Dead Men and Dreamers
Ronald Speirs/Carwood Lipton, R

On his first day in Normandy, Speirs discovers the secret of war: death makes no difference. Through all the months he put in with the Army in the States, he always considered the training metaphorical. Men marked as casualties were symbolic: warm bodies willing themselves cold and still for an hour or so. But in real war, he had thought, the dead could not exhume themselves and follow you again.

He was wrong.

Dog Company drops from the sky in the dark hours of the morning of June the sixth. Speirs leaves his plane first, stepping out into a void scarred with the tracery of flares and anti-aircraft fire. As always, he experiences the strange stillness of the jump, the way he seems barely to move at all until he lands on the balls of his feet and realigns himself in relation to ground and weight and the liability of his heavy parachute. He unhooks himself, notes the loss of his leg bag, and leaves the chute behind in a heap.

Once he reaches the cover of a stand of trees, he takes stock of his position. Close to the ground he can almost believe he’s alone, and as far as he can see nothing moves. He pauses, considers the sprawl of their deployed forces all across the countryside; methodically reviews the map in his mind.

Close by, a twig snaps and someone hisses something in an unfamiliar language. He stiffens, beginning to unshoulder his Thompson. Another sound reaches him, and another. A full patrol must be on the move. Shooting them would be counterproductive: the company is probably nearby. After a moment, his extremities fairly humming with adrenaline, he withdraws farther into the shadows and drops onto his stomach.

The patrol rustles back and forth all night, often mere feet away. Speirs doesn’t sleep, but lies shallowly inside himself, without thinking, just a dumb array of muscles and sinews attuned to the world. When dawn comes, the forest folds into itself again, and the Germans disappear into one of its creases.

Speirs stays where he is, returning to full awareness. Something creaks above him, hollow and brittle, a seam sliced through the surface of the morning. He glances at his hand resting on the Thompson, and the sunlight like a snake slithers and coils along it. He gets to his feet and looks up.

From the tree against which he has been lying dangles an American paratrooper, tangled in the traces of his harness. His legs swing when wind shakes the tree; as he shifts back and forth, the fabric of his parachute rasps against the boughs. He stares at Speirs with an even blue gaze.

“Trooper,” begins Speirs, and then stops. The man twists ponderously in his suspended orbit, and when his face slips out of shadow, Speirs sees something he didn’t see before: the wound neatly drilled by a bullet just under the line of the jaw.

It is his first corpse, but he doesn’t even try to understand it—that would constitute a waste of the energy he conserved all night. Immediately he recognizes that there can be no reconciliation of this with anything that has happened before, no context he has ever known. He sheds his entire past, standing there on the swell of a small hill in Normandy, as easily as he shrugged off the husk of his parachute. He simply studies the body, and though he does not yet have the words for this thought, he reflects that the chronology of past and future mean nothing to this man, preserved upright in the pattern of life with a flower of blood blooming over his neck. Maybe he has already died, or maybe he has yet to die; he behaves the same way. He hangs simulating life and purpose in the void between earth and sky, because his body, minutely mechanized, knows nothing else to do.

Speirs readjusts the Thompson’s strap on his shoulder and turns away. His trek across the countryside whittles down the hours, and by the time he arrives at the rendezvous point, day has given way to night has given way to day again. Wandering through the sea of battered soldiers, he meets briefly with Winters and Compton, and as he is leaving them he comes across one of Dog’s sergeants sitting on the pavement, wincing as a medic bandages his outstretched leg.

“Lieutenant,” the sergeant calls, his voice guttural with relief.

Speirs halts at a distance. “Sergeant Stafford?”

“Yes, sir. We been waitin’ for an officer since yesterday.”

“No other Dog officers survived?”

Stafford shrugs. “Nobody’s made it here yet.”

Speirs nods and looks away, scanning the crowd. Flatly he says, “That leg going to be a problem?”

“I can walk on it,” offers Stafford. “It ain’t as bad as it looks. The thing that’s funny is that it’s worse’n it feels. When I got hit I was walkin’ up the road back thataway, and it didn’t even hurt. I turned around an’ shot the bastard who got me an’ walked all the way here, maybe two miles. Didn’t hurt till now.”

Speirs slowly looks back at him and says nothing. He can see Stafford’s eyes glitter with sudden unease. “Anyway, sir,” Stafford says at length, “one of our guys got put in charge of a work detail of German POWs just outside town. I think an officer’s s’posed to take over.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” says Speirs, and leaves him to cope with his petty pain. If he cared at all, he would try to tell Stafford about the superfluity of his wound. The initial impact was all: the first jolt when he jumped and the wind took him and he waited, between the security of his past in the plane and the certainty of his future landing. For the rest of the war, all he can do is try to catch up with what happened there, the fact of his own death.

Sunk in this thought, Speirs strides out into the green mesh of the forest on the outskirts of town. Ahead, off to the left, he sees the small moving silhouettes of the German POWs and the staunch figure of their guard. He slips a hand into his pocket, touching the pack of cigarettes that Compton gave him, and thinks, This doesn’t matter at all.

* * *

Late at night, the Germans begin to sing across the field near Carentan. It makes Speirs restless, so after he ensures that Dog is settled into its allotted area, he begins to wander the forest. He goes deep, deep through the dark impenetrable heart of it, and there in the clearing he begins to clean his Thompson.

Gradually he becomes aware of a thin wail rising and falling like a siren from somewhere nearby. He pauses, hunched over. After a moment, he stands unhurriedly, hefting the gun, and follows the noise.

On the opposite side of the wood, three men crouch in a single foxhole, low to the ground, speaking in frantic whispers—and above them still rises that plaintive dirge of someone crying into the nothingness. As Speirs approaches, the men look up; he recognizes none of them, but they are dug in on Easy’s side of the field.

“What’s going on here?” he queries of no one in particular.

The closest to him, a lean man with a feral expression, pointedly makes and then breaks eye contact. “There was an accident, sir.” Speirs glances at the medic kneeling to work on a shadowy figure. The last man appears youngest; he gapes up at Speirs, pale and almost weeping.

“An accident.”

“Private Smith thought Sergeant Talbert was a German.” The lean one casts a withering glance at the youngest man and, hearing Talbert cry out again in that unreal voice, goes to his sergeant and begins speaking to him softly. Speirs knows that they expect him to condemn Smith; but looking at this boy with his white face against which his dark eyes and hair show up like bruises, he thinks it an altogether simple mistake to make. In the night they are all just black blank bodies going through the motions. He says only, “Patch him up and get him out,” and leaves without seeing Sergeant Talbert’s face.

On his way back through the forest, he comes upon another young Easy private, apparently spooked by the commotion, and takes him back to his hole. He recognizes the other man in it—Sergeant Martin, one of Easy’s squad leaders, who glances up at their approach and does nothing but shift position and close his eyes again. It both rankles and pleases Speirs, this complete and unexpected lack of fear. The private hunkers down again and begins to talk as Speirs is about to leave. He says that on D-Day he fell asleep in a ditch, and Speirs stops and tries to imagine that; but he can’t. When he looks at this man he sees only his blue, blue eyes in the murk of the hole, the gauntness about his cheeks and chin, and the awkward, disjointed arrangement of his body. When he finishes, Speirs asks his name.

“I’m Blithe, sir. Albert Blithe.”

Speirs crouches down over him, on the lip of the hole, and tells him, in the precise terms he has been gathering in his mind since D-Day, what life at war is. Not the struggle against death, but death’s reflection, its shadow cast upon the ground. He tells Blithe that he is already dead and should not waste energy fighting it. The only thing to do is keep moving. He would not expect anyone else to understand this, but Blithe with his blue eyes and terminal face should know. Speirs squats high above him, looking down, and remembers.

He comes up the forest trail from the right and the guard—a sergeant from Dog whose name escapes him—salutes almost guiltily. Returning the salute, he surveys the prisoners, a dingy, downcast group burying dead livestock. He can hear the dull slap as the sergeant behind him passes his gun from hand to hand. He can smell the mud raw and rotten as gangrene. He reaches into his pocket and takes out the pack of smokes.

He goes to the prisoners individually, handing out the cigarettes as soon as the men look at him directly. They are dead-eyed, depthless, completely automatic in their movements: the ball-and-socket roll of shoulders when they dig, the routine of arranging a cigarette. Muscular reflexes after the heart has stopped. They know what will happen, so the future holds no fear. Speirs almost smiles at them.

A few days after the bayoneting of Sergeant Talbert, the 506th comes off the line. It’s already too late for some of the men: when Dog files into town to be evacuated, Speirs finds himself surrounded by medics treating the most recent casualties. He spots Winters and Nixon of Easy, and Lieutenant Welsh with his disconcerting drunkard’s verve, flanking an incoming stretcher. He orders Dog to shelter and joins the other officers, who have paused while the stretcher-bearers try to flag down a jeep.

“How many men did you lose today?” he asks.

Welsh, fumbling with a cigarette, says fiercely, “None.” The cigarette catches, sputters in the fine drizzle, goes out. “Damn it. None, yet. A private got hit on patrol.”

“Harry, he did volunteer,” says Nixon in a low voice.

Speirs looks over their heads to see Private Blithe on the stretcher, taking up the least amount of space possible. There is nothing of interest in him anymore: those blue eyes are fixed as the sky. Faint petals of blood spread along his neck from underneath a makeshift bandage, and as if in answer, from his uniform pocket on the opposite side dangles a little white inevitable flower. Speirs doesn’t know what it’s called, but he knows what Blithe is called, no matter how many hospitals take him on: a corpse.

A jeep rumbles around the corner, and the men prepare to lift the stretcher again. From behind Speirs, Winters says, “Harry, take Lipton’s place. Lipton, fall out!”

The back of the indicated man is to them: he is bent over Blithe, briefly laying his hand on the private’s forehead as if giving a benediction. Speirs can’t make out what he says, but at Winter’s command he steps away from the group and almost literally falls out. Speirs can see his set expression of controlled pain when he reels from the stretcher and then catches himself.

“Sergeant,” Winters says more quietly, “I thought you were in the hospital.”

“I got out, sir,” replies Lipton without a trace of levity.

“I want you back in.”

“The men—”

“Have nothing to do but wait here.”

“They’re going to be evacuated. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to go back to England at the same time as Easy.”

Winters glances at Nixon, who says nothing; just smiles sympathetically.

“If you’ll sit down somewhere and rest,” says Winters finally, “I’ll tell the hospital that you’re too valuable to spare.”

“Thank you, sir,” says Lipton, ducking his head to smile.

“It wouldn’t necessarily be a lie,” adds Nixon, as if to put him at ease, but Lipton merely salutes them both and turns away.

As he passes, Speirs notices the jagged scar on his cheek, still dark and alien as a fresh wound, and his uncomfortably foreshortened walk—not quite a limp, but a compensation for one. “Sergeant Lipton,” Speirs says in acknowledgement; and Lipton, who seems to know more than he lets on, answers with “Captain Speirs”; but he does not look into Speirs’s face.

* * *

After the chaos in Foy has subsided, Speirs makes a circuit of the entire town, checking for more snipers. But as he roams through the haphazard streets, circling the main body of men, what he is really doing is staking out his territory. This, the town he has flushed of the enemy; this, the company he has carried. He knows the currents of power in the Army, knows that Easy will be his within days. Until then, it already unofficially belongs to him, and he to it. In a way the entire war has been preparation for this. Speirs’s legend has inhabited the company since D-Day, thanks to the serendipity that appoints Easy men as observers to his exploits.

He rounds a corner and comes upon Lipton wallowing in rubble with a few other soldiers, trying to treat a wounded man. He kneels near the man’s head in that odd attitude of his, half supplicant and half priest, holding one bloody forearm. Roe squats at the man’s feet, bandaging his leg, but Lipton seems equally absorbed in his own ministrations.

“First Sergeant,” calls Speirs.

Lipton glances over his shoulder. “Sir,” he says evenly, still gripping the man’s hand, “we need a jeep.”

“They’re pulling in at the crossroads now. Move him out.” Speirs comes up behind Lipton and says as he begins to rise, “Let the men take him. I need your report on casualties.”

The others pause, glancing to Lipton. He nods at Roe, who takes charge of the group and leads them down the street, staggering under their burden.

“Dike wasn’t their commander,” says Speirs almost absently, watching them go. He looks at Lipton then, shrewdly, and prompts, “Was he?”

“Lieutenant Dike was the acting CO of Easy Company, sir,” replies Lipton, rubbing at the blood on his hands.

“Did Lieutenant Dike ever ask you for a casualty report?”

“No,” says Lipton. He has a way of avoiding eye contact without making a point of it. Speirs finds it intriguing, so he waits there without speaking, ankle-deep in the rubble. “He didn’t,” says Lipton, and meets Speirs’s eyes briefly: a flicker of uninterrupted brown, remotely. No-man’s land.

“Give me a casualty report, Sergeant,” Speirs says. Lipton responds with an exhaustive list of losses and wounds suffered in the attack, concluding with the man who was just transported to the jeeps. Speirs understands instinctively the meaning of the delivery of this account, the subtle but unmistakable change of balance between them. He owns the company now, and if Lipton resents the displacement, he gives no more sign than he did when asked to surrender his patient to Roe. When it is done, Speirs thanks him, though it’s not regulation to thank inferior officers.

Lipton stands with his hands behind his back almost expectantly, although he doesn’t say a word. Speirs follows his gaze; he’s staring at the building that harbored the German sniper this morning—a high, crooked silhouette against the reddening sky.

“How many killed by the sniper?” Speirs asks.

Lipton stiffens slightly and says, “Four.” He reaches into his pocket and comes out with a fistful of something, which he extends to Speirs. Speirs takes it, not knowing what to expect. He feels the fine, smooth edges of the dead men’s dog tags, the liquid roll of their chains—and, before Lipton retreats, he feels how the other man’s hand shakes.

“I saw you,” he says.

Lipton looks at him obliquely, his face unreadable, and says, “Sir?”

“Running across the street before Powers got him.”

Lipton nods. “Shifty’s a good shot.”

“Good enough for you to risk that.” He intends it as a statement of fact, but Lipton says “Yes” quickly, as though he has questioned it. From the way Lipton’s shoulders rise, Speirs can tell that his hands are moving behind his back, clasping more tightly together.

“Risk doesn’t really matter,” Lipton says at last. “You ran through the German line to join up with I Company. It’s what you have to do. And when I did it, it didn’t really seem to matter; I just did it, that was enough.” His eyes seem to close down for a moment.

Speirs watches the play of muscles in his arms, imagines the hands behind his back clamping down as if on an open wound. He thinks of the timelessness of that run. How once he vaulted out of the lee of the building, all superfluity fell away; there was nothing behind him or before him, just the piston drive of legs and the cavernous sound of breathing and the slow flame of adrenaline, the way the running wore a groove in the world that he had only to follow. He knows Lipton felt it, too, and that’s why he’s still shivering. It’s cold in the vacuum, stripped of everything.

He takes out a pack of cigarettes and lets two drops into his hand. “You smoke?”

“Yes, sir. Just during wartime,” says Lipton, smiling a little.

“You’ll be a lifelong smoker, then,” observes Speirs flatly, and offers him one. Without hesitation, Lipton takes it between two rough, surprisingly nimble fingers and waits as Speirs produces a lighter. The flame catches between them and holds, making pools and valleys of shadow on their faces. Speirs takes Lipton by the wrist to hold his cigarette steady for lighting, but it’s strange: Lipton’s hand only shakes more violently.

The last man in the work detail has been resting by the side of the road. Speirs stands above him until, laboriously, as if granting a favor, the man climbs to his feet. He waits before Speirs, watching the ground.

“Do you want a cigarette?” asks Speirs, keeping the box close to his body.

“Please,” says the German, with a heavy accent.

Speirs reaches out and takes the man’s chin in his hand—his thumb finding the curve of the jaw, the tip of his forefinger touching the strange stiffness of cartilage—and forces his head up. The man looks at him with eyes sheer and bright and brittle as glass. The thin throat slides in a swallow. He could easily be an American soldier, one of the grimy, stricken boys in Dog; and Speirs idly thinks of the rumor that he knows has already started about his shooting one of his own men for drunkenness. He lights a cigarette, opens the German’s mouth like a hinge, and places it inside. Leaning in close, he says, his lips brushing the hard little knob of the German’s ear, “This doesn’t matter.”

When he moves away, the German falls back a step. A bruise is coalescing cloud-like on the underside of his face, and Speirs’s heart races momentarily, his breathing quickens. He has left a mark. The sergeant is watching him in puzzlement, so he inhales and returns to his place on the mounded earth overlooking the prisoners.

The German picks up a shovel, but when he digs, Speirs knows from the uneven rhythm of his strokes that he still thinks he has a chance. His body doesn’t believe what it has been consigned to.

Speirs looks down at them all, and adjusts the Thompson on his hip.

Later that day, Speirs suggests to Captain Winters that First Sergeant Lipton deserves some sort of recognition, for his handling of the sniper among other things. Winters agrees, and a notification of Sink’s approval comes down within hours.

When he sees Lipton that night in the solemn, soporific warmth of the church, Speirs thinks that his story about Tertius is true: it doesn’t do for a soldier to reveal his whole hand. It makes him vulnerable. So he smiles and congratulates Lipton, but gives no sign that he had any part in this at all.

* * *

* * *

Easy arrives in Haguenau one morning in early February, under an astringent wind and a sky pale and thinning like old milk. Speirs swings himself off of the leading jeep and tells Martin, who appears beside him, to get first platoon billeted as soon as possible. They are achingly tired, he knows, and cold, and in their faces there is still that rigid aspect of shock. Haguenau does nothing to raise their spirits: the street shining dully with rain, the stench of smoke, the rumble of guns across the river.

“Where’s Lipton?” he asks without turning.

“Still back with second, Captain,” says Martin behind him.

“Get him up here.” The supply trucks should have arrived before them, but the road remains empty, echoing with their voices. He needs to know how much they’ve brought with them—Lipton has a better head than he does for minutiae, who has socks and who doesn’t, how many winter coats short they are, how many days they can stave off scurvy with their meager rations.

“I think—”

“Get him up here,” repeats Speirs in a measured voice, feeling Martin’s presence at his back more acutely.

“Yes, sir.”

A minute later, he glances over to see second and third platoon straggle up along the curb, soggy, disconsolate. Lipton makes his way out of the crowd; Speirs can hear a few scattered calls of “Lip!”, to which the first sergeant nods acknowledgement. It seems strange to Speirs, this practice of giving nicknames: the men call Lipton Lip, or Talbert Tab, or Randleman Bull, a mark of mingled respect and intimacy. He can barely conceive of these men in personal terms. It has taken him this long just to work up to recognizing, at stray moments, that men like Lipton and Winters do indeed have first names.

Here is Carwood Lipton coming up the street, and Speirs is stepping forward to brief him when he notices Sergeant Luz. Luz lingers near Lipton’s elbow, supporting him with an inconspicuous hand; and Lipton, almost as inconspicuously, leans on the hand, walking on a slightly uneven keel. As they stop on the pavement, Speirs notices the stuporous white flash of Lipton’s eyes; he stands there with his feet slightly apart, his free arm dangling, his head canted down.

“Lipton,” says Speirs, and he looks up. His face has a gray cast. In a low voice, he answers, “Sir.”

“You don’t look well.”

Lipton shakes his head slowly. “Fine, sir. Just cold.”

Luz makes a noise of disgust and all but cuffs Lipton on the arm. “We’re all cold. Cold is waiting around in goddamn Bastogne for a month. What you got is not being able to fucking breathe last night.” He glances at Speirs. “It’s true. Had to practically hold him on the truck all night. All he could do was sit there gaping, sir.”

“Shut up, Luz,” says Lipton without fervor.

“Pneumonia?” asks Speirs, barely looking at Luz.

“Maybe, sir,” replies Lipton.

“Probably sir,” Luz corrects.

“Sergeant, your platoon’s being assigned to quarters.” Luz hesitates, and then with a final pat on Lipton’s arm he goes. Lipton makes as if to follow; Speirs doesn’t touch him, but says, “I’m not talking to you. You’re a lieutenant.”

“Not yet,” Lipton rasps, visibly shivering now. “Not officially, s—” A coughing fit takes hold of him, seeming to clench around him from the midriff, but he remains upright, struggling with the word. “Sir,” he manages.

“Provisional headquarters are in that building up ahead. Go in and lie down.” Lipton chokes down the spasm and salutes. As he moves off, Speirs exhales in frustration, softly but with force.

Lipton must have overheard it, because he says, “Sorry, sir.”

“Shut up, First Sergeant, and get inside the house.”

It takes longer to battle Lipton into bed—most of the day, in fact. Speirs and Luz press him by increments, so that he moves from the street to a sofa to a chair in the back room. The moon silvers the windows before Luz finally bullies him to the bed.

Speirs borrows a few blankets from abandoned houses around town that night, and with them in tow enters the back room for the first time. The air hangs heavy and inert as smoke, and he has a fleeting sense of what Lipton must feel: the slow contraction of the lungs like water around a dropped stone, the heat, the untethered feeling of fever, the betrayal of the body that once seemed unending. Of course he will not die, Speirs thinks, and is surprised by the irrelevance of the thought. But pale as he is and labored as his wheezing sounds, Lipton is indeed still there, even sitting up in bed; hunched over with the muscles clenched in his back and neck as though he strains against the burden of breathing.

“The patrol leaves in an hour,” says Speirs. The fullness of his voice startles him in this close little crypt. Lipton’s head jerks up, and for a moment his expression is unguarded, blank and stopped on the cusp of breath. Then he inhales and catches himself before he chokes, and the shutter of his face closes again.

“Captain Speirs.”

“Martin’s leading,” Speirs adds, standing in the doorway, watching his empty white face. Something flickers in it, and he says, “Not Malarkey. You went out earlier to tell Malarkey, didn’t you.” It’s not a question, and Lipton gives no answer. “Luz told me you went out.”

“My job,” explains Lipton in a voice with no air behind it.

“I talked to Roe,” Speirs continues in the same tone. “He said he’ll come by as soon as he can, but it sounds like pneumonia. Grounds for the hospital.”

“No, sir,” says Lipton with unexpected ferocity. They are both shamed by it for a moment. Lipton ducks his head and begins to cough—no longer throatily, but deep in his chest, reverberant like the hollow sound of the street echoing.

“That’s what I thought,” replies Speirs almost wonderingly. “I told him you’d probably stay.”

He can see that Lipton tries to say “Thank you,” but can’t find space in his lungs. Smoothly, Speirs deposits the blankets on the foot of the bed and stands at his side. Only the tearing sound of coughing disturbs the stillness, and then like a drowning man Lipton reaches out and takes hold of the fabric of Speirs’s pant leg, just above the knee. Speirs steps sideways, cagily, but Lipton is so immersed in his private war that he might as well be gripping the bedpost. Speirs sits down on the edge of the bed and waits it out.

At length, Lipton comes up from a great depth, gasping, and settles lower on the mattress. Gradually he returns to himself, rhythm and thought and the minute nerve firings of sensation, and he becomes aware of his hand fisted in the material of Speirs’s pant leg. He murmurs something unintelligible and begins to extricate it.

“First Sergeant,” says Speirs, and shifts closer so that Lipton’s hand slips higher on his thigh. Lipton sits up, and they pause. Then Speirs reaches down and takes Lipton gently by the jaw, sliding his fingers along its slope until he reaches the warm folding corner of skull and neck, where the throat fills and the pulse batters like a ricochet and if he pressed harder he could trace the arrangement of bone and muscle. He does not press harder; he has touched enough. He tilts Lipton’s head up so he can see the eyes and mouth black with shadow, and the expression of defiant life. He says, “Carry on, First Sergeant.”

In his fingers Lipton’s throat leaps and recedes. He wonders if the bed frame rattles because Lipton is shaking; if it is fear or fever or something else. Whatever it is, Lipton’s hand creeps diffidently up again, and he lies back on the mattress.

A faint memory courses through Speirs, and he stirs uneasily. He resists it, this image made obsolete by time, because of course nothing is real but what he touches, nothing that has been or will be matters, death proceeds infinitely without conventions of chronology. But it comes back, licking at him like flame.

He pauses, staring down at the prisoners laboring in the mud, and on his vision the flame of his own cigarette makes a brief red blot sprouting up like a flower. The muscles in his thigh burn under the weight of his Thompson. He does not know how long he waits here.

The one German—his German—looks up as if alerted by some signal beyond sound. His eyes are impossibly bright.

Something clicks, outside of Speirs.

He doesn’t know. Does he kill them? Does it matter?

In the darkness he finds Lipton in the bed. Did he kill eight, twenty, thirty German prisoners in a ditch on D-Day? Does he touch Lipton one February night in Haguenau with the enemy just across the river and the streets festering in the rain like a wound? It shouldn’t matter. Death makes no such distinctions.

The next morning, Roe will come and find Lipton half-asleep, cooler, breathing a little more easily. Quite an immune system y’got on you, Roe will tell him. Strange dreams, tricks of the fever: Lipton probably will not remember.

But sometimes dreamers and dead men do tell tales. Sometimes they swing from trees. And sometimes they fall by the roadside but rise again and follow, slogging clear through Carentan and Aldbourne and Eindhoven and Mourmelon and Bastogne. And Speirs remembers.