They start work early in the masons’ yard. Edie can hear the rhythm of striking chisels and see the blocks of white stone waiting. She places her feet carefully on the treacherous cobbles, but up above workmen whistle songs on scaffolds. They are standing in the empty spaces that once glowed with cathedral glass, sawing out the cracked stones so they can put in the new. It all looks so precarious, this work; she can see more hope and determination than engineering. What has been brought down by machined steel and high explosive is being put back with mortar and sweat and courage and care. It matters, she sees, that all of this is made right. This town is fixing itself. They are putting it all back like it was. She thinks of her husband’s photograph face. Could she put all that back too?

A wagon passes in front of her loaded with scaffolding and she walks on. The houses of the Grand Place look ragged, rickety, brittle. They are propping each other up like a staggering row of closing-time drunks. Most of the roof tiles have gone, so that the skyline is a zigzag of rafters. It is like the houses are showing their skeletons and it makes them appear terribly vulnerable. Arras is like a model built from matchsticks, she thinks, and the breath of one more big bad wolf could blow it all down.

The gaps in the façades show the fringes of lampshades and the patterns of bedroom curtains. These rudely exposed fragments of lives once lived—the wallpaper choices and the glimpses of wardrobes—are the most moving. It is these details that make these sad stones into ravaged homes. It fills her with such a sense of pity to stand here. It is all so immediately, forcefully tragic, but looking around here, she is finally certain that this is not the place: however ill-used Arras has been, the town in the background of Francis’s photograph has suffered worse.

The square is filling up with voices, and footsteps and journeys weave across it. There are still advertising signs on the pockmarked buildings and beneath the painted lettering (VINS ET SPIRITUEUX—BEURRE ET FROMAGES—VÊTEMENTS FEMME) shutters are opening and wares are being shown to the morning street. There are men in straw boaters and women in white weekend dresses and all the crowd has a sense of direction and purpose. A young girl skips, a boy points, and a family groups together to have their photograph taken by the ruins.