Theo Hossbach lay on a cot in a military hospital in Cambrai. All of him was fine except for the last two joints on the ring finger of his left hand. He wouldn't see those again until and unless what the Resurrection of the Flesh preachers liked to talk about turned out to be the straight goods. Theo doubted it-Theo doubted almost everything people in authority said-but you never could tell.

One thing Theo didn't doubt was that he was lucky to be there, or anywhere. Along with the commander and driver, he'd bailed out of a burning Panzer II. They'd all run for some bushes a couple of hundred meters away. He'd made it. Ludwig and Fritz hadn't. It was about that simple.

The bullet that amputated those last two joints came later. He didn't know whether it was aimed at him in particular or just one of the random bullets always flying around a battlefield. The one by Beauvais seemed to have had more of them than most. Theo might have been prejudiced; he'd never had to bail out of a panzer before.

Or he might not have been. The French and English had stopped the Wehrmacht's drive at Beauvais, and it hadn't got started again. This made two wars in a row where the Schlieffen Plan didn't quite work. Hitler's generals came closer to pulling it off than the Kaiser's had, but what was that worth?

A nurse came by. She took his temperature. "Normal. Very good," she said as she wrote it down. "Do you need another pain pill?"

"Yes, please," he answered. Those two missing joints seemed to hurt worse than the stub he had left. Phantom pain, the doctor who cleaned up the wound called it. He could afford to dismiss it like that; it wasn't his hand.

"Here." The nurse gave Theo the pill, watched while he swallowed it, and wrote that down, too. He figured it was codeine; it made him a little woozy, and it constipated him. It also left him less interested in the nurse, who wasn't bad looking, than he would have been if he weren't taking them every four to six hours. But it pushed away the pain, both real and phantom.