At dawn they are marched across a jagged landscape, joining a few other rivulets of prisoners heading north: French, Turks, two Brits. Every day fewer aircraft come overhead. One man coughs incessantly, another has two broken arms, another cradles an eyeball still hanging from its socket. Gradually the hearing in Zeno’s left ear returns. Blewitt suffers such intense tobacco withdrawal that, more than once, when a guard throws away a butt, he dives into the snow after it, though he never manages to recover one while it’s still lit.

The water they are given smells of excrement. Once a day the Chinese set a pot of boiled whole-kernel corn down in the snow. A few shy away from eating the carbonized crust burned to the bottom of the pot but Zeno remembers the Armour & Company cans Papa used to heat on the wood stove in the cabin beside the lake and chokes it down.

Every time they stop, he unlaces his boots, peels off one pair of Utah Woolen Mills socks, tucks them inside his coat, up against his armpits, and puts on the warmer, drier pair, and this more than anything is what saves him.

In April they reach a permanent camp on the south bank of a river the color of creamed coffee. The prisoners are sorted into two companies, and Blewitt and Zeno are put with the healthier group. Past a series of wooden peasant huts stands a galley kitchen and storeroom; beyond that lies a ravine, the river, Manchuria. Spindly, wind-wracked conifers stoop here and there, their branches all sculpted by wind in the same direction. No guard dogs, no alarms, no barbed wire, no watchtowers. “The whole country’s a damn ice-cold prison,” whispers Blewitt, “where are we going to run?”

Their quarters are thatched huts that accommodate twenty lice-tortured men arrayed on the floor on straw mats. No officers, all enlisted men, all older than Zeno. In the dark they whisper about wives, girlfriends, the Yankees, a trip to New Orleans, Christmas dinners; the ones who have been here the longest report that during winter they lost multiple men every day, that their lot has improved since the Chinese took over the camps from the North Koreans, and he comes to learn that anyone who fixates—who talks nonstop about ham sandwiches, or a girl, or a certain memory of home—is usually the next to die.

Because he can walk without trouble, Zeno is assigned duty as a fireman: he spends most of every day gathering wood to heat black pots hung over the fireplaces in the prisoners’ kitchen. Those first weeks they eat soybeans or dry field corn boiled to a paste. For dinner there might be wormy fish or potatoes, none larger than an acorn. Some days, with his wounded forearm, it’s all Zeno can do to gather a single load of wood, bundle it, drag it into the galley, and lie down in the corner.