They walked on in silence for a while. The trees along the side of the road had lost a lot of their branches. They looked twisted, somehow pressingly tragic, and Harry briefly wished that he could pause and sketch their shapes. There was also a lot of debris—coils of wire, pickets and posts, and stacks of corrugated iron sheets. Stragglers sat by the roadside and watched it all pass by.

“It’s going to get hot today,” said Taylor.

Harry looked up. A plane droned through the overhead blue and plumes of pink smoke rose on the skyline.

“I’m not talking about the weather.”

A truck full of Irish went the other way. Their feet dangled from the back of the truck bed. One of them had got a drum and was beating a rhythm. They didn’t seem to be in the mood for singing, though. A convoy of ambulances followed them, which put anyone off trying to fit a song to the beat.

“Ruddy long way to Tipperary,” said Jones and threw his cigarette away.

They were digging in the field by the brickworks, stripped to shirtsleeves and sweating. The digging men went at their task as if they wished to be finished with it.

“Vegetable patch?” queried Wilkinson. “That’ll be a lovely row of cabbages come Christmas.”

“Give it a rest,” said McCabe.

German prisoners were resting by the crossroads while their guards had paused to smoke and pass water bottles between them. They stared at the traffic on the road. Was this then what the enemy looked like? They looked very small, these men, and very tired. Their ordinariness struck Harry. They looked more exhausted and ragged than monstrous. A pair of brown eyes made direct contact with Harry’s own. The boy had shorn-short blond hair and stripes of mud down his face. He had a very young, slightly unfinished-looking face, as if his features hadn’t quite set yet. The man next to him nudged his arm and the boy turned away.

“Poor bastards.”

The woods to the north were being shelled again. Harry could smell them burning. The blackened tree trunks were stark and sharp and didn’t really look like a woods any longer. It reminded him of something from a ghost story, something macabre and gothic and full of dark meaning.

“We’d know, wouldn’t we?” said Will.

Walking wounded were coming back. Their faces were white with the dust from the road, crusted with sweat. Some of the wounded moved like old men, all lurching concentration. Others quivered and jittered. Harry and his companions stared at their faces, looking for features that they recognized. Will’s hand was on Harry’s arm.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”