“You should help them,” she cried when the driver hesitated. To her, it looked as if the soldiers on their side were capable of nothing more than defense in the face of what was being thrown and shot and hurled at them.

He hopped out too and hit the ground, diving straight into a mud so viscous it was hard to believe solid ground could exist anywhere beneath the mire. “Stay by the car,” he ordered, clambering across the ground, the camouflage patterns on his uniform no longer needed because his whole body was now covered in clay.

“Stay by the car?” Jess shouted. It was a ridiculous command; the car was exposed. A horrific scream that seemed to be right above her head had her instinctively mimicking the driver: making for the ground as fast as she could. By sheer luck, she fell into a ditch, which provided a semblance of cover and she thanked God that the person there wore an American uniform rather than a German one.

“What the hell are you doing here?” the owner of the uniform barked.

“This was supposed to be a field hospital,” Jess snapped back. “He,” Jess indicated the driver, who was hunched over a couple of feet away in the same ditch, “was meant to know where we were going.”

“If he’s come from Naples, then he doesn’t know shit. It was a field hospital. It was evacuated last night.” The GI, whose rank insignia proclaimed him a captain, raised his head and fired his gun into the blindness in front of them.

Jess crouched where she was, unmoving. It was inconceivable that this was battle: a huddle of men in a boggy ditch popping their heads up every few seconds to shoot in the general direction from which a cannonade of machine gun fire emanated. And she knew, as surely as the fact that she could actually die at any moment, that she’d been a damn fool. She hadn’t thought about what armed conflict would be like. She’d understood she’d be roughing it, that her accommodations would likely be tents, that there would be no luxuries. But she’d been so busy fighting to get herself here that she hadn’t stopped to imagine how it would feel to be in range of enemy bullets. Because she wasn’t supposed to be in range of enemy bullets.

Thank God for the noise and the physical echo of the sound inside her body. It deafened her to the usual physical reactions to fear; she couldn’t feel her heart or her breath and whether both were faster than usual, she couldn’t even comprehend that she had hands, let alone that they might be sweating. Her eyes were almost the only thing that seemed to be within her control and she tried to fix her gaze on one thing, rather than everything. As she did so, she realized that she was the only one in the hole who was frozen; none of the men looked scared. After their first flicker of surprise at seeing she was a woman, each one had settled back into a state that looked a lot like resignation. Which meant they’d done this before. Too many times. And they’d survived or else they wouldn’t be here. It gave her hope.