Joggers prance past the proceedings. Japanese tourists walk past without stopping to lift their cameras. Harold and I are the only spectators and I fear someone might ask us to move along as there is no place for us and we are in the way. But we might as well be invisible.

After twenty minutes of preparatory theatrics, Montcalmette and her soldiers commence their fatal march toward my men, who—and this is somewhat true to the way it happened—do not move a muscle until the French are within shooting range, and then, with a volley of shot, the French collapse on the field.

There is a minute of indecisive quiet, in which a huddle of other persons begins to budge from the meridian’s edge. Can it be…yes…they indulge in a simulacrum of Mohawk war whoops as if from some cartoon…they tend to the injured French soldiers then encircle and kill the remaining Redcoats.

Montcalm and Wolfe are the correct age—Wolfette is about twenty-five.

But the soldiers…the soldiers are all between eight and eleven years old.

After the enactment, Wolfe and Montcalm peel their surcoats off and spread them on the grass, and take Tetra Paks and granola bars out of a cooler for their students, who sprawl over the battlefield and await their school bus.

One of the children lies on the grass reading a book separate from the others, and I would like to see which book she has chosen—it’s a thing I do on the train, on the bus, on a bench in the park, whenever I see someone reading. Though reading is a solitary act requiring privacy and quiet, I feel bound to other readers by an invisible thread of words, a kinship without speech. I suppose this is one of the things that made my schoolmates laugh at me and I wonder if this young child’s schoolmates taunt her in the same way.

“I wouldn’t mind,” I tell Harold, “getting a bit closer to see what that child is reading…just out of curiosity.”

I wonder if her book will protect her. For some reason, despite all that has happened to me, I still hope reading might help somebody. But her school bus arrives, and I hear in the melee that she and her classmates are bound for Rimouski, four hours northeast of here across the Saint Lawrence—halfway up the coast to where I have lived all these years in the old wooden house of Madame Blanchard. Perhaps once the children come of age their well-meaning teachers will invite a young soldier to their classroom with an invitation to die in the wars now being born.