Darkness had seeped into the smoke and they flung their Redskin yells into a frightening gloom as the jeep swerved to and fro across the deserted tramlines.

The smoke thinned; they could see the stars above them and the trees flashing past. They were heading out of town, but in which direction they did not know.

They were travelling on a main road, bordered by dense, dark woods. Along the roadside, for mile after mile, were parked convoys of great, silent trucks waiting their turn to move down to the docks, to the waiting ships.

The jeep was hurtling along the white line now, at its maximum speed. Blair and Richardson were singing at the tops of their voices, intoxicated anew by the roaring wind. The grey ribbon of road came flying towards their headlamps. They had a second’s glimpse of a road junction ahead of them. On a sudden impulse Private Richardson jammed the steering wheel over to the right.

‘Rommel,’ he screamed into the darkness, ‘here we come!’ The jeep turned the corner at seventy miles an hour and exploded into the back of a ten-ton lorry.

The Fifth Battalion had suffered its first casualties.

‘It’s the waiting,’ said Colonel Pothecary, ‘it’s getting on their nerves.’

‘It’s getting on mine,’ said Noel Norman, sipping his whisky. ‘What price May the fifteenth now?’

‘The Brigadier says it can’t be before June the fifteenth now.’

‘What’s so sacred about the fifteenth of every month?’ asked Norman. He squirted more soda-water into his glass. ‘First it was March the fifteenth, then April, then May, now June. I suppose it’s one of those things like having an “r” in the month.’

‘It’s the tides,’ explained the colonel, ‘the Brigadier was telling us. It’s something to do with the tides; I can’t remember exactly what.’

He reached for the decanter and refilled his glass.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘there’s such a thing as over-training a battalion. That’s what I’m afraid of now. I told the Brigadier it was hard to keep a training programme going in these circumstances. D’you know what he said?’

‘What?’

“‘Give ’em drill, Pothecary, give ’em drill.”’

‘It’s strange,’ Norman held his glass up to the light and frowned at the grains of cork floating in his whisky. ‘Higgs opened this bottle with a penknife, the little beast. I was saying, it’s strange how you can get a sort of change of mood almost overnight. All of-a sudden you feel it, one morning. Nothing happens, not a word is spoken, yet you can feel it right there on parade.’