The mysterious processes of war were carrying the Fifth Battalion, as if on a conveyor belt, towards its destiny. Somewhere in an office a folder was being taken from a steel cabinet, a great mechanical card-index was whirring, teletypers were clacking their frantic messages; harassed, middle-aged brigadiers were sitting round long, oak tables adding up battalions and divisions, fumbling with slide-rules, running nicotine-stained fingers down the columns of ammunition tables. A thousand clerks and typists were working overtime, irritably and impersonally as if it were an income tax collection that employed them, instead of the destiny of six hundred sunburned men idling in their shirtsleeves on a hillside above the sparkling Channel. In Whitehall, in requisitioned country mansions, in hidden headquarters burrowed deep underground, the lights burned day and night, girls scurried about corridors clutching big, buff envelopes. Somewhere there were these thousands of people planning a war, people with a strange fever stirring among them, the same fever that sweeps the floor of a Stock Exchange; people whose typewriters, sealing-wax rubber-stamps, filing systems were the instruments that shaped the dark tomorrow of the Fifth Battalion; and it was as if by some strange chemistry that, as the fever of suspense mounted among these pallid legions, it drained from the men of the Fifth Battalion. Like the spring of an over-wound watch, the tension which had been five months growing in the camp on the hillside broke in the sweet, May sunlight.

Perhaps it was because certainty had come to them at last. For months they had wondered: will it be? Now they were sure. Living in their own land, among their own people, they were as isolated from their homes as if they were abroad; sealed off in a coastal area that was forbidden to travellers; without leave; their mail censored by their officers as if they were abroad; the convoys crowding the roads day and night; the landing craft bobbing in rows in the harbours. In the first days of May every man in the battalion had to reduce his kit to assault scale. All spare clothing was collected by the quartermasters. Personal belongings were stowed in the men’s kitbags which were labelled and sent to their homes at the Army’s expense. Now they were stripped for action, and suddenly sure of what was to come.

The men were fit; their strength surged exulting in their veins. They were trained, they were armed and equipped as they had never been before. They were confident, and all their excitement vanished. They were calm now, and outwardly indifferent, waiting without impatience or foreboding. They gave themselves up to the summer, and passed their days in a stupor of content, drugged with sunshine, anaesthetised by the scent of blossoming flowers, lazy and languid and enchanted by the richness that was coming to life all round them. The dizzy hours and days reeled past them as they slept in the sun, lulled by the drone of bombers and of bumble-bees.