‘Of course, and you will again. It’s what it is.’ Howard was unimpressed. Clarke pushed on. ‘Would you prefer gory? Grotesque? Gruesome?’

‘Of course not, they’re all gratuitous.’ The men glared at each other. They’d been living on top of one another for some weeks now, under circumstances that were more than testing.

‘Well, you give me some fresh words to pin this hell. You’re a writer too.’

‘I can’t. I’m not.’ Howard looked as though he was in pain, actual physical pain, like some of the men who lay about waiting for the attention of a nurse. He thought about it. He was a playwright, or at least he had been once. It was not something he believed in now. Not something he could hold on to after France. Creativity and ambition had been blown to bits along with everything else. He returned to the copy and shook his head. Finally he muttered, ‘You call it a victory.’

‘We held the line.’

‘It was no sort of victory for mankind.’

‘We’ve dug in, our trenches are secure.’

‘Yes, I fear the men are already in graves. They’ve dug their own.’

‘You can’t talk like that, man.’ Clarke was impatient. Howard knew that his attitude wasn’t acceptable. It didn’t do to grumble. There was a tacit agreement: everyone had to keep their pecker up. Even whilst killing or being killed.

‘What are they estimating? Twenty-six thousand British men dead, the British Expeditionary Force broken?’

‘Where are you getting these numbers from? Only eight thousand are confirmed dead, eighteen thousand missing.’

‘Oh, and you think they are just going to turn up, do you? Maybe they will.’ Howard shrugged, his body oozing sarcasm. ‘They might stagger through the mud any minute now, only they’d have to get past the twenty thousand Belgians and the seventy thousand French bodies first.’ An accidental spray of spittle leapt from his mouth and landed on Clarke’s cheek. Clarke calmly took out a handkerchief and dabbed it away.

‘The Germans have had losses too.’

‘That doesn’t comfort me.’ Howard dropped his head into his hands. He half expected it to roll off; he’d been having nightmares about that recently, about decapitated bodies and detached limbs. In his nightmares he’d be walking along a French street when suddenly his leg would fall off, or he’d trip on someone else’s arm; one time he dreamt he found an ear in his soup. Lots of the men were having similar disturbances, but when they woke up, the nightmare carried on. ‘They were kids, just boys. They were massacred.’ He let out a low groan. It was animalistic. Guttural.

‘We’re at war, Howard.’

‘As if I could be in any doubt.’

Clarke thought he ought to change the subject, but looking around him, he struggled for a diversion. They were billeted behind the lines, near the casualty clearing station. Getting between Dunkirk and the Front every day had become untenable; during this heavy period of shelling there were no vehicles that could give them a lift. If vehicles were taking that route, they were laden with ammunition on the way out, and carrying wounded when they returned; there was no room for newspapermen. It was safer to stay put, but Clarke was beginning to worry that Howard had chosen the wrong place to base himself. Maybe he should be in Dunkirk, or better yet, England. Yesterday they had come across an incineration device where the amputated limbs were disposed of. Howard had observed the nurses do their hellish work and then he’d vomited and wept.