After he returns to his room, the sound of her breathing is slowing, he can hear it through the paper wall, that fine line between his dreams and hers, and so Harry makes tentative steps around the unfamiliar floorboards, not wanting to disturb her sleep. Careful movements. Shallow breaths. When he closes his eyes he sees the cabinets full of framed photographs and shaving sets and penknives. He sees Francis’s photographs and razor and knife—and the lucky charm that perhaps ought to have been his.

Chapter Forty-Three: Harry

Chapter Forty-Three

Harry

Ypres, September 1921

HARRY WHITTLES A PENCIL TO A POINT AND GOES TO RETRIEVE THE sketchbook from his bunk. He treads carefully on the stairs. It is dark in the dugout and his fingertips stretch to find the walls. He curses as he kicks at a fallen-over stool, kicks it into Alfred McCabe’s suspended shins.

He staggers back. Hanging from the beam, his belt about his throat, Alfred McCabe creaks. His tongue protrudes horribly. There is a crust of blood in his beard. His eyes bulge, but there is no brightness of life behind them. Only the red ribbon, wound through McCabe’s dead fingers, stirs. A silver-plated Saint Christopher spins.

Harry vomits. McCabe is their old contemptible, their regular, their warhorse; he is all swagger and soldiering lingo, is all talk of Boers and cavalry and Mafeking medals on his chest. It doesn’t seem right that McCabe should be dead. Harry straightens and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. Now they are all as good as dead. “Old soldiers never die,” he whispers. “Young ones wish they would.”

The electric bulb dips and buzzes and suddenly Harry sees that McCabe’s face is not his, but his brother’s. Francis Blythe, wrongly and rightly, is hanging dead in a dugout south of Cambrai. Harry stares. He gulps for breath, his chest shudders, blood bangs in his ears, but his brain and his eyes cannot align. Gravity jolts. He is transfixed by the face of his four-months-maybe-dead brother. He scans the dugout. All is as it was: he touches the ironclad walls, the wooden props, the pressed-earth floor, the mirror and the pinups and posted poems, and McCabe’s boots, suspended still six inches off the earth. He hears water drip and smells damp clay and tastes blood where he has bitten his lip.