Alexander knew it was the biggest British army yet sent into battle. His colonel had told him that twenty-six divisions, every man a volunteer, were stretching along a fifteen-mile front. The French were doing their part but of the original forty divisions they had promised, they’d only been able to muster eighteen, their strength drained by the savage five-month German attack on Verdun. This had worried the colonel and it worried Alexander. It had felt like they were going into battle with their forces already heavily depleted. But the old generals had insisted the assault go ahead and so go ahead it must. It was now almost two years, give a month, since the beginning of the war and over eighteen months since he had seen Rose and the children. He’d stopped hoping for a decent period of leave until something changed. This, as Hopkins had said, could be it.

Alexander glanced to where his friend, Captain Palmer, was marshalling their men. He lifted his hand, receiving the same in reply. He hadn’t known Philip Palmer more than twelve months but they’d struck it off immediately. On the couple of times they had been granted a forty-eight-hour leave, they’d spent it in a nearby village getting drunk together and talking about home and family.

Although they were the same age, Philip had been married to his childhood sweetheart for over a decade and had three children, the eldest a boy of nine and the youngest a girl of three. Philip’s two brothers had been killed in the first year of the conflict, but he’d told Alexander that his parents were army people and had accepted the loss of their sons stoically. Alexander hadn’t known quite what that meant. Already he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand it if anything happened to his boys, or Betsy for that matter.

Philip was a strange mixture, Alexander thought now. An army man through and through, but a poet too. He was exceptionally well read, having taken English Literature at university, and he had shown Alexander some of the poems he’d written. In Alexander’s humble opinion, they were amazing. One in particular, entitled ‘A Summer’s Morn’, had transported him back in time to when he was a boy at Highfield. He’d almost been able to smell the scent of climbing roses and newly mown grass, and hear larks calling in a blue sky. For a few precious moments it had taken him away from the grim reality of the trenches, of men dying, or being horribly crippled or burned alive.

‘Nearly time, sir.’