Her days consisted of hitching rides on ambulances to collecting posts closer to the front then watching as ambulances brought in men from the battlefield, their faces stark white beneath the dirt and cut through with tears. Many were uninjured bodily, but their minds were lost somewhere in France, and Jess photographed the medics working with especially gentle hands to do whatever they could, which was very little, for those men.

The bocage fighting in the area was the dirtiest anyone had ever seen, from the castrator mines that leapt up and detonated at crotch height, to the surrendering lone German soldier who would emerge with hands up until the American GIs came to take him prisoner, whereupon he would leap to the side and the machine guns hidden in the hedgerows would mow down every American soldier who’d thought the white flag was the one thing that could be relied upon in war. But nothing could be relied upon, not anymore.

At an aid station near La Fière she recognized the insignia of Dan’s division among the men and heard that his battalion was in the area, that they’d succeeded in cutting a line across the Cherbourg Peninsula, that they’d been fighting unrelieved and without replacements for thirty-three days and had achieved every mission they’d been set and never given up any ground they’d taken. The news that he was alive made her the one crying silently in her cot at the hospital that evening, wondering why she was shedding so many tears over a man who was just a friend, but reasoning she would do the same for Martha if she’d suddenly, after a long silence, heard good news about her.

* * *

The day after the Germans, who’d been gathered in the surrounding hedgerows like deadly nesting birds, finally capitulated at Saint-Lô, she begged Major Henderson to allow her a ride on an ambulance out to the town. “It’s been captured, which means it’s no longer the front, so I’m allowed to travel there,” she reasoned.

He just shook his head, not to prevent her, but because he knew he couldn’t. “Look after yourself,” he said and she thanked God that the surgeon she’d helped one night in Italy, the one who had Dan’s brother’s stethoscope, was the one in charge of the field hospital and that he usually did his best to help her get to where she wanted to go.

The reports she’d seen of the siege of Saint-Lô, written by her male counterparts out of the luxury of their very own press camp at Valognes, with their very own set of jeeps, censors and couriers, had spoken grandiosely about the glory of the battle. When Jess climbed out of the ambulance at Saint-Lô, try as she might, she couldn’t find the glory.

The town was destroyed, unlivable, another victim of war. In front of one shattered villa, magenta fuchsias bloomed in profusion over the body of a dead American soldier, a fluffy white rabbit hopping over his leg. It was a surrealist composition worthy of Man Ray but Jess didn’t photograph it. How war could so easily make a corpse inhuman. This man had died on soil not his own in order to secure one small town and had then been left to the attentions of rabbits. Someone in America was crying for him, imagining him honored with prayers and farewells, when the only sound to wing him toward death had been the crash of bullets, the boom of exploding shells.