By 1916 Lovejoy couldn’t take it anymore, and hitchhiked his way from Bloomingfield to Ottumwa and enlisted with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He told them he was 21, which maybe they didn’t believe but also they didn’t care, because they gave him a crash course in driving and shipped him over to France to haul whatever he could of soldiers back from the front.

It was an awakening, of sorts, holding his truck to the road through the German guns with men screaming from the gurney. The glory of war had never meant much to him, but up close it was worse, all incoherent noise and violence and meat. He wrote home, trying to explain any of that, but it must not have worked, because Gene and Roy followed him over in 1917. He didn’t know that at the time, mind; by the time Ma Jenny’s letter asking him to look out for them caught up to him, it came bundled with another saying they’d already been blown up somewhere away to the north. She didn’t blame him, she said; anyway he’d tried.

The other drivers got drunk with him when the news came, Ernest stolidly and Olaf furiously, the two Friend brothers sympathetically. Normally so voluble, that night they all sat quiet, except for the sound of the guns five miles away and the muffled screams from the hospital; what was there to say?