A movement above made Jess look up to the watchtower looming over her. The guard inside trained a gun on her. “We’re Americans!” she screamed in German. “Get the hell out of there!”

She was barely conscious of Dan and the others moving in front of her, weapons ready, of the rest of the jeeps in the convoy drawing up. She kept shooting pictures as Dan shouted at her, “Move!”

But she didn’t.

“Goddammit, Jessica! He’s got a gun. Move!” Dan yelled again, pushing her behind him.

She was barely conscious of the fact that Dan was so incensed that he’d called her Jessica, barely conscious of the moment the guard in the watchtower dropped his gun and Dan released his iron grip on her arm.

She entered the camp with the men of the United States Army and she knew the moment she caught it that it was the image that would show America what war had become. Not a gallant and heroic jousting for glory but a savage and bestial destruction of humankind.

Her camera foregrounded fat peacocks, plumage bright as a summer sky. The red flowers dancing strong and bright, reaching up to the sun shining above them. And behind that, the women. Tissue-paper skin barely covering bones; it was almost possible to see inside them. And their faces. Bereft of emotion. Dead, but given the sentence of living.

The guard in the tower stood down, as did the handful of other guards left to face the consequences. The skeletal women didn’t cry. They barely reacted to Dan and Jennings and Sparrow and the vehicles following behind. Didn’t respond to the medics laying them on stretchers; flinched in fact, as if they would rather be left alone. And Jess knew that meant their sufferings were beyond imagining; to wish for the hell they already knew rather than the terror of the unknown was a fear too stark to contemplate.

Jess found a female camp guard who, now that she’d been taken into custody, was willing to tell them everything.

“We had too many women to look after them properly,” the guard said to Jess in German and Jess translated for Dan. “Each building was meant for five hundred but was filled with more than two thousand. One bunk for four women; they slept head to feet. And every day fifty died but two hundred arrived. What was I supposed to do?”

The guard looked at them as if she expected their pity. Jess blanched but made herself ask, “Why are the women here?”

“Some are Jews. Most are resisters,” the guard replied and Jess repeated the words to Dan as best she could through a throat tight with tears.

“Every morning the beds were filled with dead bodies,” the guard went on, eager to have it all out now. “We woke the ones still alive at three in the morning and did the roll call to see how many we had left. It took two hours to call each name and every morning someone would fall or faint or die but even if it happened beside them, the women were not allowed to move. If they did, they would be beaten with the wooden stick.”