He writes down the place-names and the dates for Edie, wondering as he does so whether she might presently be in any of these places. The snow had turned to rain by March. The villages were dirty and straggling. Grim weather, he writes. He pages on, fitting photographs into brackets, and it is June and they are again billeted back near Béthune. There are football matches and boxing tournaments and they swim in the canal. There’s a brigade horse show and concert parties and they sleep in the sun under the trees. He can still picture the light moving through the branches above and hear Will’s voice at his side.

Harry takes the train south to Albert. He watches it all pass by the window and tries to see the woods where they camped and waited to move east. The countryside is all rather trampled hereabouts; he looks out and sees collapsed masonry, strewn timber, and corrugated iron. Letters in plasterwork threaten SUSPICIOUS PERSONS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT, while the wall all around the words has crumbled back to lath. There are telltale hollows and mounds of earth. Tree stumps line a lane. Black thistles grow. The barbed wire is mangled and rusted, and, like the plasterwork words, has lost its menace. It is only ugly now and sad to see.

There are duckboard tracks along the roads through the town and piles of debris on either side. It is all coming down and rising up new. He has seen construction sites on the outskirts. Rows of wooden houses are being built. Their design reminds him of the cowboy towns that he has seen on the cinema screen. One of these new properties has a sign outside announcing itself as the VILLA D’ESPÉRANCE; the name had struck him and then he had wondered if he was right to be surprised by it. How could hope better be exemplified than the effort to make this place a home again?

He had been told about the town’s leaning Virgin, how she had gazed down all askew from the top of the tower, threatening to end the war for whichever side made her plummet. He had seen newspaper images of her at ever more precarious inclines. It had seemed as if hope and meaning were invested in those angles. A new church is being built now beside the old. It seems that Albert is trying to right itself, to rise and look forward. The golden Virgin is long gone, though. He looks up at the basilica and it is gnarled and scabbed and sorry-looking. Some ruins have a romance, but this is a gloomy pile of stones.