On the right the American armour had broken through and was rumbling southwards across the base of the Breton peninsula towards the Loire. In the centre British troops, massed secretly and striking suddenly, were battering down from Caumont into the switchback of the Bocage, the thickly-wooded hill country. Towards the left of the line, the British divisions which had been fighting for weeks over the same strip of ground, from Tilly down to the Odon, and from the Odon down to the Orne, pushed forward at last, an army of tired, muddy, battle-drunk men leaving behind them Hottot and Hill 112 and a score of other shell-pitted hills and smashed villages. Every night as these men moved forward there was yet another hill or yet another village to take, yet another stream to cross under fire; every night they summoned fresh reserves of strength and will from their exhausted bodies and went forward against the mortars and the Spandaus and the eighty-eights. This time nothing was going to stop them.

Then they came to the last obstacle between their tanks and the flat lands of the French interior, the gateway to the Big Push, the last and highest ridge that forms the southern border of Normandy. For months they had pointed to this ridge on their maps, talked about it, read with foreboding the Intelligence reports of the fortifications that the enemy had installed here. Now it lay before them, twelve hundred feet above sea level; and the battalions of British infantry moved forward once more to the attack.

The Fifth Battalion of the Wessex Regiment had been ordered to deploy along its start line before daylight. Throughout the night the files of riflemen, plodding up and down hill along the narrow, tall-hedged lanes, had looked over their shoulders at the barrage flaring on the horizon, fretting the edges of the night with fire, and had felt its thudding rumble against their eardrums.

Now, towards dawn, the barrage was slackening. The men moved over the last hilltop that faced their objective and walked quietly downhill, their rifles at the trail or slung, hidden from view by the milky, white mist that clung to the hillsides.

Their start line lay along the valley between the two hills, and as they filed down to it, the mist that shrouded their objective began to slowly recede, heaving and billowing, like a glacier in a dream. As the mist crept down towards the valley it revealed the meadows and woods that clothed the hillside, still sombre in the dawn.

The infantrymen filed silently into their positions along the valley, sinking down out of sight against the banks of sunken lanes. The icy dew soaked through their trousers; the chill of the dawn lay like cold steel against their cheeks.

The first light stealing over the ridge, touched the black fringe of treetops up on the hillside, and a multitude of birds awoke to shrill song.

There was no other sound in the morning.

CHAPTER ONE