ panted Charlie Venable, as he squirmed under a fence and scrambled to his feet behind Mister Paterson, the platoon officer.

‘This scheme’s a kind of dress rehearsal,’ said Mister Paterson, not turning his head as he talked. ‘I heard that Monty was around somewhere watching it.’

‘Reckon they mean business at last?’ Baldy had come scrambling up alongside Charlie Venable.

‘Well, if they don’t,’ said Charlie,’ after all this, they won’t see me much longer.’

He leaped across a ditch, landed on all fours in the mud and rose painfully to his feet: ‘I’ll resign,’ he said, ‘I’ll bleeding resign.’

Night had fallen, and the men of the Fifth Battalion were lying under the hedgerows, trying to sleep, with only groundsheets and greatcoats to keep them warm.

The colonel came down the road, pipe in mouth, greatcoat collar turned up, listening as he walked to the mutter of voices in the darkness.

Some of the men were asleep, the desert veterans, the men who could sleep anywhere; but most of them were talking in the darkness, some complaining of the unaccustomed hardships to which they were being exposed, some speculating and exchanging gossip about the coming invasion. One group huddled together at the crossroads singing sentimental songs; their soft, sweet, adolescent voices left the colonel with a bewildering sense of pain. Long after he had passed them by he remembered the round, red faces, framed by the upturned collars, illuminated for a moment in the darkness by the glow of cigarettes. Quiet, uncomplicated farmers’ boys from the west, the kind who formed a sort of passive mass in the battalion, the kind who – unlike the Jocks and the Cockneys and the Geordies in their midst – never gave him any trouble. My bumpkins, he thought, my poor little bumpkin boys, what is there in store for you, do you ever dream what there is in store?