April 1914
Spring bursts out all at once, the way it does in the Midi, without warning. One morning the causses are grey and bare, and the next everything is green, the junipers smell strong, the ewes are out and Henri's kids arrive at school with bunches of wild narcissi that they lay on his desk like an offering. Henri pretends to grumble - 'this isn't an altar, it's a school' - but he leaves the flowers in a jam jar on the windowsill.
April is the month when he prepares the older ones for the leaving certificate. Six pupils this year, among them Lucienne Marty the draughtswoman and Fernand Lavergne the enemy of accents. Henri keeps them back in the evening after class, an extra hour, dictation-questions-arithmetic, the sacred triptych. The parents agree because the certificate is the door - not to fortune, no, but to the post office, the counter at the town hall, the rank of corporal instead of private. The social escalator of the Third Republic rises slowly, but it rises.
Lucienne will write a flawless paper. Henri knows it already.
In Lyon, spring changes the light on the Rhône quays but changes nothing in Jeanne's life. The housework at the Bernardins', the washing, the accounts. Paul comes home in the evening and talks about the elections. Always the elections. The campaign is in full swing in the working-class districts. The SFIO has pasted up posters all over the third arrondissement, on factory walls, on the hoardings round building sites. 'Against the Three-Year Law - for peace - vote Socialist.' The Radicals paste theirs up too, a little different, a little less red. And the right pastes over them the following night; it is the war of the walls, the battle of the paste pots.
One Sunday, Jeanne goes with Paul to an open-air meeting on the place du Pont, in the Guillotière district. It is mild, there is a crowd, women too - not many, but a few. A speaker from the SFIO talks about income tax, social justice, peace. Jeanne listens. She does not have the vote. No woman in France has the vote. You can kill the editor of Le Figaro, but you cannot slip a ballot paper into a box. She looks at the men around her, Paul among them, their attentive faces, their caps, their moustaches, and she thinks something she cannot yet put clearly into words, but which is something like: this world is theirs, not mine, and yet I am the one who keeps it standing.
She will not say so to Paul. Not like that. But she will say it to her neighbour Marie, the next day at the wash-house. Marie will shrug. 'The men do the politics, we do the rest. The rest is everything.'
Verdier has left Paris. He has been sent to inspect barracks in the East, between Toul and Nancy, on the edge of that border which fills all his nights. He finds what he had feared without ever having seen it: the fortifications are solid - Séré de Rivières did good work thirty years ago - but the troops who will man them are not ready for what is coming. The men train with the Lebel rifle, which is a good rifle. They manoeuvre in open ground, bayonets fixed, in the red trousers that can be seen two kilometres away. The regimental officers are competent, brave, trained. But trained for what? For the war of 1870, only better. For the charge, the assault, the offensive à outrance.
Verdier visits a battery of 75s. The gunners are superb, fast, precise. Twenty rounds a minute. No army in the world has a gun like it. But he looks at the ground, the wooded hills rising towards the border, and he thinks of the German howitzers firing over those hills, eight or ten kilometres away, onto positions no one can see. And he thinks of the machine guns, of which the French army has a ridiculous number per regiment, because doctrine says the machine gun is a defensive weapon, and France's vocation is not to defend itself - its vocation is to attack.
He dines one evening at the table of a colonel of chasseurs, in Nancy. The colonel is a charming, cultivated man, who quotes Péguy and collects Lorraine faience. After the cheese, Verdier ventures the question: 'Colonel, what do you think of our heavy artillery?' The colonel looks at him as if he had just sworn. 'Verdier, we have the 75. What more do you want?' Verdier has heard that line before. He is beginning to understand that he will hear it right to the end.
In Paris, the Caillaux affair is still fermenting, but it has lost the front page. The trial is set for July. Meanwhile, politics reasserts itself, and the politics of April 1914 is the election campaign. The country is getting ready for the general election in May - the last elections of peacetime, but nobody thinks in those terms.
The debate is clear, on the surface at least. On the left, Jaurès's Socialists and the Radicals want to repeal the Three-Year Law, pass the income tax, and keep the peace. On the right, the moderates and the conservatives want to keep the Three-Year Law, bury the income tax, and prepare for the revanche - or at least not look weak in front of Germany. Poincaré, from the Élysée, does not officially take sides, but everyone knows which way he leans.
Jaurès is tireless. He speaks, he writes, he travels, he electrifies. He is in Toulouse, in Marseille, in Lille, in Lyon. He carries on his shoulders the immense weight of a simple idea: that war is not inevitable. That men of goodwill, in every country, can refuse to let themselves be led to the slaughter. That there is another way.
It is beautiful. It may even be true. But it reckons without the forces no one controls - the alliances tangled like strands of barbed wire, the military plans that provide for nothing but automatic responses, the nationalists in every country shouting louder than the pacifists, and above all, above all, that thing Verdier feels in his figures and Jaurès feels in his gut: the machine is running, and nobody quite knows any more where the brake is.
But in April, all that remains theoretical. War is a subject for meetings and newspapers. Real life is the price of bread, the rent, tomorrow's work. In Lyon, the canuts who are left weave silk, and the new workers go into chemicals, industrial textiles, metalworking. In Labastide-Murat, they plant, they plough, they prune the vines. In Paris, people go to the theatre to see the latest Sacha Guitry play, and they dance the tango, all the rage and all the scandal since last year - the Archbishop of Paris has condemned it, which has naturally multiplied the number of dancers tenfold.
France lives. The buds are bursting, the café terraces are opening again, the days are drawing out. Henri takes his class on a botany walk across the causse and teaches them the names of the wild orchids. Jeanne plants radishes in the patch of garden behind their building in Vaise. Verdier, back in Paris, files his notes in a folder that he labels carefully and puts on the shelf in his office, between two treatises on Prussian tactics.
On 30 April, Henri receives a letter that is not from Jeanne. A hand he does not know, a white envelope, a Figeac postmark. It is from the sister of a friend from training college, one Émile Soulié, a schoolmaster at Capdenac. Her name is Louise. Émile told her Henri was fond of poetry. So is she. She sends him a poem by Francis Jammes, copied out in her own hand, and three lines: 'My brother says you are a good man. I do not know many people he says that about.'
Henri rereads the letter twice. Then he folds it and puts it in the drawer of his bedside table. He does not reply straight away. But he thinks about it as he falls asleep, and it is perhaps the first night in April when he does not think about the elections.