He begs to differ on one score: two years on from the guidebook’s publication there is a village here again, of sorts, and a new church. It is a village built of corrugated iron and wood cladding, the church a Gothic arch of curved metal. It is a fine modern Nissen hut. People are scraping out gardens between their iron houses, there are rows of cabbages, and chickens peck. He notices white lace curtains hung at the windows and the face of a young girl, her nose pressed against the glass. He raises his hand in a hello, but the girl’s eyes slide solemnly and offer no acknowledgment. The houses remind him of the huts that they spent time in on Salisbury Plain. It has the air of a prospector settlement, its people brave pioneers scratching a mark in the wilderness. They are plowing out, reclaiming the land around the village. He wonders if they are plowing through bones.

The attack of the twentieth of July was officially deemed a failure. Those who could had retired back; those who couldn’t would be brought back that night. This operation did not work according to plan, Lieutenant Rose wrote in the official battalion diary. He had told Harry that over a bottle of whiskey a week later, framing the phrase with fingers that were seconds later over his eyes. They lost almost all their senior officers. Rose hadn’t looked like he was of a mood to have a glass raised to his promotion.

Noise issues from one of the huts and, stepping closer, Harry sees that it is a bar. The name, AU BON RETOUR, is painted in tidy white lettering above the lintel. Inside, he takes in the corrugated iron walls and the framed photographs of the village before the war. Paper garlands droop from the ceiling and a tricolor is hung from the far wall. The bar itself is a sideboard with bottles and potted geraniums set upon it. He orders a whiskey and recognizes a man down the bar as the driver from earlier. Harry points at a bottle and the driver nods.

“So this is what it was all for, eh?” says Harry as they clink glasses together.

The driver introduces himself as Alfred. He is helping clear the land for the cemeteries and hasn’t been back to England since the end of the war.

“The Irish brigades finally took this place that September,” Alfred tells him. “Only there was no village left by then. What they found was the tunnels—this great network of subterranean passages and shelters under where the village had been. It was like a fortress, like a maze. Is it any wonder that it took months to take it?”