“What?” he asked, studying her face.

“I was just being thankful for being caught in a hurricane in Tahiti when I was six. It wasn’t as bad as this, but…” she shrugged.

“Tahiti?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

“Tahiti,” she repeated.

“Sure as shit would give anything to be there now,” he said. “Hurricane and all. Let’s go.”

Jess began to stand, to revive her cramped legs, but immediately ducked upon hearing the whistling sound she’d come to realize preceded a shell explosion.

“No need to duck,” he said. “That one’s ours. We try not to hit ourselves too often.”

“How can you tell?”

“Listen,” he said, cocking his ear as if they were straining to hear when in fact it was impossible to do anything else. “If you hear the whistle first and then the thump, it’s theirs. Thump first, echo after is ours. You learn to tell a thump from a whistle from an echo pretty damn quick. We’re heading for that foxhole over there. Should be a medic inside. You’ll be okay.” He glanced up at the sky as if he had the power to stop shells from falling in their vicinity during the time it took them to scramble to the back of the line.

Jess was thankful for the mini-lesson on the intricacies of shells. There was so damn much she didn’t know. But Martha had said that she knew nothing about war when she arrived in Spain in 1937. And Martha had survived and learned from men like the one beside Jess now and done a damn good job. It wasn’t in Jessica May’s makeup to give up after one frightening encounter. But she said none of this to the captain as they hurried along, although hurried was the wrong word—the ground was so slippery she was terrified of falling over and ruining her film, if not her pride.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to slide along on our stomachs like penguins?” she asked at one point after she’d had to drop her pride and grab his arm just in time to save herself from landing face first in the slime.

He laughed. “It probably would be.”

They found the medic and the scramble continued to a point even further back, where a jeep was parked. An injured man was laid in the back and the captain climbed in after Jess.

“You don’t have to escort me,” she said.

“Jerry’s retreated for now. Won’t be back till tomorrow if we’re lucky. I can spare half an hour. Besides, if anyone finds out I had a woman in my foxhole and didn’t deliver her to a point out of shooting range, then I’ll be serving as a private in a company in a training camp rather than running a company in the field. And yes,” he grinned, “there are so many jokes you could make about what I just said that it’s hard to know where to start.”

She burst out laughing. If anyone had said to Jess that it was possible to smile or laugh at the most dangerous moment one had ever faced in one’s life, she wouldn’t have believed them. But now she saw that was all you could do to get through; that on the other side of jocularity lay despair and nobody could afford to waste a single moment on that out here otherwise they might as well run without a weapon straight into the open arms of the Germans.