She was reclining on the couch in front of me, but she wasn’t really here at all. She was back by the soldier’s bed, reliving the moment. Her recollection of an incident that had occurred weeks earlier was, at this moment, more real to her than the fact of her lying on a leather couch in a psychologist’s consulting room in the Villejuif military asylum in the suburbs of Paris.

“Then what happened?”

“I left him to attend to another patient who’d begun making a lot of noise in the meantime.” Another long pause. I said nothing. “Then we heard the whistles of the first mortars and all of a sudden everything was on fire. The casualty ward was in a converted barn, you see. I dived into a corner and curled up into a ball, thinking I was about to die myself. By the time it was all over there was barely a ward left. The barn was in ruins. But I came out unscathed. Not a scratch.” She sat up and turned to look at me. “Not a scratch, doctor. I had some ringing in my ears that lasted a few hours, and that’s it. The Australian died, as did the others—twelve soldiers, two nurses, and a surgeon. I was the only survivor. And then it was all over.”

“And you had your first seizure that night.”

“Yes.”

I’d treated scores of men for shellshock since the start of the war, perhaps more than a hundred, but Madeleine Pernety was the first woman to have walked through my door. Women weren’t supposed to suffer from shellshock, yet Madeleine exhibited all the classic signs: catatonia, insomnia, chronic nausea. And seizures—trembling that lasted a quarter-hour or more, trembling that became so violent she would have to be restrained.

“Surely,” I said, “he’s not the first soldier to have died on your watch. What was it about this particular soldier that you’re having such a hard time forgetting?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it that he told you he loved you?”

“No. That happens all the time.” Her hands began fretting again.

“How often?”

“I suppose men have told me they love me about twenty or thirty times.”

“What about you, Mademoiselle Pernety, have you ever told a man you love him?”

“Just once.” Another long pause. I clocked it: four minutes. “We were engaged to be married. Then, when the war started, he was called up. He died in April 1915. At Ypres.”

“And so, as soon as you were old enough, you volunteered yourself—as a tribute, I suppose, to the man you loved.”

“Yes.”

“Does it trouble you when a man tells you he loves you?”

“Very much.”

“Why? Because he’s dying?”

“Because I have no love to give him in return.”