THE ARGONNE, NOVEMBER 11, 1918

Sergeant Maximilian Wolf of the Sixteenth Royal Bavarian Infantry lost almost his entire squad the last morning of the war. It was announced the fighting would end at eleven o'clock. All they had to do was wait, keep their heads down and it would be over. The trouble was the Americans had lost a lot of men crossing the Meuse, and General Pershing kept attacking. He was going to teach the Germans a lesson. Mortars rained down on them in the trenches. And when that happened, the captain ordered them over the top.

Some of the men – schoolboys, really – had arrived the day before in clean uniforms. They didn't have fleas or lice or rotting feet. They had terror in their eyes. They lit cigarettes with shaking hands. Now they were dead.

Levi Adler, Maximilian's friend, was dead too. Maximilian and Levi had fought side by side for four years – first against the French and now against the Americans. Levi was dead and Maximilian was alive, and Maximilian couldn't say which of them was the lucky one.

Now it was over. Maximilian sat on the edge of the trench and ate his ration of black bread and sausage. He drank deeply from his canteen. The water was warm and smelled of sulfur. He smoked a cigarette. He took a small notebook from his chest pocket and opened it to the drawing of Levi he had made days earlier. The eyes were wild and full of life. He turned to a blank page, rested his helmet on his lap and the notebook on the helmet, and began to draw what he saw across the battlefield.

Soldiers from both sides climbed out of the trenches, tentatively at first, but then more confidently. There were a few cheers on both sides as the truth of the Armistice sank in, but most of the men walked around in silence. A crow was cawing somewhere. American and then German soldiers picked their way across the mud to find anyone still alive. The air smelled of ordnance and blood and shit.

During his four years in combat, Maximilian had been seriously wounded twice, not counting the gassings. Once, early on, a piece of shrapnel had torn open his cheek and temple just behind his eye. A year later, white phosphorus had burned his entire back into scar tissue and taken him out of action for three months. His back still looked like a slab of meat, white and gristly with ropey purple and crimson stripes. It never stopped hurting.

'Here's Hagen,' someone shouted. Maximilian nodded to show he had heard. Hagen was one of the new ones. Maximilian couldn't remember what he had looked like. It didn't matter. He didn't look like anyone now.

Maximilian took the Iron Cross from his chest. The captain had always ordered anyone with decorations to wear them. 'For the Fatherland,' he had said. Maximilian dropped the medal where he had dropped his cigarette and ground them both into the mud with his heel. He went to help bury Hagen, or what was left of him.

The next morning Maximilian cinched the Luger high around his middle and pulled his tunic down over it. He filled his pocket with bullets. What remained of the company fell into formation and marched off the battlefield in a column of twos. The Americans stood and watched them go.

They came to a road where the trickle of men became a muddy brown river. The captain called out the cadence from time to time, in that high Prussian trill Maximilian hated. The men ignored the captain and walked as they pleased, out of step mostly.

They passed ruined farms with the bloated carcasses of horses and cows lying about, their stiff legs pointing toward the sky. They walked through what had once been forest but was now shards of shattered wood lying among splintered stumps and churned-up earth. You could see what was left of a steeple in the distance. The town – Fleury – was badly damaged. What windows remained were shuttered. No one watched as they passed.

A skinny dog came out of nowhere. It ran up to one man after the other until someone dug into his pocket and gave the dog a piece of dry biscuit. The dog ran with them then. Someone else gave it a scrap of food. It ran up to Maximilian. He reached down and patted the starving animal on his trembling ribs. Maximilian found a piece of sausage in his kit and fed it to the dog. The dog licked his fingers. And as it did, Maximilian felt tears well in his eyes. Thank God, thought Maximilian. I'm still in here somewhere.

THE RIVER STYX

The soldiers crowded into third-class carriages: four men on a wooden bench meant for two. And when the seats were gone men squatted or sat in the aisles as best they could. Every car in the train was packed with men. Even between the cars, where you could see the tracks below, they crouched or stood, one on top of the other, their rifles between their legs, their kits on their laps or backs. There were a hundred men in a car meant for thirty. It was winter and there was no heat, but the air was stifling and foul. Before they had all settled into place, the train lurched into motion.

Maximilian sat jammed against the window. The man next to him looked old, probably forty. You could see where the rank insignia had been torn from his uniform. Tufts of white hair sprouted here and there on his head and cheeks; he had great black bags under his watery eyes. Almost as soon as he sat down, he was asleep. His head hung heavy on his hollow chest. His breaths were shallow and rapid. He had a rattling cough deep in his chest. He whimpered from time to time without knowing he was doing so.

There was little conversation anywhere in the car, mostly just the sound of coughing or sneezing. No one knew it at the time, but the influenza epidemic had begun. In a month, the old soldier beside Maximilian would be dead from the flu. And by the end of next year the flu would kill fifty million people, three times the more than sixteen million people that had died in the war. The flu would spread around the world as soldiers returned home from the Great War.

The rocking of the car, the slow click-clack of the wheels, sent Maximilian into a dreamless sleep. After an hour the train shuddered to a stop, blowing out great puffs of steam. The men were ordered off...