“Bonne journée,” they say to her, and touch their hats, as they step out into a landscape that’s all at the wrong angles. The taller brother puts his arm around the younger and they walk down the platform. As the train slides past, it could well be Will and Francis for a moment. Perhaps she, as an only child, had not fully appreciated how much Francis needed his brothers to be there with him? She thinks about the photograph of Francis alone in the square, and is struck by the terrible loneliness of that image.

Chapter Fifteen: Harry

Chapter Fifteen

Harry

Montauban, Somme, August 1921

Location image order: Mrs. Eunice Maxwell requests a photograph of the church in Montauban. Her son, Pte. Alan Maxwell (26519, 17th Manchesters), was KIA on 1st July 1916, has no known grave.

IT IS PERFECTLY QUIET. THE ONLY SOUND IS THE WIND THROUGH THE grass. This spot ought to be full of ghosts, ought to writhe with angry energy. Instead it is the absolute emptiness that strikes Harry.

“‘The struggle for the village was short, but fierce and sanguinary,’” he reads. “‘Today it is utterly impossible to locate the site of a street or house. The only remaining landmarks are the pond and the cemetery—the latter considerably enlarged by the addition of numerous German graves. Everywhere else nothing is to be seen, except heaps of stones and rubbish, beams, scrap-iron and debris of all kinds.’”

He looks up from the guidebook and finds that he can’t disagree with its assessment. There are not even really ruins here. Nothing but thistles, nettles, broken glass, and piled stone. A sign indicates that a hump in the earth is where the village church once stood. Iron crosses lean crazily around it.

Harry bends down to get an upward angle on the remains of the church. He wants to somehow make it seem as if there is more to this place than just a bulge of earth. He wants to somehow make it seem more significant. He focuses in on the fancy ironwork of the crosses. As there is no grave for Private Maxwell, so too there is no church to photograph for his mother. Harry feels as if he can’t help but fail Mrs. Maxwell.

He walks on. It is five years since Private Maxwell died taking this village, and yet there now doesn’t seem to be a single soul trying to reclaim this place. He has read in the newspapers about English villages adopting devastated communes on the Somme, organizing raffles and jumble sales and bingo nights to raise money to gift fruit trees, food parcels, and plows. There doesn’t seem to be anyone here to whom fruit trees might be gifted. He wonders if people will ever live here again. Would anyone want to plant an orchard here? What strange fruit would grow from this earth?