It was a week of sunshine and blue skies. For two days the men of the battalion were allowed to go down into the little seaside town to seek their pleasure. The beaches were crowded with holiday-makers; in the little chalets which lined the sea-wall families sprawled in deck-chairs and cooked meals on Primus stoves. On the day the battalion arrived, the island had been cut off from the outside world. Transport services to the mainland had been stopped. The island was sealed; the holiday-makers, a horde of timid, respectable little middle-class people, resented it; they resented the war which they had come here to forget and which had pursued them, as they might resent a thunderstorm which had come to spoil their holiday. And with unanimity and determination they settled down to ignore, as well as they could, both the unwelcome war and its involuntary representatives in their midst – the men of the Fifth Battalion.

The sturdy, sun-burned, big-booted infantrymen sauntered in pairs along the promenade staring at things they had almost forgotten; the girls, beautiful in their wet bathing-costumes, whisking by with the rainbow drops of water shaking from their hair, leaving behind them the warm, milky smell of flesh and seawater; the children in waders squatting amid their sand-pies and squealing at the water’s edge; the laughter and the smell of cooking from the chalets; the crowds round the refreshment huts; and all the confused hubbub, drifting up from the beach in the dizzy sunlight, of surf and shrieking and shouting and gramophones.

No one spoke to them. No one paid any attention to them.

Two soldiers sat on the promenade rails, dangling their legs and talking delightedly to a little boy who stood looking up at them, his head cocked on one side. A pretty little girl appeared; she tugged at the little boy’s sleeve and said plaintively, ‘Mummy says come away, Rodney; you mustn’t speak to the soldiers.’

Dickie Crawford, turned away from an overcrowded tea-room, leaned amicably in at the door of a chalet and said, ‘Got a cup o’ tea for a thirsty soldier, ma?’

A fierce little woman answered, ‘Don’t they teach you manners in the Army? Go away.’

A German reconnaissance plane came over and the Bofors guns that crouched on the sea-wall began to bang shells into the blue sky. The infantry-men stood round the sand-bagged emplacements and roared with derisive laughter as the civilians scuttled from the beach.

Every night there were air raids on the town and on the ships that were anchored in hundreds offshore. The soldiers lay in the darkness of their tents, listening with vindictive delight to the bombs falling on the nearby town and muttering reckless encouragement to the raiders.

On the Wednesday evening two riflemen of the Fifth Battalion went into a public house and were refused beer.

‘Sorry, lads,’ said the publican, mopping the counter, ‘sold out.’

The bar was full of civilians drinking.