The roads have been remade to some degree, but the land on either side has yet to be smoothed and tidied and made right. The ground is hummocky, scrambled over with tangling vegetation, and strange stumps of trees stand like sentinels. For an irrational instant Harry feels like the trees are watching him. There is something accusing about this ill-used landscape.

They had read newspaper reports about the attacks of the first of July as they waited north of Albert. On the eighteenth of that month they had finally received their own orders to move forward. The weather had been wet and they had slipped and skidded on roads that were turning to mud. It was the early hours of the morning before they had arrived, swearing then as they were instructed to make bivouac camp in a boggy field. The men who were coming out told them stories about fighting in the woods, about the splintered branches and the tugging brambles, about all the corpses and the confusion. It was an evil place, they said, a regular charnel house. Harry remembers the faces of the men who told them these stories, the whites of their eyes in the dawn light, the rush of their words, how they had almost seemed to want to outdo one another in shocking those who hadn’t been in the woods. Some of them had seemed like they’d left their wits in the woods.

In the distance, to his right, there are what must once have been woods. Black sticks bristle on the skyline. To the left the land slopes away and he can see miles and miles of empty ugly nothingness. Harry feels a great oppressive weight of the nothingness. He feels like the last man left.

By the side of the road is a white stone obelisk. TO THE GLORY OF GOD, reads the inscription on the bronze plaque, AND IN IMPERISHABLE MEMORY. He realizes that the trunks and sticks and scrub behind are those woods. He passed through there himself in the last days of July, with the mist and the gas shells and the splintering awfulness all around. He photographs the memorial, focusing in on the bronze words. The broken trunks of trees are like phantoms in the background of his image. Blackened and leafless, they give the impression that it is January, but the horizon shimmers with August’s heat.

The road ahead glares white. He remembers these roads as a loudly nudging line of traffic: the trucks, wagons, mules, motorcycles, and the dust from the endless columns of men. His eye scans for familiar landmarks. There is hardly anything here that he recognizes. Just south of where the four roads meet, and just before the ruins of the brickworks, there had been a caved-in barn. The grave had been dug in the field beside. He turns at the junction of the roads, trying to find a feature that he would know.