“Let me see your eyes,” the doctor says in his beautiful calm voice. I wish he would ask Müller to go for a hand lamp again so that I could ask him how Schwarzschild is, but he has brought a candle with him. He holds it so close to my face that I cannot see anything but the red flame.

“Is Lieutenant Schwarzschild worse? What are his symptoms?” Müller says, leaning forward.

His symptoms are craters and shell holes, I think. I am sorry I have not told Müller, for it has only made him more curious. Until now I have told him everything, even how Hans died when the wireless hut was hit, how he laid the liquid barretter carefully down on top of the wireless before he tried to cough up what was left of his chest and catch it in his hands. But I cannot tell him this.

“What symptoms does he have?” Müller says again, his nose almost in the candle’s flame, but the doctor turns from him as if he cannot hear him and blows the candle out. The doctor unwraps the dressing and looks at my fingers. They are swollen and red. Müller leans over the doctor’s shoulder. “I have a theory about Lieutenant Schwarzschild’s disease,” he says.

“Shut up,” I say. “I don’t want to hear any more of your stupid theories,” and do not even care about the wounded look on Müller’s face or the way he goes and sits by the wireless. For now I have a theory, and it is more horrible than anything Müller could have dreamed of.

We are all of us—Müller, and the recruit who is trying to put together Eisner’s motorcycle, and perhaps even the doctor with his steady bedside voice—afraid of the front. But our fear is not complete, because unspoken in it is our belief that the front is something separate from us, something we can keep away from by keeping the wireless or the motorcycle fixed, something we can survive by flattening our faces into the frozen earth, something we can escape altogether by being invalided out.