“Jesus, Frannie. How can you say that? How can you be thinking about that now?” He’d landed a good punch on Francis the day previously. His eye was swollen with it and the cut on his cheekbone would leave a scar. As he watched his brother now, smirking and picking at the label on the bottle, Harry felt an urge to hurt him again.

“Well, tell me it’s not true.”

“Fuck off.”

“Exactly. Don’t think I don’t see it.”

“I don’t want to have this conversation.”

“And I don’t want you to have her. If I die, I’ll come back and haunt you.” Francis’s lips were wet with whiskey and grinning then. “Poor Harry,” he said with a laugh.

“You’re drunk. I’m not listening to you.” He stood to leave.

“What the fuck does it matter anyway? We’re all sunk, mon frère.” Francis threw the empty bottle away. It smashed as it hit the pile of bricks. “Everything is lost now,” he said.

Chapter Twenty: Harry

Chapter Twenty

Harry

Guillemont, Somme, August 1921

ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, OLD MAN?” ASKS RALPH FIELDING. HE HANDS Harry a whiskey.

“Nothing that the services of a laundry and some shoe polish won’t put right.”

“That’s the spirit.”

He had stayed there by Will’s grave for a long time. He didn’t speak any words, silent or otherwise, to his brother. He didn’t even particularly feel a sense that Will was there. But there was something very basic and oddly comforting about being so close to his bones. The wood of his cross had weathered to a silver-gray, but it was entirely straight and exactly the same as every other cross on this row. A piece of metal tape embossed with the letters R.I.P. had been nailed above the strip bearing his name and number, his rank and regiment, and the date of his death. Harry had put his fingers to those letters, so small and yet saying so much, felt the texture of them under his fingertips. It was exactly the sort of aluminum tape that is punched out for a penny on slot machines in railway stations.

The sun reflected off the nameplates. Beyond the barbed-wire fence he could see the skeleton trees. It struck him suddenly that he was standing in the no-go flat expanse between the woods and the village. The enemy had sprayed bullets across it from the higher ground near the quarry. They had been ordered to try to sprint across it a week after Will’s death. Harry remembered the noise and the fear, the roar of their voices and his own blood banging. Today it had been completely quiet. Camomile, charlock, and poppies nodded silently. It was truly peaceful. The only noise was the crows in the field behind and the sound of his own unsteady breath.