The 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. “This girl I knew, she was engaged to a captain in that unit,” he told Hastings, who was in the bed next to Nick’s, lying on top of his blankets dressed in his uniform pants, looking at an old issue of Photoplay and showing off his chest and the bandage around his middle to the nurses. A bullet had passed cleanly through his lower abdomen, and, after a surgeon had stitched his intestines back together again, he was in fine shape.

“Lost out to a captain, did you?” Hastings grinned. “Well, it happens to the best of ’em.”

“Aw, hell,” Nick said. “She was engaged when I met her. She liked me pretty good, though,” he said, making things sound better than they had seemed at the time. Sure, Elissa had seemed to like him, but then her grandpa had dropped the news of her engagement, had even shown Nick a picture of her with her arms draped around the tall captain’s waist. “Sorry, son,” her grandpa had said. “But I thought you should know. There’s a train you can catch tonight, one A.M.” So Nick had gone, fuming that she had so skillfully played him. He’d gone back to Camp McCoy and thrown himself into the sheer physicality of training, every day pushing himself until he was so tired he fell into a dead sleep before even hitting his pillow. Later, in England and France and Belgium, other things had arisen to captivate his attention. Brief affairs with English lasses, endless training, and then crossing the English Channel; then, combat, alternately replete with mind-numbing terror and equally mind-numbing boredom.

Yet, when the news about the 285th came up, it brought her to his mind, and, reclining in his hospital bed, on a real pillow for the first time in months, he got started remembering the good times they’d had together. Pretty soon it seemed he couldn’t think of anything else. Even a cute nurse who kept coming by to needlessly fluff his pillow didn’t change matters.

And then, one sunny February day, he read in the Stars and Stripes that Captain Benjamin Granton of Wisconsin had been among those killed at Malmédy.

He was stricken with pain on Elissa’s behalf, at first. Then, setting the paper aside, he began to look on the bright side.