At Dettingen and on other battlefields I had seen the human remains those watermelons were meant to resemble. I could have told the watermelon clean-up crew that their job, not the musketeers’, was the most realistic part of the exercise. You scrape up the remains of a shelled soldier in much the same way: you collect the pulp off the ground with a spatula fashioned out of whatever stick or spoon or stone comes to hand, or you harvest your buddy’s innards with your palm. You don’t want to leave him there. You could stuff what’s left of his pulp into your canteen, and I’ve done it. That old spoon in my canteen has gathered the sacred remains, reeking in the sun.

Seeds. We spilled watermelon seeds all over that Westerham field. Slippery and living, they sickened me more than did seeing the sweet mottled rind and blood sugar-pulp explode. I’ve seen my comrades hit the ground the way those seeds sank in the dust. Men dying in war are seeds: they cast themselves into bog and dirt. Sand yawns and men grind into it, every dying fighter animated, planting himself, frenzied, digging to stay alive. Seen from a height the men are tiny, wriggling, animate seeds, shoving themselves in the living ground. At the stupid Westerham thing I wanted to scream the difference: that the watermelon seeds are alive! The dead fruit yet bore surviving seeds: some would sprout new life that year but soldiers’ seed stunk dead in our blown-off balls.

If I were not a disciplined man I could have murdered all the spectators. I could have taken the ladies in their straw hats and strangled them with their scarves.

After I witnessed the Westerham watermelons I became more afraid of how men might remember me than of how I might have been forgotten. If my British countrymen grieved my soul with such displays, what might I find in Quebec where, let’s be honest, no one cares for me at all?

Henrietta Wolfe once wrote a letter in which she outlined how much she loved me. She addressed it not to me but to the man who was my superior during my Paris leave. It must have amused the man, perhaps even irritated him, but he put it down to motherly sentiment and passed it on to me without comment or censure. I have seen it in the digital catalogue of one of the museums that preserve my memory: someone must have ripped it out of my pocket on the battlefield while they were taking the scissors to my hair:

My dear Lord Bury,

When my son departed England I saw you and explained how I love him. I was in mid-explanation when you dismissed me and I realized you had wearied of this woman’s complaints: you assured me all parents love their sons alike. I grant that many do love their sons very much.