Upon arriving in Hagenzeele, a fictional place in Flanders, Helen speaks with an official. He supposedly represents the government, but there is no infrastructure present to undergird his authority. The fragility of the bureaucracy in the immediate aftermath of World War I is encapsulated by the austere image of this man in his dilapidated shed, surrounded by ruins.
All this she had from a Central Authority who lived in a board and tar-paper shed on the skirts of a razed city full of whirling lime-dust and blown papers.
This is the first image the narrator dwells on after Helen has crossed the channel and taken a train to find Michael's grave in Belgium. The image of the flimsy shed and flattened city combined with the image and sound of the dust and papers blowing through the air epitomizes the mass destruction that Europe now has to recover from.
Moreover, this is the first piece of detailed imagery in several pages. Overall, the narrator moves through the story at a swift pace and focuses more on characters and events than setting, usually slowing down only to stage dialogue-focused vignettes developing the relationship between Helen and Michael. For this reason, the story does not contain much imagery at all. When the narrator switches gears and begins to actually describe the scenery that meets Helen when she arrives in Hagenzeele, the reader is relieved by the presence of imagery but numbed by the somber image.
