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Germany, where she began research for her novel in archives in Stuttgart and Munich. Germany, however, seemed more poisonous than Paris, “a foreign caricature of itself,” full of uniforms and salutes. Signs everywhere announced “ Juden verboten ”—a slap in the face to Martha, both of whose parents were half Jewish; in Stuttgart she saw uniformed Nazis jeering at an elderly (probably Jewish) couple who had been forced to scrub paving stones and watched the mousy librarian cringe in terror before the boorish young “brownshirt” who had recently been appointed her superior. The newspapers were full of belligerent hate speech, which reached a crescendo with the first bulletins about fighting in Spain—the result, the papers said, of mob rule by “Red Swine Dogs.” Disgusted, Martha decided she couldn’t stay in Germany any longer, or even in Europe.
    “Europe is finished for me,” she would write to Allen Grover. “A lot of things are finished”—her old life among le Tout-Paris ; the casual affairs with men who gave her “company, laughter, movement” but not passion; even, maybe, her pacifism, and her pacifist novel. She had intended to spend time touring the Great War killing fields in France and Flanders, but now she would go home to St. Louis, where she’d spend the long, dark winter keeping her widowed mother company. St. Louis was a good place for waiting. She wasn’t sure what would happen next, but she was confident something would. For despite all the strangeness and anxiety she’d encountered in France and Germany—the feeling that the War to End War might be followed by the War to End Europe—the trip had done her good, she felt. It had given her a chance to exhale and relax. Now, she told Grover, she was ready to “start all over.”

July 1936: Paris
    On Sunday, July 12, a young man with a camera hanging from his shoulder got off the train from Paris in Verdun, on the Meuse River 130 miles northeast of the capital. Of medium height, with a shock of dark hair, black eyebrows, and the face of a gypsy, he was somewhat shabbily dressed, in an old leather jacket and much-worn shoes. His French was fluent, but his accent hinted at somewhere in Middle Europe—not surprisingly, since he’d been born in Budapest twenty-two years before, as Endre Erno Friedmann. That wasn’t the name on the press card he carried in the pocket of the weather-beaten jacket, though; there he was listed as André Friedmann. But for the past few months he’d been calling himself Robert Capa.
    Luckily, Capa’s camera wasn’t in the pawnshop, as it often was when he needed cash, because today he had an assignment from one of the smaller Paris agencies to photograph an event that all the European newspapers and magazines would want to cover: the peace demonstration taking place outside Verdun, where for eleven months in 1916 German and French troops had fought the longest and costliest battles of the Great War. Nearly 300,000 men had died there: 13,000 of them were buried beneath the white crosses that dotted the green grass of the French military cemetery, with the remains of a further 130,000, all unidentifiable, contained in an ossuary nearby. Now, on a gray, chilly July day twenty years after the battle, more than seventy thousand “Peace Pilgrims,” veterans and noncombatants from fourteen countries—including a phalanx of Germans marching under a flag bearing a huge swastika and throwing the Nazi salute—were gathering to honor the dead and to pledge that their sacrifice would not be repeated.
    There were occasional spatters of rain as an honor guard of three wounded veterans carried the ceremonial torch, which had been lit in Paris from the eternal flame beneath the Arc de Triomphe, to the Douaumont ossuary. Capa caught them with his Leica: three unsmiling middle-aged men in carefully brushed dark suits, each wearing a beret against the chill, two of them blinded, gripping their canes, their free hands