August 1914
The tocsin rings at four in the afternoon, on Saturday 1 August.
In Labastide-Murat, it is the church bell. The priest pulls it himself, full swing, and the sound rolls across the causse like dry thunder. Henri is at the Delpechs', stripped to the waist, bringing in the last bundles of hay before the heat. He hears the bell and he stops. Old Delpech stops too. They look at each other. They know. Everyone knows. They have been waiting for it for three days, since the assassination of Jaurès, since the ultimatums, since the papers began to talk of nothing else. And yet, when it comes, it is like a punch in the stomach.
General mobilisation.
Henri goes down to the village. Outside the town hall, the village constable is pasting up the poster - the one that had been kept for years in a locked drawer, pre-printed, with only the date to be added. White background, big black letters: ORDRE DE MOBILISATION GÉNÉRALE. Groups form. The women come out onto their doorsteps, the men come in from the fields, the gardens, the café. No one shouts. That is what strikes Henri - the silence. People read the poster and fall silent. A few women cry, but without a sound, as if sound would be indecent.
Henri is not called up at once. Class of 1910, reserve corporal in the 7th Infantry Regiment at Cahors, he is to report on the third day. Two days to put his affairs in order, close the school - it is already closed - and leave.
He goes home. He writes two letters. The first to Jeanne, short: 'It's done. I leave on Tuesday. Don't worry. Love.' The second to Louise, longer, and he will never reread it, because he knows that if he rereads it he will not send it.
In Lyon, Paul has his orders in his hand at five in the evening. The postman brought the mobilisation papers while the tocsin was still ringing, because everything was ready, everything had been planned for years, every reservist on file, every regiment assigned, every train timetabled. The French mobilisation machine is a masterpiece of logistics - four million men to be clothed, armed and transported in two weeks, and not one train may be missing, not one station congested, not one man at the wrong barracks.
Paul is posted to the 23rd Infantry Regiment, at the Part-Dieu barracks. Departure Monday the 3rd. Jeanne reads the papers with him, sitting at the kitchen table, and her hands do not shake. Not yet. She has two days. Two days to wash his linen, darn what needs darning, make up a parcel - tobacco, socks, saucisson, a knife, the things you take when you do not know how long you are going for.
On the Sunday, they do nothing. They stay together, in the flat in Vaise, and they do nothing. Paul smokes at the window. Jeanne sits beside him. They hardly speak. At one point, Paul says: 'It'll be over by Christmas. Everybody says so.' Jeanne nods. She does not believe it. She does not know why she does not believe it, she has no military expertise, no knowledge of strategy, but something in her, an instinct older than reason, tells her it is not true.
On Monday 3 August, Germany declares war on France. But that no longer matters; the war is already here. Paul leaves in the morning, with his bundle and his military papers, and Jeanne watches him go down the rue de la Claire with a step that tries to be steady, without looking back. He looks back at the corner, once, and raises his hand. Jeanne raises hers. Then he turns and he is gone.
She goes back in. She closes the door. She sits down. And there, only there, her hands begin to shake.
Henri reaches the barracks at Cahors on Tuesday 4 August, amid an organised chaos that is little short of a bureaucratic miracle. Hundreds of men are pouring in from all over the département - peasants, craftsmen, clerks, schoolmasters, even priests, all jumbled together in a disciplined crush. They are kitted out. The red trousers, the dark-blue greatcoat, the red képi. Henri puts it all on and looks at himself in the mirror in the latrines. He does not recognise himself. The schoolmaster has vanished. In his place, a thin corporal with round spectacles and a Lebel rifle weighing four kilos. Only a corporal - a training-college man ought to be a sergeant, but appendicitis in 1912, six months in a military hospital, and promotion had passed him by. He had drawn a schoolmaster's lesson from it: the best-laid plans can founder on an organ eight centimetres long.
He recognises faces. Old comrades from his military service, lads from the Lot he has passed at the market in Cahors. And strangers - a butcher from Gourdon, a notary's clerk from Gramat, a shepherd from Rocamadour who cannot read but can carry forty kilos on his back without flinching. The 7th Infantry Regiment reassembles itself in three days, like a jigsaw whose pieces were scattered through the drawers of an entire département.
On 7 August, the regiment leaves by train. Destination: the East. Nothing more precise is said. Henri stands in a cattle truck, squeezed among thirty men who smoke, who sweat, who sometimes sing, and who watch summer France go by through the cracks in the planks - the vines, the harvested fields, the poplars along the rivers. Every station they pass through is a grim celebration. Women hold out bottles of wine, flowers, flags. Old men weep. Kids run alongside the train shouting 'Vive la France'. Henri watches them and thinks of his own pupils, the ones in Labastide, who would have done the same.
Verdier went to war three days before everyone else. On 30 July, he was posted to the staff of III Corps, in Lorraine. That is where Plan XVII is to strike - the offensive in Lorraine, straight at Morhange and Sarrebourg, the reconquest of the lost provinces. Verdier knows the plan by heart. He also knows its flaws. But he is an officer, he obeys, and he will do his job as best he can.
On 8 August, the first French troops cross the border into Alsace. Mulhouse is taken on the 8th, lost on the 10th, retaken on the 19th. The official communiqués speak of victory. The reality is more confused - brief, violent, disorderly engagements in which French soldiers discover within hours what Verdier had known for months: the German artillery is terrifying.
On 14 August, the great offensive begins in Lorraine. Two French armies, the First and the Second, charge eastwards with the idiotic bravery that doctrine demands. Bayonets fixed. Red trousers. Élan. The regiments advance in close order against German positions prepared long in advance - trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, machine guns, and behind them the heavy howitzers whose calibres Verdier had counted in his office on the boulevard Saint-Germain.
On 20 August comes the shock. Morhange. Sarrebourg. The French armies run into the German defences and are thrown back with losses that defy understanding. In a single day, 22 August, the French army loses twenty-seven thousand men. Twenty-seven thousand. Dead. In one day. It is the bloodiest day in the whole history of France, and no one on the home front knows it yet.
Verdier is at his post, in a requisitioned château near Nancy, when the reports come in. The figures. The regiments decimated. The officers fallen at the head of their men, sabres drawn, mown down by the machine guns like grass under the scythe. He reads the reports one by one, methodically, and something breaks in him that will never mend - not his capacity to function, which remains intact, but his faith in the institution to which he has given his life. The French General Staff sent men to be slaughtered knowing - or bound to know - that the doctrine was wrong. Red trousers against the machine gun. Élan against the 150 mm howitzer. Courage against physics.
Physics won.
And while Lorraine burns, the north collapses.
It is the trap Verdier saw on his map in Brussels. The Germans entered Belgium on 4 August, in colossal strength - the bulk of their army, hundreds of thousands of men, across the northern plains. Liège held out for ten days, heroically, but Liège fell. Brussels falls on 20 August, without a fight. The Belgian army falls back on Antwerp. And the German armies come bursting south, towards France, in a gigantic wheeling movement that sweeps everything before it.
The British army is there - a small expeditionary force, a hundred thousand men, landed at Boulogne and pushed up into Belgium. On 23 August, at Mons, the British fight for the first time and discover the same thing as the French: machine guns kill faster than courage can run. They fall back.
The French armies in the north are falling back too. Charleroi, 21 August. Another disaster. V Corps, where regiments from the Lot and the South-West have just arrived after days on the train, is flung into the battle without preparation, without reconnaissance, without heavy artillery. The losses are monstrous.
Henri is there.
The 7th Regiment arrived in Belgium on 19 August, after five days of trains and marches. On arriving, Henri saw things no object lesson had ever taught him. Belgian villages on fire. Columns of refugees on the roads, women with handcarts, kids crying, old people walking without knowing where. And the noise - the noise of war, which you hear before you see it, that dull rumble of artillery that makes the ground shake underfoot.
On 22 August, the regiment goes into action near Bertrix, in the forests of the Ardennes. It is total confusion. The orders contradict each other. The maps are wrong. The officers do not know where the enemy is. And suddenly the trees explode. The shells come in over the tops of the beeches, without warning, and the men marching in column along a forest track are cut to pieces.
Henri lies flat in a ditch and stays there, his face in the earth, for an hour. It is not courage. It is the inability to move. Around him, men are screaming. The butcher from Gourdon has lost an arm. The notary's clerk from Gramat is dead, lying on his back, eyes open, a shell splinter in his chest. Henri looks at him and does not understand. His brain refuses the information. This man was alive twenty minutes ago, he was talking about his fiancée, and now he is an object.
The regiment falls back. Everyone falls back. It is the general retreat, ordered by Joffre on 24 August, when it finally becomes clear that Plan XVII is a total failure and that the Germans are coming from the north in a strength nobody had been willing to see. France falls back along the whole front, from Belgium to the Vosges, and the Germans advance.
The retreat. Twelve days of marching south, under the August sun, with the thirty-kilo pack, the rifle, the cartridges, the feet bleeding in the new boots. Henri marches. He does not think. He puts one foot in front of the other, he drinks when there is water, he eats when something is handed out, and he sleeps ten minutes in a ditch when the regiment halts. The roads are choked with columns crossing each other, supply convoys, wounded being taken away in carts. And the civilians, always the civilians, that tide of people fleeing with whatever they could carry.
He writes to Jeanne on 28 August, a scrap of paper scribbled in pencil during a halt: 'I'm alive. I don't know where I am. Don't worry.' He does not know if the letter will arrive. He does not know if Jeanne is still in Lyon. He knows nothing. No one knows anything any more.
And Joffre - the commander-in-chief, the stout, placid man who eats well and sleeps well and whom nothing seems to shake - Joffre does the only intelligent thing in the whole catastrophe. He reorganises. He pulls troops out of Lorraine, he creates a new army, the Sixth, out of regiments brought in from everywhere. He puts Gallieni, old Gallieni, colonial soldier and sharp mind, in charge of the military government of Paris. And he waits. He waits for the Germans to stretch out, to wear themselves out, for their supply lines to crack, for the moment to strike.
The moment will come. In September. On the Marne.
But Henri does not know it. Henri marches.
In Lyon, Jeanne waits. She has had no news of Paul since 10 August - a note, 'arrived safe at the regiment, all well, leaving soon.' Since then, nothing. Military silence. She carries on ironing at the widow's, and cleaning at the Bernardins' - who have taken her back for three days a week because the usual maid has gone to join her family in the Auvergne. She reads the paper, the official communiqués, which lie with great diligence. 'Our troops are withdrawing in good order to prepared positions.' Jeanne does not understand military jargon, but she understands the word 'withdrawing'. Withdrawing means going backwards. Going backwards means losing. And losing means Paul is somewhere in the middle of it.
On 30 August, she finally receives a card. Two lines in Paul's handwriting, almost illegible: 'Marching for ten days. Holding on. Love. P.' The field post stamp is dated the 25th. Five days' delay. Five days in which anything could have happened.
Jeanne puts the card down on the table. She looks out of the window at the summer burning on the roofs of Vaise. Somewhere out there, hundreds of kilometres away, her husband is marching with a rifle in a war nobody asked his opinion about.
On 31 August 1914, the German army is sixty kilometres from Paris. The government has left the capital for Bordeaux. Gallieni is fortifying the entrenched camp of Paris. Parisians who can are fleeing south. The stations are black with people.
And Henri marches. And Paul marches. And Verdier, bent over his maps in a command post that moves back every day, at last sees something change in the movement of the German armies - a bend towards the south-east, a flank laid bare, a mistake. He says nothing. Not yet. He watches.
August has lasted a century.