She thought she saw a flicker of a smile; at any rate, he turned his attention away from her and back to the exploding stars that burst into life and flickered out before them, into the smoke, thicker than any fog rolling up the Hudson, into the choking smog of earth and ammunition and adrenaline that hung in the air.

Who knew how long she crouched there, recording every moment first with the Rolleiflex and then, when it only had one shot left—which she wanted to save—with the Leica. In between bouts of fire, the GIs wisecracked to one another, finding time to light cigarettes from the ubiquitous white and red packs of Lucky Strikes. She remembered reading one of Martha’s articles about Spain in which she’d said that you couldn’t wait forever for the shell to fall on you; you couldn’t cower in expectation of death all day. Watching the men around her, Jess understood what those words meant.

Then, just as she had the Leica lined up, her finger depressing the button, she saw, through the viewfinder, a man in a German uniform fall, the consequence of a shot from her partner’s gun. The captain didn’t react, just lined up the next one and shot him, too. The men died, not gloriously, not spectacularly and certainly without anyone to mourn them, disappearing into the mud beneath their feet. Two lives had just ended, one of them was frozen in time inside her camera. She didn’t know how she would bring herself to look at that negative, didn’t know that she could ever allow herself to discover exactly what it meant to die.

She was supposed to be glad; two fewer Germans was a good thing for her country. But how could anyone be glad of a boy dying alone, an unthought-of consequence in this grand mess called war?

* * *

“I need to send you out with the medics,” her companion said a while later when the shooting had lessened and the men were drinking from their canteens.

“Where are the medics?” Jess asked. “All the noise has mixed my head up into jigsaw pieces. It’s my first day on the job—and I’m not saying that for sympathy, but by way of explanation.”

“Explanation accepted and no sympathy given.”

“How long has it been like this?” she asked, indicating the mud and the rain, knowing her job was to get answers to go with her pictures, and that conversation was, like the Rollei, a good diversion from fear.

The captain rubbed his temple tiredly. “Weeks. Since we arrived in September. Apparently nobody thought to check what an Italian winter was like.”

He was a veteran, then. Very few U.S. Army units had served in Europe, but he’d already done two months in Italy. His words reminded Jess of her father who, like the people who hadn’t understood what havoc Italian rain could wreak, was always the one wanting to go to faraway places in winter, who never considered the weather, who would never remember where exactly they’d pitched the tent. It was as if men like her father were running the war, although that probably wasn’t fair. It was just that, out here in slime and sludge that roiled around them like a living thing, in rain like nothing seen since the time of Noah, in the midst of men who were alive one minute and dead the next, organization must be impossible. And Jess thanked God that she wasn’t a dumb debutante model like they all thought, that she was her mother’s child, that she had learned from a young age to organize herself amidst the worst kind of shambles.