In the summer, he’d felt hot and heavy, his neck and cheeks often scorched by the sun. The smells were worse then. Bodies, alive and dead, reeked to high heaven, the rats got fatter, slower, more audacious, his feet swelled inside his boots, pushing painfully against the hard leather. The French sun was not so ferocious in September; it was pleasant. He’d spent a lot of the day with his eyes closed and his head turned towards the warmth, simply enjoying what he could. Now the sun had slipped below the horizon, dusk had brought a chill and fat spots of rain fell spasmodically, threatening a downpour before morning. The moon came up, loud and silver, but kept dipping behind lurking clouds. The young boys were shivering; Howard knew it was terror more than temperature. He offered to make some Bovril. As he waited for the water to boil on the stove, he tried to ignore the dark rumbling and the intermittent flashes in the sky. He wished it was a storm. He didn’t wonder whether it was Allied or enemy shelling; it hardly mattered. He looked at his hands, scratched and cut, his stubby, grubby fingernails; he thought about the ache in his back and thighs – two years of crouching had taken a toll; he picked off lice from the seams of his jacket and threw them on the flame of the stove.

The lads were glad of the Bovril. Grateful to have something to do for a few minutes.

‘It does you good, something hot inside you,’ he commented. It was the sort of illusory remark that they made to one another. As though anything did any good.

The night eventually became pitch black and then the rain that had threatened materialised. The downpour was tough, relentless. They slept with their kit on their back and tin hats on their heads, their feet in puddles. Howard could only see other men as shadows.

‘Steady, lads,’ said the young lieutenants, unsure but determined not to show it. Their tone suggesting camaraderie, unity.

‘Hold it down,’ hissed Sergeant Bowler in response to one man coughing and another whispering to a mate. His tone was considerably less friendly. Lieutenant Colonel Owens struck a match from time to time, to glance at his wristwatch, which was synchronised to those of the gunners.

Howard heard the signal at 5.20 a.m. It was still dark.

The dawn was shattered by the clamour and turmoil of the explosions and the now-familiar long screech of the shells rushing through the air. Hours of silence collapsed into a roar of fire and rage as the artillery erupted with an enormous violence. Howard and his regiment listened and waited. They were not up and over first. It was to be a slow onslaught, a creeping barrage. This command had been passed on in the guise of a strategy. Howard feared it was more to do with lack of resources than tactics, but he couldn’t think about that now. A slow onslaught sounded perilous, but then it was no more or less exposed than all the other suicidal missions they had embarked upon. They were lucky they weren’t first out, that was all that was worth thinking about. Some other poor bugger was taking the brunt. Funny world when all you had to be happy about was that someone was dead before you were.