So why did he feel a need to remind her of her responsibility to her husband? Why did he feel a need to elevate the man in her eyes? He wasn’t sure. Pride, perhaps? A deep, intrinsic sense of fair play?

He wondered where to start. Acting as a journalist, he had seen more than most. For most soldiers the war was confined to a few hundred yards of torture; his stretched for miles. What part of war could he serve up to her? Ypres? Could he tell her about those early days? A city was razed. Everything reduced to ruin and rubble. Homes blazing, women raped, children shot on their way to school. Or Loos, where Michael fell? His brother, screaming for death, crying for Enid. Perhaps Hooge? The devil’s own hell. It didn’t matter; he couldn’t hope to make sense of it anyway. He found he could not explain the scale. What did the numbers mean? Ten men dead here, fifty more there. Three hundred in a skirmish, tens of thousands in a battle. He thought it best to tell her of individual acts of bravery, horror, brilliance and futility. That way she might comprehend what it meant to be at war.

‘There is lots of preparation and waiting before the men go over the top. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes, I suppose there must be.’

‘I shall tell you of two weeks in a small village called Hooge where I spent some time in the summer of 1915. Remember, the war has been going on for more than two years now, and I am only going to describe two weeks.’ She nodded, once, a small, purposeful movement. ‘Hooge is not far from Ypres, just a couple of miles. For a time there was a chateau there called the White Chateau. It had excellent stables and rather comfortable accommodation for the brigade staff.’

‘Sounds all right,’ she mumbled tentatively. He knew she didn’t want to get it wrong.

‘Yes, it was. Gone now, of course. No chateau, only rubble, sandbags and deep mine craters. I initially drank wine there and ate decent beef. Then I watched men die there as it became a battlefield. At first I made friends with some of the soldiers, followed their progress. Basil liked a human interest story. So we drank with them in the French bars or in the officers’ mess, ate with them as they dug trenches and trained. We waited with them night after night as the ground shook and men further up the process were already being blown to bits.’ He sighed; it came deep from his soul and it was hopeless. ‘However, I came to understand that it was intolerable to befriend them, then lose them, time after time. Relentless, insufferable. I remember one young Irish officer in particular who taught me that. He was a handsome chap, had the sort of charming smile that women like, but there was a profound melancholy in his eyes that I thought left more of an impression than the smile and the straight teeth. We struck up a conversation two or three times. He was fond of the theatre so we had that in common. He told me he’d written to his mother to say he’d met me; they’d seen a play of mine together in London once. He always gave me a wave, asked what I made of things. I stopped knowing how to answer. What could any of us make of it?