The notes on Rose’s desk told him how he had gone back out again after the failed attack and struggled to get Francis to the dressing station. Rose had carried Francis on his back, across all that awful ground, even though he knew Francis was dying, even though he knew that he couldn’t possibly make it. Harry hadn’t known that Rose had brought Francis’s body back, and he can hardly imagine how he managed it. Rose’s notes recorded that he left Francis in the dressing station without much hope, but then, when the shelling started, he knew that all hope was gone. Harry had realized, as he looked at the photograph of Francis’s grave, that the eruption of concrete around it is what is left of the dressing station. He remembers the concrete bunkers, the shelling and the screaming and then the meaningful silence. There was so much confusion. There were so many bodies. He is struck by the unfathomable loneliness of the single cross. Where have the rest of them gone? How many unfound men are out there still? Will they all be brought home one day?

As Harry had turned the photograph of Francis’s grave in his hands, he had thought of all the images that he has taken and sent back to waiting, needing, doubting families. Is this how those parents and siblings and wives felt when they received Harry’s photographs? There is a finality to it now, a final silencing of the nagging questions, but Harry also feels a profound new sense of loss. He has slept, though, for the past week; nights of deep, silent, dreamless sleep—sleep such as he hasn’t known for months, maybe years. He thinks of all the names on his list and hopes those men really are resting in peace, truly sleeping silently, and that their families have also stopped dreaming.

Harry sees Rose himself as he looks at the disparus. The blur of a face that might for a moment have been Francis’s. Was that just imagined too? Captain Michael Alfred Rose committed suicide back in April. Francis was the last missing man that Rose had placed before he took his own life, Marie-Thérèse had told him. Harry wonders what emotions Rose had felt as he stood behind the camera squaring Francis’s cross in a viewfinder. What did he feel then as he posted that photograph of Francis to Edie? Harry had spoken to the priest in Saint-Christophe. The priest had walked Harry to the grave where Rose is buried without rank, another anonymous Englishman. He had hung himself from the ash tree. Harry can’t help but work (and rework) through an imagined day in which Rose puts Francis’s face in an envelope, addresses it to Edie, and then carries a stool and rope down the field.