The rain was coming on and that grim cold weather had reminded him of that endless night in the Vosges Mountains, sleet descending from a sky so dark that it appeared a depthless slate hovering low above their heads, a darkness punctured by the flat white bursts of the antiaircraft rounds that continued to blast the mountain all around them so that mixed with the sleet were stones and clods of muddy earth. Sometimes blood too would spatter down like some nightmare rain as they huddled together in the cratered foxholes, shivering and chattering and, despite the rain, thirsty beyond measure. For hour after hour he could do little more than lay facedown in the mud, the noise and terror utterly without cease. On either side of him were two men with whom he had crossed much of southern Europe: The others were Victor Fujimori and Jim Ban. Both would die the following day or the day after, although he would not be with them then, and in the dozing half dream of the foxhole they appeared as skeletons in uniform, their death’s-head masks grinning out from their helmeted skulls, all around him craters of darkness and of light, the bodies within blooming white and terrible before thudding to earth again, dead, silent, while the big guns continued to fire unabated for all the hours to come. All he could do, despite his training and even despite his will to live, was clutch his helmet, occasionally yelping in fear but otherwise silent, breathless. And the dead. He would remember the dead, especially after the whole of the battle was over and they had accomplished the goal they had set out to accomplish, a goal levied upon them by a general somewhere far afield of where they huddled on that forested mountainside. It was only when the death count came that they would truly understand just how many of them would never leave that French forest. Sometimes Ray wondered if the dead stalked those forests even now, searching out their names in English, in scattered Japanese, their spectral shapes a kind of lambent mist through wet pines.

That he had survived had been a kind of miracle. Now, upon a different ridge, he watched the landscape drift into the quiet of the coming rain, all the beasts of the fields and the birds of the air hunkering down for the weather to come. The fire he built he had already determined would be his last, and so he had used more wood than he ordinarily might, the process of collecting it having brought him to ever-widening circles on that boulder-strewn ridge, the flames now crackling and hissing at the first drops of rain.