November 1914
The cold arrives all at once, in the night of 3 to 4 November, like a door opened onto winter. Henri wakes in the dugout with numb fingers and his breath smoking. The mud of the trenches hardens on the surface but stays soft underneath, a slimy trap under a crust of frost that cracks underfoot. It is worse than liquid mud, in a way, because you think you are walking on something solid and suddenly you sink in up to the knee.
The men have nothing to cover themselves with. The dark-blue greatcoat is woollen cloth, fairly thick, but it has been soaked for weeks and never dries. Blankets are scarce - one per man in theory, one between two in practice. They sleep pressed against one another, out of animal instinct, out of necessity, and the modesty of the early days disappeared long ago. Henri sleeps against the shepherd from Rocamadour, back to back, and the shepherd's warmth is the most precious thing he owns.
Supply is the second problem. The soup arrives cold, carried up from the rear in camp kettles by ration parties that take an hour to get through the communication trenches under shellfire. Sometimes the ration party does not arrive. A shell on the communication trench, a kettle knocked over, a carrier killed, and the section does not eat. Henri has learned to keep a crust of bread in his haversack at all times, a crust as hard as wood that he scrapes with his knife and softens in the water from his water bottle. His mother's saucisson ran out long ago.
And then there are the rats. Henri had seen some in October, but in November they are everywhere. Big, glossy, fed on what nobody wants to talk about, they run over the sleepers at night, gnaw the packs, steal the food. The shepherd from Rocamadour kills them with his rifle butt with professional efficiency - he is a man used to vermin, to dirt, to hard living, and the trench does not frighten him as much as it does the others. He says to Henri, one evening: 'It's like winter on the causse, Corporal. Only worse. But it's the same.' Henri is not sure he agrees, but he understands what the shepherd means. You survive the way you have learned to survive.
Ypres has sunk into a relative quiet. The battle died down at the end of October, for want of men to fight it on either side. The salient holds. The British will stay there for four years, in that pocket of Belgian mud that will become the symbol of all that is worst in this war. But in November, no one knows that yet. They know only that it is no longer moving.
And along the whole front, it is the same. From the sea to Switzerland, the armies are dug in. The official communiqués, every day, say the same thing in different words: 'Nothing to report.' 'Intermittent shelling.' 'Local actions without result.' This smooth language covers a daily reality of death dealt out retail - a sniper here, a shell there, a trench collapse somewhere else. Every day, France loses men. Not by the thousand as in August, but by the hundred, by the dozen, a constant trickle of pointless deaths that change nothing whatsoever. The war of attrition has begun.
Joffre settles into this kind of war. From his headquarters at Chantilly, in the château of the Condés, he organises, plans, sacks. He sacks a great deal. Generals who failed in August, colonels too old, majors too timid - or too clear-sighted, which comes to the same thing in a system that confuses prudence with cowardice. Joffre wants attackers. He is looking for the breakthrough, the nibbling, the methodical wearing down of the enemy. He believes the next offensive will be the one, that the Germans are exhausted, that you only have to push a little harder.
Verdier does not believe it. He has seen at close quarters how many assaults a well-defended trench can absorb, and he knows the Germans dig better, deeper, with concrete when they can find it. But Verdier was promoted to major on 1 November - they promote quickly when officers die quickly - and a major does not contradict a commander-in-chief. He does his job. He improves the positions, organises the reliefs, writes precise reports that nobody reads to the end.
In Lyon, Jeanne is learning the rhythm of the factory.
It is a rhythm unlike anything she has known. Up at five, in the dark. The walk to the tram, in the November cold, with the other women converging from the streets of Vaise and La Duchère, muffled figures in the mist. The packed tram, where they stand, pressed together, and hardly speak because it is too early to speak. The factory at six. The workshop, the stool, the bolts, the noise. Ten hours' work. At six in the evening, the same road in reverse, legs heavy, eyes stinging from the filings.
But Jeanne is changing. She does not see it herself, not yet, but those who know her see it. Her neighbour Marie, at the Sunday wash-house, says to her: 'You've got thin.' Jeanne has got thinner, it is true - the fatigue, the skipped meals, the hours on her feet. But that is not what Marie sees. It is something else. An assurance in her voice. A way of standing straight. Jeanne earns money. Jeanne leaves her home every morning to go somewhere she is needed, where her work is of use - lorries, parts, the war, the country. It is terrible that it has to come through the war. But it comes through.
She has written to Paul to tell him. Not straight away - she waited three weeks, long enough to be sure she would hold out, that they would not send her away, that it was real. She wrote simply: 'I'm working at the Berliet works, on parts inspection. It pays well. Don't worry about me.'
Paul's reply takes twelve days to arrive. Three lines in pencil, in a hurried hand: 'All the better if you're working. It's hard here but I'm holding on. Give Marie a kiss for me.'
Jeanne rereads the three lines. 'All the better if you're working.' She had expected worse. Or better. She does not know. She puts the card in the biscuit tin, which is now overflowing with Henri's letters, Paul's cards, newspaper cuttings. The tin is becoming the archive of a world that is falling apart.
On 11 November - a date that means nothing yet - the Germans launch a last offensive at Ypres. It fails in the mud and the blood. The battle of Flanders is over. The toll is monstrous on both sides. There will be no breaking through. Nobody will break through. The front is a wall, and it will stay one.
In Paris, the government is still in Bordeaux. It will not return until December. The ministers govern from a distance, in a provincial city turned temporary capital, between the vineyards and the quays of the Garonne. Poincaré champs at the bit. Viviani hangs on. And Clemenceau, in L'Homme libre - renamed L'Homme enchaîné, the free man now in chains, since the censors suspended it for eight days in September - lays into everyone with methodical fury. The government is incompetent. The General Staff is blind. The parliamentarians are cowards. The censorship is stupid. He is right on every count, which does not make him any more agreeable. At seventy-three, Clemenceau is a force of nature that the war has woken like a volcano thought extinct. He wants power. Not yet. Not straight away. But he wants it, and he says so to anyone who will listen, with that brutal frankness which is his own brand of courtesy.
On 15 November, Henri is relieved. His battalion leaves the front line for rest - 'rest' being a relative word, meaning you move back five kilometres and sleep in a barn instead of a hole. But it is a barn. With straw. And a roof.
Henri sleeps fourteen hours straight. When he wakes, he does not know where he is for thirty seconds, and those thirty seconds are the best of his life since August. The silence. The absence of shells. Hay that smells of hay and not of death.
During the eight days of rest, he washes - for the first time in six weeks, in a tub of lukewarm water behind the barn, and he discovers his own body, thinner, dirty, covered in louse bites. Lice. The other enemy, the permanent one, the one you never manage to beat. They boil their shirts when they can, they delouse themselves by hand for hours, and twenty-four hours later the lice are back. Henri accepts them as he accepts the mud and the rats - with a resigned disgust that is perhaps this war's first form of wisdom.
He writes. A great deal. To Jeanne, to his mother, to Louise. To Louise above all. Eight days of rest means eight days of writing, and his November letters are the longest he has ever sent to anyone. He still does not describe the war - he cannot, he will not, and the censor would forbid it anyway. But he talks about himself. About what he thinks in the evenings, in the dugout, when he cannot sleep. About what he wants to do afterwards - afterwards, that magic word that stands in for hope. He wants to take up his class again. He wants to apply for a transfer to Figeac, to be closer. Closer to what, he does not say. But Louise understands.
She replies on 22 November, a four-page letter, the longest she has ever written, of which Henri will remember every word to the end: 'I shall wait for you as long as it takes. But come back. The rest we shall build together.'
Henri folds the letter and puts it in his breast pocket, against his mother's note and the notebook. His breast pocket is his strongbox, the only place in the world that still belongs to him.
On 26 November, the battalion goes back up the line. The relief takes place at night, in the communication trenches, in single file, without a sound. The men coming down pass the men going up, and in the darkness all you can see are eyes. Those coming down have an empty look. Those going up have a hard look. Henri recognises the difference. He knows now which side he is on.
The trench has not changed. The mud, the rats, the smell. The Germans are a hundred metres away, behind their wire. Sometimes you can hear their voices at night, when the wind carries. German words, incomprehensible, human.
The shepherd from Rocamadour settles into the dugout, spreads out his blanket, takes from his haversack a piece of goat's cheese as hard as stone which he found during the rest period, and shares it out with his knife. Five men eat cheese in a hole, by candlelight, and it is a feast.
On 30 November, Verdier writes an end-of-month report. He does it every month, meticulously. Strength, losses, ammunition expended, state of equipment. The figures are dry and they say everything. His regiment has lost forty-two men in November, seven of them killed, without advancing or retreating a single metre. Forty-two men for nothing. And this is a quiet month.
He closes the file. Through the window of his command post - a farm cellar, in fact, but with a window looking onto a ruined garden - he watches night fall over Picardy. Somewhere in that night, men are keeping watch, men are sleeping, men are writing letters to women they may never see again.
He thinks of his wife, who stayed in Paris. He does not think of her enough, he knows it. Madeleine Verdier, née Aubry, the daughter of a notary from Chartres, whom he married in 1902 and with whom he has two children he barely knows, because he has always been somewhere else - in Morocco, in garrison, at the ministry. The war has only made worse an absence that was already there. He writes her proper, affectionate, empty letters. She replies with identical letters. They have been married for twelve years and they are two polite strangers.
Verdier closes the window. It is cold. December tomorrow.