Harry walks through the cemetery gate. The crosses are straight and orderly and stretch a long way. He starts to count rows but gives up. There are thousands here. Maybe tens of thousands. The scale of it, even after having already seen so many dead men and so many graves, shocks him. There is a gun emplacement among the graves, the concrete crumbling away. He has read that it is the only German pillbox that is going to be allowed to remain on Flemish soil, serving as an instruction and a reminder. He thinks that no more reminder is needed than the crosses that fill his vision all around.

Most of the burials here have no names, he sees. These men have all been swallowed up by the earth, their identities gone along with their futures. They have lost their bones, their blood, and the name that bound it all together and made them into that particular man. These men are now nothing but gaps and question marks. It matters then that someone is asking the question, that someone is searching for these nameless men, but what a big and terrible question it is. He thinks of Rachel’s search and how impossibly vast it has been. It seems, in this instant, like a definition of hope. Looking at the stretching crosses, at this place full of terrible questions (with only tidiness and order for an answer), he rather hopes that Edie hasn’t come here.

Other figures move between the graves. He stares at the women, bending with flowers and private words and tears, but none of them are her. The shadows of the crosses swing around as he walks along the path. He thinks of Francis’s spread arms, the awful shadow swinging around the cross to which he was tied, and is glad, regardless of what happens next, that she will never see that.

He remembers looking into Francis’s eyes at the end, that last moment, his eyes full of half-formed suspicions and Harry’s own stolen words. Could his brother be here? Could he be one of the nameless burials? To find him, among so many men, so many other names and absences, seems like an impossible quest. All the paper trails that he has pursued have ended. It feels like the end of the line.

Has she walked through this cemetery earlier today? Has she stood where he is now standing and spoken her guilt and innocence to the nameless graves? Could she really feel Francis’s presence if he was here? All that Harry can feel is an awful sense of emptiness.

When he looks at it through his viewfinder, the rectangle is full of crosses, like a postcard that his brother sent once long ago. The crosses crowd into the frame and stretch away beyond it. Harry supposes that he is the lucky one, but at this instant he can’t muster much positive feeling. The shutter clicks. He cries.