Summary

After spending a few more days with Mathilde, Celestin Poux becomes restless and speeds away on his motorcycle. Heinz Gerstacker, a former German soldier, whom Heidi Weiss had contacted, writes to Mathilde. After the trenches at Bingo had fallen, Gerstacker had been taken prisoner by the French. The men who were leading him across what had been no-man's-land, stopped to look at the bodies lying there. There was an old cellar whose door had been partially blown off. When the soldiers had pointed their flashlights down the stairs, Gerstacker had seen a dead soldier wearing German boots. In Mathilde’s imagined chain of events, Benjamin Gordes had returned to look for Kleber at some point during the fighting and had been killed. One of the men had traded boots with Gordes. Mathilde knew that Manech’s mind was too...