Charlie Venable swore bitterly; he was finding it hard going and his hands and knees were raw already. There were the first houses of a village ahead of them now, and shelter; behind them the German machine gun stopped its fruitless probing; then they heard it firing again at another party coming up behind them. The village was captured and the cottages were swarming with British infantrymen searching for German stragglers. There was some looting. A mob of German prisoners squatted at the foot of a long wall, listless, furtive, uninterested in the army that was streaming past them. Paterson and his platoon trudged past the prisoners. Charlie Venable swore again, this time at the top of his voice. ‘You ––ers,’ he shouted at the prisoners, ‘you’re lucky I never got ’ere first.’

D-Night. The Fifth Battalion were dug in beyond the village, waiting to be counter-attacked. The men lay in their holes listening to the German bombers which had been prowling about the sky since the coming of darkness. The night was lurid with flares and tracers. Guns were booming. The Germans were shelling the beach. Colonel Pothecary, standing at the foot of the steps leading down to the cellar which was his headquarters, brooded over the casualty return he had just signed; the first. He watched the gun-flashes over the dark silhouettes of the treetops, and wondered where his boy was, whether he was alive or floating in some grey waste of water like the corpses of the morning’s assault. There was a party of his men still out doing an ammunition fatigue. He worried for them. Colonel Pothecary could not forget his boy, or the parents of the men he led; his burden was heavy upon him.

As they heard the shell rushing down at them through the night the file of men who were moving across the dunes dropped the boxes they were carrying and flung themselves to the ground.

They pressed their bodies into the wet sand, cowering from the blast which buffeted them. They heard the clang of splinters striking the sides of wrecked landing craft and felt the upflung sand raining on to their clothes.

‘On your feet,’ called Mister Challis, the platoon officer. ‘Everyone all right?’

‘The Swedebasher’s stopped one,’ somebody answered in the darkness.

The lieutenant recognised the voice. ‘That you, Martin?’ he asked, moving towards the speaker. Martin was kneeling beside a dark bundle on the sand.

‘All right…’ this time it was the strong, dark voice of Sergeant Ferrissey, ‘…Hit the trail. Golly, you an’ Martin look after the Swedebasher.’

The men heaved the boxes on to their shoulders and moved off towards the anti-aircraft guns whose intermittent flashes were stabbing the night.