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“She’s talking about the Spanish Civil War,” I said. “ ‘They shall not pass’ is a famous statement made by a woman called La Pasionaria. She was a speaker for the Popular Front. She lives in the Soviet Union now.”
    “You’re a Communist?” the sergeant said.
    “No. I was for the Republic,” Rosita replied. “But they blighted themselves with the murder of the clergy. I am not political, except for my hatred of the fascists.”
    “Do you know if others are alive?” I asked.
    She shook her head.
    “You mean no?” I said.
    “The difference between life and death is not measurable here,” she replied.
    Even after eating, she could not walk, and the sergeant and I had to take turns carrying her. Her body had no odor, as though her glands had dried up and her pores were no longer able to secrete moisture. We carried her through a network of irrigation ditches and hid in a culvert under a road that had been bombed and rendered impassable. We also hid under a train trestle and slept in a forest where we kept warm by heaping leaves and dirt on ourselves. My feet were blocks of wood. I unlaced my boots but did not remove them, for fear I would not be able to fit them on again. When I woke in the morning, three inches of snow had accumulated on top of me without my being aware of it.
    The weather continued to worsen. The grayness of the day and the snow swirling out of the fields allowed us to keep walking; otherwise, we would have had to stay hidden in the woods until dark. We saw dead cattle in a field and a farmhouse pocked with holes, including the roof, probably made by aerial gunfire. We also saw a convoy of trucks filled with German infantry going up a dirt road toward the front, followed by three armored personnel carriers and two ambulances and a motorcycle with a sidecar on it. The motorcycle sputtered to a stop, and the driver and the officer in the sidecar climbed into one of the trucks. Later we saw a train carrying rail cannon and panzers boomed down on flatcars. Late in the afternoon the sergeant worked his way under the back wall of a farmer’s barn and returned with five potatoes stuffed in his pockets, his face as red as sunburn from the wind, snow speckling on it like bits of glass.
    We kept traveling into the night and stopped only out of sheer exhaustion. The moon was up, the countryside bright and cold and empty of sound or movement. Just before going to sleep, I wrote these lines in my notebook: The woman is carrying lice. If she has typhus, Pine and I will soon have it, too. She sleeps with her head against my chest while I walk. My lower back is on fire and I have trouble straightening it. Pine is a yeoman and a solid fellow, with far more humanity in him than he is aware of. I hope he gets through this all right. Good night, Grandfather. Good night, Mother. Good night, Lord. See you all in the morning.
    Just before dawn, Pine shook me awake. We were at the bottom of a gulley, sheltered by spruce and fir trees that were white with fresh snow. “It’s crawling with Krauts out there, Lieutenant,” he whispered. “Mechanized infantry, lots of it.”
    “Going which way?”
    “East. I think they’re running out of gas. They parked a light panzer in the field. Three guys got out and left it.”
    “Where’s Rosita?” I said.
    “Still asleep.”
    “If they set up a perimeter in the woods, we’re in trouble.”
    “Sir, when I went after food last night, I saw another farmhouse. It’s just north of here. It looked deserted. I saw a cellar door in back.”
    I couldn’t think. Those given to asceticism might disagree, but I never found hunger a friend when it came to imposing order on one’s thoughts. “How far is the house from the trees?”
    “A hundred yards, maybe. The woman was coughing, sir. She needs to be in a warm place. She needs a lot more food, too. We could use some of the same, Lieutenant.”
    “You regret taking her along?”
    “I don’t know how I feel, sir.