HARRY LOOKS OUT ACROSS THE WATER. THE OLD CITY GATE IS NOTHING now, just a grass-grown slouch of stones. He has read that it is to be rebuilt as a great archway spanning over the road, with the names of all the missing recorded on the vault. He imagines his brother’s name arching over that space, along with David West and all the others. The plan to list them in stone as THE MISSING implies that they will now never be found, he supposes. Chiseling them onto a memorial implies a finality. It draws a line. But what a difficult line to negotiate. How do they move beyond that?

Bullfrogs croak unseen in the water below. He sees mangled metalwork in the water, fallen stones, and limbs of trees. He thinks about the water on either side of the duckboard tracks. There had been bloated bodies in the water too. There had been so many bodies. He wonders how the names of all the missing might fit within the width of the street behind him. And how many damaged lives multiply out of that? How many derailed expectations? How many unanswered questions? How many years of waiting?

He has seen a sign for Boesinghe on the road. Does anything exist there now? Two days after Francis had been put on the post, they were back in railway carriages and heading for that destination. There had been nothing left of the village but ruins. All around it was just churned mud and broken stones. The devastated landscape had no mystery and they had exchanged few words as they moved north along the tracks.

Francis had been ahead of him. Harry had seen the marks on his wrists, the red welts where they had been bound. He wanted Captain Rose to see them, to see the shame marked on Francis’s skin, to share his anger. He also wanted to see Francis’s anger. But instead he just seemed to be absent. Francis’s eyes wouldn’t connect with his. It wasn’t that they avoided him. He was just elsewhere.

A man passes on a bicycle, raising a hand in acknowledgment. The roads are still full of potholes. Harry watches the bicycle’s weaving progress, stones skittering under its tires. An advertising panel by the side of the road offers English breakfasts and motor tours of the Salient.

Only the signpost at the side of the road—THIS WAS LANGEMARCK—had told them that they had arrived at their destination. Otherwise it had been completely obliterated. There were no clues to prove that a town had ever stood there; there wasn’t a building or a tree, just a great stretching desolation. Harry considers what there is now for the motoring tourist to see.