January 1915
The year begins in frost and silence. Not the silence of peace - the silence of war when it is getting its breath back, that low hum made of noises you no longer hear because you have heard them so much: the distant rumble of artillery in a neighbouring sector, the sharp crack of a sniper, the scrape of shovels in the frozen earth. Henri lives in that noise the way a sailor lives in the noise of the sea. He no longer hears it. It is when it stops that he is afraid.
Young Fayolle is better. The cough has eased with the dry cold of January, which is paradoxical but true - the frost has killed the mud, killed the damp, and lungs that suffered from the wet breathe better in the biting air. Fayolle turned twenty on 3 January. Twenty, in a trench on the Aisne, without a glass of wine, without a girl, without anything. Henri gave him his bar of chocolate, the one from the war godmother's parcel, and Fayolle ate it in four bites with the eyes of a kid. He is a kid. They are nearly all kids, except the shepherd from Rocamadour, who is thirty-five and looks fifty.
The shepherd's name is Antoine Lacombe. It took Henri a while to learn it, because everyone calls him 'the shepherd' and it fits him like a glove. Lacombe hardly ever talks about his life before. He has a flock - two hundred ewes on the Causse de Gramat, looked after by his wife and his father-in-law while he is here. He has a daughter whose name he does not say. He has a dog, a patou, whose name he does say - Flòc - and whom he talks about with more tenderness than anything else in the world. When Lacombe wants to say things are going badly, he says: 'Flòc wouldn't be pleased.' When things are going well - which is rare - he says: 'Flòc would've liked that.' The dog is his moral compass, his fixed point, and Henri sometimes wonders whether Lacombe is surviving for the dog as much as for his wife and children.
Joffre is preparing for spring.
From Chantilly, in that château smelling of wax polish and leather armchairs, far from the mud, far from the noise, the commander-in-chief plans. He wants to attack. He has always wanted to attack. The front is stable, the ranks are filling up again - the classes of 1914 and 1915 are coming in, twenty-year-olds who did not fight on the Marne, who know nothing, who are trained in a few weeks and sent to the front with a Lebel and a prayer. Joffre wants them for the spring, for a great offensive in Artois and Champagne, a double attack that will break through the German lines and restart the war of movement.
It is Joffre's dream. It is Verdier's nightmare.
Verdier is summoned to Chantilly on 12 January for a staff meeting on artillery resources. He walks into the château in his muddy boots, with his brand-new major's insignia and a cardboard folder containing his calculations. Around the table, colonels and generals in immaculate uniform, freshly shaved, smelling of eau de Cologne and not of the trench. Verdier presents his case. To break through a line of defended trenches on a one-kilometre front, you need - figures to prove it - four hundred pieces of heavy artillery and a hundred thousand large-calibre shells. In January 1915, the French army possesses three hundred heavy pieces along the entire front. The factories produce ten thousand heavy shells a month. The calculation is simple. It is impossible.
A general answers that the 75 will make up for it. That the 75's rate of fire - twenty rounds a minute - is worth ten heavy howitzers. Verdier clenches his teeth and does not say what he thinks, which is that the 75 fires flat at what can be seen, and that the German positions are behind ridges, in holes, under concrete, where the 75 can do nothing. He says: 'General, the 75 is a magnificent weapon for a different kind of fight.' There is a silence around the table. Verdier is not invited back.
In Lyon, January is the month when Jeanne understands that the war will be long.
It is not a line of reasoning - it is a physical observation. The Berliet works are increasing production. You do not double the night shifts, you do not build an extension to the workshop, you do not take on two hundred more women for a war that will be over by spring. Jeanne sees the walls going up, the machines arriving on lorries, the foremen marking out lines in chalk on the floor of the new workshop. And she understands. It is not temporary. It is not for the time being. It is the new life, and it will last as long as it lasts.
She settles into it. Not out of resignation - out of pragmatism. That pragmatism of the women of 1915 which has no name, no theory, no manifesto, and which keeps the country standing more surely than all Viviani's speeches. Jeanne pays her rent. Jeanne puts money aside - not much, a franc a week, in an envelope hidden in the biscuit tin, among the letters. Jeanne eats her fill. It is not prosperity, it is survival with dignity, and for a railwayman's wife in 1915, that is already considerable.
On Sundays, she writes. To Paul, always - regular letters, brief, reassuring. To Henri, once a month - longer letters, in which she talks about the factory, the neighbourhood, Marie next door, who is pregnant, whose husband is at the front, and who does not know how she will manage. Jeanne's letters to Henri are the only ones in which she tells the whole truth. With Paul, she treads carefully. With Henri, she can say: 'It's hard, but I'm holding on. The factory eats up my life but it gives it to me too. I don't know how else to put it.'
Henri understands. Henri is the only man in her life who understands, and he is four hundred kilometres away in a hole.
Mid-January. At the front, the daily war invents its rituals.
There are the watches - two hours on the fire step, eye glued to the periscope, hands frozen on the rifle. There are the fatigues - the soup to be fetched, the sandbags to be filled, the communication trench to be repaired, the wire to be put out at night in no man's land, crouching in the dark, heart pounding, while the flares go up and come down and every second of light is a second of possible death. There are the rotations - eight days in the front line, four in the second line, four at rest, and the cycle begins again, endless, with no horizon.
And there is the post. The post is the religion of the trenches. The vaguemestre is its priest. When he comes along the communication trench with his bag, the men fall silent and wait, and every name called out is a grace, and every silence after a name that has not been called is a small bereavement. Henri gets post regularly - Louise, Jeanne, his mother, sometimes Émile, Louise's brother, who sends news of the Lot. He is rich in post. Others have no one. The shepherd from Rocamadour never receives anything, because his wife cannot write and neither can his father-in-law, and one day Henri offered to write for him, to take down his dictation, but Lacombe refused with a shake of the head. What he would say to his wife is no business of the schoolmaster's. Henri understood and did not insist.
Louise writes letters that are countries. Henri unfolds them in the dugout in the evening and enters them the way you enter a house. She tells him about the school - the children, the lessons, the mothers who come to ask whether she has news from the front, because the schoolmistress must know things, she who reads the papers and has a man out there. Louise does not say that Henri is 'her man'. But the mothers know, because the letters arrive at the post office in Capdenac-Gare and the postmistress knows the handwriting, and in a small town of a thousand people in 1915, a letter from the front addressed to a young schoolmistress is a novel that everybody reads over your shoulder.
She writes to him on 18 January: 'The children asked me whether the war would be over soon. I did not know what to answer. I told them the soldiers were fighting for them, which is true, and that France would win, which I hope, and that their fathers would come back, which I do not know. I am lying to my pupils, Henri. It is the first time in my life I have lied in a classroom. It makes me ill.'
Henri reads this letter twice, folds it into his pocket, and does not reply until three days later, because he is looking for the words. What he finally writes: 'You're not lying. You're choosing what they can carry. That's what we do, we schoolteachers. The whole truth isn't for children. It isn't for adults either, come to that. It's for no one. But someone has to look it in the face, and we're the ones who do it, you there, me here, each in our own way.'
On 20 January, it snows. Real snow, thick, heavy, that covers everything in a few hours - the trenches, the wire, the shell holes, the bodies. No man's land turns white and almost beautiful, like an ordinary field in winter, and for an hour Henri forgets what is underneath.
The men gather the snow to melt it and have clean water, which is a luxury. The shepherd from Rocamadour makes a snowball, looks at it, puts it down, and says: 'At Rocamadour the ewes are indoors now. They smell of their fleeces. Flòc sleeps with them.' Nobody laughs. It is not funny. It is the saddest thing Henri has heard this month, and he has heard plenty.
The France of January 1915 is learning to live at war. It is an apprenticeship nobody wanted, that nobody teaches, and that everyone is serving at the same time. Prices are rising - bread, coal, sugar. Ration tickets are not here yet, but they will come. The shops are emptying of some goods, filling up with others. Women in black are everywhere - in the markets, in the churches, in the streets. Black is the colour of 1915. Not the elegant black of the Parisian women of before - the thick, heavy, final black of mourning.
The papers lie and everyone knows it and everyone reads them all the same, because there is nothing else. The censorship cuts, strikes out, forbids. War correspondents write heroic fables from châteaux behind the lines, and soldiers on leave read them and tear them up and trample them, and a rift opens between the front and the home front that will never close again. The men who come home on leave do not talk. They look at the people in the street, the cafés open, the theatre posters, and they no longer recognise that world. And that world no longer recognises them.
Clemenceau keeps lashing out. In L'Homme enchaîné, he denounces the censorship, the incompetence, the feebleness. He demands munitions, heavy artillery, a command worthy of the name. He is right, as always. And as always, being right is no use when you do not have power. But Clemenceau knows how to wait. It is the only patience he has.
On 31 January, Henri is sitting in the dugout. The candle has almost burnt down. The shepherd is asleep. Fayolle is asleep. The two other men of the section - a plasterer from Souillac and a café owner's son from Martel, who came up with the reinforcements in December - are asleep too. Henri is the only one awake. He opens his notebook and writes:
'Six months. I have been here six months. It feels as if I have always been here. The school, the causse, the narcissi - it is a dream I had, or a story someone told me. What is real is the earth, the cold, the noise. And L.'s letters, which prove to me that the other world still exists.'
He closes the notebook. He blows out the candle. He lies down against the shepherd, who grunts in his sleep but does not wake.
Outside, the snow is still falling, and the war is waiting for spring.