“You mad bastard, Wraysford,” said Michael Weir. “You mean you chose to stay when you could have gone home?”

“Home?”

“You know what I mean. England. It’s so lovely at this time of year. I used to go and spend Whitsun with an aunt who lived in Sheringham on the coast of Norfolk. In late May the air was so pure you could get drunk on it. The fields and hedgerows were alive. It was the most beautiful time. And there was a little pub in Burnham Thorpe where–“

“Take me when it’s finished, not before. I’ll show you something in the meantime. The place we’re going next. Have you had your orders?”

“Yes, though they’re not very detailed. We move out on Friday and down to Albert. Just our luck. I thought we’d spend the rest of the war here, but they’ve got so much mining on down there that corps staffs asked for two extra companies. And guess who got chosen. Albert’s the place with the Madonna hanging off the spire, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s going to be a squash. Half the bloody BEF’s going to be there. Whisky?”

“All right,” said Weir.

“On Thursday night, when the rear area’s full of transport, I’m going to take you into the village for a farewell treat.”

“What do you mean?”

“You wait and see. Something you’ve wanted for a long time.” Weir looked suspiciously at Stephen but said nothing. He guessed what Stephen was planning. He had heard from men returning from rest that there was a farmhouse on the other side of the village where a light shone in the window all night. A woman and her daughter, it was said, would work through a whole platoon. The thought of it filled Weir with anxiety. He had first touched female flesh when only seventeen and had recoiled from the possibility it offered. The girl was a year older but seemed to belong to a different generation. Where he felt inhibited and much too young for what she was suggesting, she had a humorous worldliness, as though her long experience made her view the act as the simplest and most natural thing imaginable. What he had heard about and what he wanted to do seemed to him so shameful and so private that he would not want to be seen doing it by anyone at all, even the girl herself. He declined her invitation; he told himself he would wait until he was older.

Meanwhile he looked with bewilderment at the married people he knew, particularly his parents. When they sat in the sitting room of their roomy brick house, reading books or playing cards, he gazed at them with big eyes, picturing scenes of debauchery. When his mother turned to him with a quizzical tilt of her head and laid down her sewing to ask him what he was thinking, he had to focus quickly on her parted hair, her beads and modest layers of clothes, and put from his mind the picture of inflamed organs and the interplay of flesh. Clearly these acts were natural, this was the way the world renewed itself and carried on, but even so, when he watched his parents talking to their married friends, he wondered at the strange conspiracy that kept their actions hidden beneath their demure public behaviour.

He began to invite women to dances or to tea at his parents’ house, but there never seemed to be a question of sex. He held hands occasionally or, if he was lucky, was granted a good-night kiss on the cheek. He went to university, where the small number of women were educated separately with only brief and tightly chaperoned meetings with the men. If he had done it just once, he would have known how to do it again. At the age of twenty-three he thought of trying to contact the girl again to ask if she was still interested, but saw that this was a ridiculous thing to contemplate. He later discovered she was married.

He joined the Royal Engineers two years before the war broke out. The chaste male comradeship offered camouflage. Here at last he would be like everyone else: a man who wanted women but who was–regretfully, but with, in his case, some relief–denied them by circumstances. He could make rueful jokes with the others about their absence and his remarks would be tinged with real remorse. For the first six months of the war he found the relief made him euphoric. He gained a reputation as an eccentric but dependable officer of unquenchable high spirits. With his university background, he was quickly promoted and the men warmed to his ebullience. But as the fighting grew and the shelling intensified, his nerves began to wear. He had not been trained to live in tunnels three feet wide at great depths underground. He did not like the feeling that at any second in the trench he might be killed.

At the age of thirty his lack of physical contact with women became less like an absence in his life than a positive presence. He became tired by his ignorance, no longer envious of other people. He convinced himself that what he had missed could not, by definition, be extraordinary. It was a simple function, unremarkable, and easy for him now to ignore. The thought of ending his abstinence became more and more bizarre and full of practical pitfalls he could never overcome; it became, in the end, unthinkable.

The heavy bombardment had not preceded a major advance by the enemy, as many had feared. It had been the signal only for another short bombardment, and then a resumption of relative quiet.

Patrols went out at night and listened to the sound of German housekeeping: the mending of wire, the sewing on of buttons, the visits of the orderly with his lice powder, and an old Bavarian barber. They were better dug in than their British counterparts and better provided for by mobile kitchens and barrels of beer that came up as far as the reserve trenches. Occasionally at night there would come the sound of a folk song. These were not of the sentimental kind favoured by the British soldiers, but strong, mournful evocations of a loved land.

Stephen, lying in a shellhole with Byrne, felt his body tense with hatred at the sound of them. Many of the men in his platoon felt respect for the Germans, a tolerance in quiet times that seemed to him to border on affection. He felt nothing but an urge to violence; he wanted to answer them with steel and explosive, with metal tearing into soft tissue and spinning on the bone. When the war was over there would be a place for contemplation, even generosity, but in the meantime he treasured his hatred as a means of saving his own life and those of his men. He turned toward Byrne’s cork-blackened face and pressed his lips to his ear, where he whispered so softly that the creak of his tongue against teeth and palate was louder than the words themselves.

“Machine gun at the far end. No activity. All asleep. May as well go back.” The night was helpfully starless; the moon was buried deep behind banks of rain cloud. A fretful wind was not enough to open them and shed light on the ruptured earth in which they lay. Above the occasional rush and murmur of the breeze was the sound of a nightingale.

Stephen fingered his unused knife regretfully. Byrne nodded his head. He carried a two-foot club he had made from a piece of oak. With a short arm swing and a snap of the wrist at impact he had once shattered a German sentry’s skull with it.

They eased out of the shellhole and began the crawl back to their own lines, where, in the most hazardous part of the excursion, they had to cross four rows of wire and roll into the trench without attracting fire, either from German machine guns that were permanently trained on the lip of the British trench, or from their own sentries, startled from a guilty slumber and loosing off at the first sound they heard.

Hunt was the sentry when they returned to the trench. They heard his rifle cock as Byrne knocked against a tin can that dangled on the wire.