“Your guess is frankly as good as mine,” said the lieutenant. “Moncrief rode forward this morning. He says that the whole place is an utter shambles. Villages that are on the map have just been deleted. They’re just not there. Absolutely razed to the ground. Nothing but dust. There’s dead Boche everywhere and prisoners streaming back. It’s going to take forever to get them all buried. Moncrief says that the flies are infernal. He smoked two cigarettes at once to keep the filthy brutes off his face. He hasn’t stopped coughing since he got back.”

“So what’s the halftime score, then? Are the odds on our side?”

“I’m not a betting man,” said Rose. “And I don’t know that we’re at halftime yet.”

“But we’ll get our crack?”

Heavy artillery was heaving overhead. The lieutenant crouched and put his hands to his ears. “Good God, this is perfectly deafening.”

Will repeated the question. He shuffled a greasy set of playing cards as he spoke, the cards slipping smoothly through his fingers. Harry looked on and admired the agility of his brother’s unfaltering fingers, the steadiness of the rhythm, undisturbed by the churning sky and the shuddering ground. Was it really just twelve months ago that Will was a boy arranging seashells on the sand? Had they all changed so much?

“Without doubt,” Rose replied. “We’re just awaiting orders as to when and where.”

“Forgive my younger brother’s eagerness,” said Francis. “He’s sparring for a scrap.”

“Aren’t we all?” said Rose.

Harry wasn’t entirely convinced by the lieutenant’s scrapping eagerness.

“I think that we know less about what’s going on than they do in Manchester,” said Wilkinson, looking up from the newspaper.

“I’m ready for my front-page photo,” said Will, putting aside the playing cards and straightening his tunic.

“‘Lancashire will indeed be proud of them,’” read Wilkinson.

“Given half a chance,” said Will.

Chapter Fourteen: Edie

Chapter Fourteen

Edie

North of Albert, August 1921

THERE ARE TWO YOUNG MEN SITTING OPPOSITE HER IN THE RAILWAY carriage, obviously two brothers, and Edie is glad of the laughter in their voices as she looks out at the sad country beyond the window. The whistle screams, the steam clears, and she sees villages that are all wooden huts and leveled churches. Those strange undulations of the earth. The straggling belts of brown barbed wire. The endless thistles. She wants to shut her eyes to it, not to see just how desolate and broken it is, but she tells herself that she must look.

The boys grapple arms, laughing, and smile when their eyes meet hers. She can make no sense of their foreign words, but the sounds are the same, and it pulls her back to Francis’s teenage bedroom and all those noises that were always coming through the walls.