AT CLOSING TIME on a Saturday night towards the end of May, Privates Blair and Richardson, riflemen of the Fifth Battalion, came reeling out of a public house to find themselves lost in a stifling white fog of smoke. They only came into town once a week and this was their first intimation that this seaport town, which each day became more crowded with troops and transport waiting for the invasion, was being hidden every night under a vast smokescreen.

They lurched along the pavement, supporting each other, laughing and spluttering inconsequentially at each other; two stocky little Yorkshire tykes with Africa ribbons on their tunics and too much beer inside them.

It was funny and mysterious and bewildering, this pungent, blank whiteness in which they wandered, alone amongst crowds, the pavement heaving under them and their heads a whirl. They suddenly heard voices harsh and loud in their ears and turned truculently, looking for trouble, to hear the voices fading eerily away in the smoke. They could hear footsteps, snatches of song, girls laughing and squealing in mock protest. Faces appeared briefly and vanished past them; and every ten paces or so one of them would step off the kerb with a jolt and sit in the gutter, quaking with laughter, until his comrade hauled him up on to his feet again.

They lurched on, zigzagging across the pavement to collapse in the gutter or stumble into a shop doorway, with no idea where they were going; and both of them were as lost and lonely inside as their bodies were in this ghostly street. Way-aye, man, make way for a soldier. And, wrapped inside that, the chill human core of terror at a new departure, the gnawing, desperate impatience at the waiting for an unknown day.

Somewhere, beyond the woolly, white smoke, a clock struck eleven. They heard buses go by every few minutes, the last buses. As they heard each bus pass they waved their arms wildly and yelled and screeched; dimly they were aware that they had to get back to camp. The buses grumbled away into the smoke. The streets had emptied; there were few voices now.

‘Hey, Geordie,’ sniggered Private Blair, who had staggered away to his left, ‘look here.’ He was leaning against the bonnet of a jeep.

Private Richardson toppled forward into the jeep and crawled into the front seat. ‘Aye, aye, man,’ he said, ‘three cheers for the ol’ battle buggy.’ Private Blair was still clambering in as the jeep jerked away from the pavement.

‘Sort ’em out, Geordie lad,’ he shouted as Richardson fumbled with the controls, ‘they’re all there.’ He was standing, swaying, in the back of the jeep, holding on to Richardson’s shoulders. ‘Put your foot down, Geordie!’

Geordie put his foot down; the smoke, the glimpses of shopwindows, the gleams of light through the blackouts, went streaming away past them, and the night wind battered at their faces.

‘Yahoo-oo.’

‘Yahoo-oo.’

‘Ya-hippee-ee.’