“Something I thought our CO would want to deal with,” Jennings said quietly.

But how could anyone deal with what they found?

In the forest, surrounded by shell craters, trees splintered like matchsticks or disfigured with bullet holes, and foxholes lined with snow in which men had been living in groups of three of four for warmth for weeks, was an injured man. He’d been lying in the snow for three days after stepping on a mine. He’d been lucky, Jennings said grimly as they drew near; if you stood on a mine in a particular way, it pushed the veins and arteries up into the leg, closing them off somewhat, staunching the bleeding from the severed foot.

“The medics tried to get to him,” Sparrow added as they walked closer, “but they got shot at every time. The Krauts have pulled back now so we can reach him.”

Jess could see that the injured GI was still, somehow, through losing a foot and lying in the snow between two opposing sides for three days, conscious. His lips were moving. Dan dropped down beside him.

Jess took a picture of Dan, sitting in the snow and lighting a cigarette for the injured man, who was telling Dan that he’d been set upon by Germans under cover of darkness on the first night. The Germans had booby-trapped him, rigging up a device under his back that would explode the moment he was lifted up by the medics or someone like Jennings from his platoon, killing them all.

Thank God he was still conscious, Jess thought now. Thank God he’d been able to tell them.

While Dan smoked a cigarette with the man, more the leader right now than he’d ever been as he saluted the courage it had taken to not succumb to blackness in order to save a life or two, while an engineer worked to cut the wires leading to the explosives, all Jess could do was record with her camera, honor this man in black and white for an act that would never win a war, but that meant Jennings’ parents or Sparrow’s parents or somebody else’s parents would still have sons to pray for.

* * *

The costly battle of the Ardennes meant that Jess hardly spoke to Dan for the next month. To even want to take his attention away from the things he had to do would be pure selfishness. But, every time she saw him, she remembered the caress of his thumb, which meant that the quick dozen words and smiles they occasionally exchanged weren’t enough.

Soon, like every other fight, the Ardennes was over but Dan was with the advance troops as they pushed down to Cologne. Jess and the other correspondents ferried back and forth to Spa from the front each day, a situation that wouldn’t change until they’d secured a base in Germany. All the traveling meant even less chance to see Dan, and that she rolled a jeep in the ice, which was a common problem among correspondents in the late winter weather. Dan visited her, fuming, in March at the hospital where she’d been sent to have two broken ribs bandaged.