Apples are ripening in the field at the side of the road. These young trees look to have been newly planted and the stumps of the old trees in between are almost indistinguishable now. Harry remembers how buds had broken on the old trees’ severed limbs in March 1917. Though they had been cut clean across at the trunk, green leaves had sprouted from the boughs. They had stared at this inexplicable show of new life. That too had once looked like hope.

“Rebirth. It all goes round. It all carries on.” Gabriel points at the name painted above the door of a roadside shack. It is called the Buvette de la Renaissance. A man is smoking as he leans in the doorway. He raises a glass to them. “When I have completed my memorial I intend to stop remembering. I will work hard at forgetting all of this. I will work until my bones are tired each day, and not dream. I will breathe in each new morning and be glad of it and I will not look back.”

“You’re probably right.”

“And you should too.” Gabriel offers him his hand. “We will meet again, my friend. I know it.”

“I hope so,” Harry replies.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Harry

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Harry

East of Chaulnes, Somme, March 1917

WHY DID THEY HAVE TO CUT DOWN THE ORCHARDS?” ASKED BARTLEY. They were standing in a field of newly felled trees. Bartley was a corporation gardener at home and this destruction seemed to strike him as profoundly as if he had found himself surrounded by a field full of felled men.

“Why are the bridges blown? Why are there craters at every crossroads? It’s the same reason: they didn’t want to leave behind anything of any use.”

It had seemed like a strange dream to be climbing up out of the trenches, out of the line that they thought they might have to hold forevermore. Then they had marched down roads that, just hours earlier, had been behind the enemy lines. They had stared at the belts of wire, the enemy dugouts, and the green grass beyond. They had laughed, linked arms, felt almost giddy with it. It had seemed like the first day of a holiday. It had sobered them, though, when they had seen the cans of petroleum and the cottages that were still smoking. It was the small inconsequential things that had touched Harry most: the smashed greenhouse, the goldfish floating in a pond, and now this field full of felled apple trees.

“But trees? There are new buds,” said Bartley, holding up a severed branch. “At home I prune at the start of March.”

“These have been well pruned,” said Pembridge.

“It’s barbaric.”