“You lost, mate? Need a lift?” The driver leans out of the window. Harry hadn’t heard the vehicle pull up and the sudden breach of the silence had alarmed him momentarily. There are tarpaulins and stakes and a quantity of mangled barbed wire in the back of the van.

“Do you know if there used to be a brickworks off this road? A red-brick building with a fallen chimney?”

The driver laughs. “Once upon a time. Long ago. You’re at the wrong crossroads, pal, but I know just where you mean. Hop in. I’ll save you some shoe leather.”

He turns the truck and they head back past the black woods.

“Not a place for a picnic, eh?” says the driver.

“Not quite,” Harry replies. The barbed wire in the back of the van rattles. “Is that salvage?”

“A drop in that ocean, aye. They reckon that there’s at least a hundred thousand tons of wire alone.” He raises an eyebrow at Harry and whistles. “And then there’s the ammunition and the bones. It’ll go on for years, you know.”

Harry can’t imagine how it will ever end.

“This is your place.”

The van brakes and Harry looks out. He recognizes the slump of red bricks, albeit now much diminished and matted over with brambles. Nature seems to have an urgent desire to cover it all.

“If you’re staying in the village, the bar does a passable approximation of beer. You’ll find me there and thirsty most nights.”

The driver honks his horn as he pulls away.

Harry looks about. Suddenly all is stillness and silence again. He tries to rewind and reorient himself. The barn was on the corner of the side road facing the ruin of the brickworks. There is nothing there now but a pile of timber and tile. The field where they buried them was to the right of the barn. He measures his bearing and tries to re-find the angle, riffling mentally through the fixed images. He recalls a line of crosses and sees none. There is just turned earth. Harry’s shoes are clogged with mud and his steps falter, stumbling on pieces of chalk in the soil that look like bones. He turns in the field, the field that should contain the bones of his brother. There are no signs that they were ever here. He thinks about Mrs. Maxwell, wanting a photograph if she could not have a grave. He thinks about Rachel, needing a grave to go to and the horrible hugeness of that word—missing. He thinks about Edie’s uncertainty. There is no grave for his brother. And, if his brother’s grave is missing, where is he? Harry’s feet slip from under him and he finds himself kneeling in the mud, staring at the empty earth.

Chapter Sixteen: Harry

Chapter Sixteen

Harry

Bivouac camp, Talus Boisé, Somme, July 1916