Lieutenant Paterson was a sturdy young man with fair hair that lay gleaming like a golden cap across his brow, and smooth, ruddy cheeks. He was twenty-two years old but did not look more than nineteen; when he was alone with his mother he still called her ‘Mummy’.

At four o’clock in the morning Lieutenant Paterson had still not yet gone to bed. He had lived a long time for this night, and it seemed stupid and pointless to sleep through it. Instead, he strolled slowly round the camp perimeter, chewing the stem of his unlit pipe and trying to summon up thoughts appropriate to the occasion.

He had thought of all the poems he knew, dreamed a dozen battle scenes in which he had won a dozen decorations, drifted into a sentimental vision of his mother hearing the news of his death, written in imagination his first letter home from the front, conjured up a picture of himself lying bandaged in a hospital bed with his family tiptoeing respectfully to his side; and it was still not yet dawn. The night had become terribly long and terribly quiet; to Paterson the distant hum of the factory had already become a torment.

Towards the morning the moon was obscured by cloud and the sea grew dark; the air became chill. Lieutenant Paterson, as he breathed, felt the air in his throat and his lungs like ice. It was hard for him to breathe, harder still to dream. He was beset by thoughts more dismal than he had yet known; thoughts of himself being delivered home to his mother like a helpless package, handless or armless or legless; thoughts of his mother weeping over his smashed and frightful face; thoughts of himself sprawling dead, face downwards by the roadside, with the battalion plodding by as if he had never existed and his mother waiting in anguish far away for news of him.

It had not been difficult to soldier these last three years, at OCTU, at battle school, with the battalion; there were leaves, and weekend visits, letters from Mummy and parcels from Mummy. Mummy sent his laundry to him every week, wrapped daintily in sheets of tissue paper and sprinkled with lavender which reminded him of her each time he opened the parcel.

He could see his Mummy now, tall and slender, with hair more golden than his own, sitting at table in the white-frilled blouse with the cameo brooch at her throat, smiling at him across the spotless tablecloth and the glittering cutlery and the gleaming cut glass and the flowers.

For the first time it seeped into his understanding that he was going now far beyond her reach, where it would not be in her power to help or comfort him.