How had it happened? Were they sure he was dead? He called through to Hans’s unit from the captain’s field telephone. The voice on the other end said that they’d identified his torso. He’d been given a field burial.

Murnau returned to his dugout. He cracked his head going down the steps.

Ideas jarred one upon the other. Over the course of the afternoon, fellow officers dropped in to offer condolences. Words ground on. His jaw felt dislocated. His hands were filthy with mud from the floor.

In hospitals, he’d seen men beat their heads against the wall in grief. On pickets, he’d seen a guard dog refuse to eat or sleep because its companion animal had been killed. He cried his way into coughing fits.

He sat on the dugout floor, stripped of the physical strength he needed for work.

What about Hans’s mother? he thought. The notion was a flare that burned away self-pity.

His captain came by. Murnau thanked him for letting him telephone. The captain waved it off. He borrowed Murnau’s candle, saying he needed more light to catch someone cheating at skat.

It grew dark outside. A short rain came and went.

Starlight made pale gleams on the runoff through the doorway.

He was buried alive by the news.

It was an easy declension to work out. Hans had been killed in Russia. Hans had been killed in Russia because he’d served in the Fusiliers. Hans had been where he’d been with the Fusiliers because of when he’d volunteered. And Hans had volunteered when he had because of Murnau.

The next day he resumed his duties. A legend grew up around his reception of the news. It was repeated to the new men, at times when Murnau was within earshot. According to the story, he’d been in his dugout when the message came. Practicing the stoicism he preached, he’d read the dispatch twice, nodded in private meditation, folded it into a pocket, and then had busied himself at his work, saying nothing about it to anyone, then or afterwards. He was supposed to have responded to the captain’s consolatory visit with the comment “My friend still lives as our model.”

Both his fellow lieutenant from the dugout and the captain allowed the story to circulate, he assumed because of its inspirational value.

He wanted to write his father and tell him that his son had finally become everyone’s model Prussian.

By September he began petitioning for transfer to the Flying Corps.

The decision would take months. In the meantime his unit held a stalemated part of the line.

In October, Herr Ehrenbaum died. Murnau received a note from Mary Degele.

In November, he was able to visit her on a three-day leave.