Life was better than death, and peace was better than war.

Yet death watched. So if you had a moment of joy, it was better to conceal it. When your heart beat loudly with hope, you kept that as quiet as possible also.

Curiously, although they were all war paintings, not a single dead body was visible in any of them. Yet it made a rare kind of sense. War was over for the dead. It existed only in the faces of the living, which was where Paulie Walters had looked for it—in the eyes and mouths of those in trouble, in the way flesh acted in grief and pain and shock. He had looked for it too, in the wounded reaching for each other, or giving comfort with the terrible tenderness people can show in the darkest places. He had found it even in those odd moments of laughter, in the rare joy that is the underside of the deepest anguish.

Now he was nearly twenty-seven years old. He had stopped pretending a long time ago that the darker sides of life were unknown to him, or that he loved most of what he had witnessed. Lieutenant Spadero had caught it very quickly. He was his father’s son, and his father had passed on a key part of his inheritance: the knowledge that life held more grimness and cruelty than one could ever find reason for or understand.