Bastogne was enough to make any man question why he was here. Sitting in a damp foxhole George turned his cigarette lighter over in his fingers.

He had survived, he had made it another day without being blown into a million pieces. He couldn’t say the same for his friends. It was unusually quiet, no distant sounds of bombs, no men laughing or even whispering among themselves.

Flipping open and closed his lighter he sat in silence in his home in the dirt. He was alerted only slightly by the sound of shuffling and approaching steps crunching on snow, but he barely looked up. He felt utterly defeated.