Yellow clay drops from Bagger’s head, which he briefly mistakes for brain matter. He then hears a voice say his name as if from within his own body and dismisses it as a blast side effect. He motivates himself with an imaginary exchange with General John J. Pershing and observes Company P moving about in the wreckage.

Bagger is a career con man who manipulated fellow soldiers into taking his place in combat and acting out in order to force himself into non-frontline assignments like latrine duty. He has since accumulated genuine skill as the battalion’s de facto burial specialist.

Bagger hears the voice a second time before Lewis Arno, a 14-year-old who lied about his age to enlist, appears. Bagger feels simultaneous resentment and reluctant affection for him. After Arno confirms he also hears the shriek and remarks on Bagger’s gruesome appearance, Bagger discovers a human ear stuck to his jaw, briefly jokes about it, and discards it. Arno reports that the major general wants him. Bagger is skeptical until Arno identifies the commander by his withered arm. Fearing that he will be forced to undergo a court-martial, Bagger rises unsteadily, refuses Arno’s help, and nearly topples into the mass grave.

As they walk toward the meeting, Arno pesters Bagger with questions about The Son of Tarzan, the book they are currently reading together. Bagger accidentally began this practice because Arno, who has illiteracy, begged Bagger to read dime novels to him.

Bagger stomps a still-beating human heart before Arno can see it and invents a false hazard to steer the boy away from a cart of dismembered limbs. They drop into a trench where Company P is forming a column under Lieutenant Jules Aquila and Sergeant Moss DiStefano. Arno guides Bagger past the chaplain Father Muensterman, who is retching into his own hands, and into a large shell crater resembling a bowl painted with vertical stripes of blood. The crater wall bears the compressed remains of a human head. Three soldiers from Company P stand at attention inside. Bagger registers them as the unit’s most disposable men, then realizes that both he and Arno are considered as members among these men.

The company’s commanding officer, Major General Lyon Reis, convenes the five soldiers. Bagger notes Reis’s underdeveloped right arm hidden in a tailored sleeve, the golden walking stick he carries in its place, and the gap on his uniform coat he reserves for the Medal of Honor he has not yet earned. Reis is the 43rd’s youngest-ever commander and despised for tactics that send men directly into machine-gun nests. When Bagger explains they were caught by a shell, Reis answers him with contempt.

Bagger has an internal “shamefly,” a Tennessee fly that went down his throat when he was looking at a military recruitment poster featuring Uncle Sam, who bears a resemblance to Bagger’s father. Bagger also calls the shamefly “Uncle Sam.” Uncle Sam prods Bagger to talk back to Reis, prompting him to make a corpse pun about. Reis reveals he knows Bagger by name, calls him “Private Gravedigger,” and predicts he will die alone and unremembered. Reis strikes him across the shoulder with the walking stick, orders all five into formation, and as the shriek continues, Bagger imagines them standing on a gallows.

Reis asks Private Vincent Goodspeed, a conspicuously clean, nervous soldier with a reputation for battlefield looting, what he sees in the sky. Goodspeed delivers a sycophantic answer about Allied artillery that Reis dismisses. Reis then turns to Private Hugh Popkin, a large, slow man with severe trench mouth and a gas-burned scalp, for an answer. Popkin correctly spots a patch of blue sky, which Reis uses to argue that his superiors cannot see opportunities for a strategic reversal.

Bagger studies one of the other soldiers, Ben Veck, a lone Black flamethrower operator transferred from the segregated 368th Infantry Regiment, who has severe shell shock. Bagger deduces the 43rd is being pulled off the line and Reis is being replaced, and suppresses satisfaction.

Reis directs the men’s attention to the shriek on the battlefield, then issues his final order: find the wounded man and help him. The men understand “help him” as a euphemism for euthanasia. Reis spurs the men on with his catchphrase, “élan,” and exits.

Alone in the crater, the five men share a sense of mutual isolation. Bagger moves into the trench as Company P’s footsteps fade. Father Muensterman shouts that Bagger will find the devil out there; Bagger jokes back, assigning devil names to himself and each of the others.

Bagger and Arno wade through a flooded trench, and Bagger peers over the top into a leveled landscape that includes a wrecked but still-standing piano. When Veck, Goodspeed, and Popkin arrive, Popkin discards a detached tongue from the trench wall. Nearby mortars force everyone to duck. Popkin refuses to go. Goodspeed argues they have technically fulfilled the order by locating the shrieker. He suggests simply waiting for him to die. Veck, speaking for the first time, says waiting will not work. Popkin responds with racial hostility. Bagger defends Veck to spite Popkin. When Bagger asks how Veck can call Reis a good man, Veck answers quietly that Reis had chosen him. An explosion then sends Veck diving face-down into the trench water.

Arno sits down in the mud, insisting the shriek is physically harming him. Bagger argues that ignoring Reis’s order risks court-martial, particularly if the outgoing general punishes them on his way out. Popkin proposes a pact of silence, but Bagger undermines it with sarcasm, pointing out that none of them trust one another. Veck reinforces the danger by citing the Nantillois incident, in which Reis punished a company for executing German prisoners. Goodspeed argues that it would be absurd for all five of them to go into No Man’s Land and that only one should go. Bagger predicts that Goodspeed wants to be left alone to loot the battlefield corpses. He recounts Goodspeed’s reputation as Vincent the Vulture: stripping valuables from the American and German dead alike, allegedly cutting rings off the dying, and rumored to be trading with the enemy at night. Popkin mimes a pistol with his hand and crudely threatens Bagger.

Bagger decides to con Popkin into volunteering. Using his late father’s sermon cadences, he constructs a story in which Popkin crawls out, dispatches the shrieker, and returns a hero. He suggests that Popkin will be celebrated up the entire chain of command and awarded the Medal of Honor before Reis ever gets one. The emotional hook is the letter Popkin will finally be able to write to Effie, a woman back home he is obsessed with, claiming she can only love a fighting man while describing civilian dates in her letters. The fantasy of winning her works: Popkin rises and takes a step toward the ladder. Arno then lets out a scream, shattering the trance.

Arno claws at his temples, insisting the shriek is killing him. Bagger plugs the boy’s ears with clay. The others are visibly demoralized because of the sound, and Popkin snaps out of his reverie. Veck insists they must fairly choose who will go looking for the shrieker. Arguments erupt: Goodspeed warns against drawing lots using a morbid lifeboat analogy; Popkin vetoes straws because he knows Bagger will cheat. Coin flips, arm wrestling, and other methods are proposed as alternate methods and are summarily dismissed. Veck suggests Rochambeau. Bagger recognizes an opportunity, feigns reluctance to convince the men to do it, and watches the others shift into the overconfident posture of men who believe they hold an advantage over him.

A brief flashback reveals that Bagger mastered Rochambeau as a boy by studying opponents’ reactions to wins and losses at his father’s church, then entering a round-robin on a borrowed nickel and tripling his stake. Back in the trench, Bagger proposes the same round-robin format. The matches proceed. Against Veck, he correctly predicts Veck will choose rock and throws paper to win. Against Popkin, he anticipates Popkin will choose scissors and wins using rock. Against Goodspeed, he reads that Goodspeed will choose paper and wins with scissors. He watches the other matches play out until only Bagger and Arno, who has won none of the games, remain. The loser of this match will go into No Man’s Land alone.

Bagger reflects on the con man’s problem of knowing a mark too well: Arno is an orphan who joined the Army seeking adventure and a family, and Bagger knows more about him than is comfortable. Arno asks for the ending of The Son of Tarzan in case he does not come back. Bagger invents one in which Tarzan must fight his son Korak to the death and wins, as there can be only one Lord of the Jungle; Arno accepts it.

They raise their fists. Arno drops his hand a beat early; his fingers curl into an indeterminate shape that is not a valid throw. Bagger’s own fist dissolves without settling on any symbol. Popkin immediately declares Arno the loser. Bagger registers his own failure to choose as one more instance of failing to fight.

Arno methodically discards his gear, including his canteen, mess kit, shaving kit, and his copy of The Son of Tarzan. He keeps only his first aid kit and wire cutters. The shaving kit, visibly unused, hits Bagger hardest. The remaining four men make hollow small talk as Arno climbs the ladder, looks back at Bagger, and receives a cold wave off.

Arno goes over the top and is swallowed by the battlefield. The men begin to quarrel. Then Bagger’s internal voice returns, clearly and insistently, pleading for help. Bagger assumes it is Arno reaching back to him. When he sees the abandoned novel lying in the dirt, Bagger imagines himself as Tarzan and Arno as Korak, and reminds himself that Tarzan goes after his son. Bagger strips his own equipment, keeping only his gas mask and Bible, and climbs out into No Man’s Land against his companions’ protests. He tells himself that one honest act may pardon a lifetime of crooked ones.

Bagger catches Arno by the ankle in No Man’s Land, startling him badly. He spots the white engineer’s tape marking the charge boundary and sees Arno has drifted off course. They crawl together through battlefield wreckage toward the shriek. Arno then points to a tower of pure white light roughly six feet wide, rising straight up from the ground into the smoke. At its base, a woman in a red dress and blue cape lies tangled in concertina wire, copper hair around her. Arno cries out that it is “her,” a pronoun that strikes Bagger as the most incongruous word he has ever heard on the Western Front. Both men crawl toward her. A wire barb punches through Bagger’s nostril as he closes the distance.

Bagger understands with a jolt of guilt that the woman has been shrieking in the wire the entire time his group sat arguing amongst themselves. He then sees that the tower of light originates from the woman’s skin.

He and Arno use wire cutters to free her, but when German fire ignites a nearby tree, Bagger abandons the slow approach and drives the wire down with his bayonet and boots so Arno can cut multiple layers at once. He reflects that the 43rd’s nickname (the “Butcher Birds,” named for a bird that impales prey on wire) has never felt more apt than in his moment. The woman’s arm lifts away cleanly, as though she was never truly caught. When Bagger sees her face, he is certain he knows her from somewhere. Her eyes open and the shriek stops. Bagger understands that the internal voice saying his name and pleading for rescue had come from her. He and Arno are both weeping as Bagger pulls the woman into his arms. The light collapses and the battlefield briefly transforms: The cold lifts, the smell changes, the noise recedes. It ends when the woman’s head turns toward the Allied trench and the light sweeps outward, drawing immediate German machine-gun fire.

Arno tackles Bagger flat as bullets strip the wire above them. Pinned down, Bagger concludes the woman is too pure for this world and moves his hands toward her throat.

Arno pulls Bagger upright before he can act on his violent impulse. As the woman’s head moves, the light from her skin sweeps across No Man’s Land and intensifies the German fire. Arno solves the problem by drawing the blue cape’s hood over her head, extinguishing the light. He then shoulders Bagger’s rifle and waves Bagger to run while he provides covering fire alone. Bagger lifts the woman and is startled to find she weighs almost nothing. He sprints through craters and over human debris toward the Allied trench with German grenades detonating on either side.

Near the trench, Bagger clips a propped corpse with his boot and falls. A German minenwerfer shell begins its descent directly overhead. Then something inexplicable intervenes: Both he and the woman are thrown 15 feet sideways into the Allied trench a moment before the mortar detonates, obliterating the section of wall where they had just been. Bagger surfaces from a clay collapse, battered but alive, and concludes he has always been lucky.