The story of Anne’s life had tapped a weakness in him he hadn’t known existed. For some days he was persistently troubled by the thought of the small girl running into the field behind her house. He thought of the moment at which she screamed. When he imagined the policeman giving her the news he thought of the incongruity of the lumpish official in his uniform and the minute, uncomprehending girl. The man had brought a simple message: her world, her life as she had known it, was finished. Then Hartmann put himself in her place and tried to imagine what his reaction as a small child might have been. He found it impossible.

At the start of 1917 it had been easy enough for him to make an under-age entry into a demoralized army. In the ensuing eighteen months he had seen men die in their hundreds, some of them known to him, some in terrible pain and some obliterated by shells so that no part of them remained except some ragged piece of flesh in a tree. Although he had felt briefly shocked, Hartmann, like the other soldiers he knew, required only a day or two away from the front to find the wash of normality restore him. He had felt fear for himself and sorrow for the men who died, but it had not gone deep; some instinct, of self-protection perhaps, had shut out any excess of feeling.

Anne’s story troubled him in a low, destabilising way. The unfairness of the persecution by the villagers outraged his sense of justice. What further courage had her parents needed that neither had been able to find? Yet Anne herself, starting from nothing, had contrived it. With none of the basis of family love he took for granted, she had confronted this evil and created a life for herself. From a brief remembered experience of normality she had fashioned a convincing and proper identity.

Hartmann put these thoughts aside and tried to concentrate on work. As he watched the countryside slipping past the window of the train he wondered what business of Antoine’s could be so urgent and so confidential that he couldn’t give even the merest hint of it by telephone. Antoine was someone who enjoyed the exercise of power and discretion, as Hartmann had discovered when they first met in the army; but he was also a trusting and expansive man who wouldn’t have taken pleasure merely in trying to tantalise an old friend.

Hartmann took up a book, but after reading a few pages he put it aside. His thoughts kept returning to Anne. He couldn’t understand what resilience and courage lay inside her. For the first time since it had ended he was forced to think about the war, an episode of such surreal horror that most people could only face it by ignoring it. Yet here, in Anne’s life, was the clear domestic connection with the bizarre nightmare of the trenches. Some parts of her story had seemed a little vague, but Hartmann recognised the events to which she referred. His first job as a junior officer, fresh from hasty training, had been to tell the weary veterans of Verdun that one more push under the dashing General Nivelle would bring them victory. He was roundly disbelieved. There were things, as Anne’s mother had remarked, which are too much for human beings to endure. When the men came down the line after their spell at the front many of them refused to go up again. They had reached a limit beyond which no amount of urging from a fresh-faced officer would propel them. They would defend, but they would no longer attack.

Antoine Lallement, a respected and senior officer, had taken the view that the men could be pushed no further, but that some sort of formal obedience to orders was necessary until the doomed attempt on the cruelly named Chemin des Dames was abandoned.

In the first week of June there had been near-panic at the scale of the mutinies in the regiments around Soissons. There were rumours that exemplary measures had been taken. An entire unit was said to have been rounded up and machine-gunned by its comrades. Hartmann was sceptical of the stories. By this time many junior officers had come up from the ranks and identified too closely with their men to have allowed such things. Nevertheless, as officer in charge of communications with the press, Hartmann was shown an order from the Ministry of War instructing that no news of executions be released without the ministry’s approval, for fear that the Germans or, just as bad, the British, should learn the extent to which morale was beginning to break down.

He had put such events from his mind, thinking only that in the end more lives would be saved if the army stood firm. He wondered now what men like Anne’s father must have felt. He had never heard of murder behind the lines before. It was not exactly surprising but it argued extreme provocation. Yet in the world of continuous noise and death which men had been able to describe only with words like ‘hell’ or ‘inferno’ normal morality was already violated. No one felt inclined to pass judgement on the private actions of others, even on murder. And yet – and here was the pity beyond his imagination – such single actions were connected; they were not entirely random or alone.

He remembered well the public outcry Anne had talked about which followed the newspaper stories that came out after the war concerning two young ensigns, Herduin and Millaud, who had been shot without trial for cowardice at Verdun. It seemed that both men had in fact been exceptionally brave and that their platoons, who had been forced to carry out the executions, did so with tears in their eyes.

He also had a vague recollection of the case of Anne’s father. There had been some uncomfortable stories about the true extent of the 1917 mutinies, and the army, or some of its senior officers, had been anxious to put themselves in a better light, particularly after the bad publicity of the Herduin-Millaud case. The story of how a private soldier had murdered his commanding officer must have seemed a good way to redress the balance and show that severe discipline had been necessary. Many of the newspapers, owned or run by members of the small élite that wielded more power than the ever-changing governments, were only too happy to print stories about the heroism of the murdered officer. Among the people Hartmann knew in Paris it was dismissed as a small attempt at propaganda and quickly forgotten. He had not paused to think how such an event might affect the lives of those intimately concerned.

He was moved also by the picture Anne had given of her parents. He thought of the small girl on her father’s shoulders and wondered what this poor man had been like, with his big moustache and tired eyes and his beloved little daughter. Anne, he thought, could only have been a child of great gentleness, big-eyed, excitable and trusting. And her mother: she sounded a simple woman, dependent on others and presumably beautiful if it was from her that Anne had inherited the light femininity of her bearing. In the brief and mundane connections between the three of them that Anne had sketched he saw a life of tenderness that was enviable. He wondered at how quickly Anne had absorbed its elements to be able to make such a person of herself.

In the past Hartmann had felt sympathy for friends who were distressed, even the odd rush of unexplained compassion, like the one he had felt for Roussel when they surveyed the house together; but what he felt for Anne was something more unsettling, a feeling which was complicated by his continuing desire for her, which one night at Merlaut had not dispelled.

As well as this aimless pity he felt awe at her composure. Her life began to look like a rebuke of his own – or so he thought – with its privilege and hedonism. It appeared to him that through no fault of his own he was now faced with the responsibility of her happiness; that by playing with her feelings he had invited her to place her trust in him, and now it was his duty to redeem the horror of her childhood.