“We were at school together, Marcellin, Madeleine, and I,” Gabriel goes on. Harry watches as he pokes a stick at a helmet and turns it. Mercifully it is empty. Gabriel throws the stick away and shrugs. “She had a brown face and yellow plaits. She took the sheep out and knew birdcalls. She had quick hands. She could catch lizards and could dance. She danced with us both.”

Harry sees gavottes spin around Gabriel and his brother’s grave and a girl’s white-toothed smile. He sees the spin of a long-ago garden, a woman’s lips forming the words to a song being played on a gramophone. But the woman is his brother’s wife and he should not recall those words on her lips. He blinks the rest away.

“They were married before the war?”

“Yes. Him in uniform. But when we were sixteen I thought that it was me who Madeleine would choose. It was my eyes that she smiled into. But Marcellin had the confidence. He was the one who had all the talk, who knew the right words to say to girls, and he would have the farm one day. Marcellin had a future. Now he has no future.” Gabriel picks up a piece of brown metal and turns it over in his hands. “Shrapnel?” he says. “I do miss my brother, you understand.”

“I understand,” says Harry.

They rejoin the road, which looks as if it has recently been relaid. The new surface makes the roadside trees, splintered and severed, look all the more tragic. Today the sun is high and these trees can offer no shade. Harry takes off his jacket and passes a water bottle to Gabriel. This must once have been a handsome avenue, he considers. The well-spaced slumps of brick to either side must have been smart houses. There are fragments of dressed stone still, and roses scramble over fallen walls to which they were perhaps once trellised. The grandeur of the gateposts looks almost mocking.

“‘Following the Enemy withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, British troops entered Chaulnes, almost without striking a blow, on March eighteenth, 1917. But the town would be recaptured by the Germans in March 1918,’” he reads aloud from his guidebook. “‘It was only finally taken by the Allies on August twenty-eighth, after being surrounded. It was razed to the ground. The low brick-and-rubble houses which lined the wide straight streets sheltered a population of about twelve hundred fifty inhabitants. Very few of them escaped total destruction.’”

Gabriel passes the water bottle back and they walk on. A couple in black are staring at a pile of stones. The woman turns rheumy eyes to Harry. He takes off his hat.