‘Hello,’ he whispered. It was habit to keep it down in a trench; you had to assume the enemy were always alert to sound. No one replied. Howard felt about again and this time his fingers touched a nose, a mouth. The cold, lifeless face of a soldier. Someone’s son. Nothing to do for him but close his eyes. He winched himself into a sitting position, then, inch by sorrowful inch, manoeuvred into a crawl. Every movement sent a searing pain up his leg, through his hip, his blistered skin screaming in outrage. The bullet wound in his side throbbed, and he paused to vomit, the acidic taste in his mouth adding to his discomfort. He crawled around the trench. Before, he’d had the impression that ten or a dozen men had taken refuge here, but now he was alone with about half a dozen dead bodies; men who had fared worse than he had in the flaming tongues of the bomb’s burning debris. As he inched through the dirt, trying to find the flasks belonging to the dead men, one of them reached out and grabbed his arm. For a moment he couldn’t comprehend how this could possibly be, and then he understood: the man was still alive.

‘Where have they all gone?’ he asked.

‘Onwards,’ rasped the man. He was badly burnt and difficult to look at. The hair on his head had been blazed away. His face was a primitive patchwork of black and red. One side had melted off altogether; his ear had slipped and become just a nub on his neck. Shiny and tight, his skin was unrecognisable as such, a mass of blisters and peeling. His lips were violet, like forget-me-nots. Howard couldn’t understand why he wasn’t shrieking and struggling. He assumed he must feel numb, perhaps shock; certainly his breathing was heavy, his pulse rapid.

He searched around and found a half-full flask tucked in a discarded kitbag. He trickled water into the man’s mouth, whose eyes flashed with immense gratitude. Howard – who had long been expecting death, who had never felt truly alive from the moment he left Vivian and had even wished himself dead after he killed his first man – was now glad to be alive, if only to give this man a drink.

‘Have they gone towards the Germans?’ he asked.

‘Orders are orders,’ muttered the soldier. He didn’t have eyelids. Howard nodded; he understood. Hadn’t he made the same decision himself when he was safe in the crater with Sergeant Bowler? None of them dared to be called deserters. He poured the last trickles of water between the man’s blistered lips.

He didn’t have a clue how the battle was going; he couldn’t guess how long it might take for help to come. Time was a luxury they didn’t have. ‘We’ll need more water and some food. I’ll go and get some.’ The man lacked the energy to thank him. Howard wasn’t even sure he had heard as he stared into the middle distance; without eyelids, it was hard to know if he was awake or asleep.