She shakes her head and watches as he folds away his newspaper.

“You’re folding bread crumbs into the paper. Can you understand much of it, then?”

“Some of it. A little. I stumble through. My French is survival-grade, really. I’m better equipped for restaurant menus than international politics.”

“How like you to feel the need to try.” The tea is scaldingly hot and tastes of nothing much. “Are tea leaves still rationed here?”

“Quite. It makes you quickly develop a taste for coffee.”

The rattle of his teaspoon seems to clatter in her head. She wonders if she had too much to drink last night. The barrel-organ man has started up again. The piped waltz is slightly too fast and somehow insistent.

“Strauss? Is Strauss still allowed?”

The waitress sings along as she clears crockery from the next table. Edie thinks about sitting in a café in Arras and how convinced she had been then that Francis might be there. Is he any more likely to be here? Across the table Harry’s fingers are breaking bread into pieces. She notices that he doesn’t eat any of it.

His eyes meet hers. “Penny for them?” he says to her.

She shrugs and looks down at her hands. “You’re not eating. You should eat. I worry that you’re not looking after yourself.”

“I am. You mustn’t worry about me.” He pushes the plate of broken bread away. “Do you want to go to Tyne Cot today?”

The too-hot tea scalds her mouth. “They’re in time with each other.” She points to the street beyond the window. A woman is sweeping the pavement in front of her shop, the broom working to the rhythm of the waltz. “It will never be real unless I see a grave. I won’t ever quite believe it. Your friend Rachel was right about that part.”

“Do you want it to be real?”

“Can it be real tomorrow? Can we go for a walk today instead?”

THEY CLAMBER UP onto the ramparts and take in the panorama. Weeds are growing through the stones, softening the jaggedness of it. There is clover in the crumbling mortar. Yellow grass and slender saplings are reclaiming the ramparts. It strikes her how determined nature seems to be to take it all back. The town—or what remains of it—is laid out before them.

“‘Few names awaken more memories than that of Ypres,’” Harry reads aloud from his guidebook, “‘a city of incomparable splendor in the Middle Ages, and of which nothing now remains but a heap of ruins. History furnishes few examples of such grandeur followed by destruction so swift and so complete. Ypres is now but a memory.’”

She turns and looks at him. “What memories you must all have. It makes me feel rather inadequate. I don’t know how to begin to comprehend it.”