July 1914
The wheat stands high on the causse. July begins in heat and dust, that white heat of the Lot which crushes the stones and makes the air shimmer above the roads. School is over. Henri closed the classroom on 30 June, put away the exercise books, emptied the inkwells, turned the chairs up on the desks. Two months of freedom. He is staying in Labastide. He says it is to prepare for the new school year. The truth is that Louise has said yes to Cahors, on Sunday the 12th, and that Cahors is closer to Labastide than to anywhere else.
Meanwhile, he helps with the haymaking at the Delpechs' - the father of the boy he went to fetch back in March. It is a tacit arrangement, one of those gift economies that keep the countryside turning: the schoolmaster helps on the farm in summer, the farmer gives eggs and cheese in winter, and nobody keeps count. Henri is not strong, but he has stamina, and old Delpech teaches him to load a cart so the bundles do not slide off, which is harder than a rule of grammar and a great deal more useful in July.
In Paris, the whole of France is looking towards the Palais de Justice. The trial of Henriette Caillaux opens on 20 July, and it is the show of the summer. The newspapers have no room for anything else. The courtroom is packed, the lawyers are stars, the public crowds in as if to the Opéra. Maître Labori is defending Henriette - the same Labori who defended Dreyfus fifteen years earlier. The prosecution wants premeditated murder. The defence pleads a crime of passion, honour outraged, a woman driven to the edge. Intimate letters are read out in court. Dirty linen is washed before the assembled nation. It is fascinating, it is sordid, and above all it is the most perfect smokescreen history has ever drawn across a catastrophe.
Because meanwhile, Austria-Hungary is preparing its revenge.
Verdier knows it. Verdier sees it in the telegrams passing through the Quai d'Orsay, copies of which reach the Ministry of War. Vienna is not going to let Sarajevo go. The Archduke is dead, and behind the Archduke it is the Empire's prestige that has been struck. The Austrians want to crush Serbia - not because Serbia officially armed Princip's hand, but because Serbia is there, small, Slav, insolent, and because if they do not strike now, they never will.
The problem is Russia. Russia, which protects Serbia as France protects Russia as Germany protects Austria. The chain. The gears. Verdier watches the cogs engage one by one, with the terrifying slowness of precision machinery.
On 23 July, Austria-Hungary sends Serbia an ultimatum. Forty-eight hours to reply. The terms are deliberately unacceptable - it is designed to be refused. Austrian investigators on Serbian soil, the dissolution of the nationalist societies, a purge of the army and the administration. No sovereign state can accept that. That is what it is for.
The news drops on Paris like a stone into a pond. But the pond is otherwise engaged. The Caillaux trial is in full swing. Poincaré and Viviani are at sea, aboard the battleship France, on their way back from an official visit to Russia - a visit planned long in advance, at which the alliance was tightened, solidarity promised, loyalty sworn. They learn of the ultimatum by the ship's wireless, between two waves, somewhere in the Baltic. They will not be back in Paris until the 29th.
France is headless during the worst week of European diplomacy in forty years.
Henri has seen Louise again. On the 12th, in Cahors, as planned. They walked along the Lot, under the plane trees of the boulevard Gambetta, and this time they did not talk only about school. Henri talked about his father, who died when he was sixteen - a minor post-office official carried off by tuberculosis. Louise talked about hers: a mother who has run a haberdashery in Figeac on her own since the father left, going off one morning to look for work in Toulouse and never coming back. They exchanged their wounds with the reticence of people who do not complain, setting things on the table the way you set down tools - without comment, so that the other can see.
They parted at the station. Henri said 'see you soon' and Louise said 'yes'. Nothing more. But on the train home, Henri caught himself thinking in terms of 'we', which had never happened to him before.
He does not yet know that the world has thirteen days left.
On 25 July, Serbia replies to the ultimatum. It accepts almost everything - almost. It refuses Austrian investigators on its soil. It is a tiny refusal, a detail, a hair's breadth. It is enough. Austria breaks off diplomatic relations the same day.
On 28 July, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. The first domino falls.
In Paris, there is muffled panic. The corridors of the Quai d'Orsay rustle with telegrams. Ambassadors run. The Bourse falls. The Caillaux trial suddenly seems grotesquely trivial - and yet it goes on, it even reaches its verdict on 28 July, the day of the declaration of war: Henriette Caillaux is acquitted. Crime of passion. The courtroom applauds. The papers lead with it the next morning, on the front page, and put the war in Serbia on page three. The hierarchy of news has gone mad.
Jeanne senses that something is shifting. Not because she reads the foreign-affairs pages - she does not. But because Paul comes home in the evening with a face she does not know. The worry of a man who does not want to worry his wife, and who worries his wife precisely by his silence. At the PLM workshop, the lads talk. There are reservists among them, men who have done their two years - or three, for the younger ones - and who keep their military papers in a drawer. Paul is thirty-one. He is of the class of 1903. If things go wrong, he goes.
Jeanne does not ask. She irons the boarding-house linen, the iron goes back and forth, the steam rises, and in her head the words go round without taking shape. Not that. Not now. Not him.
On 29 July, Russia begins to mobilise. Not general mobilisation - not yet. A partial mobilisation, against Austria alone, in theory. But Russian mobilisation is a vast, slow machine that takes weeks to deploy across a territory of twenty million square kilometres. The Germans know it. And the Germans know that every day's delay in their own mobilisation is a day lost from the plan - the modified Schlieffen Plan, the great west-east pivot, forty-two days to bring France down before turning on Russia. If Russia mobilises, Germany must mobilise. And if Germany mobilises, it attacks. It is automatic. The plan makes no provision for mobilisation without an offensive. The machine does not know how to stop in between.
Verdier no longer sleeps. Literally. He is at the ministry day and night, with a handful of officers who see the same thing he does. The news comes in by telegram, hour by hour. The French ambassador in Berlin reports that the atmosphere is grim. The ambassador in Vienna reports that no one is negotiating any more. The ambassador in St Petersburg reports that the Tsar is hesitating but the generals are pushing. Everywhere the generals are pushing. It is the logic of the plans - the plans have a life of their own, they demand deadlines, timetables, marshalling yards, trains that leave on time, and every hour of delay is an hour of disadvantage. War has become a railway problem.
On 30 July, Jaurès is at the Chamber. He is shaken, but he is still fighting. He still believes it can be stopped. He calls on the government to act, to lean on Russia to halt its mobilisation, to propose mediation, to convene a conference. Viviani listens, his face haggard. Poincaré manoeuvres. No one is in control of anything any more.
On the evening of the 30th, Jaurès dines with close friends. He talks about the International, about the socialist conference due in Paris on 9 August, about the hope that the German socialists will refuse the war credits. He believes it. He is a man who believes.
31 July.
It is a Friday. It is hot in Paris, a heavy, thundery heat. Jaurès spends the day between the Chamber and the paper. He writes a last editorial for the next day's L'Humanité - an appeal for peace, a voice crying in the wilderness. At nine in the evening, he dines at the Café du Croissant, in the rue Montmartre, a stone's throw from the newspaper offices. He is sitting with his back to the open window, the window onto the street. He eats, he talks, he gesticulates as always.
At twenty to ten, a man of twenty-nine, Raoul Villain, an overwrought nationalist, comes up to the window, his arm thrust between the curtains, and fires two shots. The first hits Jaurès in the head. He slumps over the table. They carry him to the banquettes at the back. The doctor arrives. He is dead.
The news spreads across Paris within an hour. The newsrooms, the cafés, the stations, the working-class districts. 'They have killed Jaurès.' Four words that go through the city like a shock wave. In the working-class districts, anger rises, raw, immediate. The CGT calls for calm. The government trembles - a workers' uprising on the eve of a war would be the ultimate catastrophe. But the uprising does not come. The anger is immense, and powerless. The man who carried peace is dead, and with him something irreplaceable - not peace itself, which was already lost, but the belief that it was possible.
Paul hears the news at eleven at night, from a comrade who knocks at their door. He sits down on a chair, in the kitchen, and he cries. Jeanne has never seen him cry. She puts a hand on his shoulder and stays standing behind him, saying nothing.
Henri learns of it the next morning, 1 August, from the paper. He walks out of his house, goes to the far end of the village, and stands for a long time on the edge of the causse, looking at the valley. He does not cry. He clenches his jaw so hard that his teeth will ache for two days.
At midnight on 31 July, Germany sends an ultimatum to Russia: stop mobilising within twelve hours. And another to France: declare your neutrality and hand over the fortresses of Toul and Verdun as a pledge. In other words: give us your keys.
France will not answer that.
Verdier is at the ministry. He opens his desk drawer, takes out his service revolver, cleans it, reloads it, puts it back in its holster. Then he sits down and waits for morning.
The morning of 1 August.
Tomorrow.