September 1914
The Marne.
Later, people will call it a miracle. It is not a miracle. It is a calculation, a German mistake, a French resurgence, and six hundred thousand men thrown into the scales at the exact moment when the scales could still tip.
Verdier saw it coming. On his maps, on the night of 2 to 3 September, he saw what Gallieni saw at the same moment in Paris, what Joffre is beginning to understand at his headquarters in Bar-sur-Aube: von Kluck's army, the westernmost of the German armies, the one that was to go round Paris to the west and close the trap, has veered. Instead of passing west of Paris, it is passing east. It is presenting its right flank to the Paris garrison, like a man turning his back on an enemy he believes beaten.
Kluck is not wrong to believe the French beaten. They have been retreating for two weeks. But Kluck is wrong to believe that an enemy in retreat is an enemy finished. The French are retreating, but they have not fallen apart. They march, they suffer, they lose men by the thousand at the rear - stragglers, the exhausted, wounded left behind in barns - but the regiments hold. The officers hold. The structure holds.
On 4 September, Gallieni understands. He calls Joffre. He insists, he pushes, he almost begs. They must strike now, into Kluck's flank, with everything they have. Joffre hesitates for a day - a day that lasts a year - then he decides. The order comes down on the evening of the 5th. Tomorrow, all the French armies stop retreating and attack.
Henri has not slept for three days. Not really. Ten-minute snatches of sleep, standing against a tree, in a ditch, his cheek against his pack. The 7th Regiment is somewhere south of the Marne, in a landscape of flat fields, villages with closed shutters, roads white with dust. They have marched, marched, marched, and suddenly they are told to stop. They are told to turn round. They are told that tomorrow, they attack.
On the morning of 6 September, Henri Castayrol, corporal, schoolmaster, twenty-four, marches north with his section. He has eight men under his command, among them the shepherd from Rocamadour, who carries his pack as if it weighed nothing, and a joiner from Cahors who has been coughing for three days but refuses to report sick. They march towards the noise. The noise is in front of them, constant now, a roll of thunder that never stops - the artillery.
The Battle of the Marne lasts six days. From 6 to 12 September. It is not a battle, in fact - it is fifty simultaneous battles, on a front of three hundred kilometres, from Verdun to Paris. A million men on each side, in the September heat, in the beet fields and the vineyards not yet harvested, in the birch woods and the marshes of the Marne, slamming into one another with a violence history has never yet seen.
Henri fights. It is a strange word, 'fighting', for what he is doing. He is lying in a furrow of ploughed land, he fires at grey shapes three hundred metres away, he reloads, he fires again, and between the shots the shells come in and turn over the earth around him like a mad gardener. The joiner from Cahors is killed on the 7th, beside him, a splinter in the throat. Henri holds his hand while he dies, which takes four minutes. Four minutes is a long time. The shepherd from Rocamadour crawls over to him and says: 'Got to go, Corporal.' Henri lets go of the joiner's hand and goes.
Verdier lives through the battle from a command post set up in a school - a school, as it happens, and he thinks of Henri without knowing that Henri exists. The reports pour in, contradictory, fragmentary, often half a day behind reality. Here they advance, there they fall back, elsewhere nobody knows. The battle is a fog. But the overall picture - Verdier can see it forming hour by hour. The Germans are bending. Not everywhere, not quickly, but they are bending. Kluck's flank is broken open by Maunoury's troops coming out of Paris - the famous taxis of the Marne, six hundred Renault taxis requisitioned by Gallieni to rush a brigade to the front, an episode that will become legend and that is really no more than a logistical detail in a gigantic operation, but a detail that says something about the France of that moment, about that ability to improvise when the plans have failed.
On 9 September, the Germans disengage. Kluck falls back. Bülow falls back. The whole German army withdraws northwards, towards the Aisne, and digs trenches on the high ground.
It is the victory of the Marne. Paris is saved. France is saved. The Schlieffen Plan has failed.
But Verdier is not putting out the bunting. He looks at the casualty figures - two hundred and fifty thousand French out of action in six days, killed, wounded, missing. He watches the Germans digging, burying themselves, laying barbed wire and machine guns on high positions. And he understands, with icy clarity, what no one yet wants to put into words: the war will not be over by Christmas. The war has only just begun.
After the Marne, the Race to the Sea.
It is a misleading name. It is not a race towards the sea, it is a gradual lengthening of the front northwards, each side trying to get round the other's flank. The French send troops to Picardy, Artois, Flanders. The Germans do the same. Each time, they arrive too late, the other is already there, and they dig trenches face to face. The front stretches out like a scar, from Verdun to the North Sea, and it sets.
Henri takes no part in the Race to the Sea. His regiment stays on the Aisne, in the Soissons sector, after the Marne. They have advanced, retaken ground, and now they stop. In front of them, the Germans are dug in on the Chemin des Dames, the ridge that overlooks the Aisne and whose charming name comes from two daughters of Louis XV who used the road. The name will soon mean something else.
Henri digs. Everyone digs. With shovels, with picks, with bare hands when there are no tools left. They dig trenches, communication trenches, dugouts, they lay sandbags, they string wire. In three weeks, the landscape of open fields becomes an underground labyrinth. Henri discovers mud. Not the mud of the causse, clean, limestone, quick to dry - the mud of the Aisne, clayey, greasy, sticky, that gets into the boots, into the clothes, under the nails, into the food. The mud that will now be their element, as water is the element of fish.
He writes to Louise on 20 September. His first letter since leaving. The paper is stained, the pencil poor, the writing shaky - not from fear, from fatigue. He does not describe what he has seen. He does not mention the joiner from Cahors, or the shells, or the noise. He writes: 'I am alive, which is already considerable. I think of you more than the situation demands, for which I do not apologise. I miss the causse. I miss the children. I hope Lucienne is still drawing.'
He folds the letter and hands it to the vaguemestre, the postman of the trenches, who makes his way along the communication trenches with his mail bag like a pedlar in the underworld. The letter will take eight days to reach Figeac. Louise will read it standing in her kitchen, and she will have to sit down.
In Lyon, Jeanne finally has news of Paul. A military postcard, the official kind with pre-printed sentences you cross out in pencil: 'I am in good health' - not crossed out. 'I am wounded' - crossed out. 'I am a prisoner' - crossed out. Signature: Paul. Postmark: 14 September.
He is alive. On the 14th, he was alive. Since then, nothing. Jeanne puts the card in the biscuit tin and picks up the iron again.
Lyon has changed in a month. The men have disappeared. Not all of them - the old, the unfit, the workers in the war industries are still there. But the streets, the workshops, the cafés have been emptied of their young men. In their place, the women. They are everywhere, suddenly, where no one used to see them. At the post-office counters. At the controls of the trams. In the factories of the Gerland district, where shells are made - shells are already being made, because the army is using them up at a rate nobody had foreseen, because the stocks are melting away, because this war eats metal as no war before it.
Jeanne does not go to the factory. Not yet. She irons, she does her cleaning, she waits. But she watches the women who do go - neighbours, acquaintances, strangers - and she sees something shifting in the order of the world, something underground and irresistible. The women are keeping the country standing. Without them, everything stops. No one says so yet, but everyone can see it.
On 28 September, somewhere in Picardy, the last attempts to outflank fail. The front stabilises. From Switzerland to the sea, over seven hundred kilometres, two armies face each other in trenches that look alike, separated by a few hundred metres of waste ground bristling with barbed wire and with corpses no one dares go out to fetch.
The war of movement is over. The war of position begins. No one knows how long it will last.
Verdier, transferred to the staff of a division on the Aisne front, looks at the map of the front and does a simple calculation. The Germans hold the north of France - ten départements, the coalfield of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the ironworks of Briey, some of the richest land in the country. To drive them out, a fortified front seven hundred kilometres long will have to be broken. With what? The 75 is not enough. The infantry is not enough. Élan is not enough. It will take heavy artillery, munitions in industrial quantities, time, and a new doctrine that no one has yet invented.
Verdier writes in his private notebook, on 30 September, a sentence he will reread four years later with a feeling he cannot name: 'We are in this for years.'
Evening falls early now over the trenches of the Aisne. Henri is sitting in a dugout that is not yet a dugout - a hole widened in the trench wall, roofed with logs and earth, where four men can fit if they fold themselves up. The shepherd from Rocamadour is asleep, curled up on his side, his rifle clutched against him. A rat runs along the fire step. Henri no longer jumps. He has not jumped since the Marne.
He thinks of the school in Labastide. The smoking stove. The frozen inkwells of January. The narcissi of March. Lucienne Marty, drawing faces in a single line, without lifting her pencil. Louise, smiling as she reads Bubu de Montparnasse in her kitchen in Figeac.
He is twenty-four. He is a schoolmaster. He is a corporal. He is alive.
It is the beginning of autumn, and the war is only two months old.