“They began collecting for it—the subscription—in 1916.” Gabriel wipes bread around his plate. “It was, at first, to be Monsieur Abanes’s tomb to make. Then it passed to Eloi Alazard, to whom I was apprenticed in 1914. But then Eloi is dead and so it passes to me. It is a thirdhand honor and not an inheritance that I would have wished for.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“I make drawings: heroic soldiers, crying soldiers, writhing soldiers.” Gabriel assumes demonstrative poses. “My head is full of dead soldiers in stone. Perhaps our burden is not so different.”

Despite the scars, there is something elegant about Gabriel’s hands. When he talks about drawing, his hands curl and scroll and carve arabesques in the air between them. He has the wrists of an Indian dancer. The girl scrapes together the fat and gristle and stacks the plates. Gabriel attempts eye contact and is rejected. He rolls his eyes at Harry.

“But I am ignorant. I talk of myself. I have no manners. You are here just for work?”

“Duty too. I’m trying to find some clues as to my brother’s whereabouts. I suspect that he is dead, but don’t know that he isn’t alive. My sister-in-law needs to know either way. Only I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to deliver that certainty to her.”

Gabriel nods. “Even if you find a grave, can you be sure that the right man is in it?” He peels the skin from a pear with his knife in one deft, smooth, circular movement. “When I stood by Marcellin’s grave I wasn’t entirely certain that he was there. I didn’t feel like I was standing next to my brother. I read that the burial records are often incorrect, because the earth has been turned over so many times, because it has all been shaken up. Who can really be sure? But it is very difficult to explain that to someone who wasn’t here, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Harry replies.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Harry

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Harry

French communications trenches west of Chaulnes, Somme, February 1917

THEY WENT ON IN SILENCE FOR A WHILE, WITH JUST THE NOISE OF the hurdles dripping. The earth had been frozen hard since the start of the month. They had woken with stiff limbs and with ice-rimed beards. It made their eyes ache, their throats raw, and it gnawed at their finger ends. They had cursed the cold and prayed for the thaw. It had now set in and the sky looked full of rain. Harry could hear water running under the duckboards.

“Single file,” said Lieutenant Rose from farther up the line. “Quietly as possible, now.”