are sent on a mission to the Qattara Depression, with orders to discover why a Bersaglieri outpost has ceased all communications; they find that the squad manning the outpost has been entirely killed. They bury the bodies and they return to their lines. A British artillery bombardment kills or wounds over twenty members of the platoon; De Vita survives unscathed a shell that lands near him, but afterwards he starts behaving strangely, slowly losing his mind. When the battle begins, Lt. Fiore’s platoon is ordered to take position along the defense line, at "Quota 105" (as a reinforcement to the Ruspoli Group of the 185th Airborne Division Folgore), placing themselves in holes dug in the ground, with mortars and machine guns. During the following night, their positions are subjected to heavy artillery shelling, and then assaulted by Allied tanks and infantry. The Italians respond with mortars, rifles and machine guns, and both sides suffer heavy casualties; Tarozzi is wounded in an eye, and De Vita, who occupies the same hole as Serra, snaps and climbs out of the hole, starting to walk apathetically; despite Serra’s calls for him to come back, he keeps walking until he disappears amid clouds of sand. The British attack manages to breach the first line, but it is stopped by artillery and minefields, and then repelled ("maybe this was the third miracle", Serra later tells himself). On the following morning, Serra wanders around the battlefield, littered with corpses of Italian and British soldiers; he remembers that at school he was told that "lucky is he who dies a hero", but, whilst looking at the corpses scattered on the ground, he reflects "I have seen many of these heroes: they are neither lucky nor unlucky: they are just dead. They rot at the bottom of a pit, without a shred of poetry. Death is only beautiful in schoolbooks: in real life it is pitiful, horrendous, and it stinks". Serra finds Spagna, who has been mortally wounded in the stomach and is being carried away on a stretcher; he, Fiore and Rizzo try to comfort him by lying and saying that, now that he has been wounded, he will go home. At first, the orders are to hold the line at all costs, "Win or die"; after a few days, however, Lt. Fiore’s platoon is ordered to retreat to Qaret el Khadim, and starts a long march