'I'LL show you the chap who was my driver for two-and-a-half years, " said Major Ian English. The green grass beneath his feet was neatly striped and springy; the white headstones in front of him were straight and clean; the rims of his eyes were red and rheumy.

The Major was standing in front of Grave A13, belonging to Captain John Wheatley of the 8th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry. They'd been talking across the distance of a lane in a French hamlet - roughly 6ft - when a German mortar bomb had landed between them.

From the distance of 60 years, the Major remembered: "He got the majority of it. In fact, he got all of it, and he crumpled. I was quite unhurt.

All I could do was get the stretcher-bearers, but he was dead by the time he reached the Regimental Aid Post."

The Major walked stiffly down Row A, the rows of medals on his chest catching the spring sunshine like the water in his eyes. During the Second World War, 12,000 soldiers were awarded a Military Cross for bravery. Several hundred were awarded two. Maj English and 23 others were awarded three.

He came to a halt in front of B14 which belonged Pte Kenneth Stanger.

Maj English, who died last Friday, aged 86, and whose funeral was held yesterday in Prestonunder-Scar, near Leyburn, didn't say anything.

His head was bowed, his memory as full as his eyes.

The book at the cemetery entrance didn't say anything, either. Pte Stanger was 21 when he died June 20, 1944. Nothing more was known.

Maj English knew. He was seeing him as he'd been when they first met in December 1939, Stanger barely 18. What extraordinary times they'd shared, officer and driver: Dunkirk and then the Middle East. Only it ended here in Normandy, a couple of weeks after D-Day, in a dip beside the D6.

The book at the entrance told another extraordinary story. Stanger's neighbour in B15 was Pte Jack Banks. He left school in Darwen, Lancashire, aged 14. He worked in a brickworks, but, according to his sister Jean, dreamed of proving himself on a foreign field.

He was tall and, just 15, got into the DLI. His mother, Fanny, allowed him to go, but said if he were ever posted abroad she'd tell his superiors of his age. That'd scupper his foolhardy plans.

But Operation Overlord - the madcap plan to land 200,000 men on the beaches of Normandy and drive Hitler from the Continent - was secret.

When Fanny thought Jack was safely in camp in Aldershot he was, in fact, in a landing craft on Gold Beach.

Jack, just 16, made it through D-Day. He even outlived Stanger - by a day.

On June 21, his commander asked for three volunteers to take out a German machine gun post.

Now was the moment for Jack to prove himself.

All three volunteers were hit by mortar fire.

Two were killed outright. A field ambulance took Jack for treatment to his thigh wound, but he died in the makeshift dressing station in the farm which now overlooks Jerusalem Cemetery.

Fanny never claimed his war medals. She always said she wanted him back instead.

Jerusalem is the smallest British military cemetery in North-West Europe. It has 48 graves, 23 of them are Durhams.

On his visit two years ago, Maj English sighed deeply and gasped as if drowning: "I knew just about half of them."

He was the last of the living to have seen their faces, to have recognised their voices and to have known their stories firsthand. The line ends with him, and now becomes lifeless words on a dry page like this.