But she did hold on to his words: without permission from the CO. She knew a CO who’d give her permission, she was sure of it. It wasn’t exactly what Warren had meant but nor had he been precise enough to specify that he was referring to the CO of the hospital—and she would take full advantage.

At her new home on French soil, she quickly became adept at diving into the slit trench behind her tent whenever the Germans flew over at night strafing, at pretending the enormous red welts of mosquito bites didn’t itch like the devil, at never being alone, not even on the toilet—the latrine had a row of six seats and more often than not at least one or two of the other places were occupied by nurses clutching their precious rations of Scott paper. It was incredible the conversations that could be had while doing one’s business, especially during the rare quiet times, which everyone dreaded, because that was when the nurses would finally break down.

She also became expert at sleeping in spite of the maddening ringing in her ears from the constant boom of shells and guns, at eating in spite of the way the smells of ether and gangrene and blood seemed to coat the inside of her mouth. Most of all, she became proficient at pretending not to be scared, at only crying in the shower, at being the one to tell the new nurses to sleep under their cots rather than on top, or the one to move aside and let the new recruits lie beside her when she heard them sobbing as the Stukas shrieked overhead, at telling them it would be all right.

She remembered her first night in Italy and knew that she was just as scared now as she had been then, but she also knew how to hide it better. Humor and dispensing practical advice were her chosen means for this, making a show of demonstrating how to tip one’s head upside down at the end of each day and shake it thoroughly before bed in order to dislodge another day’s worth of the thick yellow dust that covered everything; the bombed-out earth of France had taken to the skies in search of refuge, where it floated around them all day long, discovering what everyone in France already knew: there was no place of refuge. France was no longer France.

Once past the seductive vista of silky blue sea at the edge of the country, everything changed. On the beach and between the hedgerows, the land was scarred with shell craters, slashed with foxholes and trenches and wretched with newly dug cemeteries. Boards painted with red skulls and crossbones and menacing warnings about the dangers of mines were as commonplace as apple trees. New roads unfurled brutishly from the maws of bulldozers and were quickly overrun with convoys of military vehicles. Each set of crossroads bore a pole stabbed into the earth with arrows directing traffic to the different units: Madonna Charlie, Missouri Baker, Missouri Charlie. Strung over everything like Christmas tinsel were reams of wire for communications.