Stephen felt Hunt's hand reach out and help him into the trench. Byrne slithered in after him.

"Well done, Hunt," said Stephen. "I'm going to give this man a drink now. Do you like whisky, Byrne?"

"Not half."

"If Petrossian wants to know where Byrne is, tell him he's with me."

"All right." Hunt watched the men move off over the duckboards. A few yards down the trench Jack Firebrace was sitting on the firestep with a cup of tea. He was regaining his strength after six hours underground. His thoughts turned toward home. Eight-and-a-half years earlier, when his wife had given birth to a son, Jack's life had changed. As the child grew, Jack noticed in him some quality he valued and which surprised him. The child was not worn down. In his innocence there was a kind of hope. Margaret laughed when Jack pointed this out to her. "He's only two years old," she said. "Of course he's innocent." This was not what Jack had meant, but he could not put into words the effect that watching John had on him. He saw him as a creature who had come from another universe; but in Jack's eyes the place from which the boy had come was not just a different but a better world. His innocence was not the same thing as ignorance; it was a powerful quality of goodness that was available to all people: it was perhaps what the prayer book called a means of grace, or a hope of glory. It seemed to Jack that if an ordinary human being, his own son, no one particular, could have this purity of mind, then perhaps the isolated deeds of virtue at which people marvelled in later life were not really isolated at all; perhaps they were the natural continuation of the innocent goodness that all people brought into the world at their birth. If this was true, then his fellow-human beings were not the rough, flawed creatures that most of them supposed. Their failings were not innate, but were the result of where they had gone wrong or been coarsened by their experiences; in their hearts they remained perfectible.

This love Jack felt toward his son redeemed his view of human life and gave substance to his faith in God. Where his piety had been the reflex of a fearful man, it was transformed into something that expressed his belief in the goodness of humanity.

His own beliefs, but it didn't matter to him: his son was all he cared about. He had not had the chance to say good-bye when he left and had corresponded with the boy through messages in Margaret's letters. At the front and underground he was often too preoccupied to think of John and Margaret, to form exact pictures of them in his mind, but when he lay on the cross at the tunnel face or strained his ears on sentry duty there was always a sense in which they were with him. His endurance was for them; the care he took to try to stay alive was so that he would see the boy again. He watched as Byrne and Stephen disappeared, then prayed hard for John's life. The smell of the earth in the trench wall reminded him of his own boyhood, when he would fall in the mud during a game of football or play at building a dam in the stream that ran through the open ground behind the factory: there was this enduring smell of soil and boyhood. He was quite alone, as he had been always, but now with the urgent life of another boy in his heart. The next day there was a letter for Jack from Margaret. He decided not to open it until he had come back from underground. He might be killed in the tunnel and it would be better to die in ignorance if the news from the hospital was bad. If it was good, then it would seem all the better for having been kept.

It was a quiet day. Some of the division was already packing up to leave. In the morning Jack took out a sketchbook and made some drawings of his friend Arthur Shaw, whose big head had a sense of weight and shadow that yearned for the soft lines of the pencil. Shaw sat placidly while Jack went to work, his eyes flickering up and down from paper to face and back again, the pencil held lightly in the tips of his fingers. Tyson came and looked over Jack's shoulder and made a short, appreciative grunt. The drawing was simple and lacking in refinement, but Jack had the ability to make a likeness and this impressed Tyson, who wanted to be drawn himself. Jack was mysterious in his choice of subjects, however. There were a few pictures of lorries and stores, some of the villages in which they went to rest, the occasional group scene taken from memory of a concert hall or estaminet, but most of his sketchbook consisted of portraits of Arthur Shaw.

In the late afternoon Sergeant Adams arrived with Jones and O'Lone, and the men formed up to go underground.

Michael Weir had detailed Adams to be in charge while he spent the evening in his dugout with a book. At about eight o'clock Stephen pulled back the gas curtain and let himself in. He was in a state of nervous excitement.

"Go where?"

"The surprise I told you about. Come on. Bring that whisky bottle." Weir stood up hesitantly. He was afraid of what Stephen was planning. He swallowed an inch of whisky from the bottle and felt it add its small effect to the several he had already drunk. He guessed from his manner that Stephen had also been drinking.

Weir breathed in deeply as they emerged into the darkness. It was a dry summer night and there was only the distant sound of some halfhearted shelling a mile or so down the line, like a routine metal lullaby to warn the forgetful that death could come to them even in their sleep.

Weir followed Stephen down the communication trench, through the reserve line, and out into the rear area where the headlights of lorries were approaching from the tree-lined roads, illuminating large piles of kit that had been laid under tarpaulin for transport. CSM Price strode about at the railhead, where a huge artillery piece was being labouriously winched on to a train. With clipboard and checklist he had temporarily resumed his old warehouse occupation.

Stephen hung back for fear of being seen by Price and ushered Weir over to a muddy area at the end of a line of poplars where two men were leaning against a motorcycle, smoking.

"I need that bike," he said. "Major... Watson needs it urgently." He nodded toward Weir.

"Major Who?" said the man, looking doubtfully at Weir, who was wearing his white pullover and soft shoes with no sign of rank.

"Special operations," said Stephen. "Take these and say no more about it." He held out a tin of fifty Capstan cigarettes.

"Can't do that, mate," said the private, taking the cigarettes anyway. "But there's a motorbike down there, behind the shed, that no one's using. Despatch Rider got hit in the arse by a farmer. By a bloody shotgun!" He laughed. Stephen found the bike and shook it to and fro to see if there was petrol in it. There was a faint but adequate sound of liquid from the tank. He kick-started the machine and stamped it into gear. Weir climbed cautiously on to the back and held on. The bike had only one seat, so he had to perch on a rack that had been fitted over the rear wheel. His legs hung loose on either side.

As they accelerated over the rutted track and down toward the road, Stephen felt a leap and surge of exhilaration. They had left behind the death and turmoil and filth; they were breaking free into the darkness of normality, with food and drink, the sound of women, and the sight of men whose first thought would not be to kill them. The bike roared its way on to the metalled road.

They saw the lights of the village, sparse and dimmed, and a lit window on the extreme western edge that had become famous in rumour. Stephen felt Weir's fingers digging into the flesh between his ribs.

The building was a farm with a low brick house on one side and barns for livestock and straw making up a square. Stephen propped up the bike at the entrance, while Weir took the bottle from his pocket and sucked thirstily.

"Listen, Wraysford, I don't think I want to go on with this. Look at this place, it's pretty squalid and--"

"Come on. It's a woman, a soft creature who will be kind to you and make you feel well. It's not someone with a gun."

He took Weir's arm and led him across the courtyard. Weir missed his footing as they neared the door. At the entrance Weir began to tremble.

"Christ, Wraysford, just let me get out of here. Let me go home. I don't want this."

"Home? Home? A trench filled with rats?"

"If the red hats find us we'll be shot."

"Of course we won't be shot. Disciplined, perhaps. Made to resign our commissions. Pull yourself together."

They went through into a dim parlour with a stove in the middle of the floor. An old woman was sitting smoking a pipe. She nodded at the two of them in the doorway. She shook her head when Stephen began to speak and pointed to her ear.

"I want to leave," Weir hissed.

Stephen gripped his wrist. "Wait."

The old woman let out a screech toward the door that led into the house. They heard footsteps, then a female voice. A woman of perhaps fifty appeared on the dark threshold.

"I wasn't expecting people tonight," she said.

Stephen shrugged. "My friend was anxious to come and see you. I'm worried that he may be a little nervous. He wants you to be very patient." Stephen spoke as fast as he could in the hope that Weir would not understand.

The woman smiled grimly. "Very well."

"You have a daughter, Madame?"

"What is that to you?"

"I understand that she also... "

"That is none of your business. Tell your friend to come with me."

"Go on." Stephen pushed Weir in the back and watched him go faltering and afraid into the darkness on the other side of the door.

Stephen turned to the old woman and smiled. He made a drinking gesture and took out a five-franc note from his pocket. She went stiffly to the corner of the room and produced a bottle of wine and a dusty glass.

Stephen took a chair beside the stove and rested his elbow on the long flue that ran across to the wall. He raised his glass toward the old woman and drank the bitter white wine.

He wanted Weir to know what it felt like to be with a woman, to feel that intimacy of flesh. It made no difference to him whether Weir died in all innocence, but he felt it was in some way necessary for him to understand the process that had brought him into being.

Escaped from extermination, Stephen feared nothing any more. In the existence he had rejoined, so strange and so removed from what seemed natural, there was only violent death or life to choose between; finer distinctions, such as love, preference, or kindness, were redundant. The flesh of a widowed farmer's wife, paid for in the wages of killing, was, in the reduced reality inhabited by him and Weir, a better choice than the flesh of Wilkinson, shell-shattered in section, its banal brain cell and membrane dripping memory and hope on to his shoulder. He stretched out his legs and saw his heels mark the beaten earth of the farmhouse floor. He had almost finished the bottle of wine and could feel it extinguish his last trace of caution, his last recognition of the spurious ways and codes of peacetime behaviour. He felt aged and weary but very calm. The older woman had fallen asleep. Stephen went softly to the corner of the room and found another bottle in the cupboard. He poured himself a glass and took his seat again, waiting in the dim light.

When Weir returned he looked shaken and pale. The black marks beneath his eyes were visible even in the gloom of the parlour. Stephen looked at him interrogatively. Weir shook his head. "You go."

"No, thank you. This is your expedition. I have no interest in her."

"She wants you to go. Go and see her. Go and see her, you bastard. You started this. You finish it."

Weir was more agitated than he had been even during the bombardment. Stephen had a sudden feeling of panic. "What have you done?" he said.

"What have you done, you raving idiot?"

Weir sat down heavily in a chair and held his face in his hands.

Terrible pictures formed in Stephen's mind as he ran through the door. He was confronted by a junction with four passageways. He called out.

The lighting was so bad he could barely see where he was going. He fumbled down a wall and pushed open a door. There was a fluttering of chickens inside. He slammed it closed with a shudder. He ran down a second passage, pushing open doors, closing them in relief when no fearful sight met his eyes, but pressing onward in desperation.

He heard a woman's voice from behind him. "Monsieur?" It was a young, dark-haired woman. She had large, soft eyes and her hair was tied back with a red ribbon. Stephen stood speechless.

"What do you want?"

"I'm looking for... for your mother."

"This way."

She took him by the arm. They went into a room with a red carpet and screens with oriental decorations. Around the door was a wooden cut-out shaped like a minaret. The floor was of the same beaten earth as in the parlour. Stephen looked aghast. The young woman took him behind a screen, where a double bed lay beneath a homemade canopy of cotton silk. There were half a dozen candles on the floor and one in the window.

"Don't be alarmed. Give me the money now."

The last sentence restored a kind of normality.

"I don't want to... I just came to see that everything was all right." He heard a laugh from the other side of the screen. It was the middle-aged woman who had taken Weir off with her. "All right. As good as it will ever be." She came and stood beside Stephen. He could smell some sweet scent on her. "Your friend is very strange. I take him like this"--she cupped her hand in Stephen's groin--"and he backs away." She laughed. "It is long and soft, and when I touch it, he begins to cry."

She was older than Stephen had thought. In the candlelight he could see her more clearly than in the parlour. She sat on the bed and pulled up her skirt to her waist, then lay back and spread her legs. Stephen had never seen someone of that age naked. She put her hand into a bowl of disinfectant, then ran her fingers through the gash between her legs, through the coarse hair and the scarlet flesh that parted at her familiar touch.

Stephen began, like Weir, to back away. Then he laughed. He reached out to the young woman and took her arm. "You, Mademoiselle, yes. Otherwise, nothing." The older woman got off the bed and came toward him, pulling down her skirt. He felt her hands on the front of his trousers. She slid her fingers inside, and pulled out what she wanted, a piece of limp flesh, like a butcher taking something from display and laying it on the wooden board. When he felt her mouth close on it, Stephen braced himself not to back away from her slavering attention. He looked up and saw the young woman undressing. The candlelight caught the round white curve of her buttocks as she stepped out of her underclothes and Stephen felt himself stir in the woman's mouth.

She stood up and smiled, holding his stiffening flesh in her hand. "You English," she said, and vanished behind the screen.

It did not cross Stephen's mind how ridiculous he must look. His skin was bursting, stretched almost to transparency by the blood pumped down into it. The girl smiled at him from the bed. She had small round breasts. She sat with her legs straight out in front of her and her arms folded across her stomach. There was no sheet on the bed.

"Take off your clothes," she said.

Stephen dumbly did what she told him. He stood naked in front of her. The girl was patient, as though she was accustomed to dealing with awkward soldiers. Stephen looked at her. Almost six years had passed since he had touched a woman. She was beautiful. There was light in her dark brown eyes; there was air and life in her limbs. The flesh was young and un-wounded. He wanted to drown himself in her, to bury deep into the cells of her skin and to forget himself there. She was peace and gentleness; she was the possibility of love and future generations.

As he took a step toward the bed he remembered a day when another woman had lain naked like this, her legs parted in front of his eyes, and he had kissed her there, allowing his tongue to open her, as though this unlocking would provide a way into her deepest self. He remembered her gasp of surprise. He had obliterated himself in her; he had purged his longing and desire; he had lodged and invested himself in her body. In her trust and love for him, he had deposited the unresolved conflicts of his life. Perhaps his self was still in her-betrayed and unhealed. The body was only flesh, but she had taken hers away from him; and in her physical absence there was more than missing flesh: there was abandonment. The tenderness he had felt toward the dark-haired girl was gone. She smiled at him and rolled on to her side, so he saw again the white swell of her hip, too curved to allow the passage of her arms in running or aggression.

When he looked at the girl's upper body, the ribs and spine, he thought of the shell casing that stuck from Reeves's abdomen; he thought of the hole in Douglas's shoulder where he had pressed his hand through almost to the lung.

His tenderness was replaced at first by a shuddering revulsion. Then his mind emptied. There was only this physical mass. He was losing control. The old woman smearing disinfectant between her legs was unrelated to anything he had known with Isabelle. Her daughter's body was no more than animal matter, less dear, less valuable than the flesh of men he had seen die.

He did not know whether to take the girl or kill her.

In the pocket of his trousers beside his feet was the knife he had carried on patrol. He bent down and took it out, opening it against the palm of his hand. He went over and sat on the edge of the bed.

The girl looked at him, her eyes wide, her mouth open but unable to produce a sound. He felt no pity for her ignorant fear.

He turned the knife so that the blade was in his palm, then ran the handle of it down between her breasts and over her thighs.

He did not know what he was doing. He hated her for not having seen what he had seen. He felt the skin on her legs give a little under his pressure. The knife left a thin white trail where the flesh was momentarily parted before the blood rushed in again beneath the skin. He wanted there to be more than just this flesh. He rested the handle on the hair between her legs, the blade pointing up towards her abdomen. The girl looked down in horror at the reflections of light on the steel. Stephen took his hand off the knife. It lay balanced. The girl was too frightened to move. Eventually she slid her hand slowly up her thigh and took the knife, her eyes on Stephen all the time. She held the blade in her fingers, closed the knife, and threw it to the far side of the room, where it landed on the earthen floor. Stephen looked down at the bed. His mind, which had been blank, was flooded with thoughts and recriminations.

The girl had regained her calm. She did not scream for help or remonstrate; she looked at Stephen's broken attitude on the bed, his head bowed, his excitement shrunk. Her relief made her generous.

She touched his hand.

Stephen jumped and looked up. He could not believe her touch. It was tender. She should have killed him.

He shook his head in bewilderment. "What...?"

She raised her finger to her lips. She seemed to grow stronger by the second, feeding on her relief and his despair.

She said, "It is very difficult. The war."

He said, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"I understand."

He looked at her with incredulous eyes, then took up his clothes and dressed hurriedly behind the screen.

*

In the turmoil of a division preparing to move, no one noticed the temporary absence of two officers in the night. They left the motorbike where they had found it and made their separate ways back to the front line, both feeling more sober than they had expected.

The next day Weir had his orders. They would move the following evening to a billet not yet specified, then march to Albert. They were expected to help complete the digging that had already begun near the village of Beaumont-Hamel. There was no indication of whether this was part of a larger strategy or merely a routine redeployment. Since the whole division was on the move, however, it appeared that the rumours were true: they were going to attack.

Weir slumped down on to the lower bunk in his dugout. He ran his hand back over what remained of his hair. So this was the attack at last. No more peace and tranquility. The big push. He managed a snort of dry laughter. No more the quiet sector with its friendly routine patrols. With the men of the new army, he would sweep the Germans out of France.

He was resigned to it. He felt that he had lost control of his own life: when he had finally tried to alter some central part of his existence it had come to nothing but humiliation. The guns would not be much worse.

When he returned from his nighttime shift underground, Jack went to a quiet part of the trench with a cup of tea and took out Margaret's letter. He read it very slowly, not allowing his eyes to glance ahead.

My Dearest Jack,

How are you? We think about you all the time and our prayers are for you. Thank you for your letters which have been a great comfort to us. It is good to know you are keeping cheery and well.

I have to tell you that our boy died this morning. The doctors said he suffered no pain and was very restful at the end. There was nothing they could do for him. I saw him in the hospital but they would not let me take him home. I do believe they cared for him to the last and did not let him suffer.

I am sorry to have to tell you this my dear Jack because I know how much you loved him. You must not let it get you downhearted. You are all I have left now and I pray God will send you home to me safe.

I am to collect his little body this afternoon, the funeral will be on Friday. I will light a candle from you in the church.

I will write again but I haven't the heart to go on now. Please do take care of yourself and come home to me.

With love from Margaret.

Jack put the letter down on the ground and stared in front of him. He thought: I will not let this shake my faith. His life was a beautiful thing, it was filled with joy. I will thank God for it.

He put his head in his hands to pray but was overpowered by the grief of his loss. No polite words of gratitude came, but only the bellowing darkness of desolation. "My boy," he sobbed, "my darling boy." They arrived at Albert in the first week of June. The tunnellers were at once despatched to the Front, but the infantry were allowed to pass the time in rest, with fewer drills and inspections than usual and a suspiciously improved diet that included oranges and walnuts.

Captain Gray took Stephen to see Colonel Barclay, who was staying in a large house on the west side of town.

"He's an irascible fellow," said Gray. "But you shouldn't be taken in by his manner. He's a fine fighter. He enjoys hardship and danger." Gray raised an eyebrow as though to question Barclay's judgement.

They discovered the colonel looking at maps in the converted study. He was younger than Stephen had expected; although grey, he had a lean, ferrety presence.

"Pretty nice house, isn't it?" said Barclay. "But never you mind, I'll be in the trench with you chaps when you go over the top."

"Are you actually going to go over the top yourself, sir?" said Gray, with a note of surprise.

"I should bloody well think so," said Barclay. "I've been stuck on my arse with creeping-Jesus staff officers for the last six weeks. The day the balloon goes up I'm aiming to have dinner off the regimental silver in Ba-paume."

Gray coughed. "That would indeed represent a remarkable advance." His accent seemed to have become more Scottish in Barclay's presence.

"And do you know who I'll be having it with? The C in C of the Second Indian Cavalry."

"I had not appreciated that the cavalry would be involved."

"Of course they are. We punch a hole, they pour through. Haig's dead set on it."

"I see." Gray nodded his head slowly. "This is Lieutenant Wraysford, who has some knowledge of the terrain. You may remember I mentioned him to you."

"Yes, I remember," said Barclay. "The Somme expert. Well, you'd better sing for your supper."

They went out into the gardens of the house for a stroll, and Barclay asked Stephen about the lie of the land. At Gray's suggestion, he had refreshed his memory by looking at a map and was able to tell him of the marshy flanks of the river Ancre, the rising ground toward Thiepval on one side and the ridge on the other.

"Hawthorn Ridge," said the colonel. "That's what they call that. We're attacking on that line toward Beaumont-Hamel. They're going to blow a bloody great hole in the ridge first."

"I see," said Gray. "So that will give the enemy plenty of warning and a nice bit of natural fortification."

Barclay looked at him with a stern pity. "We'll get to it first, Gray. But it's going to be a long day. I expect we may be asked to reinforce other units at various stages depending on how it goes."

"But we will be in the first wave of attack?"

"Oh yes," beamed the colonel. "Over at dawn, don't worry. Regroup and take a breather at midday. Back in the early evening to put the shoulder to the wheel if necessary. Your men ready for it?"

"Oh, I think so," said Gray. "What do you think, Wraysford?"

"I think so, sir. Though I'm a little worried about the terrain. Also they've been here a long time, haven't they, the enemy? They will have built defences like--"

"Good God," said Barclay, "I've never come across two such fainthearts. There is going to be a six-day bombardment which is going to cut every bit of German wire from here to Dar es Salaam. If there's any Boche left alive after that he'll be so bloody relieved it's over that he'll come out with his hands up."

"That would certainly constitute an unexpected bonus," said Gray. And another thing," said Barclay. "I don't need tactical advice from a platoon commander. I've got Rawlinson breathing down my neck already, as well as brigade orders every day. You just do what you're told. Now let's go and have lunch." Barclay's second-in-command, Major Thursby, and the three other company commanders joined them at an elegant table in a room with long windows at the side of the house. Stephen wondered if he should not offer to do the waiting rather than converse with these superior officers, but there seemed to be ample mess waiters, augmented by an elderly French couple.

"What's this stuff?" said Barclay holding up a bottle to the light. "GevreyChambertin. Hmm, tastes all right, though I don't know why we can't have white wine with fish."

"There was no white wine in the cellar, sir," said the colonel's batman, a small white-haired Londoner. "But I knew you were partial to a bit of fish. Trout, sir. From the local river."

"Very well, Davis," said Barclay, refilling his glass.

A thin stew followed, then ripe cheese and fresh bread. Lunch went on past three o'clock, when they went to the sun-filled sitting room with coffee and cigars. Stephen felt the softness of the chair beneath him and allowed his hand to linger on the brocade. One of the company commanders, a tall man called Lucas, was talking about the fishing on the river Test in Hampshire near his parents' home. The others were discussing a battalion football match. An Edinburgh unit who were coming into the line nearby contained the entire Heart of Midlothian professional team and had proved unbeatable.

The colonel's batman brought brandy, and Stephen thought of the men in his platoon and the way they conjured cups of tea on tiny spirit stoves in damp trench walls. A sullen decorator called Studd used to fix a piece of cheese on his bayonet to entice the rats, then pull the trigger. Stephen felt that he was betraying them by eating and drinking in this elegant house, though in fact the men themselves believed you took what was available. They would barter and scrounge what they could in rest or in the line; food parcels were common property and a recent one addressed to Wilkinson, some weeks dead, had been the cause of particular celebration.

Stephen smiled to himself, aware that his brief flight from reality would soon be ended.

*

The battalion marched to a village called Colincamps. They sang on the road and swung their arms. It was a warm June day and the sun lit up the pallid green of the countryside. In the elms the rooks were calling dreamily, and in the plane trees and chestnuts was the constant sound of blackbirds and thrushes. The village was a babble of accents from Ulster, London, Glasgow, and Lancashire. The men overwhelmed the resources of the local families in their search for billets. They played football in the evening and their sweat awakened the memories of action in their unwashed, lice-filled clothes.

Stephen took his platoon to a barn where Gray was attempting to make a deal with a reluctant woman and her son. By nightfall they had got the men inside with clean straw and a hot meal from the mobile cooker.

That night the guns began. Stephen was reading a book by candlelight in the hayloft of the barn when he heard them. A howitzer was embedded not far behind and was shaking down the dust of centuries from the rafters.

The bombardment was not much to begin with; it was like a clearing of the throat, but the echoes went on and on over the soft downland, on a ringing bass note. When the echo was starting to become so deep it was no longer audible, another low boom could be made out in the continuous murmur of sound, then another, so that the walls of the barn began to tremble. Stephen could feel the vibrations run through the wooden floor of the loft. He pictured the gunners beginning to warm to their task, stripping off their shirts in the deep-dug emplacements, pressing the protective wax deeper into their ears. He was awed by the sound the guns were making; so many of them in rolling sequence on a line of sixteen miles, the heaviest providing the continuous rumble like a sustained roll of timpani, and the lighter adding unpredictable pattern and emphasis. Within an hour the whole line was pouring out shells, filling the night sky with a dense traffic of metal. The noise was like thunder breaking in uninterrupted waves.

There was some consolation to be taken from the evident power of the bombardment, though none at all from the scale of the conflict it portended. Stephen felt that the odds had been dramatically increased; there seemed to be no question any longer of escape or compromise; it was only a matter of hope, that his own side should prove stronger than the enemy.

They stayed in Colincamps for two more days before moving off toward the front line.

"Won't be long now, sir," said Byrne, grinding out his cigarette and taking his place next to Hunt. "I never thought you'd be with us when you went down in that tunnel."

"Nor me neither," said Hunt. "I wish we'd all bloody well stayed underground." Stephen smiled. "You didn't much like it at the time. Never mind. This'll be different. Get Studd and Barnes over here, will you? Leslie, you've had two days to clean your rifle. Don't do it when you're just about to start marching." The platoon fell in under the eye of CSM Price, who strutted from one edge of the ragged square to the other before taking instructions from Captain Gray. Price was the only man who seemed to know which cart track would take them to the right place and which long defile would ultimately bring them to their appointed position in the frontline trench. The countryside was shaking beneath their feet as the bombardment entered its third day.

The company had a nervous joie de vivre as it set off on the prepared road toward Auchonvillers. The traffic of ammunition and supplies was so heavy that the men were obliged to take a farm track across the fields.

Stephen felt his skin and nose begin to itch with the dust and seed that were blowing from the crops and hedgerows. Beneath their laden packs the men began to sweat, and the smell of them rose on the warm summer air. They sang marching songs with banal, repeated words of home. Stephen looked down at the ridge of grass along the centre of the track where the cartwheels had not pressed. He thought of the generations of farmers who had worked their way along it on such clear summer days.

As they rounded a corner, he saw two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path. For a moment he was baffled. It seemed to have no agricultural purpose; there was no more planting or ploughing to be done. Then he realized what it was. They were digging a mass grave. He thought of shouting an order to the men to about turn or at least to avert their eyes, but they were almost on it, and some of them had already seen their burial place. The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds.

They moved in silence, back on to the prepared road and down into Auchonvillers. Everything had changed in readiness for battle. The café where he had had lunch with the Azaires had been converted into a temporary hospital. On the main street of the village, flanked by piles of hay and carts full of animal feed, Colonel Barclay was sitting on a bay horse with shiny, barrelled flanks. As the companies formed a square and stood in silence, gazing at him, he coughed and told them what they had guessed, but had not until then officially known. He looked like a character from comic opera with his attempted grandeur and indolently snorting horse.

"You are going to attack. I know you'll be relieved to hear it because that's what you've come for. You are going to fight and you are going to win. You are going to inflict such a defeat on the enemy that he will never recover. You can hear the artillery going to work on his defences. The bombardment will stop tomorrow and you will attack. The enemy will be utterly demoralized. His defences have been shattered, his wire is cut, his dugouts are obliterated. I confidently expect that only a handful of shots will be fired at you. The enemy will be relieved to see someone to whom he can surrender."

He overcame an initial nervousness that made him bark. His enthusiasm and simple belief in what he said was communicated to the men. Some of the younger ones began to shed tears.

"However, I have to warn you that you must be extremely careful about accepting any such surrender. My instructions from the chief of the General Staff are that it lies with the enemy to prove his intention to surrender beyond possibility of misunderstanding. If you have any doubts, then I think you know what to do. The bayonet remains in my view an extremely effective weapon.

"I need hardly remind you of the glorious history of this regiment. We acquired our nickname, the Goats, in the Peninsular War, when we proved our worth in rocky terrain. We did not retreat; and the Duke of Wellington himself commended our bravery. I can say to you no more than this: that you must honour the memory of those men who bore the colours before you. In your conduct in battle you must be worthy of the great deeds of this regiment's history. You must strive to win for your families, for your king and your country. I believe you will do so. I believe we shall take dinner in Bapaume. God bless you all."

An outbreak of cheering was instantly quelled by the military police, who began to shout a list of instructions to each company. The strictest discipline would be enforced. Any man shirking his duty would be shot on the spot. There would be no questions in the heat of battle. As the men's enthusiasm faltered, the police concluded with a list of men who had been executed for cowardice. "Kennedy, Richard, desertion in the face of the enemy, executed; Masters, Paul, disobeying an order, executed... "

Stephen turned his head from the sound of the list, looking at the baffled, fear-filled faces of Hunt, Leslie, and Barnes. Tipper, the boy who had been carried screaming from the trench, had been brought back just in time, with the same vacant expression. Even Byrne's long, sanguine features had gone pale. Many of the men had the look of questioning boys, torn between excitement and a desire to be back with their mothers. Stephen closed his ears to the sound.

"Simpson, William, desertion, executed... "

When they left the village of Auchonvillers, Stephen's mind flickered back to that hot day by the river with the Azaire family. They had encountered other families who came from as far away as Paris for the famous fishing in the Ancre. Perhaps tomorrow he would finally taste "English" teas in the patisserie at Thiepval. He thought of Isabelle's open, loving face; he thought of the pulse of her, that concealed rhythm of her desire that expressed her strange humanity. He remembered Lisette's flushed, flirtatious look and the way she had taken his hand and placed it on her body. That day of charged emotion seemed as unreal and bizarre as the afternoon that was now taking them across the field to the reserve trenches.

As Stephen listened to the sound of men beginning to move off, he looked down at his feet, where the boots beneath the regulation puttees were taking him forward. At that moment, as they left the village and its trappings of normality, time seemed to stall and collapse. The next three days passed in the closing of an eye; yet the images retained a fearful static quality that stayed in the mind until death. On the way up they were given wire cutters.

"I thought the guns would cut the wire," said Byrne. "Two gas masks? Why two?"

Tipper was smiling madly while Price attached a tin triangle to his back. "So the observers at the rear can see you, young man," said Price. The air overhead was solid metal, the ground trembling with the bombardment.

There were new images, even for experienced men. The reserve and communications trenches like railway carriages in the rush hour, and only Price's barked instructions keeping some thread of order. Harrington's platoon on a wrong turning, heading in the direction of Serre. B Company, under Lucas, completely lost. The sweat of moving packs of eighty pounds through the crush of bewildered, nervous men. A sudden summer storm coming in from Pozières, drenching the German lines then drifting west and turning the earth to mud beneath the press of British feet. All of these things happening at once.

There was Michael Weir standing on raised ground, gazing toward Hawthorn Ridge. Stephen pulled himself out of the trench and went to him. Weir's face was lit by a strange excitement. "There's going to be a bang there the size of which will make you gasp," he said. "We've just laid the fuses. Firebrace is underground burying the cable."

Stephen had a moment of lucidity. "What will you do tomorrow? Where will you be?" His voice was puzzled, concerned.

"Watching from a safe distance." Weir laughed. "Our work is done. A few of my men have volunteered to be stretcher-bearers if manpower gets short. We're hoping to join you for a hot dinner. Don't the German lines look beautiful?" Stephen saw yellow gorse and weed along the longestablished lines, with white chalk marks across the hills where the main defences were dug. A towering red mist hung over them where the brick of the villages was pulverized by the bombardment. Cones of shrapnel exploded with white and yellow light. A faint rainbow was coming up above them as the sun began to press back the storm clouds.

Weir grinned. "Happy?"

Stephen nodded. "Oh yes."

He rejoined the flow of men through the trench. He thought: this thing has its own momentum now; I am being borne away by it. "Poor Fritz," said a voice. "He must be mad by now under those guns."

Hunt was at his side, panting beneath his pack. A small wooden cage was attached to it. It contained two pigeons. Stephen looked at their blank, marbled eyes.

There was just the night to negotiate, then it would begin. They were in position. Somehow Price had found their place, and Corporal Petrossian with his mania for detail had got the platoon lined up correctly. The trench was a good one.

"Best parados I've seen," said Petrossian. "And at last a front with full wooden revetting."

"Look, it's the reserve padre!"

Horrocks in white cassock over khaki trousers, bald head gleaming, was standing with bands and prayer book on raised ground like a useless earth-bound bird; the real and only padre, but known as the reserve because he never ventured beyond the back lines. Some jittering movement among the men, nonbelievers finding faith in fear. A shameful flock formed round the padre.

Stephen Wraysford joined them. He saw the still-earth-grimed face of Jack Firebrace. Arthur Shaw, a big solemn man beside him.

His own men, those who would attack in the morning, knelt on the earth, faces hidden behind one hand, in an agonizing tunnel of their own, a darkness where there was no time but where they tried to look on death. The padre's words were hard to distinguish against the bombardment.

Stephen found something more than humility, a feeling of complete inconsequence. He pressed his hand against his face, particles of flesh, pathetic Lincolnshire boy. He felt no fear for his blood and muscle and bone, but the size of what had begun, the number of them now beneath the terrible crashing of the sky, was starting to pull at the moorings of his self-control.

He found the word Jesus in his mouth. He said it again and again beneath his breath. It was part prayer, part profanity. Jesus, _Jesus... _This was the worst; nothing had been like this.

The wafer was in his mouth and the sweet wine, but he wanted more. Communion was over, but some men could not stand up again. They stayed kneeling. Having communed with their beginnings, they wanted to die where they were without enduring the day ahead of them, Stephen returned to the trench to find the men in disarray.

"It's been postponed for two days," said Byrne. "It's too wet." Stephen closed his eyes. Jesus. Jesus. He had been ready to go.

Gray's face was a line of whipped anxiety. They went together to a small hill made by the excavation of earth from a tunnel.

"Let us be calm," said Gray. Stephen could see how hard he was finding it.

"Let me recap the plan. The artillery lays down a protective barrage in front of you. You advance at walking pace behind the barrage. When it lifts, you take your objectives, then wait for it to begin again. It provides protection for you all the way. The German wire is already cut and many of their guns destroyed. Casualties will be ten per cent."

Stephen smiled at him. "Do you think so?"

Gray breathed in deeply. "I am giving you our orders. We are on the flank of the main attack. Our battalion is to be flexible. We are in the midst of great fighting units. The Ulsters, the Twenty-ninth Division--the Incomparables, fresh from Gallipoli."

"Fresh?" said Stephen.

Gray looked at him. "If I die, Wraysford, and you are still alive, I want you to take charge of the company."

"Me? Why not Harrington?"

"Because you are a mad, cold-hearted devil and that is what we are going to need."

The light was going down, and Gray raised his binoculars to his face for perhaps the twentieth time that day. He passed them to Stephen. "There's a banner over there above the enemy frontline trench. Can you see what it says?" Stephen looked. There was a huge placard. "Yes. It says 'Welcome to the Twenty-ninth Division.'" He felt sick.

Gray shook his head. "The wire isn't cut, you know. I don't want you to tell your men, but I've been up and down with these things and I can assure you that for stretches of hundreds of yards there is no shell damage at all. The shells have just not gone off."

"I thought it was cut from here to Dar es Salaam."

"It's a staff cockup. Haig, Rawlinson, the lot. Don't tell your men, Wraysford. Don't tell them, just pray for them."

Gray held his head in his hands. His wisdom and his shelves full of books were no good to him here, Stephen thought.

In their forty-eight hours of unwanted reprieve the men had more time to ready themselves.

The first rifle fire came with a falsetto crack. Barnes had shot himself through the palate.

At nightfall they wrote letters.

Michael Weir wrote:

Dear Mother and Father,

We are going to attack. We have been making preparations for some days underground. My own unit has been involved and we have now done our bit. Some of the men have volunteered to help as stretcher-bearers on the day. Morale is very high. We expect that this push will end the war. It is unlikely that many of the enemy will have survived our bombardment.

Thank you for the cake and the strawberries. I'm glad the garden is such a joy to you. We certainly all enjoyed the fruit. I think often of you both and of our quiet life at home, but I ask you not to worry about me. May your prayers be with the men who will go over the top. Thank you for the soap, Mother, which I assure you was put to good use. I was pleased that your evening with the Parsons was such a success. Please pass on my sympathy to Mr. and Mrs. Stanton. I have only just heard about their son.

I am sure I paid the account at the tailor's when I was on leave, but do settle it on my behalf if I am mistaken and I will repay you on my next leave. Don't worry about me, please. It is warm enough here. A little too warm if anything--so there is nothing further I need, no more socks or pullovers.

From your son, Michael.

Tipper wrote:

Dear Mum and Dad,

They sent me back to join my pals and I am so proud to be back with them. It's a terrific show with all the bands and the men from other units. Our guns are putting on a display like Firework Night. We are going to attack and we can't wait to let Fritz have it! The General says we don't expect no resistance at all because our guns have finished them off. We were meant to go over yesterday, but the weather was not so good.

The waiting is awful hard. Some of the chaps are a bit downhearted. That fellow Byrne I told you about, he come up and told me not to worry. I'm pleased to hear Fred Campbell has kept safe so far. Good show.

Well, my dear Mum and Dad, that's all I've got to say to you. Tomorrow we will know if we will be seeing each other again one day. Don't worry about me. I am not frightened of what is waiting for me. When I was a little lad you were very good to me and I won't let you down. Please write to me again, I do like so much to hear the news from home. Please send me a couple of views of St. Albans. Give my love to Kitty. You have been the dearest Mum and Dad to me.

From your Son, John.

Stephen choked when he read the letter and sealed the envelope. He thought of Gray's face and its experienced foreboding. He felt a terrible anger coming over him. He tore a page from his notebook and wrote: Dear Isabelle, I am sending this to you at the house in Amiens where it will probably be destroyed, but I am writing to you because I have no one else to write to. I am sitting beneath a tree near the village of Auchonvillers, where we once came to spend a day.

Like hundreds of thousands of British soldiers in these fields I am trying to contemplate my death. I write to you to say that you are the only person I have ever loved.

This letter will probably never find you, but I wanted to tell someone what it feels like to be sitting on this grass, on this Friday in June, feeling the lice crawl against my skin, my stomach filled with hot stew and tea, perhaps the last food I will eat, and hearing the guns above me crying out to heaven.

Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers--fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.

I am frightened of dying. I have seen what shells can do. I am scared of lying wounded all day in a shellhole. Isabelle, I am terribly frightened I shall die alone with no one to touch me. But I have to show an example.

I have to go over first in the morning. Be with me, Isabelle, be with me in spirit. Help me to lead them into what awaits us.

With my love always, Stephen.

Jack Firebrace wrote:

Dear Margaret,

Thank you for your letter. My words cannot say how sad I am. He was our boy, he was the light of our life.

But dear Margaret we must be strong. I worry about you so much, what it must be like for you. There are things here to take my mind off it all right. I believe it was God's will. We would have kept him, but God knew best. Do you remember how he used to chase the dandelion seed down by the canal and the funny words he had for things he couldn't say when he was a baby?

I think about these things all the time and God is merciful. He has given back to me memories of him when he was a little boy, lots of little things have come back to me. I think about them when I lie down at night and they are a comfort to me. I imagine he is in my arms.

His life was a blessing to us, it was a gift from God. It was the best gift we could have had. We must be thankful.

Tomorrow the men are going to attack and I think we will win a big victory. Soon the war will be over and I will be home again to look after you. With love from your husband, Jack.

Byrne, who was not, like the other men, a regular correspondent, found a small piece of paper on which to write to his brother. He wrote very neatly in blue ink.

Dear Ted,

These are a special few lines for you in case we don't meet again. We are going to attack tomorrow, everything is absolutely thumbs-up merry and bright and trusting to the best of luck.

I ask you to remember me to my very many, very dear friends.

Please give my fondest love to Ma, to Tom and Daisy and the babies. Here's hoping it is au revoir and not good-bye.

Your loving brother, Albert.

When he had finished he could not bring himself to seal the envelope. He took the letter out again and wrote diagonally across the bottom: "Cheer-oh, Ted, don't worry about me, I'm OK."

Eight hours before the revised time of attack the guns went quiet, preserving shells for the morning.

It was nighttime, but no man slept. Tipper gazed with incredulity at Leslie and Studd. No magic or superstition could get him out now. His last chance had gone. He had only to hold himself together until dawn.

Stephen looked deep into Byrne's face beside him. When Byrne looked back, Stephen could not meet his gaze. Byrne had guessed.

He went to Hunt, who was kneeling on the trench floor, praying. He touched his shoulder, then laid his hand on his head. He came to Tipper and punched him on the shoulder, then shook his hand vigorously.

Smith and Petrossian, the corporals, were checking kit, pushing among the reluctant men.

Brennan was sitting alone, smoking. "I was thinking of Douglas," he said. Stephen nodded. Brennan began to sing an Irish song.

He saw Byrne reach out his arm and gather Tipper to his chest. "Not long to go now, not long to go."

Toward four, the lowest time of the night, there was a mortal quiet along the line. No one spoke. There was for once no sound of birds.

There was at last a little light over the raised ground and mist down by the river. It began to rain.

Gray, urgent, sour-breathed at the head of the communication trench. "The attack will be at seven-thirty."

The platoon commanders were stricken, disbelieving. "In daylight? In _daylight"?" _The men's faces, cowed and haunted when they were told. Breakfast came with tea in petrol cans. Hunt's earnest features bent over bacon on a tiny stove.

Stephen felt the acid of a sleepless night run from his stomach to his tongue. Then came the rum, and talk began again. Men drank greedily. Some of the younger boys staggered and laughed. German artillery fire, which had been sporadic, began to build, to the surprise of the men who had been told that the German guns had been destroyed.

The British reply started up. At last the men were close enough to see what it did and were cheered by it. Studd and Leslie, breathing rum, waved their arms in the air and shouted. They could see the earth ripped up in fountains in front of the German trenches.

The noise overhead began to intensify. Seven-fifteen. They were almost there. Stephen on his knees, some men taking photographs from their pockets, kissing the faces of their wives and children. Hunt telling foul jokes, Petrossian clasping a silver cross.

The bombardment reached its peak. The air overhead was packed solid with noise that did not move. It was as though waves were piling up in the air but would not break. It was like no sound on earth. Jesus, said Stephen, Jesus, Jesus. The mine went up on the ridge, a great leaping core of compacted soil, the earth eviscerated. Flames rose to more than a hundred feet. It was too big, Stephen thought. The scale appalled him. Shock waves from the explosion ran through the trench. Brennan was pitched forward off the firestep and broke his leg. We must go now, thought Stephen. No word came. Byrne looked questioningly at him. Stephen shook his head. Still ten minutes.

German fire began at once. The lip of the British trench leapt and spat soil where the machine guns raked it. Stephen ducked. Men shouting.

"Not yet." Stephen screaming. The air above the trench now solid. The second hand of his watch in slow motion. Twenty-nine past. The whistle in his mouth. His foot on the ladder. He swallowed hard and blew.

He clambered out and looked around him. It was for a moment completely quiet as the bombardment ended and the German guns also stopped. Skylarks wheeled and sang high in the cloudless sky. He felt alone, as though he had stumbled on this fresh world at the instant of its creation.

Then the artillery began to lay down the first barrage and the German machine guns resumed. To his left Stephen saw men trying to emerge from the trench but being smashed by bullets before they could stand. The gaps in the wire became jammed with bodies. Behind him the men were coming up. He saw Gray run along the top of the trench, shouting encouragement.

He walked hesitatingly forward, his skin tensed for the feeling of metal tearing flesh. He turned his body sideways, tenderly, to protect his eyes. He was hunched like an old woman in the cocoon of tearing noise.

Byrne was walking beside him at the slow pace required by their orders. Stephen glanced to his right. He could see a long, wavering line of khaki, primitive dolls progressing in tense deliberate steps, going down with a silent flap of arms, replaced, falling, continuing as though walking into a gale. He tried to catch Byrne's eye but failed. The sound of machine guns was varied by the crack of snipers and the roar of the barrage ahead of them.

He saw Hunt fall to his right. Studd bent to help him and Stephen saw his head opening up bright red under machine-gun bullets as his helmet fell away. His feet pressed onward gingerly over the broken ground. After twenty or thirty yards there came a feeling that he was floating above his body, that it had taken an automatic life of its own over which he had no power. It was as though he had become detached, in a dream, from the metal air through which his flesh was walking. In this trance there was a kind of relief, something close to hilarity. Ten yards ahead and to the right was Colonel Barclay. He was carrying a sword.

Stephen went down. Some force had blown him. He was in a dip in the ground with a bleeding man, shivering. The barrage was too far ahead. Now the German guns were placing a curtain of their own. Shrapnel was blasting its jagged cones through any air space not filled by the machine guns.

All that metal will not find room enough, Stephen thought. It must crash and strike sparks above them. The man with him was screaming inaudibly. Stephen wrapped his dressing round the man's leg, then looked at himself. There was no wound. He crawled to the rim of the shellhole. There were others ahead of him. He stood up and began to walk again.

Perhaps with them he would be safer. He felt nothing as he crossed the pitted land on which humps of khaki lay every few yards. The load on his back was heavy. He looked behind and saw a second line walking into the barrage in no-man's-land. They were hurled up like waves breaking backward into the sea. Bodies were starting to pile and clog the progress.

There was a man beside him missing part of his face, but walking in the same dreamlike state, his rifle pressing forward. His nose dangled and Stephen could see his teeth through the missing cheek. The noise was unlike anything he had heard before. It lay against his skin, shaking his bones. Remembering his order not to stop for those behind him, he pressed slowly on, and as the smoke lifted in front of him he saw the German wire.

It had not been cut. Men were running up and down it in turmoil, looking for a way through. They were caught in the coils, where they brought down torrents of machine-gun fire. Their bodies jerked up and down, twisting and jumping. Still they tried. Two men were clipping vainly with their cutters among the corpses, their movement bringing the sharp disdainful fire of a sniper. They lay still. Thirty yards to his right there was a gap. He ran toward it, knowing it would be the focus of machine-gun fire from several directions. He breathed in as he reached it, clenching for his death.

His body passed through clean air and he began to laugh as he ran and ran then rolled down into a trench, bumping his heavy pack on top of him. There was no one there.

Alive, he thought, dear God, I am alive. The war lifted from him. It is just a piece of field beneath a French heaven, he thought. There are trees beyond the noise, and down in the valley is the fish-filled river. He was aware of a thirst that was flaying his throat, and he took his water bottle. The warm, shaken fluid ran down inside and made him close his eyes in ecstasy.

There was no one in the trench. He moved along the duckboards. It was beautifully made, with high parapets, revetting as neat as Sussex weatherboards, and tidy entrances to deep dugouts. He looked back toward the British line, each foot of which was pathetically exposed to fire from this superior position. Through the smoke of the German barrage he could see the scruffy line still straggling on, driven by some slow, clockwork purpose into the murder of the guns. The trench was dogtoothed after twenty yards or so. He could not see what lay beyond. He crept up and threw a grenade over the traverse, then ducked down. No answering fire came. He stood up and the lip of the trench spat earth in his eyes where a machine gun was firing from the second line. Stephen presumed that most of the men who had begun the attack with him were dead. The second wave had not reached this far and perhaps never would. He reasoned that he should try to retreat and join a later attack, but his orders were to press on past Beaumont-Hamel as far as Beaucourt, on the river. The soldier's motto, Price had told the men: when in doubt go forward.

He moved down the trench and found a ladder. As the machine-gun fire licked at the earth ahead of him, he crawled forward on the open ground, then ran, crouching, to a shellhole. Six men of the Lancashire Fusiliers were firing doggedly at the German reserve trench. He was almost impaled on a bayonet as he slithered into the hole.

A man firing looked at him and mouthed something Stephen could not hear. The lips seemed to be saying "fucking dead". The man plucked at Stephen's regimental badge, then cut his throat with his finger and pointed back over his shoulder toward the carnage of no-man's-land. They had a Lewis gun on the floor of the shellhole, and from what Stephen could gather were trying to get it up behind some trees from where they would sweep the trench.

Stephen shook his head and placed his rifle on the rim of the shellhole. He began firing. An hour, perhaps two, passed under the growing return fire from the second-line trench. There was barely any damage to the defences. The wire was uncut, the dugouts intact. The counterattack would shortly begin.

Stephen looked round the shellhole at the exhausted faces of the Lancashire men. They knew they were trapped.

Something moved beneath his feet. It was the face of a man whose brain was sliding out through his eye socket. He shouted out to be killed, but since he was not of his own regiment, Stephen demurred. He gave him his second water bottle, and when he bent down with it the man begged to be shot. In the noise of the battle, Stephen thought, no one would know. He fired twice down by his feet. It was the first life he had taken that day.

Jack Firebrace stood with Arthur Shaw on raised ground near what they had called One Tree Hill, watching. They expected a swift passage, almost unopposed. Jack was muttering, Shaw saying nothing at all. They saw the Scots coming up out of their burrows like raving women in their skirts, dying in ripples across the yellowish-brown soil. They saw the steady tread of the Hampshires as though they had willingly embarked on a slow-motion dance from which they were content not to return. They saw men from every corner walking, powerless, into an engulfing storm.

Their own contribution to the day, the vast hole that had been blown at twenty past seven, had given the enemy ten minutes in which to take their positions at leisure. By the crater they saw young men dying in quantities that they had not dreamed possible. They had not fired a shot.

The excess of it made them clutch each other's arms in disbelief.

"They can't let this go on," said Jack, "they can't." Shaw stood with his mouth open. He was unmoved by violence, hardened to the mutilation he had seen and inflicted, but what he was watching here was something of a different order.

Please God, let it stop, thought Jack. Please let them send no more men into this hurricane.

The padre, Horrocks, came and stood with them. He crossed himself and tried to comfort them with words and prayers.

Jack turned his face away from what he saw, and he felt something dying in him as he turned.

Shaw had begun to weep. He held his miner's hands to the sides of his head and the tears coursed down his face. "Boys, boys," he kept saying. "Oh my poor boys."

Horrocks was trembling. "This is half of England. What are we going to do?" he stammered.

Soon they all fell silent. There was an eruption from the trench below and another wave went up into the pitted, moonlike landscape, perhaps Essex or Duke of Wellington's, it was impossible to see. They made no more than ten yards before they began to waver, single men at first picked out, knocked spinning, then more going as they reached the barrage; then, when the machine guns found them, they rippled, like corn through which the wind is passing. Jack thought of meat, the smell of it.

Horrocks pulled the silver cross from his chest and hurled it from him. His old reflex still persisting, he fell to his knees, but he did not pray. He stayed kneeling with his palms spread out on the ground, then lowered his head and covered it with his hands. Jack knew what had died in him.

Stephen thought of the brief communion he had enjoyed as he stood for better position on the body of the man he had killed. Nothing was divine any more; everything was profane. In the roar about his head he could make out only one word with any clarity.

"... the fucking Lewis gun... fucking eaten alive."

Still in the shattering noise, they had to break out and kill their killers. Two men got the Lewis gun to the rim of the crater, but were taken by a storm of bullets as they slowed to drag the clumsy ammunition bucket. The others were left with Stephen, trying to surrender. One man throwing a white handkerchief, climbing out, was hit with silent precision in the eye.

Stephen looked behind, to where a line of support troops was coming forward in extended order, organized and balanced, toward them. Thirty yards back they caught the range of machine guns, which traversed them with studied care until every man had gone down in a diagonal line from first to last. There was no movement from the bodies.

He shouted in the ear of the man next to him who shouted back but all one could hear was "Jesus" and the other "Fucking gun." Stephen threw both his Mills bombs a short way ahead, and, as they went off, ran backward on his own to a ditch behind a small clump of elms into which he flung himself.

It was noon and the sun was very hot above him. No clouds swathed it, no breeze cooled him. The noise had not diminished. He became aware of an acute exhaustion. He wanted to sleep. He reached down for his water bottles, but both were gone.

In the fighting round the German trenches there was confusion. He saw men unsure of which way they should be advancing. The trench he had entered earlier in the morning had been retaken by the enemy. A new attack on them was rolling forward behind him.

He believed he had to go on. The sense of elation had left him, but some automatic determination seemed to have taken its place. First he had to drink or he would die. His tongue was swollen like an ox's; it was like two tongues in his mouth. He thought of the river Ancre, down the hill to his right. He had lost all his men, so it made no difference where he fought. He stood up and began to run.

He saw men from a colonial regiment, Canadians he thought, go forward through a narrow gap down toward a ravine. In the forty minutes it took him to skirt the back of them he had seen a battalion laid horizontal on the field. Only three men reached the German wire, where they were shot.

He was running, raging, in a dream, downhill toward the river. He saw a familiar figure to his right. It was Byrne, bleeding in the right bleep, but moving.

"What happened?" he screamed.

"Wiped out," Byrne shouted in his ear. "Colonel's dead. Two company commanders. We're supposed to regroup and attack again with the Fusiliers."

"On the river?"

"Yes."

"What happened to you?"

"I went back and came again. The second wave were killed in the trench. You can't move for bodies."

"Have you got water?"

Byrne shook his head.

Toward the German lines they came across boys sleeping in shellholes. Nights of wakefulness beneath the bombardment, the exertion of the morning had proved too much, even in the range of enemy guns.

Shellfire was beginning again and Byrne and Stephen lay down with a sleeping boy and a man who must have been dead for some hours. Part of his intestine lay slopped out on the scooped soil of the shellhole where the sun began to bake it.

On the left a sergeant's mouth was moving hugely as he tried to urge men forward to another assault on the German trench that ran down to the railway track.

"There's some of our mob," said Byrne.

It was Harrington's platoon, or what was left of them.

"We must go with them," said Stephen.

Once more in ragged suicidal line they trudged toward the pattering death of mounted guns. Bloodied beyond caring, Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror.

Harrington was screaming where his left side had been taken by a shell, fumbling morphine tablets in his trembling hands.

Sniper fire began from the clogged shellholes toward the trench, then one final heave forward. A boy was whipped backward against a tree by the power of the blast into his shoulder, others were falling or diving to the ground their own guns had chewed.

Byrne made stealthy progress toward the screaming boy. He got in behind the tree, the bark of which was flaking under lateral fire. Stephen saw the white of a field dressing flap as Byrne began to bind the wounds. Stretcher parties were coming up behind them, but were bringing long, waving lines of fire into their upright progress.

Stephen dropped his face into the earth and let it fill his mouth. He closed his eyes because he had seen enough. You are going to hell. Azaire's parting words filled his head. They were drilled in by the shattering noise around him. Byrne somehow got the boy back into the shellhole. Stephen wished he hadn't. He was clearly going to die.

Harrington's sergeant was shouting for another charge and a dozen men responded. Stephen watched them reach the first line of wire before he realized that Byrne was with them. He was trying to force a way through the wire when he was caught off the ground, suspended, his boots shaking as his body was filled with bullets.

Stephen lay in the shellhole with the boy and the man who had died in the morning. For three hours until the sun began to weaken he watched the boy begging for water. He tried to close his ears to the plea. On one corpse there was still a bottle, but a bullet hole had let most of it leak away. What was left was a reddish brown, contaminated by earth and blood. Stephen poured it into the boy's beseeching mouth.

Wounded men all round him tried to get up and retreat, but only brought eruptions of machine-gun fire. They sniped back doggedly from where they lay. When there was no fire from no-man's-land, the Germans in the second trench sniped at the bodies on the wire. Within two hours they had blown Byrne's head, bit by bit, off his body, so that only a hole remained between his shoulders. Stephen prayed for darkness. After the first minute of the morning he had not sought to save his own life. Even when his body opened itself to the imaginary penetration of the bullets as he ran through the gap in the wire, he had felt resigned. What he longed for was an end to the day and to the new, unlivable reality it had brought.

If night would fall, the earth might resume its natural process, and perhaps, in many years' time, what had happened during daylight could be viewed as an aberration, could be comprehended within the rhythm of a normal life. At the moment it seemed to Stephen to be the other way about: that this was the new reality, the world in which they were now condemned to live, and that the pattern of the seasons, of night and day, was gone.

When he could no longer bear the smell of the flesh in his shellhole, he decided to run, come what may. A small attack on his left was temporarily drawing the German machine guns toward it and when he judged the moment right, by luck or fate or superstition, he ran weaving backward, with several others who could not wait for nightfall.

Close to collapse, he staggered downhill toward the river, to the drink he had craved since noon. He left his rifle on the bank and stumbled down into the water. He dropped his head beneath the sluggish flow and felt it rush down into the pores of his skin. He opened his mouth like a fish.

He stood on the river bed, trying to hold himself together. He trailed his hands with the palms turned up as though in supplication. The noise pressed against his skull on both banks of the river. It would not diminish. He thought of Byrne, like a flapping crow on the wire. Would they pour water down the hole of his neck? How would he drink? He tried to calm his thoughts. Byrne was dead: he had no need of water. It was not his death that mattered; it was the way the world had been dislocated. It was not all the tens of thousands of deaths that mattered; it was the way they had proved that you could be human yet act in a way that was beyond nature.

He tried to move to the shore, but the current was stronger than he had thought, and as his body neared its final exhaustion, he lost his footing and was carried downstream.

He was surrounded by Germans in the water. A man's face next to his shouting foreign words. Stephen held on to him. Others clasped each other, fighting to get out. All around him the people who had killed his friends, his men. Close to, in their pitted skin and wide eyes, he saw men like himself. An old, grey-haired corporal screaming. A boy, like so many, dark-complexioned, weeping. Stephen tried to hate them now as he had hated them before.

The press of German flesh, wet in the river, all around him, their clogged tunics pressing him, not caring who he was. The whining melee of their uncomprehended voices, shouting for their lives.

There was a_ _narrow bridge above the river, of rough British engineering. The Germans tried to clamber on to it, but the British soldiers stamped on their hands. Stephen looked up at the lone figure of a British private, helmetless, looking down with disdain.

"Get me out," he shouted. "Get me out."

The man held down an arm to him and began to pull. Stephen felt other arms on him in the water. They were tearing at him. The private fired into the river and Stephen was up on the bridge. A few of them looked at him in surprise.

"Prisoners," said the man who had pulled him out. "Why should we help them across the river?"

Stephen reeled off the bridge on to the far bank of the river and lay down in the marshy grass.

Isabelle, the red room, his grandfather's cottage... He tried to focus on fragments of definite memory, to fashion a possible future from the past. His mind fixed on the smell of a musty clerk's office at the East India Docks. For a minute or more he lived in the room above the wharf.

It was dusk, it was close to night, though daylight lingered tauntingly, and with it the noise.

His curiosity began to return. He wanted to know what had happened. He had undertaken that morning to attack and he should move forward, wherever he was. The weight of his pack, now waterlogged, seemed to him such a burden that he forgot he was not carrying a rifle. Above him to the right was the big wood of Thiepval.

He pulled himself up and began to walk toward the German line. An impact took his head as though a brick thrown at great speed had struck his temple, and he fell to the ground.

The next face he saw was not the clerk, or Isabelle or his mother, as he halfexpected, but one of Weir's tunnellers.

"Blimey, you're a long way from home. You must have come a good mile and a half," said the man, unravelling a field dressing.

Stephen grunted. The man's homely voice was too much to remember; it was from another time.

"Tyson's the name. We were all volunteered, if you take my meaning. They stopped attacking up where we were. They sent our mob down here. All the stretcher-bearers got wiped out. The Ulsters have copped it up there. So did your lot."

"What have I got?"

"Flesh wound, I'd say. Left leg. Not even a Blighty one after all that. I'll send Captain Weir over."

Stephen lay back in the shallow shellhole. He could feel no pain in the leg. Price was reading the roll call. Before him were standing the men from his company who had managed to return. Their faces were shifty and grey in_ _the dark. To begin with he asked after the whereabouts of each missing man.

After a time he saw that it would take too long. Those who had survived were not always sure whom they had seen dead. They hung their heads in exhaustion, as though every organ of their bodies was begging for release. Price began to speed the process. He hurried from one unanswered name to the next. Byrne, Hunt, Jones, Tipper, Wood, Leslie, Barnes, Studd, Richardson, Savile, Thompson, Hodgson, Birkenshaw, Llewellyn, Francis, Arkwright, Duncan, Shea, Simons, Anderson, Blum, Fair-brother. Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegram would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without the sound of fathers and their children, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers' shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.

Of 800 men in the battalion who had gone over the parapet, 155 answered their names. Price told his company to dismiss, though he said it without the bark of the parade ground; he said it kindly. They attempted to turn, then moved off stiffly in new formations, next to men they had never seen before. They closed ranks. Jack Firebrace and Arthur Shaw waited for them and asked how they had done. The men walked on as though in a dream, and did not answer. Some of them spat or pushed back their helmets; most of them looked downward, their faces expressionless yet grained with sadness. They went to their tents and lay down.

*

Out in his shellhole, looking up the hill toward Thiepval, Stephen lay, waiting for the darkness to be complete.

Michael Weir slipped in beside him. "Tyson pointed out where you were. How's the leg?"

"It's all right. I'll be able to move. What are you doing here?"

"Volunteered. There's chaos in our front line. There aren't enough trains to get the men out. The field dressing stations are overflowing. The trench you started from is just a mass of bodies, people who never even got going." Weir's voice was unsteady. He was lying against Stephen's injured leg. "Two of the generals have committed suicide. It's terrible, it's terrible, it's--"

"Calm down, Weir, calm down. Move over that way a bit."

"Is that better? What happened to you?"

Stephen sighed and lay back against the earth. The noise was diminishing. The artillery on both sides had stopped, though there were occasional outbreaks of machine-gun fire and the sound of sniping.

"I don't remember," he said. "I don't know. I saw Byrne killed. I thought we'd done well at first. Then I was in the river. I don't know. I'm so tired." It was dark at last. The night poured down in waves from the ridge above them and the guns at last fell silent.

The earth began to move. To their right a man who had lain still since the first attack eased himself upright, then fell again when his damaged leg would not take his weight. Other single men moved, and began to come up like worms from their shellholes, limping, crawling, dragging themselves out. Within minutes the hillside was seething with the movement of the wounded as they attempted to get themselves back to their line.

"Christ," said Weir, "I had no idea there were so many men out there." It was like a resurrection in a cemetery twelve miles long. Bent, agonized shapes loomed in multitudes on the churned earth, limping and dragging back to reclaim their life. It was as though the land were disgorging a generation of crippled sleepers, each one distinct but related to its twisted brothers as they teemed up from the reluctant earth.

Weir was shaking.

"It's all right," said Stephen. "The guns have stopped."

"It's not that," said Weir. "It's the noise. Can't you hear it?" Stephen had noticed nothing but the silence that followed the guns. Now, as he listened, he could hear what Weir had meant: it was a low, continuous moaning. He could not make out any individual pain, but the sound ran down to the river on their left and up over the hill for half a mile or more. As his ear became used to the absence of guns, Stephen could hear it more clearly: it sounded to him as though the earth itself was groaning.

"Oh God, oh God." Weir began to cry. "What have we done, what have we done? Listen to it. We've done something terrible, we'll never get back to how it was before."

Stephen laid his hand on Weir's arm. "Be quiet," he said. "You must hold on." But he knew what Weir was feeling because he had felt it himself. As he listened to the soil protesting, he heard the sound of a new world. If he did not fight to control himself, he might never return to the reality in which he had lived.

"Oh God, oh God." Weir was trembling and whimpering as the sound rose like damp winds scraping down a sky of glass.

Stephen let his exhausted mind slip for a moment. He found himself go with the sound into a world in which there was only panic. He jerked awake, pulled himself back with an effort into the old life that could not be the same, but which might, if he believed in it, continue.

"Hold me," said Weir. "Please hold me."

He crawled over the soil and laid his head against Stephen's chest. He said,

"Call me by my name."

Stephen wrapped his arm round him and held him. "It's all right, Michael. It's all right, Michael. Hold on, don't let go. Hold on, hold on."

ENGLAND 1978--PART THREE

In the tunnel of the Underground, stalled in the darkness, Elizabeth Benson sighed in impatience. She wanted to be home to see if there were any letters or in case the telephone should ring. A winter coat was pressed in her face by the crush of passengers along the aisle of the carriage. Elizabeth pulled her small suitcase closer to her feet. She had returned from a two-day business trip to Germany that morning and had gone straight in to work from Heathrow without returning to her flat. With the lights out she could not see to read her paper. She closed her eyes and tried to let her imagination remove her from the still train in its tight-fitting hole. It was Friday night and she was tired. She filled her mind with pleasant images: Robert at dusk with the strands of grey in his thick hair and his eyes full of plans for the evening; a coat of her own design made up and back from the manufacturer in its clinging polyethylene wrap.

There was a madman in the carriage who began to sing old music hall songs.

"It's a long way to Tipperary... " He grunted and fell silent, as though an elbow had been applied under cover of the darkness.

The train started again, heaving off into the tunnel, the lights surging overhead. At Lancaster Gate, Elizabeth fought her way through the coats and on to the platform. She was relieved to be up in the rain where the traffic moved with the sound of wet tyres on the leaves that had drifted in from behind the railings in Hyde Park. She bent her head against the drizzle, pushing on toward where she could see the green shopfront of the off-licence beam its vulgar welcome.

A few minutes later she laid the suitcase and the clanking plastic carrier bag on the step as she opened the front door to the Victorian house. The mail was still in the wire cage attached to the front door: postcards for the girls upstairs, buff envelopes for all five flats, a gas reminder for Mrs. Kyriades, and, for her, a letter from Brussels.

Up in her flat she ran herself a bath and, when she was comfortably immersed, opened the letter.

If Robert chose to write in addition to his brief, panicky telephone calls, it usually meant he was feeling guilty. Either that or he was genuinely de-tained by the business of the Commission and had not even been home to see his wife.

"... appalling amount of work... boring paper read by the British delegation... Luxembourg next week... hoping to be in London on Saturday... Anne's half-term... " Elizabeth put the letter down on the bathmat and smiled. There were many very familiar phrases, and she was not sure how much of it she believed, but at least she still felt a surge of fondness for him when she read them. The warm water closed over her shoulders as she slid down into the bath. The telephone rang. Naked and dripping on the sitting room carpet, she pressed the receiver to her ear, half-wondering, as she always did, whether there was any electricity in the handset and whether the water on her ear would conduct a shock into her brain. It was her mother, wanting to know if she would go down for tea the next day in Twickenham. By the time she had agreed to go, Elizabeth was dry. It hardly seemed worth getting back into the bath. She dialed a Brussels number and listened to the single European ring. It sounded twenty, thirty times unanswered. She pictured the jumbled sitting room with its piles of books and papers, its unemptied ashtrays and unwashed cups, in which the instrument let out its neglected bleat.

In the hallway of Mark and Lindsay's terraced house there were a pram and a pushchair, round which greetings were exchanged. Elizabeth, in a gesture that had persisted since college days, handed Mark a bottle of wine.

As she stepped into the double sitting room, in which the dividing wall had been knocked through, Elizabeth entered a routine so familiar that she found herself talking, smiling, and behaving as though by predetermined programme. Sometimes when she went to see Mark and Lindsay they had invited other people. Tonight there was a couple from the next street and a man suspiciously on his own. Elizabeth found a cigarette alight in her fingers and red wine sliding down her throat. They were her oldest friends, bound to her by shared experience. Although she often thought the three of them would not now become so close if they were meeting for the first time, the link was surprisingly emotional. Lindsay was an impulsive woman with a domineering tendency; Mark was a homely man of no clear ambition. In their twenties there had often been some other guest who tried to impress with self-important stories or who was anxious to claim positions of political integrity unavailable to the rest; but by now such evenings took a friendly, uninspiring course.

Their lives had changed. Only the children had altered things. At some stage there would be an exchange between the others about behaviour and schools, and she would have to close her ears, partly through boredom, partly through an unacknowledged anguish.

Lindsay had also been through a phase of inviting unattached men when Elizabeth went to visit. For two or three years the previously settled threesome would be augmented by a variety of single men, desperate, divorced, drunk, but more often merely content to be as they were.

"Your trouble," Lindsay once said, "is that you frighten men off."

"Trouble?" said Elizabeth. "I wasn't aware that I was _in _trouble."

"You know what I mean. Look at you. You're so poised, with your smart dresses and your Anouk Aimée good looks."

"You make me sound middle-aged."

"But you know what I mean. Men are such timid creatures, really. You have to be gentle with them. Make them feel safe. To begin with, anyway."

"Then you can do what you like?"

"Of course not. But look at you, Elizabeth. You have to compromise a little. Remember that man David I introduced you to? He's very kind, just your type. You didn't give him a chance."

"You seem to be forgetting that I've got a boyfriend already. I don't need to go pop-eyed and flirtatious with Dennis or David or whatever he's called. I'm spoken for."

"By the Eurocrat, you mean?"

"Robert is his name."

"He's never going to leave his wife. You know that, don't you? They all _say _they will, but they never, ever do."

Elizabeth smiled serenely. "I don't mind whether he does or not."

"Don't tell me you wouldn't rather be married."

"I don't know. I've got a job to do, people to see. I can't suddenly devote my time to searching for a husband."

"And what about children?" said Lindsay. "I suppose you're going to say you don't want children either."

"Of course I'd like children. But I think I need to know why." Lindsay laughed. "You don't need to know anything at all. It's called biology. You're thirty-nine."

"Thirty-eight in fact."

"Your body tells you time is running short. You're no different from the millions of other women in the world. You don't need a reason, for God's sake."

"I think I do. I think one should have some sort of reason for doing something that, on the face of it, is quite unnecessary."

Lindsay smiled and shook her head. "Spinster talk."

Elizabeth laughed. "All right. I will try, I promise. I'll try my hardest to fall spontaneously and exotically in love with Dennis--"

"David."

"With whoever you produce."

After having apparently given up, Lindsay had that night made a final attempt: a man called Stuart. He had tangled fair hair and glasses. He revolved a large wine glass thoughtfully in long fingers.

"What do you do?" he said to Elizabeth.

"I run a clothing company." She disliked being asked this question, thinking people ought to ask new acquaintances who they were rather than what they did, as though their job defined them.

"You say you run it. You're the boss, are you?"

"That's right. I started as a designer about fifteen years ago but I transferred to the business side. We formed a new company and I became the managing director."

"I see. And what's this company called?" said Stuart.

Elizabeth told him and he said, "Should I have heard of you?"

"We supply a couple of chain stores, but they put their own labels on. We do a small amount of what we like to call couture under our own name. Perhaps you've seen the name in that context."

"And what exactly is 'couture'?"

Elizabeth smiled. "It's mostly what you'd call dresses."

As the evening went and Stuart relaxed the defensive tone of his opening cross-examination, Elizabeth found that she quite liked him. She had grown accustomed to people's responses to her. Many of them assumed that there was a polar choice between marriage and work and that the more enthusiastically she had embraced her job, the more vigourously she must have rejected the idea of children or male partnership. Elizabeth had given up trying to explain. She had taken a job because she needed to live; she had found an interesting one in preference to a dull one; she had tried to do well rather than badly. She could not see how any of these three logical steps implied a violent rejection of men or children. Stuart told her that he played the piano. They talked about places they had visited. He didn't give her a long exposition of capital markets or join in competitive argument with Mark; nor did he too obviously flirt or fawn. He laughed at some of the things she said to him, though she noticed that there was an edge of surprise in his amusement, as though something about her had not predisposed him to expect her to be lighthearted. When he did not ask her for her telephone number she was relieved, though also fractionally disappointed.

As she drove the familiar route home, over the river, she let her mind play with the idea of what it would be like to be married. Just by the Fulham Road ABC they had built the pavement out into the road to make it impassable to heavy traffic. It always made her inhale, in an effort to make her narrow car even smaller as it squeezed between the bollards already crimson with the scraped paint of fatter vehicles. Perhaps if she was married her husband would do the driving. Some chance, to judge from the couples she knew.

It was one o'clock when she let herself into the flat. As she turned on the light in the sitting room she saw her still-packed suitcase. She went into the kitchen to make some tea but found she had forgotten to buy any milk on her way back from the Underground. By the sink were her breakfast cup and plate from two days ago, when she had left in a hurry to get to the airport.

She sighed. It didn't matter. Tomorrow was Saturday and she would sleep in as long as she liked. She could read the paper in bed with the radio playing softly in the background and with no one to interrupt her tranquil routine.

It never went quite as smoothly as she planned. To begin with, she had to dress and go out to buy some milk. Then, when she had settled back in bed with the paper and a pot of tea, the telephone rang twice.

There was then at last an hour of perfect solitude. The main article in the paper was prompted, as many others had been, by the sixtieth anniversary of the 1918 armistice. There were interviews with veterans and comments from various historians. Elizabeth read it with a feeling of despair: the topic seemed too large, too fraught, and too remote for her to take on at that moment. Yet something in it troubled her.

In the afternoon she drove down to Twickenham. The firm's accountant had advised that she should run a large car on the company. He said this would impress clients and be what he called tax-efficient. Elizabeth had bought a glistening Swedish sedan with boorish acceleration and a tendency not to start.

"You work too hard, that's your problem," said her mother, pouring tea from a pot with small pink roses set, improbably, on trails of honeysuckle. Françoise was in her middle sixties, a handsome woman with a lined, gentle face on which the shortsightedly applied powder was sometimes visible in little patches on the cheekbones. She retained a certain dignity, given by her posture and the grave light of her blue eyes. Although her grey hair made her look like a grandmother, it was possible to see in her skin and the texture of her face the earlier ages she had lived through; a fairness lingered in the front of her hair; episodes of middle age, even childhood, could be read in the open, only superficially marked, planes of her face.

Conversations with her mother ran on predictable lines, but only up to a point. Naturally Françoise wanted her daughter to be happy and not to look tired when she came to visit, but she did not assume, like Lindsay, that marriage was the way to achieve this end. She had herself married a heavy-drinking man called Alec Benson who was disappointed that Elizabeth was not a boy and had disappeared to Africa shortly after her birth in pursuit of a woman he had met in London. He had returned at intervals and Françoise patiently took him back when he needed a home. She had remained fond of him, but she hoped for something better for her daughter.

On the sideboard there was a photograph of Elizabeth at the age of three being held by her grandmother. It was a family axiom that she had "adored" Elizabeth, who found it disconcerting that she had no recollection of her: she had died the year after the picture was taken. There she was in the photograph, unquestionably doting, though this unreturned love had a ghostly, unnerving quality for Elizabeth.

"I was reading an article about the anniversary of the Armistice," she said to Françoise, who had been following her gaze.

"Yes, the papers are full of it, aren't they?"

Elizabeth nodded. If she knew little about her grandmother, she knew even less about her grandfather. Her mother had occasionally mentioned "that awful war," but Elizabeth had paid little attention. It had reached a stage when it would be embarrassing to ask her mother about him because it would have revealed the state of her ignorance. But something about the war article had unsettled her: it seemed to touch an area of disquiet and curiosity that was connected to her own life and its choices.

"Do you still have any of your father's old papers?" she said.

"I think I threw most of them out when I moved. But there may be some things in the attic. Why do you ask"

"Oh, I don't know. I was just thinking. I feel mildly curious. It must be something to do with my age."

Françoise raised an eyebrow, which was as close as she came to enquiring about Elizabeth's personal life.

Elizabeth ran her hand through her hair. "I feel there's a danger of losing touch with the past. I've never felt it before. I'm sure it _is _something to do with my age."

What she described as a mild curiosity crystallized inside her to a set determination. Beginning with the contents of her mother's attic, she would track this man down: she would make up for the lateness of her interest in him by bringing all her energy to the task. It would be one way, at least, of understanding more about herself.

*

Elizabeth straightened her hair in the mirror. She was wearing a suede skirt, leather boots, and a black cashmere sweater. She pushed the thick dark hair back a little from her ears and turned her head sideways to insert two costume earrings the color of oxblood. There was light mascara on her lashes; the paleness of her skin made her look less Gallic than Lindsay had been suggesting, but there was nevertheless something dramatic in her face that further makeup would have overstated. In any case, it was only Monday morning, time for the late walk to the Lancaster Gate Underground, her mouth still burning from the too-hasty coffee she had bolted as the radio told her it had turned half-past eight.

The train of the Central Line fitted its tube like a bullet in the barrel of a rifle. When it came to its customary sudden, dark, and unexplained halt between Marble Arch and Bond Street, Elizabeth could see the pipes and cables of the tunnel only inches from the shell of the carriage. It was the deepest, hottest line in London, dug by sweating tunnellers on a navvy's day rate. They started again with mysterious smoothness and glided into Bond Street, where a delayed crowd was waiting. Elizabeth got off at Oxford Circus and hurried north through the pedestrians ambling three abreast, none of them looking ahead, then turned left into the area behind the shops.

Once a week regularly and sometimes more often she went to visit Erich and Irene, the principal designers for the company. Both had refused to move from their old office or even to change the name on the door when the new company had been formed five years earlier.

Since she was already late, it would make no difference if she stopped at the local Italian café. She ordered three coffees to take away and Lucca, the plump, grizzled attendant, tore up a Mars bar box for her to balance them on as she made her precarious way to a door a few yards down with a_ _brass nameplate in the brick: BLOOM THOMPSON CARMAN. WHOLESALE, FABRIC AND DESIGN.

"Sorry I'm late," she called as she stepped out of the lift on the second floor and made her way to the open door.

She put the improvised tray down on the desk in the area laughingly known as Reception and went back to close the concertina doors on the lift.

"I brought you some coffee, Erich."

"Thank you." Erich came out of an inner room. He was a man in his early seventies with wild grey hair and gold glasses. His cardigan had holes in the elbows so large that there were in fact no elbows. His chainsmoked Embassy and baggy eyes gave him an air of compressed weariness held at bay only by his nervous, ticking fingers that worked the round dial on the telephone, impatient at its slow returning grind, or skittered his gold scissors through bolts of unshaped cloth.

"Train got stuck in the tunnel as usual," said Elizabeth. She sat on the edge of a desk, moving magazines, pattern books, invoices, and catalogues with her hip. Her skirt lifted over the black woollen tights on her knees. She sipped dangerously from the scalding plastic cup. The coffee tasted of acorns, earth, and steam.

Erich looked at her sadly, his gaze travelling the length of her body, from the thick dark hair, over the line of her thigh and the revealed knee, to the toe of the chestnut leather boot.

"Look at you. What a wife you would have made my son."

"Drink your coffee, Erich. Is Irene here yet?"

"Of course, of course. Since eight-thirty. We've a big buyer coming at twelve, I told you."

"Hence the Saville Row suit?"

"Don't bother me, woman."

"At least brush your hair and take off that cardigan."

She smiled at him as she went through into the workroom to see Irene.

"Don't say it," said Elizabeth.

"What?" said Irene, looking up from a sewing machine.

" 'Look what the cat's dragged in.' "

"I wasn't going to," said Irene. "I'm far too busy for chitchat."

"Here's some coffee. Did you have a nice weekend?"

"Not bad," said Irene. "My Bob was taken poorly Saturday night. Only indigestion as it turned out. He thought it was appendicitis. What a fuss, he made, though. How's your Bob?"

"My Bob? He didn't ring. I don't know. I had a letter, but it's not the same, is it?"

"You tell me. My Bob's never put pen to paper except on the Littlewoods football pool coupon."

"I thought he was an expert on archaeology."

Irene raised an eyebrow. "You shouldn't be so literal, Elizabeth." Elizabeth cleared a space at her desk and began to make telephone calls. There were meetings to arrange, a cloth warehouse to visit, buyers to placate. When Erich had arrived from Austria in 1935 he had left disappointed customers in Vienna who had been prepared to pay well for his exuberant designs. He had first employed Irene as a seamstress but had later become dependent on her as his own energy began to fail. Elizabeth had joined them fifteen years ago, when their order books were growing empty. It had taken time to stop the slide, but then the company had grown rapidly; its headquarters in Epsom employed fifteen people and had flourished at a time of economic difficulty. Inflation ate some of the profits before they were even banked: like Weimar, Erich said. He took a dim view even of success, but his own inspiration was almost exhausted, and most of the company's successful designs came from younger people commissioned by Elizabeth. At lunchtime they closed the office and went to Lucca's café.

"The lasagne is very good today," said Lucca, poised with a stubby bookmaker's ballpoint over his small curling pad.

"Fine," said Elizabeth. "I'll have that."

"Very good choice, Signora," said Lucca. He liked to stand close to Elizabeth so that his vast belly pressed through his spattered white apron and the black cashmere on her shoulder. "I bring you a little salad."

There was always the implication in his manner that this was a particular gift to Elizabeth, made from tiny slices of fresh fennel and pieces of Italian wild mushrooms flown in that morning from Pisa, secretively prepared by himself for fear of arousing the envy of other diners, anointed with the extra-virgin olive oil, and gallantly omitted from the bill.

"Not too much onion, please," said Elizabeth.

"I'll just have wine," said Erich, lighting a cigarette.

"Lasagne for me too," said Irene.

Lucca waddled away, his back view revealing a purple cleft of flesh at the top of his blue-checked trousers. He returned with a litre of dense, inky fluid and three glasses, only one of which he filled.

Elizabeth looked round the restaurant, which was filling with shoppers, workers, even tourists who had strayed north of the shops on Oxford Street. These were the lines of her life, these were the things that concerned her. Order books and Lucca's salad; Robert's awaited calls and the criticism of Lindsay and her mother. Strikes and economic crisis. Trying not to smoke yet keeping the endless check on her weight. A planned holiday with three or four others in a rented house in Spain; a snatched weekend with Robert in Alsace, or even in Brussels itself. Her clothes, her work, her flat: its small orderly ways maintained by just one weekly visit from a cleaner while she was at work. No elaborate system of crèche, day care, and mother's help as exhaustively discussed by her married friends. London in approaching winter, the wail of traffic through the park, and cold Sunday morning walks that issued into jovial meetings in the pubs of Bayswater that seemed to last an hour too long. And the sense of a larger life inside her, excited and confirmed by pictures she saw in galleries, books she read, but particularly by pictures; something unfulfilled, something needing to be understood.

Sometimes she went away on her own to wilder parts of northern England, where she read or walked. She didn't feel self-pity because she could see nothing to feel sorry for; the mundane concerns and preoccupations of her life were interesting to her. She found bed-and-breakfast cottages and small pubs in guidebooks where she sometimes fell into conversation with the owners or with other guests, and sometimes just read by the fire.

Once in a village in the Dales a boy of no more than nineteen began talking to her at the bar of the pub. She was wearing her reading glasses and a thick greyand-white-speckled sweater. He had fair hair and an unconvincing beard. He was at university and had gone off walking in order to do some reading for his studies. He was awkward with her and used set phrases with signalled irony, as though referring to books or films they both knew. He seemed unable to say things without suggesting that they were quotations from someone else. After he had drunk two or three pints of beer he became calmer and told her about his studies in zoology and about his girlfriends at home. He implied a riotous love life. Elizabeth liked his enthusiasm and the pitch of excitement at which he appeared to be living, even in this primitive pub on a Yorkshire hillside with only the landlord's steak-and-kidney pie to come.

It was not until after dinner, when she made her way up the narrow stairs to her room and heard him following, that it occurred to her that his interest was more than conversational. She almost burst out laughing as he took her arm with clumsy caution outside her door. She kissed him on the cheek and told him to get on with his books. When he knocked on the door an hour later, however, she let him in. She was feeling very cold.

He was overwhelmed with gratitude and excitement; he was not able to contain himself even for a minute. In the small and icy hours of the morning he tried again. Elizabeth, reluctant to be awoken from deep sleep after a long day's walk, submitted wearily. He did not want to talk to her in the morning; he wanted to leave as quickly as possible. She felt a little tenderness toward him. She wondered what function the episode had served in his life and in his mythology of himself. She liked living alone, she liked being alone. She ate what she wanted, not proper meals but plates of mushrooms and baked potatoes, grapes, peaches, or soups she made herself. She filled glasses with ice cubes and lemon slices, then poured gin over them, hearing the explosion of the ice, leaving hardly any room for tonic water. She had plastic tops that kept the wine drinkable from one day to the next.

In the cinema, she could drown in the sensuous load of picture and sound without the distraction of company or conversation. In the worst films she wandered off from the story and inhabited the scenery in a plot of her own. She felt selfconscious about going unaccompanied in case she should meet a couple she knew hand-in-hand in the foyer on their evening out; so she generally went on Saturday afternoon, entering in the after-lunch daylight, emerging in the darkness with the full evening still ahead.

By the end of a weekend she did want to talk to someone. She had read articles in the papers or seen something on the television that had set her mind moving; she needed to test her response.

"What do you know about the war, Irene?" she said. "You know, the First World War."

" 'Pack up your troubles' and all that stuff?" said Irene. "Terrible business, wasn't it?"

"Did your father fight in it?" said Elizabeth, cutting the hairy, internal stalk from the centre of a quartered tomato.

"I don't think so. I never asked him. But he fought in something because I've seen his medals."

"When was he born?"

"Well, he wasn't thirty when I was born, so he must have been born about eighteen ninety-five I should think."

"So he was the right age?"

"Search me. I don't know when the wretched thing was. You ask Erich. Men know all about these things."

Erich poured what remained of the litre carafe into his glass. "Even I am not old enough to have fought. I do remember it a little. I was a school-boy."

"But what was it _like?" _said Elizabeth.

"I have no idea. I don't think about war. In any case your English schools should have taught you all about it."

"Perhaps they did. I don't seem to have been paying attention. It all seemed so boring and depressing, all those battles and guns and things."

"Exactly," said Erich. "It's morbid to dwell on it. I've seen enough of that kind of thing in my own lifetime without raking up the past."

What are you suddenly so interested in ancient history for?" said Irene.

"I'm not sure it _is _ancient history," said Elizabeth. "It isn't very long ago. There must be old men alive now who fought in it."

"You ought to ask my Bob. He knows everything."

"I bring you coffee now?" said Lucca.

*

The road swept down into Dover on a wide, banking curve that overlooked the locked, grey sea to her left. Some childish sense of joy came up in Elizabeth at the sight of the water; it was the start of holidays, it was the end of England. On a Thursday evening in winter, it was like breaking bounds.

She drove, as instructed, beneath towering gantries, up a ramp, and down through narrow marked lanes, peering round the piece of paper that a man in a kiosk had slapped on to the middle of her windscreen. She was waved to the head of an empty file. She got out of the car and felt the sea wind whip her hair. There were two container lorries to her left and a dozen or so smaller goods vehicles between marked lines round the dock; it was not a popular crossing. In the shop she bought a map of northeast France, and another of the motorways of Europe that would help her on to Brussels.

In the trembling hold of the ship she gathered up her book, her spectacles, and a spare sweater, in case she should decide to go on deck. She gratefully escaped the diesel fumes of the huge articulated trucks and climbed the steep stairs to the passenger decks.

She felt a little presumptuous. Having lived to the age of thirty-eight without giving more than a glance to the occasional war memorial or dull newsreel, she was not sure what she now expected to find. What did a "battlefield" look like? Was it a prepared area of conflict with each side's positions marked down? Wouldn't buildings and trees get in the way? Perhaps the people who now lived in these places would be sensitive about them; they might resent the arrival of some morbid sightseer, come like a tourist who hovers with his camera at the edge of an air crash. More probably, she thought, they would know nothing about it. It was all a very long time ago. "Battle of What?" they would say. The only person she could remember evincing an interest in these things was a boy she had known at school: a funny, gentle creature with a wheezy voice who was good with algebra. Would history be there for her to see, or would it all have been tidied away? Was it fair to expect that sixty years after an event--on the whim of someone who had shown no previous interest--a country would dutifully reveal its past to her amateur inspection? Most of France was now like England in any case: tower blocks and industry, fast food and television.

She pushed back her hair, settled her glasses, and took out the book that Irene's Bob had given her to read. She found it hard going. It seemed addressed to insiders, people who already knew all the terminology and all about the different regiments; it reminded her of the aircraft magazines her father had bought for her during his final attempt to turn her into the male child he had wanted. Still, in some of the book's more matter-of-fact moments, the calmly given statistics and geography, there was something that held her attention. Most eloquent of all were the photographs. There was one of a moon-faced boy gazing with shattered patience at the camera. This was his life, his actuality, Elizabeth thought, as real to him as business meetings, love affairs; as real as the banal atmosphere of the crosschannel ferry lounge, known to every modern holiday-maker in Britain: his terror and imminent death were as actual and irreversible to him as were to her the drink from the bar, the night in the hotel ahead, and all the other fripperies of peacetime life that made up her casual, unstressed existence.

Although her grandmother was French, she did not know the country well. She fumbled for words as the expressionless policeman thrust his hand through her car window at the dock and made some rapid, guttural demand. The big lorries shuddered on the quayside; no other cars seemed to have made this winter crossing to a cold, dark continent.

Out of Calais, she found the road south. Her mind turned to Robert. She pictured the evening they would spend in Brussels. He was good at finding restaurants where he would not see anyone he knew and could talk to her without being on his guard. It was not that anyone would have minded; the majority of diplomats and businessmen away from home for long periods made "arrangements" for themselves. Robert was unusual in the double inconvenience of having both his wife and his mistress in England. The thought of this made Elizabeth laugh. It was typical of a certain impracticality in him. The reason he did not want anyone to see them was because he felt guilty. Unlike his worldly confrères, who entertained their women on one of numerous business accounts, introduced them to their friends and even, sometimes, to their wives, Robert pretended that Elizabeth did not exist. This was something she found less appealing, but she had plans for it.

She chose a hotel in the town of Arras, which Bob had told her was near a number of cemeteries and battlefields. The hotel was down a narrow side street that issued into a quiet square. She went through iron gates and up a gravel path to the front door. She stepped inside. To the right was a dining room with low lights in which half a dozen people scattered singly among the many empty tables were taking dinner with an audible sound of cutlery on china. A stooped waiter eyed them from the entrance to the kitchens.

The reception desk was in a nook below the stairs. A woman with ironcoloured hair wound into a bun put down her pen and looked up at her through thick glasses. There was a room with its own bathroom; someone would bring her case up later. Would she be taking dinner in the hotel? Elizabeth thought not. She carried the small case herself, down a long corridor in which the intermittent ceiling lights seemed to grow dimmer the further she went from the stairhead. At last she found the number on the door. It was a vast room in which a riotous wallpaper had been pasted over the original nineteenth-century distemper. A seraglio effect had been attempted with drapes from a canopy around the four-poster bed, though the oval china door handles and the marble-topped bedside tables remained unorientalized. The room had a smell of damp cardboard, or perhaps brown tobacco from an earlier decade, mixed with something sweeter, a prewar aftershave or the attempted concealment of some half-remembered plumbing failure.

Elizabeth went out into the night. Back on the main street she could see the square and the station to her right and the top of a cathedral or substantial church ahead of her. Keeping the spire in view, she went through the narrow streets, looking for somewhere congenial to eat, where a_ _woman on her own would not attract attention. She found herself eventually in a large square that looked a little like the Grand' Place in Brussels. She tried to imagine it full of British troops and their lorries and horses, though she was not sure if they had had lorries in those days, or, come to that, whether they still used horses. She ate in a crowded brasserie full of young men playing table football. Pop music thundered from a speaker perched above the door. Occasionally the noise was augmented by one of the youths revving a two-stroke motorcycle just outside.

She looked up Arras in the index of Bob's book and found references to staff headquarters, transport, and a number of baffling numbers and names of regiments, battalions, and officers. The waiter brought herring with potato salad, both of which seemed to have come from a tin. He deposited a mock-rustic pitcher of red wine next to her glass.

So what did they do in a town, exactly? She had thought of wars being fought in the countryside, on open ground.

She drank some red wine. What did it matter anyway? It was just a stopover on the way to see Robert.

She read a few pages of the book and drank some wine. The combination of the two things awakened a small determination in her: she would understand this thing, she would get it clear in her mind. Her grandfather had fought in it. If she had no children herself she should at least understand what had gone before her; she ought to know what line she was not continuing.

The waiter brought a steak with a towering portion of frites. She ate as much as she could, plying mustard over the surface of the meat. She watched as the juice from it furred the edges of the potatoes, turning them red. She enjoyed the small physical details she noticed on her own; in company she would just have talked and swallowed.

The food and wine brought relaxation. She sat back against the red plasticcovered bench. She saw two of the thinnest and tallest of the young men eyeing her from the bar and looked down quickly to her book in case they should interpret her idleness as encouragement.

Her small determination hardened into something like resolve. What did it matter? It mattered passionately. It mattered because her own grandfather had been here, in this town, in this square: her own flesh and blood.

*

The next day she drove to Bapaume and followed the signs for Albert, a town, Bob had told her, that was close to a number of historic sites and which, according to the book, had a_ _small museum.

The road from Bapaume was dead straight. Elizabeth sat back in her seat and allowed the car to steer itself, with only her left hand resting on the bottom of the wheel. She had slept well in the seraglio, and the hotel's strong coffee and icy mineral water had given her a sense of strange well-being.

After ten minutes she began to see small brown signs by the side of the road; then came a cemetery, like any municipal burial ground, behind a wall, belched on by the fumes of the rumbling container lorries. The signs began to come faster, even though Albert was still some ten kilometres away. Through the fields to her right Elizabeth saw a peculiar, ugly arch that sat among the crops and woods. She took it for a beet refinery at first, but then saw it was too big: it was made of brick or stone on a monumental scale. It was as though the Pantheon or the Arc de Triomphe had been dumped in a meadow.

Intrigued, she turned off the road to Albert on to a smaller road that led through the gently rising fields. The curious arch stayed in view, visible from any angle, as its designers had presumably intended. She came to a cluster of buildings, too few and too scattered to be called a village or even a hamlet. She left the car and walked toward the arch.