Abdullah shrugged and started off to join the rest of the ANA, leaving Chris staring confusedly at the raggedy bunch of locals. A few of them were looking over in his direction now, calling things out in Pashtu. They sounded angry. He knew that he should go over and talk to them, to reassure them that the commander would be reported and punished. But he didn’t know how to approach this situation and he was terrified of making it worse. His throat was very dry. What if the locals turned their aggression on him and his troops? What if that provoked the ANA to similar violence? And even if he managed to stop a fight from breaking out, any discussion with this lot was guaranteed to last a long time. He didn’t have a long time. His men were waiting for him. They were low on water.

Robbo came through on the radio, sounding worried.

‘Boss, Robbo, I’m getting atmospherics here – farmers clearing out of the fields to our East. We need to get moving, over.’

Chris looked over at the locals. He realised he could still hear the child’s crying – or had it just started up again?

‘Two two alpha, roger,’ he said. ‘Uh, we’re leaving. Moving to link up with two two charlie, over.’

He killed the radio. ‘Rami? Go tell Sergeant Abdullah we’re moving NOW.’

* * *

On the last day of the trip they went to the Somme. For Sophie, the graveyards and the trenches they had seen so far had all just about made sense, but the scale of the Thiepval memorial had her stumped. There were too many names. If you looked at one or two or even ten or twenty you could imagine them as actual people, but when you looked up, and then behind you and then across at another pillar they stopped being people and became just names. Sophie wandered round the memorial in a semi-trance, feeling pleasantly dwarfed by its incomprehensibility. Then she felt worried that the thing she was feeling was pleasant when it should be horrifying. Then she felt pleased that she was sensitive enough to worry about that. Then she felt worried about feeling pleased, and so on until the thought ran away from her into infinity. Just like the names, she thought, and that thought was so clever she couldn’t help being pleased. She could tell that some of the others were whispering about her because she was spending such a long time in silence, just looking, but she decided that was okay.

In the visitor’s centre there was a guestbook for people to record their responses. Ludo Hall made a beeline for the pen, but Mr Mably stopped him.