AT TWENTY-SIX MINUTES past three on the morning of Friday, April 28th, the sergeant commanding the guard of the Fifth Battalion was sitting huddled over the stove-in the long, gloomy guard-hut. The off-duty men lay sleeping in a row along one side of the hut, sprawled snoring or muttering on their palliasses with blankets heaped over them. There was a little pool of dim light in the centre of the hut, cast by the glowing stove and the flickering hurricane lamp at the sergeant’s feet. The rest of the hut was in darkness. A bucket of cocoa stood on the stove. The sergeant had a Woodbine between his lips; his eyes smarted with fatigue and there was a fog of sleep inside his head. He wore his greatcoat like a cloak over his drooping shoulders. A clock on the bench beside him ticked thunderously in the silence; thirty-four minutes before the next change of sentries. He settled forward somnolently.

Away in the darkness at the end of the hut the door creaked. The sound crept into the guard commander’s reeling consciousness; he was fingering the upturned collar of his coat and beginning to turn on the bench when the explosion split the silence into a million ringing fragments and the violet, blinding flash lifted him to his feet and flung him forward against the stove. In the next seconds, as the roar of the explosion lingered in the men’s ears, echoing as if contained in the gloom and smoke of the guard-hut, it filled with fresh noises; the crash and clatter of the falling cocoa bucket, the moaning of the sergeant lying scorched and writhing by the red-hot stove, the clatter of boots and the confused hubbub of the off-duty men lurching, dishevelled, to their feet; violent voices outside the hut; and in the air, the sharp and heavy stink of high explosives.

Hubbub and confusion; men bending over the sergeant, dragging him out of the pool of cocoa that spread slowly on the dusty concrete; men ramming home the bolts of their rifles and staggering towards the door of the hut; and a voice, high and sharp as a whiplash:

‘Turn out, the guard!’

The voice rallied the guard; each man stopped for a moment in his tracks; a startled tableau in the gloom.

‘Outside, the guard! Come on, come on!’

They knew the voice. Savage understanding seeped into them. They clattered out of the hut and formed up in two lines in the darkness outside. The sergeant raised himself painfully on to all fours, then heaved himself up on to his feet. His left cheek was a great grey blister. He followed the men out.

The voice was lashing at them again in the darkness.

‘Three minutes to turn out the guard. What do you think this is, a war or a Sunday afternoon picnic?’