‘We might be seen.’

‘In the barn.’

She had not been able to resist or refuse him. Carefully they crept down the stairs and fled to the barn, the moon flinging its light on to her pale nightdress, illuminating her like an angel. The straw scratched their backs, shoulders and buttocks, but neither of them seemed to care. He rolled them over so that she was above him and only her knees would get scratched. She seemed surprised yet elated to be on top. He wanted to cry at the glory of her: her pale skin, made still more wonderful because of the splashes of pink at her throat, cheeks, nipples, lips; desire marking her. Her breasts, swaying rhythmically, made him ease up on to his elbows so they could pound against his face; so tantalising and thrilling that he thought he might explode with delight and desire.

Then he knew what he had to do.

He wondered whether he looked different to her. He knew he was different in the instant that he made the decision. As he pushed into her, as her flesh parted and accepted him with such sweet willingness, he knew he was going to betray her by going away. Leaving her. It wasn’t what he wanted. But he didn’t have any choice. Love, not hate, had sent him to war.

After all, they were almost the same thing. So extreme. So perilous.

He couldn’t sit in Blackwell waiting for her joy and pleasure in him to become stagnant and then to morph altogether into something sickening like disappointment, and he knew it must. It would. If he stayed. Going was the right thing and the most bloody. Telling her would have been the right thing too. Yet it was hopeless. He didn’t give either her or his mother the chance to try to persuade him out of his decision. He knew how it would have been if he had tried to tell them he was joining up. They would have begged and berated him to change his mind. They would have told him he was breaking their hearts. Perhaps Vivian would have clung to him, her arms clasped around his neck, his knees. He’d have had to loosen her grip a finger at a time. His mother might have flung herself across the door in a feeble effort to stop him going. He’d have had to gently and firmly move her aside.

It would only have hurt them more when they failed.

The war was as he remembered it, worse if anything. At the beginning there had at least been shock at the horror of it all; now there was resignation, doubt that it would ever end, poor recollection of what life had once been. Most of the men seemed to understand that they were in hell and here for an eternity. They all looked the same to him. It was hard to mark anyone out to befriend or even mistrust. Their uniforms were filthy. Every last man stank of sweat, urine, blood and vomit. He caught their lice within days. Their faces were drawn, weary: thin, cracked lips, hollow cheeks, their eyes unreadable, depleted. Throughout the day they listened to the shelling and the silence; both caused fear and alarm. The shelling was spasmodic but persistent in Howard’s part of the line, and it frayed nerves and caused incessant tension. Heads pounded, the earth was pounded; no one could tell the difference any more.