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fend like a man, responsible to no one other than himself. And he was in pain; sharp, agonizing jolts jarred his every movement. At that moment, empty of all feeling, ripped away from all that he loved, the boy wanted nothing more than to die. Instead, Vincenzo faced the long and grueling process of burying his family.
     
    “You want a marker for the graves?” his friend Franco asked. Franco was fourteen, with a muscular frame, crisp dark eyes and a thick head of hair that he hated to have cut, long locks ruffled by the slightest wind.
    The boy shook his head. “I’m the only one who needs to know where they are,” he said.
    “I’m sorry, Vincenzo,” Franco said. “They did not deserve to die like this.”
    Vincenzo stared at the graves and nodded. “No one does,” he said.
    “Maybe if they had left along with the others,” Franco said. He stood next to Vincenzo, his right foot resting against a crumpled stone wall that had once been the older boy’s home. “Left when the Germans told them to leave. Maybe today they would still be alive.”
    “My mother said that if we were to die, we had earned the right to die in our own city,” Vincenzo said.
    “You heard the soldiers with the bullhorns,” Franco said. “You read the leaflets they dropped. They’re coming back. This time with tanks and many more soldiers. They’re not going to stop until they destroy all of it.”
    “I heard them,” Vincenzo said. “And I believe them. What they can’t have, they want no one else to have.”
    “These graves we made won’t last very long,” Franco said. “The bombs will see to that.”
    Vincenzo looked past Franco and out across the smoke and ruin of Naples. “The bombs can’t hurt them anymore,” he said.

BOOK
ONE
    . . . We are but warriors for the working day.
    —
H ENRY V

W ILLIAM S HAKESPEARE

1
    45TH THUNDERBIRD INFANTRY DIVISION HEADQUARTERS SALERNO, ITALY. SEPTEMBER 25, 1943
    Captain Edward Anders leaned under the warm shade of a fig tree, a lit Lucky Strike hanging from his lips, and stared down at the beachhead below. His troops had been in the first wave of the attack to capture a city whose name he had never heard before the war. It took the combined forces of American and British troops nine days to advance past the beach and up the side of the sloping mountain where he now stood, smoking the last cigarette in his pack. Behind him, a command post had been set up inside a long series of brown tents. Inside the main tent, there were 3,500 sets of dog tags scattered in four wooden boxes, waiting to be mailed Stateside for eventual delivery to the relatives of the men who had been lost in a fight for sand and rock. Anders stared at the mountains above him, up toward Cassino, then back down toward the city of Naples, and knew there was still a lot of hard fighting left.
    “Hey, Cap,” a voice behind him said. “Word is you want to see me.”
    “It was more like an order,” Captain Anders said. “But let’s not stand on formalities.”
    Captain Anders turned to look at Corporal Steve Connors as he stood at attention and held his salute, the Gulf of Salerno at his back. Anders brushed away the salute. “From what I’ve seen, you have as little patience for that shit as I do. Which probably means neither one of us is going to get far in this army.”
    “I just want to get far enough to go home, Cap,” Connors said.
    “Will Naples do you in the meantime?” Anders asked.
    “What’s in Naples?”
    “Most likely nothing. From the reports I’ve seen, the city’s already nothing more than a ghost town.”
    “But still, you want me to go,” Connors said.
    He removed his helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his uniform. Steve Connors was twenty-five years old, a college graduate and second-year law student from Covington, Kentucky. He was just shy of six feet tall with a middleweight fighter’s rugged build, topped by thick strands of dark hair, brown eyes and a