He steps inside the church, and even in here it is as cold as the grave. It takes a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. Stubs of candles are flickering out, like the sputtering ends of prayers. The walls of the church are Old Testament and last judgment, but it is all pulsing stars and shooting comets above. The blistering plaster on the ceiling suggests the mystery of clouded heavens, and Harry remembers a star-punctured sky over Salisbury Plain long ago, and the faces of his brothers looking up. He also remembers the first night after Francis died, how the sky had seemed to be entirely empty and he had suddenly been certain that no god was looking down. But Gabriel is at his side then, his hand on Harry’s arm. “Come away,” he says. “We need a coup de courage, not a confession.”

It is not much warmer inside the bar. Overcoats are kept buttoned. The barman polishes a glass and holds it to the light. There is not much light today. Gabriel clinks his glass against Harry’s and says, “Absent friends.”

Jacques Delpy, down the bar, is holding forth on the significance of this day, on why it is a start rather than an end. It feels like an end. He says that it will be better now, that they have been shown the way, that henceforth it will be socialist brotherhood and full bellies. The old world is breaking up, he says. It is cracking apart.

Marie Leval cries quietly and takes a brandy for her nerves. She lost her sons, all gone at Verdun but all apart, one by one, and three to mourn. It would have been easier, she says, if they had gone together. Harry considers: Did his mother feel the same?

It is almost four years to the day since Harry’s mother died. He had had to write to her a fortnight previously to tell her about Francis. There had never been a reply. There never would be one. He looks at Marie Leval and thinks about his own mother shedding sons one by one. Only he had come back. He had come through. Did that make him the lucky one? Ought he to appreciate that luck? Was it careless—callous, even—not to?