They marched past winter-bare orchards and beet fields and roadside shrines. They passed thatched cottages and waterwheels and weedy canals. The road’s straightness reminded Harry of the Roman road over Blackstone Edge, where he and Francis had so often walked together, with a history book or binoculars or a camera, photographing the stones worn smooth by the passage of centuries of packhorse trains and the ghosts of old soldiers. He re-heard the cries of lapwings and his brother’s voice singing long-ago ballads, but Francis wasn’t singing today. The route ahead was demarked with the debris of passage: an either-side litter of bent metal and trampled paper.

“I feel like we’re late for the party,” said Will.

The road’s curiosities sustained them for a while; they marched past a dressing station, antiaircraft guns, and red-brick redoubts. Chickens scattered from their feet in Le Touret and children lined along the roadway to stare. Poplar colonnades stretched away and a blackbird sang as they crossed a farmyard. Francis whistled a reply and made it whimsy. The houses were sandbagged in Richebourg and the church a fascination of rococo ruin. Pausing for a rest, they peered into the splintered tombs and saw the antique black bones.

“This place is full of ghosts,” said Francis.

They moved up through the old front line, which was all wattle and hurdle and rotting wood. Harry was struck with how makeshift it all looked, how amateur and improvised and vulnerable. It felt like walking through ancient history, and the sweet-rotten smell of it—medieval and full of warning—gagged in his throat. Split sandbags spilled and other people’s rubbish striated the earth walls like archaeology. Harry looked at the mud-streaked fragments of candle wax and glass, the crumbling rust and the folds of burlap, and wondered who these people had been. Something about the old derelict trenches made them whisper.

“Like the bastions of Troy.” Michael Rose’s voice didn’t sound entirely steady.

“What a shithole,” Francis replied. “What a shambles.”

Honeysuckle tangled its claim where barbed wire had failed, and, farther up, they had to negotiate their way through a sagging tent of telegraph wires that caught in their packs and rifles. (“Mind the wire!” came echoing back, too late.) All of Harry’s senses seemed to have pushed to the surface with the goose bumps on his arms and he took in every precise sight and sound and smell of it. He had never placed his feet more carefully. He had never been more aware of all the textures that his fingers touched or the sound of his own breath.

“I feel like I’m walking over somebody’s grave,” said Will.