Hugo’s rifle cracked, there was an echo and a report, and somewhere a crashing sound, dead weight collapsing into piles of pine needles and mulch.

Wodziczko’s eyes shone like those of a boy on a porch in moonlight. He finally said, “Gee.”

Hugo gazed his way. “I would like a chocolate bar.”

“Yeah. Yeah!” Wodziczko tottered into the warehouse, and began fumbling with a crate. Hugo squinted into the night.

Then, from a great distance, Hugo heard something disheartening. It was the same voice as before. It hissed at him: “Shooting at the truth won’t stop the truth, comrade.”

10

If in September 1918 you had a god’s eye view of the Saint-Mihiel salient, in a once-beautiful if swampy region of France, it would look like a fifty-two-mile-long tear across the landscape described by the perambulations of the Meuse River. Even though there were still clumps of fertile ground left—some woods, a stray vineyard or two—the weary locals in the villages of Flirey (or Fleurey) and Thiaucourt referred to this decimated triangular wedge of battlefront as the hernia, l’hernie. It was mostly a land of churned mudflats supporting the occasional blasted kiln or toppled church, burnt-out pyres, former stables, barns.

As for l’hernie itself, the dividing line between armies, it was a scar knitted with loops of rusted gooseberry wire laid down years before by Germans who, like their French counterparts, had long ago begun to grasp the meaning of “never.”

The 135th was on the edge of l’hernie.

On the first moonless evening of September, it rained. Up and down the Meuse, rain fell into the river and along the banks and into the bombed-out farmhouses, and it beat against the canvas tents in which twenty thousand Germans slept the exhausted, shallow sleep of the starving.

Shortly after midnight, spotters noted in their logs the sound of thunder, and they turned their eyes from the skies to stopwatches to determine how far away the heart of the storm was. And then, one by one, as flashes from the ground illuminated the sky, logbooks were dropped into the mud, and soldiers raced to sound alarms.

It wasn’t thunder. Instead, it was an introduction to a new adversary. The artillery of the U.S. First Army had launched a barrage of shells. Among actual raindrops, the explosive rounds rained down on trenches, command posts, ammunition dumps, and nests of machine-gunners. A single shell came down upon an overtimbered roof on a building near the village of Corny, with an explosion that blew bricks and wooden framing across a courtyard. Moments later, the hiss of sand pouring down from the hole in the roof, and then into the rain, one, two, three, four, a half dozen, a dozen dogs leaping out of the building and bolting through the nearby vineyards. They ran, panting, some of them in gas masks, others fluttering with the satchels containing cigarettes they delivered.