There was a packing crate inside the cage to protect her from the rains that washed over the whole of France that summer. Once, Lee was crouching down and talking to Banjo, who had taken to lying on an old horse blanket in the crate, when he noticed that Lieutenant Ripley was nearby. He stood and saluted, and Ripley saluted back as if it ruined the moment. Ripley, leaving, stopped himself.

“Corporal?”

“Sir?”

“Perhaps, one day, we should go flying,” Ripley said. When Lee said nothing in response—he wanted very badly to go flying—Ripley blushed. “If you like that sort of thing.”

There were rumors of an Allied advance. The infantry had made many advances over the last four years, over the same four hundred or so yards, matched by retreats and routs, but this one was rumored to be different. Such was what the American infantry kept saying, and the British, French, Canadian, and Australian troops kept telling them that advances were always rumored to be different.

Another rumor spread from unit to unit: peace, whenever finally at hand, would be announced with the launching of three dark-blue flares at midnight.

Universally, the doughboys looked up at least once at the evening sky, trying to imagine the sight, and instead realized the inherent cruel joke— of course, the sign would pass invisibly. You couldn’t see three blue lights at night.

Lee considered and dismissed the rumors just like anyone else. He nonetheless wobbled toward hope. He whistled to himself for no reason, and once he played baseball with children in the village. The old woman who washed the uniforms found a ham hock on her front stoop. When he wandered back to the barracks, he felt that a strange, second, phantom self walked alongside, jauntily, unburdened, and eager to greet the remaining day. Even when it rained, as it did every day. Something in his face wavered, as if a good-enough shove would send him to the side of the angels. “Hello, Banjo,” he said, even when he wasn’t near the dog’s cage. “Hello, Lieutenant Ripley,” he whispered to himself. “Look at that view.”

He was on the verge of once again discovering his reflection in windowpanes. He did not notice that Banjo had begun to dig a hole below her doghouse, one that would lead under the mesh of her cage.

8