They fanned out among the bombed and ruined grape arbors, then ran across the local farmyards, in a pack, in the dark, over rising hills, illuminated through rain showers by explosions and farmhouses set alight. They dodged the freight spilled from railway cars, skittered over moldering grain stores; barnyard chickens in coops shrieked when they passed. They were shepherds, the most noble of dogs. They had been trained, but now they were just running, and soon they loped off the battlefields, bounding with the grace of dancing royalty into the woods, never to be seen again.

The shells continued to fall. The Germans began to hope that the enemy would perhaps run out of shells—after four years of battle, that any factory had any shells left was somewhat amazing—but it became apparent to their seasoned ears not only that the Americans had brought shells, but that they came in a new and depressing variety of sizes.

At five a.m., the noise ceased. It was replaced by a rumble of engines, the squeals of metal treads turning: Allied tanks. Built in France and Britain, these were, unlike their American counterparts, real. There were hundreds of them, moving awkwardly through the mud, and behind them, in a line extending the length of the salient, a sight no one had ever seen: 660,000 fresh American troops. It was a line that stood shoulder to shoulder for fifty-two miles.

They brought out cutters and Bangalore torpedoes, and sliced through the loops of cheveux de frise, and laid chicken wire atop the old barbed wire spools; then the Allied infantry, a mass of angular faces under metal helmets, began to walk forward.

Camouflaged machine guns and Krupps howitzers mowed them down by the thousands. But the beauty of the American forces was that there were hundreds of thousands to replace them.

And though this was a baptism, and the Americans had wanted a baptism, it was not a battle anyone would write songs about. Saint-Mihiel was not a name that would call for reckoning; it wasn’t Verdun or the Fields of Flanders or the Somme. It was important only in that, for the first time, the application of overwhelming force, in the form of average men and machinery, pried the enemy out of their trenches. The doughboys were getting the hang of war.

The German troops destroyed villages as they left, blowing up railways and bridges, and throwing dead horses into wells, as Stosstruppen used flamethrowers to set fire to haystacks.

And that was when the Indians were turned loose.