A dirty tape wriggled across the beach and the riflemen came stumbling along it, shedding water from their sodden trousers. Mister Paterson flopped beneath a wrecked landing craft that lay broadside on and waited for his platoon to come up. One by one they dropped to the sand behind him. There were German shells falling a little inland, where the first assault troops had already passed, and somewhere among the yellowed, battered houses scattered along the waterfront and the smashed rubble of wrecked pillboxes a machine gun was rapping remotely.

‘All right, my lads,’ said Paterson breathlessly. He ducked under the bows of the beached craft and ran heavily along the tape. There was a tangle of wire ahead, with German mine warnings poking up everywhere and a few British dead lying with their faces in the sand. They followed the tape along a path torn through the wire and came on to a narrow track running laterally. In front of them now were gentle, dreary dunes rising from pools and runnels of water, with grass growing scantily on their upper flanks. On each side of them sappers were rooting up mines as hastily as potatoes, and a little away to the right a beach dressing station had just been established, with a row of loaded stretchers waiting on one side and a row of corpses laid out on the other, each a still mound under a grey blanket, with big boots protruding at the end. Some pioneers were trying to dig in along the far side of the road, in the wet sand.

They moved on. There was the sudden wheep-wheep of bullets. Paterson could not see where they were coming from; then the grating, shrieking descent of their first shell. They flopped, pressing themselves frantically into the sand, then staggered to their feet and went lumbering after Paterson.

Someone was whimpering loudly; it was like the crying of a spoilt child. Sergeant Shannon stopped and looked round. Little Alfie Bradley was lurching about in a wide circle, well away from the tape, pressing his hands to his face. The sergeant raced after him and pulled him down to the ground.

As the boy felt the pressure of the sergeant’s hands on his shoulders he tried to stifle his crying; he kept on sniffling jerkily. There was a red pit where one of his eyes had been. Blood welled darkly from the other.

‘I can’t see,’ he whispered, ‘I can’t see.’

The sergeant comforted him.

‘All right lad, there’s nowt t’ worry about. Yer eyes are full of blood. You’ll be all right when they’ve washed them.’ He whipped out the boy’s field dressing, his hands already bright with fresh blood. He knew the boy would never see again. He bound the dressing tightly over the boy’s face. It began to stain red at once.