It was only a short drive to the field hospital, which was altogether too fine a word to describe the tents, the stretchers, the bodies, the stink of mud and flesh, the too few people unloading the ambulances with the too many bodies. “Flick!” he called to a woman who’d come out to check over the wounded men in their vehicle, “Can you take Captain…” He stopped.

“Oh, Jessica May. Lovely to meet you,” she quipped, holding out a filthy hand for him to shake.

Before he could reply, Flick accosted him. “Where’ve you been hiding, stranger?” She gave him the kind of easy smile that suggested they’d done more than share war stories.

And Jess knew it was why she’d saved that one shot on the Rollei—for just such a moment. She took it. The grubby officer looking back over his shoulder to the battle he’d left, to the men he probably needed to check on, and the nurse gazing up at him with adoration.

* * *

That night at the Eleventh Field Hospital was almost worse than the battlefield. The Germans controlled the high ground of the mountains, and the hospital was within shelling range, the place of greater safety it had moved to proving only to be the better of two bad choices, rather than a sensible position.

Within minutes of her arrival, Flick had shown Jess a spare cot in a tent with five other nurses, the cot only available because the nurse who’d once occupied it was now a patient. That was the cost of having nurses closer to the front line than they’d ever been in any other war but it was counterbalanced by the fact that they could have a man in the shock tent and hooked up to life-saving plasma within one hour rather than five.

Jess was lucky enough to cadge a roll of film for her Leica from the supply store—someone had died with it on them and nobody else had a use for it. But that was the only piece of luck in one long and unlucky day as the Germans began to toss shells at the hospital with deadly intensity.

“Never shelled us before,” Anne, a nurse—a small woman who looked as if she would hardly be able to help lift a stretcher but here she was, carrying the weight of every injured man’s survival on her tiny shoulders—said grimly to Jess. “First time we thought it was an accident. Now we think Jerry means it.”

And Jerry did mean it. Before long, a shell made a direct hit on the mess tent, leaving a stew of ration boxes, canned eggs, salted peanuts and onions embedded in the mud. It was fortunately empty of people at the time but the result was that the electrical system, which had been wired through the mess tent, went out and the night continued on through the beams of flashlights.

So Jess found herself in an operating theater holding one of the flashlights when all other hands were busy, watching doctors operate with their boots covered in mud, their surgical gowns covered in blood. Jess’s camera caught them as she concentrated once more on looking only through the frame; it was the best way to keep her stomach calm. And she had to stay calm because what did anyone back in America know of any of this?