James Holland

So, you know, best part of a week after D-Day.

Yeah.

They're pleased to be back.

But they find that the journey up to the front line is incredibly sobering because the fields are littered with dead cattle.

On their back, legs stuck up in the air.

There's loads and loads of photos of this.

But worse is a dead body strewn across the landscape.

And Hales writes, it brought it home to me with a trembling horror, what I was going to face and perhaps suffer.

I knew then that more scenes of carnage and devastation would inevitably follow.

Yeah, they will.

Yeah, because this is just about ordinary people with ordinary emotions and anxieties and worries and fears and stresses and strains.

Yes, because these are just nice, decent people.

Keith Douglas killed by an airburst.

Exactly.

Someone else shot in the chest by a sniper.

Maybe not.

But everyone's been poking fun at Trooper Mills, who's Wharton's young gunner.

And Mills once told the boys he'd never smoked except in dire emergencies.

Then in a brief interlude in the fighting around St.

Pierre, all the boys were smoking furiously, including Mills.