“He was in the hospital for months and I wasn’t really certain that he’d make it. We sorted all the paperwork out, and my mother and I even talked about what hymns he would have liked at his funeral. It quite spooks me now to remember that! Because one morning we walked into the ward and his eyes were open again. Just like that. He pulled through then, he got stronger every day, but the version of Michael that I got back wasn’t the brother that I’d known before the war. He joked once that he’d looked his maker in the eye. I suppose it was coming so close to the edge that did it. Or that’s how I reasoned it to myself, anyway. The version of my brother that I got back was a driven man. The war had spat him back out again, but it had taken his mind. He was obsessed, you see.”

“Obsessed?”

“By what had gone on. By making it right.” Louisa blows at her tea and makes small waves. There is such difficulty in her eyes, Edie sees, as she looks up over the rim of her cup. “I’m afraid that Michael felt guilty, that he had a sense of unfulfilled responsibility. You see, when he was still in his hospital bed, he made a list of the men in his unit that he’d lost, and he gave himself a mission to account for them all.”

“Like a shepherd looking after his sheep?” There is a framed photograph of a young man over the fireplace. He is wearing a tweed jacket and holding a cloth cap in his hand as he leans on a farm gate. His fringe flops over his forehead and there is a sparkle of amusement in his lifted eyes. He looks rather like Louisa Davies, Edie thinks, she can see a family resemblance, but she also recognizes the young man’s features, just a little older, from some of Francis’s photographs. This is the young man with whom she has needed to talk, only it is now too late.

“Something like that,” Louisa replies. “Like a shepherd who has lost his sheep and needs to bring them all back into the fold. He made a list of the men who had died and a list of the missing. He had to be sure that the first group all had a grave marker, and the latter all had to be found. Only, that was such an undertaking. He had set himself an impossible task.”

“Absolutely impossible.” Edie thinks about Tyne Cot and the words on all those crosses; all the men, so many men, KNOWN UNTO GOD and God alone.