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

Transcript:

5

when one shell landed near the Regimental Head Quarters it buried itself so deeply before exploding that even officers standing on tanks round about were unharmed.

In these gun-orchestrated small hours Paul strove to remember what day it was, to try to exert some purchase on his connection somewhere with civilisation and England. He couldn’t work it out, and felt lost in consequence. It was in fact Thursday, June 8th, but he could only remember the long expanse of hours only broken into light and darkness. Already, he couldn’t recall how many nights there had been.

His vigil was broken by cannon-fire from two German aircraft. Before there was any sound bright lights shot across the fields where the tanks were, about thirty feet above them. Then came ripped thwacks in the ears, and a huge pumping noise came from the copses and orchards behind, as the 20 millimetre shells, about as big as pepper pots, exploded. The rods of red light in the air cracked, and the hair on Paul’s neck stood up, from the painful force with which the cannon-shells cleaved the atmosphere, and ripped it into sound waves. Behind the cannon shells came the planes, their engines thrumming in a high foreign note,