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bets on whether various buildings would still be standing; between each of their regular supply runs another substantial landmark would disappear. Russell walked through the shattered streets where sections of elaborate cornicework, blown from impressive villas, lay in the more general debris. Some of thesturdier houses had walls or parts of them intact, though the roofs had gone. Most of the houses had been reduced to rubble, however; the rubble was then ground to powder by further bombardment.
    Back with his company Russell found the men grumbling but determined. The major of B Company, who was thought to be invulnerable, had been wounded. Having brushed aside shells and grenades, he had finally been hit by a sniper while he stood outside a recently captured farmhouse. Sugden had been blown up in the air by a shell during an attempted advance, but on landing had continued walking; Bell had seen it with his own eyes. Padgett had reported sick with trench foot. The medics had put the offending part in water, but it had not swelled up in the prescribed way, so he had been sent back to the front. Another member of Russell’s platoon had had an attack of the shakes, or Anzio anxiety as the others called it, and had been ordered to rest. It was said that a man in D Company had been carried away screaming, strapped to a stretcher. Others had been killed or wounded. Nothing much had changed.
    Russell’s section was occupying one of the farmhouses they had taken from the Germans. It had a concrete oven in the courtyard which gave ideal protection to a machine gunner, and the half-broken walls provided cover for the others. As billets went, it was an improvement, and Padgett had been able to earth and sandbag the vulnerable points with his usual skill. It was only a temporary shelter, however, en route to another trench from which they were supposed to attack.
    â€˜We’re lucky here, mate,’ said Bell, who was brewing up that night. ‘A couple of days and it’ll be back to bloody Passchendaele.’
    Russell was trying to play cards with Sugden. ‘How do you know so much about the Great War, Frank?’ he said.
    â€˜My dad was in it. Yes. What a show that was. The Somme. Ypres. He saw the lot. Come back with lungs full of gas. You should have heard him cough.’
    Sugden looked up. ‘There’s some Yankee chap out on theMussolini canal, he’s got this new trick. When one of the Jerries slips out of his trench to go for a piss, this bloke picks him off.’
    Bell ignored him. ‘To tell the truth,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind where we go or what happens provided we never inherit another trench from the Sherwood Foresters. Blimey.’
    Sugden came from Yorkshire. He objected to the way Bell, a Londoner, was always grumbling. It was true that the Sherwood Foresters were known for leaving a mess. And it was not that he was so cheerful himself. It was more that he was suspicious of the fibre of a southerner and therefore resented his complaints. A half-hearted argument began to rumble between the two men, which ended when Bell produced the food.
    â€˜My brother-in-law’s got a fish shop in Halifax,’ said Sugden. ‘Best fish and chips for miles.’
    The men looked down dumbly at their plates.
    â€˜I could do with a nice cod and chips right now,’ said Russell.
    â€˜Not cod,’ said Sugden. ‘We never have cod. That’s a dirty fish. We have haddock.’
    The officer in charge of the platoon had gone back to company headquarters excited by the prospect of the drink ration that would have accumulated for him since he had been up the line. He was an excitable but tenacious character of, it appeared to Russell, about sixteen years old. His absence meant that Sergeant Quinn, a thin, melancholy man from somewhere in the northwest, was in charge.
    Quinn was an expert in body disposal. He appeared not to mind the stench of the corpses the previous