David Holbrook
Page from the manuscript of Flesh wounds
[Ashwell, Hertfordshire?, August 1962]
From MS Add. 9987

Transcript:

4.

an army of men. He peered into the seething darkness that merged with the blood on his tired and inflamed retina, and hoped the thirty minutes away. He walked carefully along one side of the square of tanks, stopping at every three paces to listen. The world seemed to be dead, except for the guns.

The din continued all the time. Stray shots buzzed over from right and left, where bursts of Spandau and Bren went backwards and forwards all through the night. Patrols were out from both sides. The beaches provided a continual index to the scene, four miles away. There bombs fell, shells bammed, and warships off shore still replied. The Warspite was still shooting at the six great chimneys of Caen steelworks, and other targets: five chimneys were down, but one still remained. The cruiser’s projectiles travelled like trains through the sky, and fell with a bump for which there is no common simile, except perhaps that of a locomotive being dropped from the top of a tower a few yards away. Yet despite the grotesque size of the projectile, they were learning from experience how wasteful such shooting could be: the Germans had brought up a railway gun, firing 170 millimetre shells. More than half of the shells failed to explode, and