The mud did not care about Dr. Arthur Pendelton's medical degree. It did not care about his visions, either -- though he would not have called them visions. He called them dreams, because dreams were something you could wake from, and what happened in the Somme was something you could not.

July 1, 1916. The day the British Army learned the word slaughter had a new meaning.

Arthur stood in the aid station -- a barn with the roof blown off and the walls shot through -- and counted the bodies. One, two, twelve, twenty-three. The number kept climbing. The bandages ran out. He used his own shirts. He used the lining from a dead lieutenant's coat. He used everything.

Before the attack, he had dreamed of this moment three nights running. Not symbolically -- literally. He had seen the artillery barrage, heard the whistle, watched the first wave walk into the machine-gun nests and fall like wheat before a scythe. He had tried to warn Captain Huxley. Huxley had thanked him politely and sent him back to the wounded.

Now Arthur pulled a shard of shell from a young private's thigh -- the boy couldn't have been more than seventeen, with hair the color of straw and a photograph of his mother taped to the inside of his tunic -- and wondered at what precise moment the war had stopped being a tragedy and become a farce.

"There's more coming," Sergeant Major Wright said, appearing beside him with a face like crushed gravel. "Fifteenth Division. They're pushing through the gap at Thiepval."

"The gap is a killing field," Arthur said. "I've seen the dream --"

"Don't," Wright said. "Don't do that again."

"I'm not --"

"You say 'dream' and 'vision' and 'I saw this before,' and every time, there are thirty more bodies. So either you're cursed or you're crazy, and I don't care which, just stop telling us."

Arthur looked at the private on the table. The boy was breathing shallowly. The fever would come in hours. Arthur could feel it building in the wound like a slow drum. He cleaned it with boiling water that was barely more than hot. He packed it with whatever antiseptic he had left -- dilute iodine, barely enough to sting.

He had saved this boy's life once before, in a dream, six months ago. In the dream, the boy died of gangrene. So Arthur had insisted on a different dressing, a deeper incision, a drainage tube that wasn't standard procedure. The boy had lived. And then three weeks later, a mortar shell had landed on the aid station and the boy was dead anyway.

That was the pattern. That was the curse. Save a man from the wound, and the shell would get him. Save him from the shell, and dysentery would take him. Save him from dysentery, and a friendly-fire incident in the trenches would end him. The war had a way of collecting its debts.

Eleanor found him at dusk, sitting on an overturned crate outside the ruined chapel where they kept the more stable patients. She had dark hair that she wore pinned back with a pencil, and hands that were always stained with iodine. She brought him a cup of tea that tasted of tin and regret.

"You look like hell, Arthur."

"Thank you, Eleanor. That's encouraging."

"You saved three more today."

"I lost twelve."

"Twelve out of three hundred. The math works in our favor."

"The math is wrong." He looked at her. Her eyes were green, like the sea in photographs he'd seen before the war. "Tell me something, Eleanor. If you could see the future -- if you knew exactly how each person dies -- would you try to change it?"

She sat beside him. The chapel bell had been melted down for ammunition, but the cross still stood, cracked down the middle. "Why would I want to know how people die?"

"Because then you wouldn't waste time pretending it matters."

She was quiet for a long time. Somewhere behind them, a dying man moaned. The sound was so faint it might have been the wind.

"I think," she said finally, "that if you knew how everyone died, you'd understand that the only thing that matters is what happens between the living and the dying. Everything else is just... noise."

Arthur closed his eyes. He wanted to tell her about the dream he'd had last night -- not about the war, but about after. He had seen her, older, standing in a garden with roses. He had seen himself, gray-haired, sitting in a chair by a window. He had seen peace.

But he also saw the path to get there. The Somme. Passchendaele. The Chemin des Dames. Ten thousand more deaths, twenty thousand more, a hundred thousand more, until the ground was so saturated with bone and blood that nothing would ever grow here again.

"Arthur?" Eleanor touched his arm. "What did you see?"

He opened his eyes. The sky was dark, and the stars were out, indifferent and beautiful and impossibly far away.

"Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all."

November 10, 1918. The day before the war ended. Arthur sat in the ruins of a bakery near Ypres, surrounded by seventeen wounded men who were dying at different rates, and listened to the guns fall silent.

They didn't fall silent all at once. First the heavy artillery stopped. Then the machine guns. Then the rifles, one by one, until there was only the wind and the moaning of men who had been screaming for four years and had forgotten how to stop.

A German prisoner sat across from him, a boy really, with a wound in his leg and a mother's photograph in his tunic. The boy looked at Arthur with eyes that said: *Is it over?*

Arthur didn't answer. He couldn't. Because he knew what the boy didn't know: that the armistice was paper. That the peace would be fragile and bitter. That in twenty-one years, the guns would fire again, and this time they would be louder, and this time the world would burn.

But none of that mattered now. Not in this bakery, not in this moment, with this boy looking at him for an answer.

"Yes," Arthur said. "It's over."

The boy closed his eyes. He was crying. Arthur reached across and squeezed his shoulder, and for a moment -- the only moment in four years that felt real -- two enemies sat together in the dark, listening to the silence, understanding that they were both victims of something neither of them had chosen.

Outside, the wind blew through the ruins. The dead were the dead. The living were the living. And tomorrow, somehow, they would have to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.

Arthur Pendelton did not know what to do with his. He had spent four years trying to save people he could not save, knowing outcomes he could not change, carrying a knowledge that was not a gift but a sentence.

He stood up. His legs were weak from hunger. His hands were stained with blood that was not his. He walked out of the bakery and into the Belgian night, where the stars still burned, indifferent and beautiful and impossibly far away.

The war was over. Arthur had survived it. And he knew, with the certainty of a man who had seen too much, that surviving was the hardest part.