‘I reckon we’ll be away before he’s back from this voyage,’ the colonel went on. ‘Did I tell you what they were saying up at Brigade this morning? There’s a regular sweepstake on up there. I even heard the date named.’

‘May the fifteenth?’ laughed Norman.

‘Yes,’ said the colonel. ‘How did you know?’

‘My batman told me,’ answered Major Norman. ‘He heard it in the Horse and Hounds.’

The door banged behind them.

‘May the fifteenth, I tell you.’ There was a crush of men arguing round the wall map in the battalion canteen. At the green, beer-stained tables there were as many men discussing, disputing, crowding over newspapers, as there were playing cards. Every night there was news to make them more excited, more argumentative. The air offensive over France and Germany was reaching proportions that had never before been known. A security ban had been applied to prevent foreign diplomats from entering or leaving the country and from sending any communication out of the country. A Defence Regulation had been introduced to permit the control of roads in southern England for military traffic. All overseas travel had been cancelled. England was being sealed off from the outside world. German E-boats were prowling the Channel in search for the massing of an invasion fleet; the newspapers reported clashes at sea, and the men of the Fifth Battalion themselves sometimes heard, in the silent night, the distant thudding of guns from across the dark waters.

‘May the fifteenth.’ Alfie Bradley sat in a corner of the canteen, insulated from the noise around him, his heart thumping with excitement, penning the ninth page of a letter to his Floss – whom he would be seeing again in five days’ time.

‘May the fifteenth.’ In the corporals’ clubroom at the end of the canteen hut Corporal Gonigle sat at the piano, lackadaisically playing ‘Some of These Days’ in a broken, discordant rhythm. Meadows and Warne, two corporals who had come back from the desert, lounged against the piano and talked in turn at him through the blue cigarette smoke.

‘Ay,’ said Meadows, ‘another couple of weeks, man, an’ we’ll be duckin’ mortars again.’

‘Blood an’ shite,’ said Warne gloomily, ‘more blood an’ shite.’

Gonigle had not yet been in battle. He had spent a lot of time, mostly at nights, wondering what it would feel like ducking mortars.

‘May the fifteenth, is it?’ he said. ‘I must say it’s the openest secret I ever heard.’ He went on thumping the piano doggedly.