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done and the lights were about to go on again all over the world.
     
    I N THE FADING grayness of the day, at the bottom of my foxhole, I opened my notebook on my knee and began writing. My field jacket felt as stiff and cold as canvas in subfreezing weather. I heard a pistol flare pop overhead, but inside the gloom it seemed to give off neither heat nor light and, like most day-to-day events in the army, seemed to signify absolutely nothing.
    The fog in the trees is ghostly, I wrote, so dense and smokelike and pervasive I cannot see more than thirty yards into the forest. The majority of trees are fir and larch and spruce. In the soil, where there are no snowdrifts, I can see stones that are smooth and elongated like loaves of bread, the kind used to make Roman roads or build a peasant’s cottage. Around me are apple and pear and plum and nut trees that are not indigenous to this forest, and I wonder if an early-medieval farmer and his wife and children swinked in the fields close by, living out their lives to ensure the well-being of the man who lived in a castle atop a hill not far away.
    The evening is so quiet I can hear a bough bend and the snow sifting through the branches to the ground. There are rumors that Waffen SS made a probe on our perimeter, within one thousand yards of us. I don’t believe the rumor. SS initiatives are usually accompanied by a large panzer presence. Major Fincher agrees with me. Unfortunately, Major Fincher is widely regarded as a dangerous idiot. At Kasserine Pass he ordered an entire regiment to dig slit trenches instead of foxholes. Tiger tanks overran their position and turned in half circles on top of the trenches and ground sixty men into pulp with their tracks.
    Our regiment is made up of National Guardsmen, draftees, and regular army. The officers and enlisted men get along fine. It’s a good outfit. Except for Major Fincher. Someone said the German army has been trying to find him for years in order to award him the Iron Cross. When the joke was reported to Fincher, a corporal had to explain its meaning.
    I didn’t get to complete my entry. Sergeant Hershel Pine stuck his head over the pile of frozen snow and dirt by the edge of my foxhole and stared down at me. His narrow face was red with windburn, his whiskers reddish-blond on his cheeks, his helmet fitted down tightly on the scarf tied over his ears. “We got a problem, Lieutenant,” he said.
    “What is it?” I replied, placing my pencil between the pages of my notebook, closing the cover.
    He slid down into the hole. His breath was fogging, his field jacket flecked with ice crystals. He was carrying a Thompson, three magazines taped together, one of them inserted in the frame. Before he spoke, he rubbed his nose with his mitten to clear the mucus frozen in his nostrils. His mitten was cut away from his trigger finger. “Steinberg is coming unglued,” he said.
    “About what?”
    “Waffen SS don’t take Jewish or wounded prisoners.”
    “Send him to me.”
    “I say use him on point or get him out of here, sir.”
    “On point?” I said.
    “If somebody’s got to step on an antipersonnel mine, I say better deadweight than a good soldier, sir.”
    “Steinberg is a good soldier, Sergeant.”
    He was crouched down on one knee. He dropped his eyes. I knew what was coming. I didn’t hold it against him, but I didn’t want to hear it, either. It was the curse of his kind, in this case a man who was raised on a cotton farm in one of the Red River parishes of central Louisiana, an area notable only for the fact that a mass execution of Negro soldiers by the White League took place there during Reconstruction. “I say better one of them than one of us, Lieutenant,” he said.
    “Who are ‘them’?”
    “I don’t think you want to hear what I have to say.”
    “I’m very interested in what you have to say. Take the crackers out of your mouth, Sergeant.”
    “They own the banks. They’re the ones who lent Hitler the