January 1914
It is perishing cold in the Lot, on the morning of 5 January. Henri Castayrol bumps the door of the village school at Labastide-Murat shut with his hip, his arms full of exercise books. Twenty-three papers to mark. The ink has frozen in two of the inkwells overnight, and the stove takes an hour to make the room bearable. The kids arrive red-nosed and numb-fingered, some of them barefoot in their clogs. Henri is twenty-four, with a thin face, round spectacles, and the quiet conviction that the Republic is built here, between the morning dictation and the afternoon object lesson.
He has read Jaurès. He has read Péguy too, which is harder to reconcile. In the evenings, in his room above the town hall, he writes his sister Jeanne letters that are too long, in which he talks about the kids, about the sky over the causses, and about politics. Always politics.
In Lyon, Jeanne does not read every letter all the way through. She keeps them, that she does - in a Lefèvre-Utile biscuit tin under the marriage bed - but she has other things to do. Her husband Paul works in the workshops of the PLM railway company, at the Vaise marshalling yard, and when he comes home in the evening he smells of coal and grease, he eats his soup and he sleeps. Jeanne keeps the household accounts, and keeps house for other people too, as it happens, for a family of silk merchants on the Croix-Rousse, and on Sundays she meets two neighbours at the wash-house for the laundry and the news. She is twenty-eight, with a miscarriage behind her that no one talks about.
What she knows of politics is what Paul brings home. And what Paul brings home, now, in January 1914, is the smouldering anger of the workshops against the Three-Year Law. Three years of military service instead of two, voted through last summer. Among the railwaymen, among the metalworkers, everywhere in the working-class districts, it is the burning question. Three years of a man's life, stolen. Paul says Jaurès will fight, that come the May elections the left will sweep the whole thing away.
Jeanne nods. What she mostly thinks is that three years means that if one day they have a son, they will take him from her for longer.
In Paris, in an office at the Ministry of War on the boulevard Saint-Germain, Captain Étienne Verdier rereads, for the third time, a note on the strength of the German army. Verdier is forty-two, Saint-Cyr class of 1893, with a spell in Morocco he does not talk about much and a neat moustache that is starting to go grey. He is a methodical man. He likes figures, maps, clear orders. He does not like what he is reading.
The Germans passed their own army law in 1913. They are raising their peacetime strength to eight hundred thousand men. They are building strategic railway lines towards the Belgian border - towards the Belgian border, not towards Alsace. Verdier has underlined this point twice in his note for the colonel. He knows what it means. He has read the Schlieffen Plan, or at least as much of it as anyone can guess. But Verdier's notes end up in signature books, and the signature books end up in cupboards.
The French General Staff has its own plan. Plan XVII. They will attack in Lorraine, straight ahead, with élan, with nerve. The official doctrine comes down to a single word: the offensive. Colonel de Grandmaison has theorised it, the generals have adopted it, and anyone who voices a doubt is written off as timid. Verdier is not timid. But he can count.
And above all that, the France of January 1914 lives. It even lives well, in its own way. The department stores hold their sales after the festive season, the Bon Marché prints its prices in the newspaper and Parisian women crowd in. At the Café du Commerce, in any provincial town you care to name, people are talking about the Caillaux affair, which is beginning to smell of brimstone - Le Figaro is running a campaign against the former Prime Minister, Joseph Caillaux, the man who wanted an income tax. Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro, publishes letters, insinuations, accusations. It smells like a political vendetta. Nobody yet knows how far it will go.
Jaurès, for his part, is everywhere. At the rostrum of the Chamber, in L'Humanité, the paper he founded ten years earlier, at packed meetings. He is fighting the Three-Year Law, he is fighting the arms race, he is fighting the war he can feel rising the way you feel a storm before the first drops. He is huge, he is loud, he is alive. When he speaks, even those who hate him listen.
President Poincaré, for his part, looks east. A Lorrainer by birth, a lawyer by training, he is no warmonger, but he has one certainty: France must be strong, the Russian alliance must hold, and Germany must never again take what it took in 1871. He receives, he arbitrates, he manoeuvres. At the Élysée, they are already preparing for the spring elections.
And Henri, on the evening of 31 January, marks his papers by the light of a paraffin lamp. Outside, the wind blows across the causse, the shutters bang. He is twenty-four. He has six months of peace left, but that, he does not know. Nobody does.
He writes to Jeanne: 'Nothing changes here. The walnut trees are black, the roads are white with frost, and Fernand Lavergne has handed me yet another dictation without a single accent. I despair of civilisation.'
He smiles as he seals the envelope. He sleeps well, those nights.