She chose a hotel in the town of Arras,

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 iron-coloured 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.