PERSPECTIVE SHIFTS AS he walks back into Rose’s room full of photographs. Harry remembers the grip of Rose’s hand on his arm as they had stood at Will’s graveside. He remembers Rose’s face next to Francis’s, laughing in the red glow of their cellar darkroom. He remembers—he is sure of it—reading that Rose had been killed in Cambrai. So many facts are false. So many people aren’t where they’re meant to be. So much is shaken up.

He looks around this room and Francis’s face is everywhere. How could he really have believed that Francis might be in Saint-Christophe du Quercy? And, yet, he so obviously is.

“Il était un vrai gentleman, Capitaine Rose. Sympathique. Très gentil,” says Marie-Thérèse.

“Yes, he was,” Harry agrees.

Rose had joined them while they were still training in Morecambe. He and Francis had met looking into the window of a photographer’s studio. A conversation had started as their reflections joined over flashguns and spools of film. Is this where it ended?

“But these journeys! Cette lourde tristesse! It was all very difficult. Cette affreuse guerre.”

“Journeys?”

Marie-Thérèse’s finger makes backward and forward gestures. “Each month. From north to south. Du sud au nord. And all of this terrible news,” she adds, searching for English adjectives. “Horrible news.”

“I’m sorry? I’m not quite sure I follow.”

“Ses gars. His boys. Ses soldats. Are you one of his soldiers?”

Her meaning becomes apparent when she shows him the wall. Marie-Thérèse leads Harry back through the kitchen, back past the flints and the quartz and the rosy coffeepot, which just ten minutes earlier all might have belonged to Francis. Past the spoons and the soap and the snail shells, which Harry had pictured so very clearly turning in his brother’s hands. The room beyond looks like it once served as a dining room, a sideboard displays decanters and soup tureens, only now it is something between a library and a command center. The dining table is covered over with large-scale military maps, busily annotated. As Harry looks, he sees familiar villages, and around them clusters of names and numbers. It is some moments before he realizes what the numbers represent.

“His casualties? Our losses?” He turns to Marie-Thérèse. She nods her head.

Something seems to shift under Harry’s feet as he looks at the maps. Marie-Thérèse pulls out a chair and encourages him to sit. She goes back through to the kitchen for the bottle of eau-de-vie.

Harry knows the villages, the woods, the terrains, and the names, and it doesn’t take him long to figure out Rose’s purpose or his code. The names of the missing men are in red ink; the confirmed casualties are in black. Rose had seemingly given himself the task of turning all the reds into blacks.