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outing!'
    I realized, with a sick-making lurch of the heart, that it was my job to go across with the necessary tools and remove the bloody detonator. No easy task, that. Many a man has come to a bad end while removing detonators, and there was always the added risk that the might have prepared some new little surprise to trip us up.
    Porta, half-way up the tree, was holding the four wires that led away from the mine. I edged myself forward, clutching the tools. It was a T mine. The detonator was no larger than a packet of cigarettes, but that was quite large enough for me. On one of the grenades, some joker lad written the message, 'Go to hell, damned Krauts'. It was signed with the simple name of Isaac. Really, you could see the unknown Isaac's point of view. No one with a name like that had any particular reason to love us.
    By some miracle, the luck held. We disposed of the T mine and its booby traps and snatched a few moments' rest on the edge of the grave. We sat in a tight semicircle on the ground and smoked cigarettes, a pastime that was, in the circumstances, strictly forbidden.
    'I'll tell you what,' said Porta, suddenly. 'I bet if old Adolf had to come and work in a minefield for half an hour he wouldn't be so bleeding cocky... He wouldn't be so keen on fighting the bleeding war, neither! '
    This simple reflection put us all in a good humour. We sat there laughing immoderately until the rest of the group came up to join us, led by Lt. Brandt, who was in charge of the operation. Brandt had been with us since the beginning. He had from time to time disappeared on training courses, but he had always returned to us and we tended to look upon him as one of ourselves rather than as an officer, even to the extent of addressing him by his Christian name and treating him with our own particular brand of generally obscene familiarity. He was a true officer of the front line and one of the few men to command our grudgingly given respect.
    'Bloody mines,' he grumbled. 'Much more of this sort of thing and we'll all end up together playing oranges and lemons in the nut house.'
    'We'll dream of bloody mines,' said Porta, 'when we're back home digging up the vegetable patch. We'll be trying to detonate the bleeding spuds before we know where we are.'
    Porta always spoke of 'when'; never of 'if'. On the whole I suppose we all thought in terms of 'when', though most of us were too cautious to say it out loud. But somehow you never could bring yourself to consider that one day it: might be your turn to end up in a ditch with a beer can holding your personal papers. You often thought about death, and broke into a cold sweat, but in your heart of hearts you couldn't seriously believe it would ever happen to you. Quite frequently, before a full-scale attack, we'd helped prepare the communal grave, lined it with hay, stacked up the little wooden crosses. And never once, did you picture your own body flung into it along with all the others, though God knows death was a common enough experience. How many times a day did you hear the sharp whistling sound of a grenade, the heavy thump as it landed, then the explosion, then the shrieks of pain, then the realization that the man standing next to you a second ago was no longer there... How many times had it happened that half the section had been blown up, that all round you men lay dead or dying, and you alone left standing there unharmed? You knew the luck couldn't last for ever, and yet instinctively you felt that your own personal luck was surely inextinguishable.
    Porta was eating again. This time it was a case of tinned pineapple he had found in an abandoned American jeep.
    'Funny how I never really appreciated pineapple before,' he mused. 'First thing I'm going to do when the war's over is go into a restaurant and stuff myself sick till it runs out of my ears.'
    This, of course, was the cue for one of our favourite pastimes: playing the game of 'when the war is over...' We discussed it