The silos possess the imposing dereliction of industrial edifices from the early twentieth century and I feel the strange dislocation of time wash over me again—the sensation has become familiar though I do not love it. I expected this old port to be modern yet it looks outdated, while this—my old climbing-route up the Foulon—has become spanking new. It was my place, the scene of my feat of imagination and risk. But it is unrecognizable, utterly modern: a serpentine beast rising in a fashion alien to me. It no longer belongs to my memory, but to a strange, collective understanding shared by this official and her entourage in their impeccable clothes. These are men I have seen paying to have their shoes rendered agleam at shoeshine stations between gates at airports.

“I see the silos are old,” I tell the woman, “but this…” I fling my hand toward the sinuous trail, “the path, the guardrails, the little plantations of seedlings…”

Brave tufts of leaf glow new and alive, too baby-green for an autumn day. The greenery forms small islands among mounds of raw and unnerving rubble—wounds in the landscape, made by backhoes and specialized incline-busting front-end loaders.

A placard stands near us with the figure of Montcalm painted on it, and a quotation, apparently uttered by him though I never heard him say it: Defeat is the ordinary price of being the weaker party, but being taken by surprise—that is truly woeful.

“The placard,” I say, “the path itself…” The woman waits, and I sense I’ve interrupted an important information session. “How new is it?”

“Very new,” she says. “If you go over to that bend and look down, you’ll see the best part. Yes—just over there…”

A feeling of desolation engulfs me.

I silently name the doll-like cut-outs tied to chicken-wire that has been stretched over the escarpment: effigies of my soldiers cut with a jig-saw from some sort of space-age shining board designed to withstand weather: Gunner Wendell Macpherson, eighteen, out of Bonnyrigg. Stanley Black from Coldstream. Bramwell Taylor, seventeen, his fingers previously blown off by a bottle rocket the French filled with tar and lit, yet Bramwell climbs the bank faster than I ever could because he has lashed his wrist to tines he hacked off his bully-beef prong.

My men glitter flat on the escarpment, faceless silhouettes, clambering dolls without the third dimension even dolls should possess. Those not sunlit gape dark like holes cut in the landscape where I positioned them. Is that Ronnie, clambering with his silent drum…a scrap of two-dimensional puppetry!

I flee the woman and her entourage and descend the new Foulon.