At a quarter to twelve, the crowd moves from bar to barricade. The village mayor, Marius Ferniot, looks coy in his mayoral chains. It is a big thing to have to preside over, and Harry pities him the struggle for the appropriate words. Gabriel translates here and there, where the sentiments find weight with him. We are orphaned, he says. There is hommage, gloire, patriotisme, and sacrifice. These words sound all the more abstract, all the more alien, in Gabriel’s accent. Harry thinks about the service around Will’s grave, how Francis had not seemed to be quite there even then. He also thinks about a grave surrounded by crumbled concrete. As Harry had peered closely at that photograph on Michael Rose’s wall, he’d seen how the wood was crudely hewn and hammered together, but the lettering was unambiguous enough. As he had finally looked at Francis’s grave, he realized how he had clung on to some hope. But both of his brothers are dead today and Harry too feels orphaned.

Marius Ferniot intones the names. Calvaire sent sixty-eight men to the front, to the north to fight for France, out of a population of just over one hundred and seventy. Of these, fifty-seven returned. The statistics and calculations are Gabriel’s. Calvaire did well: it beat the odds, fought and won against probability. By the law of averages this village should have lost twelve men. Marcel Mandelli looks up and nods as his son’s name is spoken. Guillaume was his eldest, Gabriel has told Harry, gone at Maurepas, where they sang “La Marseillaise” and carried the colors. He is five years dead and never buried. There are eleven names (Harry counts them) recited and now in new chiseled stone, dead in sharp lines, and below them the disparus—those who have simply disappeared, the men in limbo between life and death that discretion cannot bear to distinguish.

Harry thinks of a face on a photographic film that ought to be there but isn’t—a distinctive pair of eyes that have simply, inexplicably, disappeared. He has written to Rachel again. Would she now rather have David missing or dead? When he looks at the panel of disparus he sees the wreath weaver’s pale eyes and cannot comprehend that he could just have imagined them. When he reads the list of disparus he sees a wall full of once-familiar faces. He cannot comprehend that either.