In the morning they were told they were to move up the line again. After an hour of marching, they left the made-up road and went onto a farm track from which they could see the transport area behind the German trench system. There were no more trees, only blackened trunks; what had been agricultural fields were shell holes with pools of water in the bottom, where flies hung. It was difficult to keep any formation in such terrain and Anton’s unit became separated from Friedrich’s on his right.

There was an enemy spotter plane high above, Anton noticed. From the French batteries in Verdun they could hear shellfire growing more intense, and coming closer to them. The noise of a shell came whining overhead, then stopped. The more experienced men threw themselves to the ground before the explosion went through the field. Anton was knocked over by the blast, but unhurt. When he stood up, he saw that the main impact had been to their right. With a dozen others, he ran to help.

Horses and men lay dead or wounded round a crater. An arm in blue uniform hung from a splintered tree. In a shell hole they found Friedrich and another man. Both had lost their legs and had been blown against the wall of earth, where they were sitting, as though propped. Friedrich’s eyes were open when Anton knelt down and offered him water from his bottle. He tried to make a tourniquet round the thighs with his field dressing, but it was difficult to stop the flow of blood. The thigh bones stuck out white from the stumps. Anton pushed his morphine tablets into Friedrich’s mouth and poured more water in, but Friedrich seemed unable to swallow, so the mess ran down his chin. Anton tried to encourage him, saying the stretcher bearers would be with them soon. With his arm round Friedrich’s back, he felt something hard in his tunic pocket and pulled out a hip flask, from behind which a photograph fell out. It was the studio portrait of Ilse. He held it up in front of Friedrich’s eyes while he poured the contents of the flask into his mouth. Friedrich coughed, but seemed to swallow some of it. He lifted his right hand and held on to Anton’s wrist, so the picture stayed in his line of vision. For half an hour Anton talked to him, remembering their after-school walks down the Bahnhofstrasse, the covered windows of the Gymnasium and the grand houses with their pompous owners that they had sworn that they themselves would never become. With his arm round him and with Friedrich’s fingers clamped on his wrist, he kept talking until it was over.

‘… and that was it,’ said Anton. ‘That’s how Friedrich died.’

Martha looked at him levelly and he could sense that she was fighting a desire to speak.

‘I suppose it was no worse than the things that happened to millions of others,’ Anton said at last.