SHIELDED only by a narrow bank of baked earth as bullets flew and a grenade exploded ominously close by, Corporal Mark Byles, 34, glanced at the four soldiers who lay sweating on the ground beside him and knew what they had to do.

“Fix bayonets!” he shouted. “We’re going to assault the positions in front. Are you all up for it?” There were no objections. With the steel in place on their SA80 rifles, the men of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment (PWRR) charged across 600ft of open ground towards the enemy trenches, taking it in turns to stop and provide covering fire while their comrades advanced.

Byles, from Portsmouth, reached the first trench with another corporal, Brian Wood. “I wanted to put the fear of God into the enemy,” he said.

“I could see some dead bodies and eight blokes, some scrambling for their weapons. I’ve never seen such a look of fear in anyone’s eyes before. I’m over six feet, I was covered in sweat, angry, red in the face, charging in with a bayonet and screaming my head off. You would be scared too.”

Three Iraqis further ahead opened fire and Byles shot two with his rifle. “There was a lot of aggression and a lot of hand-to-hand fighting. It wasn’t a pleasant scene,” he said “Some did get cut with the blades of the bayonet as we tumbled around, but in the end they surrendered and were controlled. I do wonder how they regard life so cheaply. Some of those Iraqis in those trenches were 15 years old — against trained soldiers.”

The assault on May 14, described by Byles as “a perfect textbook attack”, took place during the Battle of Danny Boy, named after a nearby checkpoint on a road 15 miles south of the city of Amara in southern Iraq.

This battle, which began with three Iraqi ambushes and ended with more than 60 militants believed dead, was the culmination of one of the most intensive periods of action by a British regiment since the Falklands war in 1982.

In an onslaught that went largely unnoticed at home, the British were attacked more than 300 times in three months in and around Amara by the Mehdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric who has led some of the fiercest resistance of the Iraq war.

Last week, in interviews at their camps, soldiers who have been through what one commander called “the crucible of fire” told stories of heroism and horror. Some returned to their bases elated by combat; others broke down. But in the heat of battle itself, they rarely lost their nerve and while there have been dozens of injuries, not a single soldier lost his life.

It was on April 17 that Byles’s regiment assumed responsibility for the security of Amara, whose overwhelmingly Shi’ite inhabitants had opposed Saddam Hussein but who nevertheless resented the foreign forces that ousted him.

The clashes began at 2pm the following day when a blast bomb — a home-made grenade the size of a tin of baked beans — landed beneath the chassis of an army Land Rover in the city centre, leaving the vehicle in flames and a corporal with a shrapnel wound in the leg.

Mehdi fighters appeared from everywhere and fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) at the British soldiers as they dived for cover. “It was like a scene from Black Hawk Down,” said Sergeant Danny Mills, leader of a platoon of snipers. “There was gunfire coming from everywhere, rockets coming in around us and we were just taking any cover we could.”

The battle raged for an hour-and-a-half before the rumble of 30-tonne Warrior armoured vehicles signalled the arrival of overwhelming firepower and the fighters fled. But during the days that followed, they re-emerged relentlessly to target the patrolling infantrymen of Y Company.

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