“You can have the next bath,” Anne said, nodding at the fresh batch of water that was heating.

“We’re going to have to dig the trench around the powder room a bit deeper tomorrow,” another nurse said as she entered the tent. “I think the entire Volturno River has been redirected at us.”

All that night, Jess sobbed in her bed and nobody could hear her through the noise. If Emile had been there, she would have taken him into her bed because the familiarity of his physical presence, his connection to a world she could comprehend, would at least be a kind of comfort. Instead, she saw all the photos she’d taken, the combat pictures the less powerful of them all: the nurse who’d called their forlorn latrine, its walls made from piles of folded blankets, a powder room; Anne’s insistence that her rudimentary wash out of her helmet was a bath; Flick’s bright pink painted fingernails; the full-length mirror one of the nurses had picked up from a wrecked palace on their way north into Italy and which hung from a rope attached to the tent roof. And the photo she hadn’t taken, of the boy who’d died despite the tracheotomy—the boy who’d asked for watermelon just before his heart stopped; his ghost was there in every image.

The world needed to know that Monte Cassino, a speck on a map, the name of a battle to anyone in America, was a boy with no feet searching for comfort in a blanket. But what if Jess couldn’t convey that? Her job was so much more than she’d understood it to be. And that was another reason she cried: because she doubted she had the talent, the stamina and the stomach to do her job the way it ought to be done.

Perhaps she should admit that she’d made a mistake. Perhaps she should ask Bel to send somebody over to take her place.

Four

She didn’t have a chance to ask to be replaced. Instead, the enraged PRO from Naples—the one who’d told her to make sure she wasn’t responsible for any shit landing on him—arrived at the hospital in a furious spray of mud, telling her she’d completely disregarded his directives when she waltzed out into a battlefield.

“It was a little tricky to think about you while I was in a ditch being shot at,” she retaliated, sounding more like her old self than she had for the past two days.

Somehow, word had spread, quicker than lice in a foxhole, that there’d been a woman at the Italian front, which was a violation of the terms of her accreditation and was also, apparently, a crime worse than slaughter. She was put on a plane in Naples and sent back to England. She’d thought she wanted to get out of the hell that had left the underworld and landed on a mountain in Italy, but the way she’d been yelled at and ordered away had made her seethe and not give anyone the satisfaction of telling them she didn’t want to be in Cassino anyway.