An American wounded in the Ardennes had a far better chance of living than his father would have in the last war, and the man in the Red Cross helmet was the reason. The Army had built a chain of survival that began with him: a company medic who reached the casualty within minutes, stopped the bleeding, dressed the wound and got him moving to the rear. Behind him lay aid stations and field hospitals stocked with two things that had barely existed in 1918 — sulfa powder and penicillin to beat infection, and plasma and whole blood to replace what a man had lost. Together they turned wounds that once meant death into survivable injuries.

The medic stands at ease with a folded stretcher propped against his shoulder, stealing a cigarette, his heavy overcoat snow-flecked and his helmet boldly marked front and sides with the Red Cross — the emblem that, on the Western Front at least, usually bought an unarmed medic a measure of protection. Pair him with his own next task in Carrying the Wounded, with the winter 101st Airborne Medic from the same frozen campaign, and with the smokers of Time for a Smoke. In a diorama a medic gives a scene its moral center — the man everyone hoped to see if things went wrong.

Model: BBA103 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set