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.”