In Naples, the Public Relations Officer—or PRO—a man she discovered she’d have to mollify despite the papers in her hand, let her cool her heels for a fortnight while he verified that her orders were real and that some damn fool in Washington had actually let a woman come to Italy to report on the Medical Corps and that Stone, the damn fool PRO in London—hadn’t warned him about it.

“You can go out to the Eleventh Field Hospital,” he told her at last. “But you’ll have to wait until someone’s heading that way. I don’t have a jeep for you.”

“Where do you suggest I wait?” she inquired coolly. “By the side of the road with my thumb out? Or does the U.S. Army have a more orderly approach to hitchhiking?”

“If I were you,” he said evenly, “I’d concentrate on keeping myself safe. Women are absolutely not allowed near a combat zone. I’m not taking any shit if you get yourself hurt.”

* * *

How exactly does one stay safe when one is taken to an area that is supposed to be out of the combat zone, but which turns out to be the scene of a conflagration?

In Naples, on the dance floor at the Orange Club, Jess had learned that the Eleventh Field Hospital was near Mignano on the ridge of hills surrounding the Cassino Valley. It had sounded lovely but, in a jeep that had come to a sudden halt in the place where the field hospital should be, there was nothing lovely: only sound beyond anything she’d ever imagined, so loud that she couldn’t distinguish individual noises but rather one catastrophic roar, like a gargantuan lion provoked.

The drive north from Naples had given her no indication of what she was heading into. She’d sat in the jeep, which had the floor sandbagged to minimize the effect of any mines they might drive over, one of a constant stream of olive-colored vehicles—tanks, trucks, ambulances, command cars with names like Black Devil and Death Dodger painted on them. They passed tent camps that stretched for miles in a sea of mud, dotted with soldiers stripped to the waist, shaving. Mounds of rubble that must once have been villages; occasionally they passed a pink wall still standing. Italian women washing clothes in troughs because laundry still had to be done even in the midst of war. Coils of communications wire that stretched on as if the veins of the earth were unexpectedly and horribly on display. Children playing in wrecked munitions carriers.

And then, suddenly and magnificently in front of her stood the mountains, snow-capped and wild, perforating the sky. The peaks rose above a valley from which white puffs of smoke erupted, the scars of shells gouging the once beautiful land, artillery tracks making a crazed, circular pattern. The view was obliterated a moment later by the rain that had been threatening. It came in thick and gray, engulfing everything.

Immediately afterward, the driver skidded to a halt. They’d rounded a bend and found a battle instead of a hospital. The sound became something Jess heard not only in her ears but all through her body, thudding on irresolutely like a secondary, even a tertiary heartbeat. A sound she couldn’t escape from and could hardly bear, such was the pressure of it in her head and her chest. The driver made to turn the car around but Jess opened the door of the jeep—Rollei around her neck, Leica in hand—and jumped out before he could stop her.