smoked like an entrance to a burning mine.
THEY FANNED OUT over the blasted countryside shooting at grenades, about half of which exploded. Sam adjusted his sights and began setting off German stick grenades that went up with ear-cutting thuds, both dull and sharp at the same time. After an hour he felt something like a hammer blow on his helmet. Examining a long coppery crease, he guessed it was caused by a stray shot from another man’s rifle, for other teams were working adjacent quadrants. After that, he worked in the low places, sighting in from the edge of trenches. Walking along a poisoned trickle of a stream, the water blue and stinking, he looked up the bank and saw a thighbone protruding from the earth. Downstream five German helmets sat as inert as dead turtles. Farther on he saw a mortar hitched to a team of killed horses frozen hard in their harness, and his thoughts began to balk against the math of the place; there were enough unexploded grenades of all nationalities to keep him busy for a hundred years. The smell was a walking presence and a mockery of what he had imagined of war, now blasted out of his mind forever. He understood how brutally the illusion of warfare had ended for the hundreds of thousands who’d struggled here. “What a damned lie,” he said aloud. Climbing out of the stream, he worked the bolt and fired at a French pear grenade, which tumbled away but didn’t detonate.
Suddenly an infantryman raised his head over the next hillock.
“Son of a bitch, didn’t they give you a compass? You’re not supposed to fire to the northwest.”
They walked toward each other until only a naked ravine graveled with spent machine-gun casings separated them.
“You with a disposal unit?” Sam called.
The man was coated with mud and his helmet was missing. “What’s left of one. Two of us were killed outright this morning when they kicked over grenades. Another caught a bullet in the ass, and we don’t even know who did it.”
“I been sure of my backdrop when I took a shot.”
The man held his arms up against the sky and let them drop. He looked behind him into his own sector and then back at Sam. “Nobody’s ever done anything like this before.” Bareheaded, sickly small, he seemed lost and befuddled.
Sam spat into the ravine. “It’s a bitch, all right.”
“A trainload of bitches,” the infantryman said, turning back down the hill.
It took them all afternoon to build a stack of German three-inch shells to the size of a cord of wood, set the dynamite charges, and pay out wire to the detonating machine. They had no idea how far to back off. The lieutenant found a long trench a hundred yards away, and the ten of them piled into it. After Dupuis wired the machine, the lieutenant pushed the plunger. The explosion was astounding, and at the end of the row a man from Lafayette cried out when a chunk of shell came down and fractured his collarbone. Sam crawled through a rain of falling dirt and found that the man’s heavy coat had saved his shoulder from being cut off, but that some terrible wound was bleeding under the cloth.
He laid him flat in the trench and as gently as he could, pulled his arm straight down by his side. The soldier roared at the hot star of pain in his shoulder, and Sam, who had never seen such hurt, felt foolish and near tears himself. He turned to the lieutenant. “What can we do for him?”
The lieutenant’s voice rose half an octave. “Well, I don’t know.” He looked up over the lip of the trench. “We’re not supposed to get hurt.”
Sam opened his canteen and tilted it toward the injured man’s white, clenched lips. “Maybe you could send somebody to that other bunch in the northwest. Maybe their truck works and they can come get him.”
The lieutenant remained silent. Dupuis volunteered to climb over the ridge to find another unit, and the man from Lafayette began screaming about his bones grinding together.
“What can I do, bud?” Sam asked.
The soldier’s eyes opened wide and looked past Sam out of a narrow, stubbled face wrinkled even in youth. “Hit me in the head with somethin’,” he rasped.
The rest of the men gathered close, as though the heat of their bodies would collect and offer comfort. The wounded soldier began to fill the trench with his moans, and Sam sensed how minuscule this pain was compared to the vast agonies of the death field they were in. He looked out and saw half a million soldiers going at each other in a freezing rain, their bodies shredded by artillery, their faces torn off, their knees disintegrated into snowy red pulp, their lungs boiled out by poison gas, and all of this for four years, spread out as far and wide as the continent itself.
That night, after the wounded man had been picked up by an ambulance wagon, the rest of them bedded down around their ruined truck. Robicheaux had hobbled the horses but they shuffled among the men all night and one of them stepped on Sam’s hand as he slept. In the morning his wrist was swollen and stiff, and he had trouble unbuttoning his trousers. The men washed their rations down with water and started out again, shooting not only at hand grenades, but also a certain type of four-and-a-half-inch shell that would explode if hit near the nose. For these, the lieutenant ordered them to lie flat at least seventy-five yards away before firing so the shrapnel would fly over their backs. They shot until a man named LeBoeuf was hit in the elbow by a fragment and had to be hauled hollering out to the road to wait for the ambulance. The remaining seven continued, gamely picking up grenades now and arranging them like ducks in a shooting gallery. They shot ineffectively at mortar rounds, and even large artillery duds. The sky faired off late, and they went on firing until sundown, their faces smudged gray with gunpowder. Between explosions they could hear teams in other sectors shooting as well, blowing up large caches, all of it a silly echo of the war itself. When the light gave out, Sam’s ears were ringing like struck anvils. Taking one last look at the darkening land, he felt fortunate and, at the same time, deeply saddened.
Robicheaux had found a crock jug of brandy in the cellar of a destroyed house, and after everybody finished eating, he brought it from under the truck and passed it around, the men taking swallows with trembling hands and savoring the fine liquid heat. One by one, five of them fell asleep in their blankets. A half-moon came up, glazing the high points of the frost-struck battlefield, the stumps and armaments taking on the muted glow of tombstones. Sam and his friend sat back against the front tire, watching the field gradually luminesce.
Robicheaux took off his helmet, hung it on the bumper, and adjusted his wool cap. “I’m glad we missed the big dance.” He was a robust man, all muscle, a high-school footballer who’d also worked the New Orleans docks unloading sacks of coffee.
“Ain’t you cold?” Sam asked.
“It’s all right. The house I grew up in had so many cracks in the wallboards you could read a newspaper by the sunlight leakin’ in.”
“You married?”
Robicheaux started to answer in French, but Sam waved him off. “Talk American.”
“I moved to the city so I could learn to talk better, pronounce my words, dress nicer, you know. I don’t talk like some college boy, but at least people don’t think I’m a fool. If you talk French in town people look at you like you’re stupid. You notice that?”
Robicheaux nodded. “You want a indoor job.”
“You got that right.”
“Your old man, he’s tanned like a brick from workin’ a cane farm, right?”
“I was raised by my uncle Claude and he farmed sweet potatoes.”
“Sweet potatoes.”
“I am.”
“What?”
“Married. I got two little boys up in Baton Rouge. You?”
“Yes.”
“Kids?”
Sam took a pull of the brandy and set the jug down between them. “I had a son. Oscar. He got a bad fever about two years old and didn’t make it.”
