The firing died down, and out of the darkness a great moan came. People with their arms and legs off trying to crawl away; others who could not move gasping out their last moments with the cold night wind biting into their broken bodies…

Bodies that could never be reclaimed, though they must have been tagged.

Bodies that would slowly rot, and… Michael remembered a detail from school history about how stretcher-bearers had to kick the dead men hard, in the ribs. That was how you got rid of the rats, which were nesting in their chests.

Had the man with the moustache ended that way? Had young Michael?

The platforms were new, but the lines hadn’t changed.

In 1916 old men and women would have sat on benches here, and the names of the lost would have been known to them. The pain would be raw: an ache that made you hold your breath, for surely loss like that made you sit still in case you simply shattered. There would have been mothers, trying to imagine their sons’ and husbands’ fear. Had they sat here, trying to comprehend the sheer loneliness of faraway death? He’d been told by someone that a bullet is hot when it hits you – and there were pictures of the rifles they’d used. Clunky old things, slung over greatcoats heavy with rain – boots that must have leaked, and a pack that doubled in weight because canvas soaked up the wet. How could the man with the moustache look so full of hope? Michael stared at him, and the man held his gaze.

He had not imagined being confronted like this, but the town was reaching out to the people of the past. Why was it so hard to imagine anything other than melodrama? The station had been rebuilt with brand-new facilities, and the furniture was the kind you saw everywhere: metal chairs, bolted to concrete in the style of a prison cell. There was a protective glass wall, but it had been designed not to reach the floor – that ensured the space you were in could never be snug, so you’d never be tempted to linger and become a nuisance. Michael tried to imagine the young men waiting beside him, smelling of tobacco and damp wool. He tried to see the ghosts, but they just wouldn’t appear. He saw actors only, faking local working-class accents.

‘Stand well away from the edge of platform one,’ said a voice.

‘Why?’ said Michael quietly – and for a moment he knew that his time had come, and he didn’t need whisky. He could do it, and it had to be done. There really was no need to wait for Crewe.

‘Stand well away…’

‘No.’

‘You have been warned – the approaching train is not

scheduled to stop at this station. Stand behind the yellow

line!’