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A few weeks after their arrival in the camp, when their straw mattresses had flattened out and their rifles were beginning to speckle with rust from the dew, there was a funny incident in one of the squad tents. A buck sergeant named Myron Phelps, who was thirty-three but looked much older, and who…

Captain Widdoes had been awarded the Silver Star for leading an attack through knee-deep snow last winter; the attack had gained him an excellent tactical advantage and lost him nearly half a platoon. Even now, many of the men in the company were afraid of him.

NOTHING EVER SEEMED to go right for the 57th Division. It had come overseas just in time to take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge; then, too-quickly strengthened with masses of new replacements, it had plodded through further combat in eastern France and in Germany, never doing badly but…

“Oh, then you’ve settled it,” Judith said. “Oh, that’s marvelous.”

“Settled what?”

“Whatever it was that was making you both so miserable. Oh, I’m so glad. You didn’t ever really think I believed the nonsense about the illness in the family, did you? Has any young wife ever crossed the ocean …

Nobody had to tell him what a triumph of masculinity it was to have a young whore offer herself to you free of charge. He didn’t even need From Here to Eternity to tell him that, though he would always remember how that novel came quickly to mind as he drew her face up closer to his own. She had ma…