May the fifteenth, thought Major Maddison standing in front of the mirror on the wall of his hut, Lord God of battles, let it be so. May the fifteenth. He saw himself, bleeding and smoke-blackened, lurching forward through a rain of down-pattering earth with the explosions reverberating in his ears; he saw himself snatching up a rifle and wielding a reddened bayonet; he could feel it meeting the coy resistance of flesh; there was a tickle of delight in his biceps as he thought of it.

He fumbled in the drawer of his bedside table and took out a little box. There was a strip of ribbon in the box. He stood close to the mirror and held the piece of ribbon against his left breast. With the first finger of his right hand he stroked the right side of his moustache. Something moved in the corner of the mirror. He turned angrily – still holding the ribbon to his breast – and saw his batman standing in the doorway of the hut.

‘Get out,’ he snarled. ‘And knock before you come in next time.’

The batman, panic-stricken, bobbed an unnecessary salute, slammed the door behind him, and scuttled away to the officers’ mess kitchen to tell how he had seen Major Maddison trying on the ribbon of the D.S.O. in front of his mirror.

CHAPTER NINE

Before the harvest

TO THE MEN of the Fifth Battalion there had never been a summer in their lives like the one through which, as in a dream, they were now living. The sun was rich and radiant upon the land and the trees burgeoned into great rustling clouds of glinting green; the shoots of young corn sprang from the furrows, taller and thicker each week until the brown ploughland was hidden from view. Blue-shadowed clouds piled, snowy and serene, along the skyline, towering into an immensity of sky in which the day long drone of aircraft echoed and lost itself, robbed of its menace.

Strange, dreamy days of false tranquillity; a group of men sitting cross-legged on the grass, sleepy and sodden with sunshine, while an n.c.o. stood among them explaining the mechanism of the little wooden mines that were waiting, on the beaches across the water, to blow their feet off; a soldier and his girl lying behind a hedge, drunk with the scent of the hot grass, while on the road a few yards away the endless convoys rumbled down towards the coast; men marching or huddled over their rifles in lorries, the significance of what they were doing lost in the fascination of watching a rabbit scampering across the road, a lark tumbling from the blue vault of the sky, a child waving from a window.