“Do you remember, Kat, how we commandeered the goose? And how you brought me out of the barrage when I was still a young recruit and was wounded for the first time? I cried then. Kat, that is almost three years ago.”

He nods.

The anguish of solitude rises up in me. When Kat is taken away I will not have one friend left.

“Kat, in any case we must see one another again, if it is peacetime before you come back.”

“Do you think that I will be marked A1 again with this leg?” he asks bitterly.

“With rest it will get better. The joint is quite sound. It may get all right again.”

“Give me another cigarette,” he says.