“Are you boys discharged?” Dan asked them and they nodded.

“Yes, Sir. That’s why we needed our kisses,” one of them said, indicating Victorine.

“Thought we could get a ride back with you, Sir,” the other one added.

“Sure,” Dan said. “Give me five minutes.”

“Thanks, little Vicki,” one of the soldiers said. The other added, “Bye Vicki!” before they both moved off in the direction of the jeep.

“Victorine,” the girl called after them. “I’m French!” Then she turned her attention back to Jess. “Are you Dan’s friend?”

“I think so,” Jess said.

“You can be my friend, too. But Dan is my best friend.”

Dan crouched down beside Victorine. “I have to go. I’ll come back whenever I can. I promise.”

The little girl’s face crumpled. “I want you to stay.”

“What about if I show you my camera some more?” Jess said, with a smile.

Victorine nodded, her eyes tear-filled. Dan used the moment to unravel himself from the girl, who kissed his cheeks.

“Let me walk Dan back to the car and then we’ll look at the camera, okay?” Jess said, before she hurried after Dan, scrambling over the mud and slime to keep up. “Who is she?”

“You need a pair of jump boots,” he said as he walked.

“Jump boots?”

He nodded at her boots, which she’d thought, before encountering Italy, would keep her feet dry. “Paratrooper boots. Like these.” He pointed at his boots and Jess felt a serious pang of envy at the sturdy, thick, high leather boots that would indeed be perfect.

“The U.S. Army gave me a pair of brown Oxfords and I knew enough about roughing it to understand they’d be useless, so I got these.” She pointed ruefully at her own inadequate boots, which had been the most serviceable she could find in Manhattan.

Dan studied her feet. “I’ll get you a pair. They’re in demand though. No sooner has an airborne GI died and someone from infantry is claiming his boots.”

Jess shuddered. “I don’t know if I could wear a dead man’s boots.”

“If I died I’d rather someone who needed them had my boots than they were buried in this muck,” Dan said prosaically. “Major Henderson, the surgeon you met that night at the field hospital, has my brother Laurie’s stethoscope because it was a damn good one, too good to waste.”

He paused, stopped walking all of a sudden, and Jess heard herself ask, even though what he’d said implied its own dreadful answer, “What happened?”

Dan spoke fast, in a manner suggesting that if he didn’t say it all at once, he wouldn’t be able to. “Laurie was a doctor. On vacation in Europe, he met a French girl, fell in love, married and moved to Paris. He worked with the French Army as a surgeon in 1940, the same year—June 1940, in fact—that his wife was due to give birth. It was the worst damn time to have a baby.”

Jess remembered that the end of May was when the British Army had fled France, and that June was when Paris surrendered, when the Germans took France for themselves. It was worse than the worst damn time to have a baby.