When she looks at Harry he feels like she expects him to know, as if she expects an answer, and, with the intensity of that look, he finds himself examining his trouser leg.

“You don’t have to help me,” she says.

Her fingers turn the Forget Me Not locket. He wonders if it contains her husband’s photograph and if she believes that he has forgotten her. Could Edie too believe that Francis has merely forgotten to come home? Two weeks on from writing that postcard, could Edie still be in Arras? Could she have found reason to stay there? “I need to call in Arras this week, anyway,” he says.

“Yes, what exactly are you doing here?” It comes out, evidently, a little sharper than she intends, because she adjusts her tone. “I would have thought that this would be the last place that you’d ever want to see again.”

“As I said, I work as a photographer and I’m being paid to be here. I’m here on an assignment, as it were. My assignment is a list of graves. My job is taking photographs of graves.”

THE TRAIN IS quiet. He leans against the window and watches the suburbs blur. He’s aware of Rachel’s voice, its tone and rhythm and not-quite-heard words. The fields are green. It still surprises him that they can be. She fusses with an apple and talks about the price of bread. She talks a lot. Harry remembers other railway carriages, stinking of horse and soldier, and sees it slide by.

In February 1916 they had entrained inland in cattle cars, with instructions to keep the noise down. Harry had looked out at France through wooden slats. There seemed to be a lot of empty villages and waterlogged agriculture.

“It feels like sneaking up on the war from behind,” Will had said.

But the train had brought them to a town that seemed bypassed by war and time. In between lectures on automatic gun fire and rifle-grenade instruction, they placed bets on turns of playing cards and dominoes and traded tinned rations for silk postcards stitched with sentimental slogans. They paraded in the driving rain, fixed feet at ten-to-two, and dripped. They played mouth organs and tin whistles and tug-of-war.

“Is this it?” Francis had asked.

Harry had started to write it all down that spring, long illustrated letters that lingered over the details, and he crammed all that was new and curious into a diary. He drew kit inspection, bombing practice, and drill. He drew the lime trees, the red-brick farms, and the rippling fields of wheat. He drew Will playing cricket, Francis taking photographs, and their hands passing playing cards across café tables. Harry found comfort in committing it all to paper, felt lightened by the act and the concentration it required. He recorded his brothers’ faces in every attitude and expression.

“You don’t have much luggage,” Rachel observes.