The figures on the tops of the parapets were patting each other on their backs. Someone was singing. Cigarettes were being passed and lit. It looked as if the war were quite forgotten. It looked like the war was over.

“Allons! Venez! Ne restez pas dans la merde.”

Hands were beckoning, stretching down to them, pulling them up.

“Is it safe?”

The men on the parapet were laughing. Harry took offered hands, kicked and clambered. He rolled onto the top.

“Bien. C’est mieux, hein?”

Hands were patting him, then. He lay on his back and looked up at the faces. They grinned and joshed in the gloom. Were they madmen or satyrs or ghosts? He took a proffered cigarette and a hand that helped him to his feet.

“Allez, regardez là!”

An arm pointed away. Harry looked out across no-man’s-land, across the dark shadows of the churned and cratered land, flooded shell holes glowing like milky pools, and the sharp twists of torn trees. On the far side was a bobbing line of yellow lights. Harry looked at the cigarette in his own hand and realized what it was.

“They’re on the tops too?”

“They climbed out this evening, and so we did the same. Their trenches are flooded too,” said a voice without a face in heavily accented English. Harry could discern what might have been the shape of a church spire beyond the enemy lines. “It is as bad for them as it is for us. And why should we stay in the mud just because politicians say it ought to be so? The village behind is Chaulnes. We have been fighting for it for seven months.”

The noise of laughter carried across the darkness.

“C’est complétement fou. Tout est foutu. It is all madness,” said the voice in the blackness.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Harry

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Harry

Chaulnes, Somme, August 1921

GIVE ME YOUR HAND,” SAYS GABRIEL. “ALLEZ!”

They clamber through the grassed ditches that once were trenches and climb to stand on the parapet. The ground ahead, though now scrambled over with green, still looks churned and dangerous. As they pick through the old wire Harry remembers walking along the top of the parapet searching for Francis. He had finally found him smoking with Harrison. Francis had offered Harry the packet of cigarettes and said, “It makes you wonder what the point is, doesn’t it?” Harry hadn’t been able to quite make his hand still as Francis held the struck match out toward him. With that memory seeming so close by at this moment, Harry has to cross his arms over his chest again.

“We came here in September 1916,” says Gabriel, shading his eyes to the sun. “By then the line had circled half around the town. We were fighting in the woods to the north, trying to complete the circle, but it was like a fortress.”