The Plains of Abraham at night are more sympathetic to my eyes than in the day—I wander to that place where I saw the marmots and the wraith under the apple tree, was it yesterday? Was the lad Elwyn? No—Ronnie? Was it here—yes, here are the fallen apples, but the fallen youth has disappeared.

I lie down where he lay, fancying the damp grass might retain a drop of his warmth, but night vapours sink into me. I lie on a few sour little apples hard as stones, inedible—I could use their juice, were there a single drop.

Beyond the field spangle Quebec’s lights—churches and apartments and office buildings, even a sky-high restaurant that revolves, glittering, over the city. Here in the lonely field I feel a cold worm under my fingers, an icy wet slug, a spider crawling over my face, and the moon, luminous but uncommunicative sailing over my head, waning as she did during my siege. I have always thought the waning moon resembles a lozenge being sucked, and its one indefinable, dissolving edge makes me uneasy, unlike the sharp crescent of a new moon, or that perfect edge when the moon is full.

I hear a shuffling near the apple tree—shadows shift and I make out the outline of the animal I saw yesterday, but instead of gathering apples it watches me. The second marmot hangs back at the entrance to their den. I feel compelled to make no movement or sound. I’m not scared, but I imagine one of them could jump and bite my face. I’ve had many a rodent lick salt off my cheek in my bunk on the Neptune, and one or two have bitten me while I slept.

Sometimes an unaccountable sadness comes at me from out of nowhere. There are innumerable reasons to feel broken-hearted, but which one is at play during any given bout of broken-heartedness? Sometimes I can’t tell.

“Why look at me?” I ask. “You’re just an unimportant little animal.” I can’t see its eyes but I feel them. “Did Sophie send you?”

A scrap of cloud stretches threadbare over us. There is a French word for it, when the cloud-cover stretches and breaks into chaotic little floaters, the way my men lost formation and scattered into ineffectual pieces of scarlet on the day of my battle—am I the only one who requires precision of formation in combat: an alignment of line, plane and colour in a most sacred kaleidoscope? A kaleidoscope that goes beyond symphonic sound, beyond artistic genius, and into the realm of maps and nations and of entire countries sewn together in the ultimate creation that is our human purpose and destiny—the whole globe is a general’s aim, his symphony, his masterpiece. The object at stake in his work is no abstraction, but is the only reality he possesses.