- Joe thinks about New Year's Eve, both in Shale City and at the bakery in Los Angeles, where after closing time the workers would go to a saloon.
- It's been 365 days, and Joe's celebrating his own personal new year. During this time, he has learned how to tell day from night, and he knows when the nurse will come to bathe him and change his clothes.
- Joe's also learned to tell the nurses apart. The day nurse is always the same large and skilled woman, and Joe imagines her as older. But the night nurses change. Joe can tell by their hands that they're younger. Whenever Joe gets a new nurse, he knows that they look at him for a few minutes. One of them runs out of the room. One of them cries.
- Keeping track of everything keeps Joe busy. He has named the days of the week and the months so that he can celebrate the holidays and the seasons. In his mind, he goes for walks in the woods in the spring, and he goes to the Grand Mesa to talk with his father in July. He always imagines going to sleep next to Kareen.
- Joe reckons that Kareen, who was nineteen when he left, must be at least twenty-two by now. He thinks about her getting old. In his mind, Kareen will always be the nineteen-year-old Kareen he knew. He wonders about the real Kareen, though; he wonders whether she is with someone else, whether she has a child, and whether she has forgotten him.
- Thinking of Kareen, Joe wishes he were near her, and he starts to feel homesick for America (he actually doesn't know what country he is in). He assumes that the blast that wounded him blew away all forms of identification, so no one would even be able to tell his nationality. He's pretty sure he was found in a regiment with Englishmen (Joe calls them "Limeys"), so they probably think that he's English.
- Joe thinks about the fact that he's now "English" and that he's lost his American identity. He finds the English to be a strange and foreign people, and recalls a Scotchman in the regiment who refused to fight German Bavarians because they were ruled by Crown Prince Rupert, the last Stuart heir to the throne of England (the Stuarts were an English dynasty hailing from Scotland that supplied the monarchs of England from about the 17th to the 18th century).
- Here's the story: Instead of shooting the Scotchman for insubordination, the officers, to Joe's disbelief, actually try to argue with him over it. The Scotchman becomes more and more agitated about it and threatens to bring out the truth in a court martial. Eventually, he's transferred away from the frontlines.
- Joe next thinks of someone named Lazarus, a Hun (a German soldier; not the kind in Mulan) walking across No Man's Land toward the British trenches.
- Here's that story: They can't tell if this German soldier is lost or confused, but they shoot at him, and he dies hanging over barbed wire.
- The corpse begins to decay and stink, as corpses tend to do. The colonel, who is very much into military form and decorum, orders one of the corporals to take out a squad and bury the dude, despite the fact that this requires a risky trip into No Man's Land.
- Corporal Timlon obeys and buries Lazarus.
- The next day, the Germans ("Heinie" is a word Jim uses to refer to a German soldier) start to drop shells on the English regiment, and one of them hits the spot where Lazarus has been buried, blowing his body into the air... where it lands back on the wire, with a finger pointing towards the English lines. That's how this dude gets the name Lazarus, the name of a man Jesus is said to have resurrection.
- The next day, the English try to shoot Lazarus down from the wire, but they don't manage it. The colonel comes through and smells Lazarus, which prompts him to order Corporal Timlon not only to bury Lazarus but to recite a full Anglican funeral service over the body as well.
- Corporal Timlon tries to explain that it's dangerous, but the colonel doesn't care: in his mind, orders must be obeyed.
- After digging a six-foot hole and burying Lazarus in a sheet, Corporal Timlon is reading the service when flares shoot up and get him smack dab in the butt. He gets sent away from the frontlines for eight weeks—which, in the end, is good news for him, since most of the regiment is wiped out during that time.
- A few days after the incident with Corporal Timlon, another shell hits Lazarus's grave and sends him back up onto the fence, still in the sheet... and now dripping all over the place. Um... yeah. Trumbo just went there.
- The English shoot Lazarus down. Even if they can still smell him, they'd rather not see him.
- The men try to forget about Lazarus, and in the meantime a new subaltern arrives, an innocent eighteen-year-old kid with blonde hair. Everyone has an impulse to shield him from the horrors of war, but he is eager to participate. So one night, he sneaks out to do night patrol duty on his own. The next morning, he's found fallen in a pool of vomit... with his entire arm through the decayed body of Lazarus. It's beyond gross.
- The subaltern is sent back from the front, and the men hear that he has lost his mind.
- Joe thinks about the irony of someone having a perfectly healthy body but a ruined mind that doesn't make good use of that body. Joe wishes that he and the subaltern should swap minds so that they'd both be happy. He wishes the subaltern a happy new year.