One morning, after a week of camping among the statues, he watched a group of officers drive up in an open motorcar and choose squads of ten to travel to Paris and work in hospitals. Sam drew this duty and was put in charge of guarding a narcotics dispensary. Sometimes he was sent through the pungent wards to deliver a dose of morphine to a nurse, and the things he saw on these errands aged him. The amputations, the groaning, the smell of infection and illness were proof of how little he knew about the meanness of warfare. At the end of each day, he felt humbled and simple.
Sometimes he and his contingent would walk to a café where there was a very bad piano, and Sam would practice for an hour straight. The men didn’t talk about the things they had seen in the wards, because all of it was beyond words. Sam was afraid that talking about it would make pictures stick in his head forever. They all worked in the ward for those too sick to move, and it was so huge that the ten of them combined had never seen half of it, much less the satellite buildings and compounds. There were French hospitals. English hospitals. American hospitals. Nothing in the patriotic posters or sheet music hinted at the blown-away jawbones, the baked eyeballs, or the trembling black rubber tubes dripping pus.
Eventually, because he could speak Cajun French, which to the Parisians sounded like a very bad seventeenth-century patois from the south of France, he was asked to perform some rudimentary interpreting. But every Frenchman he talked to raised his eyebrows in alarm, studied his pleasant face, and asked which colony he came from.
IN JANUARY he was pulled off hospital duty and teamed up with eight fellow Louisianans under the Indiana lieutenant, for battlefield cleanup in the Argonne. They were told they were going to a forest, and Robicheaux picked up his rifle and said, “Hot damn, maybe we can shoot us a deer and get some good meat.” But days later, when they jumped off the muddy, open truck, they saw a dead and ice-glazed countryside convulsed with shell craters and stippled with exploded trees, a vast, botched junkscape of shot-apart wagons, upended tanks, and frost-etched ordnance of every description. They were given a map and told to police two square miles of it.
Sam stepped off the frozen track and his boot broke through a crust of ice, sinking deep into a foul-smelling brook. He pulled free and looked back at his lieutenant, tall, pale-eyed, barely there, his boyish midwestern face full of obedience and confusion.
“Sir, what exactly do they want us to do?”
The lieutenant put a foot up on an abandoned water-cooled machine gun. “I think it’s pretty simple. We should look for the most dangerous ordnance and detonate it.” His voice was thin, and Sam remembered hearing that he was highly educated and had never seen combat. They all looked over the immense battlefield, unable to comprehend any of it. Even in the cold, a stink rose out of the earth, and bristling everywhere were rusted hummocks of barbed wire.
They set up a camp of sorts, erecting a small tent for their supplies, and two hours after they’d arrived, a plodding noise came from the west, and they turned to see the head of an infantryman rise up from a steep swale and then the rest of him, his right hand towing the reins of five saddled horses over the remnant of a road. He plodded on deliberately-like a horse himself, and stopped next to the truck. “I have orders to let you have these here animals,” he drawled.
“What on earth for?” the lieutenant asked.
The soldier shrugged. “Each demolition group gets a team.”
Sam pointed over the chaos of no-man’s-land. “They don’t expect us to ride these out there, do they?”
“Good idea!” the lieutenant exclaimed, his face brightening. He dismissed the soldier and took the reins, tying them to the truck’s side rails. “From horseback you’ll be able to find the shells much better. That’s the first thing to go after. The big projectiles. We can stack them and blow them up.” He gestured toward the truck bed. “We’ve been sent out with a detonator, electrical wire, and cases of dynamite.”
Sam had been issued a pair of field glasses and was studying a hill to the north, his stomach heavy with foreboding. “What about the grenades? They’re out there like gravel.” He put down the glasses and looked over at the lieutenant.
“I know enough not to handle them. Some might go off with just a nudge. I think we should try shooting them with our Springfields.”
Melvin Robicheaux took off his helmet. “Will that set them things off?”
The lieutenant raised his shoulders and turned up his hands. “Pick one and shoot at it. Sort of an experiment.”
Sam again peered through his field glasses. “I wouldn’t do it.”
The lieutenant rose up on the balls of his feet. “We’ll give it a try.”
Robicheaux got his rifle from the rear of the truck and worked the bolt. He glanced over his shoulder. “Them horses, they been in the fightin’ or they like us?”
The lieutenant turned toward the animals. “I’d guess the gimpy pair and that one with the scarred rump are veterans. The others, I don’t know. Maybe they just came up from a transport.” He turned, put his hands behind his back, and looked up the hill. “Go ahead and shoot one.”
Robicheaux adjusted the sights of the rifle, aimed at a grenade on the lip of a shell crater seventy yards away, and fired. He missed, but at the crack of the rifle one of the horses whinnied and reared, pulling loose from the truck and taking off in a zigzag gallop across the galled field and up the hill. Sam grabbed the bridles of two of the shying horses, and the other pair stood steaming in the light snow as if nothing at all had happened. The men watched the spooked horse run up the far rise for half a mile, dodging stumps and jumping craters and then stepping on God knows what, disappearing at once in a monstrous pink fireball. The ear-flattening concussion roared back across the field like a clap of thunder and they all ran behind the truck, scanning the sky for falling debris.
Once the sound of the explosion had echoed away, the lieutenant turned around and pointed to Dupuis, the only veteran among them. “What did that animal step on?”
Dupuis, a dour older man from Arnaudville, said, “I don’t know, Cap. I been here a whole year and don’t understand none of it.”
A twenty-pound piece of shrapnel came straight down out of the clouds and banged through the hood of the truck. Crouched next to a tire, Sam stared at where the horse had been vaporized and then up at the sky, unable to imagine this cause-and-effect, the power involved, or what they were doing here. Up on the hill, a crater 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.