“Come in and shut the door,” I say, still carefully protecting the liquid barretter, but Müller has already jammed the metal back against the beam.

“Do you have news?” Müller says to the doctor, eager for new facts to spin his theories from. “Has the wiring fatigue come back? Is there going to be a bombardment tonight?”

Dr. Funkenheld takes off his mittens. “I have come to examine your eyes,” he says to me. His voice frightens me. All through the war he has kept his quiet bedside voice, speaking to the wounded in the dressing station and at the stretcher bearer’s posts as if they were in his surgery in Stuttgart, but now he sounds agitated, and I am afraid it means a bombardment is coming and he will need me at the front.

When I went to the dressing station for medicine for my eyes, I foolishly told him I had studied medicine with Dr. Zuschauer in Jena. Now I am afraid he will ask me to assist him, which will mean going up to the front. “Do your eyes still hurt?” he says.

I hand the barretter to Müller and go over to stand by the lantern that hangs from a nail in the beam.

“I think he should be invalided home, Herr Doktor,” Müller says. He knows it is impossible, of course. He was at the wireless the day the message came through that no one was to be invalided out for frostbite or “other non-contagious diseases.”

“Can you find me a better light?” the doctor says to him.

Müller’s curiosity is so strong that he cannot bear to leave any place where something interesting is happening. If he went up to the front, I do not think he would be able to pull himself away, and now I expect him to make some excuse to stay, but I have forgotten that he is even more curious about the wiring fatigue. “I will go see what has happened to Eisner’s unit,” he says, and opens the door. Snow flies in, as if it had been beating against the door to get in, and the doctor and I have to push against the door to get it shut again.