December 1914
Winter moves in like an occupier. It takes up quarters in the trenches of the Aisne with the same brutality as the Germans in the north of France - methodically, with no possible appeal. The thermometer drops below zero in the first week of December and does not rise again. The mud freezes. The water in the water bottles freezes. Fingers stick to the metal of the Lebel's bolt, and a man in the neighbouring regiment has left the skin of his thumb on it.
Henri now wears everything he owns. The greatcoat, a woollen jacket sent by his mother, a knitted muffler he received in an anonymous parcel - one of those parcels from 'war godmothers', which the good ladies of the home front make up for unknown soldiers, with socks, chocolate, tobacco, and sometimes a little note of encouragement signed with a first name. The muffler is blue, badly knitted, and it itches. Henri wears it day and night.
Young Fayolle is coughing. Not the dry cough of the cold - a wet, deep cough that comes from the bottom of the chest and will not go. The battalion doctor examines him in three minutes in a dugout, by candlelight, and says: 'Bronchitis. Keep him dry.' Dry. The doctor has a sense of humour, or else he has none left at all. Fayolle stays in the line, he coughs, he stands his watches, he eats his cold soup, and Henri keeps an eye on him with the anxiety of a schoolmaster watching a pupil decline and able to do nothing about it.
On 10 December, the government returns to Paris. At last. Four months in Bordeaux, four months of temporary capital, of displaced ministers and administrative confusion. The return is discreet - no fanfare, no parade. They come back because Paris has been safe since the Marne, because the front holds, and because France cannot be governed from the Bordelais indefinitely. Poincaré returns to the Élysée with relief. Viviani returns to Matignon with dread.
For the problem is now this: what is to be done? The front does not move. Germany occupies ten French départements. Belgium is almost entirely under the German boot. And nobody has a solution. Joffre wants to attack - he is preparing offensives in Artois and Champagne for the coming weeks, 'vigorous actions' meant to nibble away at the enemy lines. Verdier reads the preparatory orders and does his calculations. To break through a line of trenches defended by machine guns and heavy artillery, you need crushing superiority in firepower, an artillery preparation lasting several days, and enough reserves to exploit the breach. The French army has none of that. It has courage. Courage, Verdier saw at work in August, in September, in October. He knows exactly how many men courage can kill when it is not backed by the means.
He says nothing. He prepares the plans he is asked to prepare. He does his job.
Mid-December. Joffre launches his first offensive in Champagne. Regiments go over the top against the German trenches north of Reims, in a landscape of white chalk and stunted pines. The results are those Verdier foresaw. A few hundred metres gained here, lost there. Considerable losses for insignificant gains. The communiqués speak of 'appreciable progress'. The reality is a chalk field churned up by shells, strewn with bodies in blue greatcoats, which the snow covers at night and uncovers in the morning.
Henri is not in Champagne. He is still on the Aisne, in his sector, in his trench. But he hears about the offensive from the reliefs, from the wounded passing through to the rear, from that permanent rumour that runs through the communication trenches like a draught. The men listen and say little. They have understood, since the Marne, that the communiqués lie and that the truth travels by word of mouth among the survivors. And what the survivors of Champagne have to say is not encouraging.
The shepherd from Rocamadour sums up the situation with his countryman's common sense: 'They send us up for nothing and bring us back with half.' Henri can find nothing to say. That is exactly it.
And yet. And yet the men hold. That is the mystery of December 1914 - why do they hold? They are filthy, hungry, frozen, exhausted, terrified. They have seen their comrades die for trenches that are retaken the next day. They know now - everyone knows - that the war will not be over by Christmas. And they hold.
Henri thinks about it in the evenings, in the dugout. He thinks about it as a schoolmaster, as a man who believes in ideas, and he finds no simple answer. It is not patriotism - not the patriotism of speeches and flags, at any rate. The flag, the men never see it; it is rolled up in a case somewhere at the rear. The Marseillaise, nobody sings it in the trenches. What holds them is something else. Their comrades, first - you do not let your mates down, you do not abandon the ones who are counting on you. Habit, next - human beings get used to anything; it is their strength and their curse. And fear of the alternative - deserting means the court martial, the firing squad, shame on the family.
He writes in his notebook, on 14 December: 'What keeps us standing is not what people think. It is not the idea of France. It is the face of the man next to you.'
In Lyon, winter weighs on Jeanne in a different way. The journey to the factory in the dark and the cold, the packed tram where the women huddle in silence, the icy workshop where fingers go numb on the metal parts. But the Berliet works are still hiring, production is rising, and Jeanne is no longer the newest arrival. New women come in every week, younger than her, more frightened, and Jeanne catches herself showing them the movements, the rhythm, the tricks - how to hold the calliper to go faster, how to wedge the stool so your back does not ache, how to negotiate five minutes' break with the foreman without being noticed.
She has become someone in the workshop. Not a forewoman - there are no forewomen; the foremen are all men, those unfit for service or too old for the front. But someone the others turn to. Jeanne Vauterin, the railwayman's wife, the one who does not say much but knows how.
Paul writes more often since November. His letters are short, factual, censored in places - words struck out in blue pencil by the officer in charge of the post. Jeanne reads between the crossed-out words. 'We're somewhere I can't say. It's raining. The food is bad. I've got a good mate, a chap from Saint-Étienne, who makes me laugh.' It is little. It is immense. 'A good mate who makes me laugh' - that means he can still laugh, and that is all Jeanne needs to know.
On 20 December, she receives a letter from Henri. The first since October. Henri does not write to her as much as he used to - his letters go to Louise now, Jeanne knows it without his saying so, and she does not hold it against him. A man who finds someone to write to in wartime is a man who has a reason to survive, and Jeanne wants her brother to survive more than anything in the world. But the December letter is for her. In it, Henri talks about the war for the first time - not the fighting, not the dead, but the landscape. 'The country here is flat. Not a causse, not a hill. Fields as far as the eye can see and poplars with no leaves left. It is beautiful, in a way, if you forget what is in it.'
Jeanne reads that and cries, without a sound, in the kitchen in Vaise, and then she blows her nose and puts the soup on to heat.
Christmas.
The France of December 1914 tries to believe in it. The newspapers publish messages of hope, the town halls organise collections of parcels for the soldiers, schoolchildren make drawings and letters that are sent to the front in bundles. Louise, at Capdenac-Gare, has her pupils draw - 'a drawing for a soldier' - and slips the best of them into her letters to Henri. Henri puts them up in the dugout, against the wood of the logs, with nails salvaged from the rubble of a farm. A yellow sun. A house with smoke coming out of the chimney. A dog. The men of the section look at the drawings without saying anything, and the shepherd from Rocamadour touches the dog with the tip of his finger, once, when he thinks no one is watching.
On 24 December, in Henri's sector, nothing in particular happens. The soup is a little better - someone has found some wine - and the regimental chaplain says Mass in a dugout enlarged for the occasion. Henri does not attend, on principle, but he hears the hymns from his post, carried on the cold air, and he does not find them unpleasant.
Further north, in Flanders and Artois, on the lines held by the British and the Germans, something else is happening.
The Christmas truce.
It is not organised, not authorised, not planned. It is born of its own accord, spontaneously, on the night of the 24th, when German soldiers begin singing Stille Nacht in their trenches and British soldiers answer with applause. Fir trees appear on the German parapets, decorated with candles. Voices call out in rough English: 'Merry Christmas, Tommy!' Voices answer: 'Merry Christmas, Fritz!' And the next morning, men climb out of the trenches, unarmed, and walk to the middle of no man's land, and they shake hands.
They will swap tobacco, chocolate, uniform buttons. In some places they will play football - the legend is true, even if the matches are short and chaotic. They will bury the dead who have been rotting between the lines for weeks. They will show each other family photographs. And for a few hours, on stretches of the front, the war will stop because the men fighting it decide, of their own accord, that it can stop.
On the French front, the truce is rarer, more fragile, shorter. The orders are strict - no fraternising, no weakness. And geography weighs differently: the Germans are at home here, in France, in French houses, in French villages, and the hatred runs deeper than among the British, who are fighting far from home for a country that is not theirs. But here and there, even on the French front, there are silences. Hours when no one fires. Moments when the war grows tired of itself.
Henri takes part in no truce. His sector stays active, the sporadic firing goes on, and a man from the neighbouring battalion is killed on 25 December at two in the afternoon by a shell splinter. Christmas. Henri writes in his notebook: 'Christmas. One dead. Rice soup in the evening. The shepherd sang.'
Verdier spends Christmas at his command post. Madeleine has sent him a parcel - a bottle of Bordeaux, foie gras, marrons glacés. He shares it all with his officers, in the cellar that serves as his office, around a staff map that does duty as a tablecloth. The Bordeaux is good. The marrons glacés are squashed. The foie gras is intact, and it is a luxury so extravagant in the circumstances that it becomes almost obscene.
At midnight, Verdier goes out into the ruined garden. The night is clear, cold, starry. In the distance, to the north, a flare climbs into the sky and drifts slowly down, like a sad firework. Then another. Then a burst of machine-gun fire, brief, and the silence returns.
He thinks of his children. Pierre, eleven. Marguerite, eight. He has not seen them since August. Four months. Pierre must have grown. Marguerite must have lost a tooth, or won a prize at school, or learned something new - and he knows nothing of any of it, because Madeleine writes as he does, properly, without details, without flesh.
He goes back into the cellar and lies down on his camp bed. Before sleeping, he writes in his service notebook, as he does every evening, the situation of the sector, the strength, the losses. Then he adds, in the margin, in tiny handwriting: 'First Christmas of the war. Not the last.'
31 December 1914. The last day of the first year.
France does not yet know what awaits it. It knows what it has lost - three hundred thousand dead in five months, the north of the country occupied, the illusion of a short and glorious war. But it does not know what is left to lose. It imagines a few more months. The spring, the decisive offensive, the breakthrough, victory. The newspapers promise it. The generals swear to it. Everyone wants to believe it.
Henri no longer believes in much, except Louise. Paul no longer believes in much, except coming home. Jeanne no longer believes in much, except tomorrow morning.
And Verdier believes in nothing any more, except the figures. The figures say the war will last for years. The figures are right.
At midnight, on the Aisne front, someone fires a flare. White, then red, then nothing. It is New Year. 1915. Henri is standing on the fire step, his eyes on no man's land, lit up for a second by the flare, and he sees the wire, the shell holes, the dirty snow, and beyond them the German line, identical to his own, with men identical to him looking in the other direction.
He is twenty-four. He is a schoolmaster. He is a soldier. He is alive.
The year that is beginning will be the worst.