Feature films of D-Day such as The Longest Day (1962) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) remain popular. Baron himself was critical of war films as he thought they lacked realism. What this novel brings, that perhaps films cannot quite capture, is this realism of the war experience. After all, Baron was there.

A dirty tape wriggled across the beach and the riflemen came stumbling along it, shedding water from their sodden trousers. Mister Paterson flopped beneath a wrecked landing craft that lay broadside on and waited for his platoon to come up. One by one they dropped to the sand behind him. There were German shells falling a little inland, where the first assault troops had already passed, and somewhere among the yellowed, battered houses scattered along the waterfront and the smashed rubble of wrecked pillboxes a machine gun was rapping remotely.

‘All right, my lads,’ said Paterson breathlessly. He ducked under the bows of the beached craft and ran heavily along the tape. There was a tangle of wire ahead, with German mine warnings poking up everywhere and a few British dead lying with their faces in the sand. They followed the tape along a path torn through the wire and came on to a narrow track running laterally. In front of them now were gentle, dreary dunes rising from pools and runnels of water, with grass growing scantily on their upper flanks. On each side of them sappers were rooting up mines as hastily as potatoes, and a little away to the right a beach dressing station had just been established, with a row of loaded stretchers waiting on one side and a row of corpses laid out on the other, each a still mound under a grey blanket, with big boots protruding at the end. Some pioneers were trying to dig in along the far side of the road, in the wet sand.

***

The author’s memoir tells us just how much of From the City, From the Plough is taken from Baron’s direct experience. Of the men of his own unit, he says ‘each was bound in a web of friendships which he did not want to betray […] Besides, training had conditioned them to war as a natural activity and imbued them with the idea that they knew how to get through it’. Nowhere is this clearer than in in some of the final, deeply moving scenes of the novel, in which Colonel Pothecary leads his men to capture an enemy held bridge:

The colonel strode calmly along the road as if he were walking on to a parade ground, looking back sometimes to call encouragement to his men, ignoring the bullets that squealed about him and kicked up little devils of earth at his feet.

He was crossing the bridge now, with men streaming after him. It was as if he had, by his own physical strength, lifted the battalion up out of the ground and borne them with him.