Beyond, to the north, the skyline bristles with tree stumps. It looks horribly sharp and unfriendly, like a wicked woods in a children’s fable.

“Marcellin died here in the woods?”

“Yes.”

He had taken a photograph of Marcellin Bousquet’s grave that morning, and a second of his brother standing at its side, Gabriel’s hand stretching out to touch the cross. There was a simple tenderness to the gesture. Behind the lens, Harry had pictured Gabriel’s hand on his brother’s shoulder. He can’t imagine himself posing for his portrait at the side of Francis’s grave.

“I am sorry.” Brambles and barbed wire pluck at Harry’s trouser legs. He kicks them away. “We walked into the town, or what was left of it, in March 1917. It was completely deserted.”

He remembers following Francis into a burnt-out house, its smell of blistered woodwork. Harry’s fingers had brushed against a cast-iron stove and he had been shocked by the heat that still issued from it.

“I read that they are going to plant pine woods from here south, great stretches of them. They think that pine trees may grow in this earth if nothing else will.”

Harry looks up at Gabriel. “Shall we walk to the town together?”

“Yes. I would like that.”

They take cautious steps between the tangles of old wire, over the dips and rises of the ground. He sees a hand grenade flaking into rust, and a bolt of machine gun cartridges. They look like something left by an ancient civilization. An ironwork gate is bent into a frightful shape, there is the mangled frame of a daybed, and Harry realizes how hard he has tried to put all of this out of his mind. He treads carefully, not wanting to see it all, yet needing to see. There are moldered sandbags, scraps of rag, and brown lengths that might be branches or bones. His boot touches the spine of a book. He nudges it and it falls stiffly open. The white pages inside are pristine, the print crisp and uncompromised.

“A Bible?”

“I think so.”

Just for an instant it might have been his own lost notebook, the book of sketches and thoughts that had been so important to him, into which he could put all his sorrows and fears, confine the images that he meant to forget, and preserve the memories that he chose to keep. Putting it down on the page had seemed to keep it all in balance, it had worked for him for a long time, but then his book had no longer been there. Harry wonders if anyone has ever curiously kicked at that cover as they’ve walked through the ruins and, if so, which page the book split open on.