October 1914
The rain.
It begins in the first days of October and does not stop. Not a clean downpour, not a storm that bursts and passes - a fine, continuous, stubborn rain that seeps in everywhere. In the trenches of the Aisne, the water rises. First the ankles, then the calves. The men wade through a grey soup in which things float that are better left unidentified. The walls cave in, the dugouts leak, the sandbags come apart. At night they rebuild what the water destroyed by day, and at night the water destroys what they rebuilt by day.
Henri discovers feet. Not his own in particular - feet in general, as a problem, as an obsession, as an enemy. The boots never dry. The socks rot on the skin. Feet swell, turn white, blister and then break open into sores. The battalion doctor - a young doc from Toulouse who is twenty-six and has looked forty since the Marne - calls it 'trench foot' and says they must change their socks, grease their feet, dry them. With what? The spare socks are soaking in the pack, grease does not exist, and drying anything in this universe of mud borders on the miraculous.
Henri organises his section. It is what he knows how to do - organise, explain, persuade. He sets up a rota: each man takes off his boots for two hours a day, in the dugout, while the others keep watch. He passes round the only lump of tallow, which the shepherd from Rocamadour has got hold of God knows where. He inspects his men's feet the way he used to inspect his pupils' exercise books, with the same close attention, and when young Fayolle - a kid of nineteen, a winegrower's son from Puy-l'Évêque, who came up with the reinforcements on 25 September - neglects his, Henri tells him so in the schoolmaster's voice. Fayolle obeys. They obey Henri not because he is a corporal, but because he has the quiet authority of people who know what they are talking about.
The front does not move. That is the great discovery of October - the front does not move. They shoot, they are shot at, men die every day, from shells, from snipers' bullets, from disease, and nothing changes. The landscape between the trenches - what people are beginning to call no man's land, borrowing the expression from the British holding the sector further north - is a desert of shell holes, tangled wire and bodies no one collects.
Henri has never seen a body decompose. Now he looks at them every day, over the parapet, when he takes his turn on the fire step. Blue uniforms, grey uniforms, mingled in the same rot. The smell is the thing nobody talks about and nobody forgets. Sweetish, cloying, it seeps into everything - clothes, food, sleep. Henri gets used to it, which is worse than not getting used to it, because getting used to that means accepting that the world has changed its nature.
He writes to Louise on 8 October. He has found a rhythm - one letter a week, on Wednesday evenings, in the dugout, by candlelight. He still does not speak of what he sees. He talks about what he is reading - a comrade has lent him a battered Balzac, Le Médecin de campagne, and he discusses it as he would have done in an ordinary letter, in peacetime. He talks about the weather, about the food, which is bad, about the post he is waiting for. And then, at the turn of a sentence, he slips in: 'I shall be happy to see you again, when all this is over, if you are willing.' It is the first time he has written anything that resembles a declaration, and he does it with the caution of a man defusing a bomb.
Louise replies on the 15th. She says she is willing. She also says she has taken up her class again at Capdenac-Gare and that the school is full of children whose fathers have gone. She says she teaches and she holds on and in the evenings she reads the communiqués and she looks for the name of his sector on a Vidal-Lablache map hanging on her classroom wall. She does not say she is afraid. She does not need to.
In Flanders, the war breaks loose.
It is the last attempt by both sides to break through before the front sets for good. The Germans want Calais, the Channel ports, France cut off from Britain. They launch the offensive on 20 October, between Nieuport and Ypres, in massive strength - and among them, whole regiments made up of young volunteers of eighteen, nineteen, twenty, students for the most part, barely trained, stuffed with patriotism and thrown into the attack the way you throw wood on a fire.
It is what the Germans will call the Kindermord bei Ypern - the massacre of the innocents at Ypres. Thousands of young men mown down by British and French machine guns as they advanced arm in arm, singing, so the legend goes. The legend embellishes, as always. They were probably not singing. But they died all right, that they did.
Facing them, the British hold Ypres. The French hold the southern part of the salient. The Belgians, what is left of them, opened the sluices at Nieuport on 25 October and flooded the plain between the Yser and the sea. Water against the army. The country drowned so as not to be taken. It is a magnificent gesture of despair, and it works - the Germans will not get through along the coast.
Verdier follows the battle of Ypres from his post on the Aisne, through the communiqués and the reports that filter through. He knows the ground - he went through Bruges on leave before the war, in another life. He pictures the hop gardens and the flax fields turned into swamps, the Flemish farms in ruins, the church towers brought down. And he thinks of the eighteen-year-old German students dying on the other side, and that thought is harder than the others, because it forces him to recognise that the enemy too is made of flesh.
In Lyon, Jeanne has made a decision.
It came gradually, during the long October days, between the iron and the evening accounts. The money is no longer enough. The ironing and the charring do not cover the rent, and Paul now draws only his private's pay, twenty-five centimes a day, a pittance paid out with abysmal bureaucratic delays. Around her, the women are going to the factories. The Lyon armaments works are hiring - the Berliet factories at Vénissieux are making military lorries, the powder mills run day and night, the clothing workshops sew uniforms by the thousand. They take women. They pay them less than the men, naturally - half, sometimes a third - but they take them.
Jeanne presents herself at the Berliet works on 12 October. She knows nothing industrial - she can sew, iron, keep accounts on a scrap of paper. They put her on parts inspection. Sitting on a stool, ten hours a day, she checks bolts by eye and with a vernier calliper. It is repetitive, it is numbing, the noise of the workshop deafens, the metal dust catches in the throat. But it is three francs fifty a day. More than the ironing. More than the charring. More than a railwayman's wife could have earned before the war, in a world that did not want her.
The first evening, she comes home to Vaise with her hands black with grease and her ears ringing. She heats up the soup, eats alone in the empty kitchen, and sits for a while before going to bed. She is exhausted. But there is something else, under the exhaustion, that she does not identify at first. Pride, perhaps. Or something wilder. The sense that she is becoming someone she was not, that the war is taking her husband but giving her back something else - a wage, a place, an existence no longer defined by the man who is not there.
She does not mention it to Paul in her letter. She writes that she is well, that autumn is mild in Lyon, that she has put some walnuts aside for when he comes home. She does not write: I work at the factory. She does not know how he would take it. A man of 1914, a worker, even a trade unionist, is not necessarily ready to hear that his wife is keeping a production line running.
Henri receives a parcel. From his mother, in Cahors. Saucisson, walnuts, a pair of woollen socks, and a note: 'My son, wrap up warm. Your mother, who prays for you.' Henri has no faith - he is a secular schoolmaster, a republican, a man of the Enlightenment. But he does not throw the note away. He folds it into his breast pocket, against the notebook in which he writes down things he will never put in his letters.
What he writes down, on 22 October: 'Lieutenant Marsal killed this morning by a sniper. Bullet in the head, died instantly. He was twenty-six and read Stendhal in the dugout. His Stendhal is stained with blood. I picked it up and I don't know what to do with it.'
What he writes down, on 27 October: 'Took a stretch of abandoned German trench. Found letters, family photographs, a harmonica. One of the men played the harmonica in the evening. Nobody laughed.'
What he writes down, on 30 October: 'Young Fayolle killed a man today. A German who showed above the parapet. Fayolle saw him, took aim, fired. The man fell. Fayolle came to find me afterwards, white as a sheet, and said: "Corporal, I've killed someone." I didn't know what to answer. What do you say to that? Well done? Sorry? That's war? I put my hand on his shoulder and we stayed there for a while.'
On 31 October, the battle of Ypres is still raging. The front holds. The Germans will not get through. But the price is appalling - the British have lost almost the whole of their professional expeditionary force, that small regular army which, man for man, was the best in Europe. The survivors are irreplaceable veterans. Their replacements will be volunteers, then conscripts, and it will take months to train them.
The war is two and a half months old. France has lost more than three hundred thousand men - killed, wounded, taken prisoner, missing. Three hundred thousand, in two and a half months. The figure is so enormous it becomes abstract. You cannot think three hundred thousand men. You can think the joiner from Cahors, Lieutenant Marsal, Fayolle's German. You can think one man at a time. That is all the brain can bear.
Verdier knows it. That is why he keeps working. Because if he stops working, he will have to think, and if he thinks, he will have to count, and if he counts, he will go mad.
On the evening of the 31st, in the trench on the Aisne, someone is singing. It is the shepherd from Rocamadour, who has an astonishing voice, clear and true, unexpected in that massive body. He sings a song from the Quercy, in Occitan, something about walnut trees and the autumn wind, and the men listen in silence in the dark, huddled together in the mud, and for three minutes the war does not exist.
Henri closes his eyes. He sees the causse. He sees the school. He sees Louise's face in Figeac, in the June sun, when she smiled as she handed back Bubu de Montparnasse.
Then a shell lands a hundred metres away, and the earth shakes, and the shepherd falls silent, and the war comes back.