The carriage is airless and all alien chatter. A fly lurches at the glass. Beyond there is a gang of men with spades. They pause from their work and stare at the train. Behind them a field of temporary crosses is being replaced with lines of permanent white graves. He wonders, as the train pulls away, how far the cemeteries stretch. He thinks of the stretch of tape lines and train lines and of how little of this country he really knows. Is Edie now on a train in England? As he pulls south, is she pulling north? He smells the earthy riverbanks, the glasswork fumes, and, at nine, as they linger at the station of a provincial town, the day’s new bread. The morning light makes a lantern of the chestnut trees.

In his atlas of the Western Front he looks for the station names that he passes, but he has already moved far beyond its pages. He is off the map and into the unknown. He remembers being on a troop train, Francis at his side, and the sense of momentum as they moved south. He feels that momentum again; only it is not his destination that he fears now, it is a sense of alarm that he feels at the thought of the accelerating distance between him and Edie. He feels a sense that there is no going back now. It is done. He puts the atlas on the vacated seat at his side and knows that he will never need it again.

The amputee disembarks into an anonymous station, leaving Harry with his newspaper. Only the pictures are intelligible to him, but they say enough. There are photographs of groups of men around new war memorials, women by panels of stone-cut names, and design blueprints presented for the reading public’s approval. He is suddenly aware that it is not just in the north. It is happening all the way down this country, in hamlets and villages, in towns and cities—the marking of it, the celebration in stone and metal, as if it is a landmark, a thing to have a line drawn under. All down the country men like Gabriel must now chisel out a history, must find an appropriate expression. He imagines it like a shock wave stretching out from the cemetery with the gun emplacement at its center. It ripples out from that place, beyond the pages of his atlas, expressing itself in monoliths and mausoleums and menhirs, in arches and obelisks, in catafalques and cruciforms—and, in their multiplication, these things mean nothing and everything. He folds the paper away.