So the battle for Ypres began; it roared, ravaged, then it lurked. Howard had been beginning to think he knew war. He thought he had seen everything dreadful that there was to see. He was wrong. Nothing had prepared him. No one could have imagined it. The Germans came: boots, boots, boots, bang bang bang.

‘They are children!’ the British officers cried. It was true that two out of three of the German troops were pimply youths, surely no older than nineteen, but the Allies could not afford to be sentimental.

Howard watched as the battle was relentlessly slogged out every day for over a month. The casualties piled ever skyward. Men were shot, burnt, blown to pieces, drowned and stabbed. He saw it all. Despite the vicious intensity of the fighting on the front line, Ypres itself, by some miracle, remained relatively unscathed. At least it did until the Germans began to periodically shell the city, and then, two weeks later, as they became more desperate and vicious, to send a heavy stream of shells directly into the centre. Howard considered the possibility that the bombardment was designed to conceal a repositioning of German forces, because surely the destruction of the city itself could have no strategic value. Clarke disagreed. ‘The attacks are motivated by malevolence.’

‘It seems there are no limits to man’s anger and spite.’

‘Quite so. Finding that with all their men, and all those guns, and all their struggles, and their sacrifice of lives they could not take Ypres, they’ve set out to break it. Peevish children are sometimes like that.’

The city was razed. Everything. Houses, farms, schools, shops, the Cloth Hall and the ancient cathedral that other men had built in 1230. All reduced to ruin and rubble. The two men watched as fires blazed, then smoke lingered; finally there was nothing other than grey wreckage.

‘It sickens me!’ Howard cried.

‘This sickens you more than the things you’ve seen on the Front?’

‘I can’t measure one against the other. War sickens me. Must men destroy everything they have created?’ Howard was white with horror. How clever and inventive we have been, he thought. So many ways to kill a man. For thousands of years we’ve been honing the art of warfare, and now it seems we’ve really become efficient. Snipers, machine guns, shells, torpedoes; bayonets if all else fails. What a creative breed we are.

For all that, on 22nd November Clarke was able to tell the world that the Allies had secured an essential victory. With excitement and new vigour he drafted the copy and then gave it to Howard for comment. Howard held the paper in his hand, his wrist limp, his fingers slack, almost letting the sheet blow away in the wind. Clarke snatched it from him. ‘Don’t you like it?’ he demanded.

‘You always write well.’

‘So?’ He wanted to know why his friend wasn’t jubilant.

‘It’s this phrase here: “bloody battle”.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘I’ve heard it before.’