Colonel Pothecary came striding on to the parade ground, pulling on his gloves. He answered salutes, spoke briefly to the regimental sergeant-major. Commands were shouted. The Fifth Battalion sloped arms, turned to the right and marched out of camp. Not a man looked round.

It was always like this. They would settle somewhere; make their huts warm and beautiful with life, each a hive of friendships and associations. Then, one day, they would march out, and not a man would look over his shoulder.

The battalion spent most of the day on the dockside, the men squatting on their packs in the heat of the sun, discussing each hour’s fresh rumour, reading and exchanging soiled scraps of newspaper, drinking the tea that was brought to them on trolleys. They were mystified and confused, all the more so because the battalion’s transport had vanished at dawn, bound for another, unknown destination; but they did not worry deeply. The machine was working again; it had snatched up their battalion in its steel claws and dropped them on to its conveyor belt. Now the belt was moving; whither, they did not know.

It was strange, too, to come into living contact with the machine for the first time, to see it at work. The Movement Control staff, the servants of the machine, hurried self-consciously about amongst the ranks of the battalion. They were irked by a vague, indefinable feeling of inferiority in the face of these fighting men whom it was their occupation to ship across the water like livestock. They were polite; they tried to show respect to the infantrymen. But for weeks they had been working overtime, like checkers in some Chicago stockyard, packing men into trains and ships and moving them on another stage nearer to the furnace. They were tired, losing patience, perhaps annoyed by their own nagging inferiority; and sometimes they became officious, shouted, lost their tempers.

The men of the Fifth Battalion sat on their packs and watched the comings and goings with a placid detachment. They felt no resentment towards these go-betweens of war, and – although they chaffed them, and tripped them up, and shouted after them, ‘You lucky people!’ – they felt no envy of them. They were the damned, the chosen, the infantry, looking down on the rest of the human race from their own, unapproachable world. The mariner looks with longing at the shore, but will not leave the sea; so these infantrymen lived content in a pride which none of them would ever acknowledge, nor yet betray.

‘All right, mate,’ said Charlie Venable peaceably to an angry Movement Control sergeant, ‘when we’re all dead an’ buried they’ll come an’ fetch you blokes. I don’ ’arf feel sorry for you.’