Which was how it happened the night of Child's death. Gray did not even see the sentry until he was nearly on top of him, a bulky silhouette swaying from left to right as he stamped his feet for warmth. The man's hands were enormous—he was always aware of a subject's hands, the challenge of them for a painter. Gray had to roll on his side, arching slightly to withdraw his serrated bayonet. It felt good, as natural as any palette knife.

The sentry was muscular under his greatcoat. Gray was surprised at the strength. It was like riding a bull to a sawdust floor, hand clamped around the snout. In death, nowever, the perspective somehow shifted again, so that the German finally looked a lot like Spangler.

Before moving off, Gray tossed four jam-pots into the adjoining trenches, two more into a dugout. Although primarily a fragmentation device, the concussion was devastating, rupturing lungs with overpressure, leaving hemorrhages along spinal cords. There appeared to be only a handful of survivors ... a boy quite like that boy in Doberitz, three or four others also like Spangler. Gray killed them quickly, impatiently.

He took up sniping to help pass the slack hours, mostly working from the middle ground with an elephant gun and a Ross telescopic sight. He would start about an hour before dawn, slipping between the furrows and painting himself into the landscape. If his marksmanship was somewhat less than perfect, no one could fault his sense of perspective, or his skill at handling shadows.

There were afternoons in those fields, as satisfying in their fashion as any spent in front of an easel—the technique was very similar. As he gradually perfected his approach he tended to work the high ground at dawn because the German lines faced east and there were some fifteen minutes when his subjects were cleanly etched in black relief. In the evening he would slip into one of the shell craters to catch a stray runner along the footpath. On better nights he could sense them before he saw them, almost hear footsteps, a heartbeat, visualize breath on the air.

But the dawns, with bleak light absorbed, not refracted, by stones, and poppies asleep in the empty silence, were his favorites. If you didn't actually listen, he once said, you could sometimes hear a flute or a guitar ... if you shut your eyes you might see another landscape someplace far away. And once or twice he even saw Zelle.

He received a letter from her toward the end of December. She was in Paris, supposedly to collect her belongings from Neuilly-sur-Seine. She had met a marvelous man, a certain Marquis de Beaufort. There were occasional zeppelin raids, she wrote, but everyone took them in stride. She could be reached at the Grand Hotel, and naturally Gray was welcome to visit, assuming he could manage a pass.