Two days later they were back in camp. The manoeuvres were over, but the feeling of tension which they had brought to the battalion remained. The unreality which had always overhung their training, the sense of playing some game without purpose, was gone. At last they felt that they were at war; they began to think in terms of a living enemy. Excitement and impatience began to stir among them. The newspapers were full of the battles in Italy and of the Soviet breakthrough in the Ukraine. Men of the Fifth Battalion, thinking back later to those days, remembered the hush that fell in the crowded canteen at nine o’clock every evening as the wireless news bulletin began, the way the clatter of cups suddenly ceased, the groups of men waiting, all their heads turned towards the loudspeaker up on the wall, and the quick stirring of triumph among them as they heard the latest Soviet Order of the Day, the new lists of towns liberated. Every day’s newspapers brought fresh news to provoke rumours and debates in the huts. The King had been visiting Army units, Montgomery was touring the war factories, a Cabinet Minister announced in Parliament staggering production figures of what he called, amid cheers, ‘Weapons for the invasion’. And – for the first time in three years – there were air raids again; the German bombers were over London and the south coast towns every night, with quick, savage attacks. The men of the Fifth Battalion, lying in their warm blankets every night, heard the beat of engines as the bombers crossed the coast, and the distant answering of the guns; and they were glad that the battle was near.

***

‘Higgsy.’

Sergeant Bender put his cards down and looked round. ‘Higgsy,’ he shouted again, ‘come here, you dozy bugger.’

Higgs came padding across the hut.

‘Higgsy,’ said the sergeant, ‘they think I’m taking the mickey. Tell ’em.’

‘Tell ’em what?’ fenced Higgs.

‘––’, said the sergeant, ‘tell ’em what you told me.’

‘Oh,’ said Higgs; ‘about leave, you mean?’

He waited for a moment while an engine under test roared and screamed. His questioners were sitting round a coke brazier in a corner of the long, gloomy workshop of the carrier platoon, to which Sergeant Bender belonged.

‘Well,’ he said with relish, ‘it’s going to be cancelled.’

He waited again to measure the effect of his announcement on the men round the brazier; Sergeant Bender; Jock MacGuinness, a chunky little miner from Fife; Charlie Venable; Dickie Crawford, a scowling fair-haired boy from the London markets; Rabinowitz, the big, black-haired Jew; and Baldy. They all looked sceptical.

‘Cancelled, he says,’ jeered Rabinowitz, ‘so they should ring up Hitler on the telephone and tell him in advance to get ready. Higgsy,’ he said, ‘you’re meshuggah.’