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By Root 1152 0

against the hull, which stopped the engine and severed the electrics—a Panzerfaust impact. The crew bailed out, Thomas more slowly than the others because he was injured in the leg and side. He had to struggle to pull himself over the breech of the gun. Once on the ground, he ran clumsily into a nearby house. He regretted his choice of refuge as soon as he saw a rifle barrel protruding from a window. Then several Germans clumped in, carrying rations and other booty they had taken from his tank. At first, they did not see Thomas. He tapped the shoulder of one man, whose startled hands instinctively shot up in surrender. The injured tank gunner explained that he was the one who was giving up. An English-speaking lieutenant appeared, who genially introduced Thomas to the huge soldier who had fired the faust which crippled the Honey. Then the prisoner was led out of the back of the house to a motorcycle sidecar which took him to a field hospital. A German doctor who tended his wounds inquired how old Thomas was. Nineteen, said the Englishman. The doctor shook his head disbelievingly and muttered: “Sixteen.” Of the tank’s crew, the wireless-operator was also captured. The lieutenant in command escaped up a drainage ditch. The driver was killed by “friendly fire” as he sought to re-enter the British lines.

The crusade to liberate Europe, upon which many men of the allied nations embarked with real idealism in June 1944, had degenerated into a series of sodden local manoeuvres. These roused few expectations among higher commanders, and cynical resignation among those who had to carry them out. Many men remarked upon the changed mood in Belgium and Holland that winter, the faltering of the commitment displayed by those who had landed on the Norman beaches in high summer. “After the airborne operation failed, we seemed to run out of ideas,” remarked Bill Deedes. “We moved very slowly. We did what Julius Caesar used to do two thousand years earlier—we went into winter quarters.” There was never any open admission by British commanders that they had abandoned hopes of a breakthrough, but the facts speak for themselves: until the German assault in the Ardennes, 21st Army Group moved nowhere far or fast.

For those occupying forward positions during the hours of daylight, positional warfare imposed immobility and boredom, while requiring constant vigilance. Beyond the enemy’s line of sight, men laboured on the daily round of fatigue duties—ration-carrying, washing and repairing vehicles, priming grenades, filling magazines, cleaning weapons. Intense activity began when darkness fell. During the hours when civilians slept, soldiers were obliged to exploit their invisibility. There were trenches to be dug, mines to be laid, units to be relieved, supplies to be brought forward. Even where there was no gunfire, the night silence was broken by the muffled thud and clink of spades, subdued voices and distantly moving vehicles. Patrols were sent out, often across a river or canal, to probe the German lines and sometimes bring back a prisoner for intelligence purposes. Each such small operation was a nerve-racking ordeal for those required to creep in darkness across water-logged countryside, poised every moment for the explosion of a mine or trip-flare, the rattle of enemy fire. Men were always tired, because even when there was no great battle to be fought, the simplest everyday tasks—cooking, finding a tolerable place in which to sleep, wash, defecate—become major challenges on a battlefield.

Thoughtful men, reared on the tradition of British bungling in the First World War, were pleasantly surprised by the administrative competence of the 1944–45 army, in which mail and rations never failed to appear. It is hard to overstate the importance of letters from home to morale in every theatre of war, and commanders knew it. “I was terribly impressed by the sheer efficiency of everything,” said Roy Dixon. “Everybody talks about the chaos of war, but to us it didn’t seem that chaotic at all. All the ordinary worries of peacetime life were taken