There were a dozen of them—two Lakota from the 351st Infantry Regiment, three Cree from the 146th Field Artillery, and the rest of them from the 142nd Infantry, the heart of the Oklahoma melting pot. They rode shirtless, bareback, with long black wigs of real human hair covering their army haircuts, and their riding was tentative and embarrassed. The army—working on a hunch—had asked them to consider wearing war paint and bonnets, and in the hours before the battle, they had stood in a canvas tent as shells exploded in the distance, staring at the bows and arrows, the makeup, the feathers, shaking their heads, and reconsidering with every passing moment how deeply ran the rivers of their patriotism.

Finally, after a captain’s raw appeal to their loyalty (“You aren’t tribesmen anymore—you’re Americans! Are you going to run from a fight?”), they decided they would ride the horses and wear the wigs, but they weren’t swapping their Springfields for bows and arrows.

By the time they took the field, the battle had fallen so far in the Allies’ direction that they rode quietly for miles, slowly, avoiding the huge ruts and potholes in the once-level ground, looking fruitlessly for the enemy. Germans unlucky enough to see them immediately surrendered, or stripped off their packs and ran or prayed. But the spirit of absurdity kept the team going, and when one of them was about to give up, he would catch the expression on another’s face—and they would both laugh in confirmation that fate had dealt them yet another hand no one would believe. Plus, there was something to be said for fighting on the winning side.

All in all, they fired their rifles only five or six times each, never at an actual target, always at the command of the men hand-cranking the moving-picture cameras on newly engineered swivel-mount tripods atop the trucks that followed them.

Lee was awakened before four a.m. by the sounds of war, and on his way to his post he saw that Banjo’s enclosure was empty. Scrapes against the soft earth, piles of dirt pushed outward. She had dug under the wire. He called for her, drowned out by the huge basso rumble of cannons, and then had to run to prepare the guns for Lenore.

By six o’clock, dawn was breaking, and the weak autumn sun cast faint light into the towering cumulonimbus clouds, doughy and thick and unnaturally busy, dotted with airplanes that maneuvered in spirals as if caught in a whirlpool. The observation planes of the 135th were in the heady mix of things—finally!—scanning for troop movements and adjusting the battery fusillades by radio transmission.