Lieutenant Paterson walked lightly at the head of his platoon. The first numb, obsessed rush was over. He was beginning to enjoy himself. For months he had wondered what his first day in battle would be like. There would be fear to conquer, he had thought; there would be sickness and disgust at the sight of death and mutilation. But the time had come and there were none of these things. Instead he felt free, triumphant, detached somehow from all that was happening around him; as if he were seeing it on a cinema screen, as if all the noises were on a soundtrack and there were no fleet bullets or whanging steel splinters to harm him. And everything – he puzzled about it – everything was so familiar. He had seen it all before, on newsreels, in war films, in the war books on which he had grown up. There was nothing new here, nothing to shock. He had grown up in the aftermath of one war, with the shadow of another already over him.

The first corpses and the first wounded aroused only curiosity in him, and a strange craving to look more closely and note every detail. Only once was he shaken. He was marching with Sergeant Shannon close behind him when he heard a shell coming. He shouted, ‘Get down, there!’ and flopped. As he lay with his head between his arms, quailing under the explosion, he heard something thump into the ground in front of him. He looked up and saw, lying only a yard ahead of him, a human trunk with a head but no limbs. He spewed over his tunic as he rose to his feet and lurched forward, white-faced and overcome with sudden nausea. He looked over his shoulder. Sergeant Shannon was quite unmoved.

The platoon moved in open file along a sunken road running inland, weapons ready. There were broad ploughlands on both sides, with Achtung, Minen boards every few yards. Far away on the left there was a wood. A machine gun opened fire from the wood and they dropped into the shelter of the road’s steep bank. ‘Keep moving, chaps,’ called Mister Paterson, and they moved forward on hands and knees with the bullets squealing overhead.