She concentrated on her fingers. They responded to her thoughts, flexing, and she remembered the cameras in her hands. She flicked the Leica around her back and lifted the Rollei. Look through the lens, she told herself. A camera reduced things to the size of a frame and she could certainly do with the chaos being minimized in some way.

Her mind was functioning enough for her to know that it would be lethal to move suddenly or distract the attention of the American soldiers. But the benefit of a twin lens reflex like the Rollei was that she shot from the waist and could be unobtrusive. The captain was too close to her for perfect focus but, rather than fiddling with the focusing knob, she leaned back a little, allowing her position to focus the shot. Then, while he shot bullets at a small posse of German soldiers she could just make out when she lifted her head to the edge of the ditch, she shot photographs.

Focus, shoot. Focus, shoot. She repeated the words over and over in her head. And she concentrated on deliberately blurring the background of each picture so that the flashes of light from the bullets or shells or God only knew what were rendered flamelike, dancing around the captain’s hands, which were so rigid and black with dirt they almost appeared to be a part of the gun they held.

How does one grow accustomed to the noise, she wondered as she at last began to discern individual sounds within the roar: a sudden loud shriek and bellow, which made her flinch, followed by the earth lifting into the air and then raining down just a few feet away as the jeep, with most of her belongings in it, blew up.

After a time, the rain cleared enough for Jess to see that the Germans were far closer than she’d realized—thank God she hadn’t noticed that when she’d first landed in the hole or she might never have found a way through the terror. They looked bewildered, not at all like the devilish beings she’d imagined them to be. In fact, they seemed just like the captain next to her: youngish, mid-twenties perhaps, filthy, tired, wet, caked in mud and oblivious to anything other than the sighting and shooting of an enemy.

Then the captain began to make a series of complicated hand gestures—which she gathered were a way of communicating through the noise—to the other soldiers, and she saw some of them climb out and race a hundred yards forward before disappearing into another ditch. She lifted her head up just enough to record their flight on her camera.

“You can’t do that!” the captain yelled.

“Why the hell not?” she retorted. If he stopped her from taking pictures then she would have nothing to distract her from the still-terrifying reality of being in the Nazis’ line of fire. Like a reflex, her body defaulted to the wit and the smile that had always got her what she wanted, and she was once again amazed at how she was still able to function amidst the inferno. “Stop worrying about me,” she said. “I’m much less deadly than the Germans.”