“I’d just been made up to captain in July 1916. I had four platoons under me, one hundred and thirty-odd men. It was my job to take care of them and to bring them home again, but by the start of September twenty of those men were dead, nearly seventy had been wounded, and six of them were missing. I owe it to them, and to their families, to make sure that the missing are accounted for and the dead properly buried. There are going to be cemeteries with white grave markers—gardens of sleep—real English gardens. There will be wallflowers and forget-me-nots and pansies and Bible words cut in stone. They’ll be places that their families can visit and hopefully find some comfort. I was meant to bring their boys home; this is the best alternative that I’m able to offer.”

Harry watches Ralph’s hands on the steering wheel. He can see the veins on the back of his hands. He thinks that this is possibly the most sincere, and the saddest, speech that he has ever heard anyone make. “I am grateful to you,” he says.

Ralph turns onto the main road and Harry looks back for a last glimpse of the village. He can see the remains of the woods ahead and the bristling lines of the field full of crosses.

“Do you want to stop for a moment?”

“It’s all right. It’s enough now to know he’s here.” He watches the rows of crosses slide, align momentarily, and then stretch apart. A man with a mower raises an arm to Ralph’s van. Harry is not sure whether it is a wave or a salute. The man looks like a last sentry guarding the field and its quiet prisoners. A woman is standing by the roadside. A flock of starlings lifts from the black woods.

“I can hardly believe that there could be birdsong in that place.”

Ralph smiles. “Believe it. There were cuckoos in the spring. We kept hearing them and laughing. They were calling and replying. I think they were nesting in there.”

Harry pictures a flight of wings through that place of splinters and shrieking and sudden conflagrations. “Good God.”

“But that’s just how it is, isn’t it? Nature takes things back. The circle goes round and goes on.”

They drive back through the deleted village, past the hump of earth that once upon a time was a church, over the railway lines, over the old front line, and back to the town where virgins plummet and barmaids say, “Boom.”