Even Collum knew that if you had to fight a battle then it was better to receive the charge than to do the charging. You wanted to be the ones holding a line, not running at it trying to break it. As a result neither side wanted to go first. He wondered how long they’d been waiting here. Birds chirped sweetly and insects clicked in the creeping bentgrass. There was the smell of hot steel in the sun. The oxeye daisies and meadowsweet and a hundred other flowers he couldn’t name seemed touchingly unaware that they were about to be trampled by ten thousand human feet.
