February 1915
The snow melts and the mud returns. It is the law of this flat country, of this Aisne earth that knows how to be only liquid or frozen, never dry, never firm. The trenches fill up again, the walls slide, the dugouts ooze. Henri meets the mud again the way you meet an intimate enemy - with disgust and resignation, in that order.
But February brings something besides the mud. February brings the reinforcements.
They arrive in batches, new men, the class of 1915 - kids of twenty who turn up in the communication trenches with enormous eyes and clean uniforms. Clean. Henri looks at them and remembers himself in August, the tight collar, the rifle that weighed so much, the total incomprehension of what lay ahead. Six months. Six months separate him from these boys, and it is a century.
He is given four of them. Four men to make up his section, which has gone down from eight to six since the Marne - the joiner from Cahors, Lieutenant Marsal, the ordinary losses of the autumn, that quiet trickle of dead and wounded taken to the rear which empties the ranks without anyone noticing. The four new men are a law student from Montauban, a barber's assistant from Brive, a peasant from Saint-Céré who speaks only patois, and a typesetter from Toulouse who wears spectacles almost identical to Henri's. The typesetter's name is Marcel Auriange. He is twenty-one, he has read Jaurès, he has read Zola, he has read Marx, and he asks questions.
Henri likes questions. Questions are his trade. But Marcel Auriange's questions are not those of a leaving-certificate pupil. 'Why do we attack if it's no use?' 'Why do the officers eat hot food and not us?' 'Why haven't we got grenades when the Boches have loads?' Henri answers when he can, dodges when he cannot, and notes in his notebook that this boy will go far or die quickly, and perhaps both.
The shepherd from Rocamadour watches the new men with the distant benevolence of a sheepdog. He does not talk to them much. He shows them. Where to put their feet. How to sleep without sleeping. How to eat cold food without throwing up. How to shit in a tin can when the latrines cannot be reached. The things nobody writes in the manuals and that survival teaches.
On 16 February, Joffre launches the first Champagne offensive.
It is December all over again, only bigger, bloodier, more pointless. Whole regiments go over the top on the Champagne front, between Reims and the Argonne, in a chalk landscape turned lunar by the shells. The artillery preparation lasts for hours - the 75s thunder, the ground shakes, the German trenches vanish under the smoke. And when the infantry go over, bayonets fixed, the German machine guns are still there. Still there. The deep dugouts have protected them. The wire, badly cut by the 75's shrapnel shells, which do not have the power to tear it out, is still standing. And the men in red trousers fall into the wire like insects into a spider's web.
The offensive will go on until March. It will gain a few hundred metres, in places a kilometre, at the cost of tens of thousands of dead. Verdier reads the reports from his sector on the Aisne and files them in the folder he has labelled 'Offensives' with obsessive care. He no longer comments. He files.
Henri is not committed in Champagne. But he hears its echoes, and above all he sees its consequences. The wounded passing through to the rear, in horse-drawn ambulances jolting over the broken roads. The reinforcements marching north-east, columns of men on the roads, heavy step, eyes straight ahead. And the rumours - the rumours that run through the trenches like water through the communication trenches, impossible to stop, impossible to check, always exaggerated, always true underneath: we've lost the 152nd. The 56th has been cut to pieces. Colonel So-and-so is dead. Captain What's-his-name was killed going over the top.
Marcel Auriange listens to these rumours and asks his questions. 'Is it true we're attacking without heavy artillery?' Henri does not answer. He does not need to. The answer is in the rumble coming from the east, day and night, that permanent roll of thunder which is the voice of the war when it is eating.
In Lyon, February is the month Jeanne meets Rose.
Rose Vigier. Thirty-two, widowed since October - her husband, a sergeant in the 99th Infantry, killed at Arras during the Race to the Sea. Rose has two children, five and three, and she started at the Berliet works in December, in the same workshop as Jeanne. She is a small, nervous woman, with quick hands and a quicker tongue. She says what she thinks, which is dangerous at the factory and necessary everywhere else.
Jeanne and Rose found each other the way people do who share the same pent-up anger. Not all at once - slowly, little by little, through sentences exchanged at the break, through looks when the foreman says something stupid, through that silent complicity of women who know they are doing men's work for half the wage and will never be thanked for it.
On Sunday 14 February, Jeanne invites Rose for coffee at her place in Vaise. Rose's two children play on the floor with a saucepan and a wooden spoon. Rose talks about her husband. Not his death - his life. How he laughed. How he carried the little one on his shoulders. How he smelled of cheap tobacco and Marseille soap. She talks about him without crying, with a ferocious precision, as if every detail wrenched from oblivion were a victory.
Jeanne listens. She thinks of Paul, who is alive, who is somewhere, and she measures the distance between her own fear and Rose's certainty. Fear is terrible. Certainty is worse.
Rose says, putting down her cup: 'The worst isn't that he's dead. The worst is I'm not allowed to stop.'
Henri receives a letter from Louise that troubles him.
It is not what she says - it is what she does not say. The letter is shorter than usual, the tone drier, the sentences briefer. Louise talks about the school, about an inspector who came round and criticised her way of teaching reading, about a roof that leaks in the classroom, about the winter that will not end. She does not say 'I think of you'. She does not say 'come back'. She signs 'Louise', without the 'your' she had begun to put in front of it, shyly, since December.
Henri rereads the letter three times and does not understand. What has changed? What did he write wrong? He turns over in his memory the sentences of his last letter and finds nothing. But he knows - he senses, with that intuition the war sharpens because it forces you to read the tiny signs on which life depends - that something has withdrawn.
What he does not know is that Louise went to the cemetery at Capdenac-Gare on 2 February. The Pradel boy's funeral, twenty-three, killed in the Argonne. His mother screamed in front of the coffin - an animal cry, naked, which went through Louise like an electric current. And since that cry, Louise cannot write 'I shall wait for you' without hearing Mother Pradel. She is afraid. Not afraid of the war - afraid of the waiting, afraid of committing herself to a man who may disappear any morning, afraid of becoming Rose Vigier without knowing it. So she draws back. A protective gesture, clumsy, instinctive. She does not know that on the other side, in a hole on the Aisne, a man in round spectacles is rereading her letter and feeling more alone than he has felt since August.
Henri does not reply at once. He waits five days - five days of trench, of mud, of shooting, of deadly routine - and then he writes something he would never have written in peacetime, because peacetime allows for caution and wartime allows only for what matters.
'Dear Louise. I do not know what is holding you back in your last letter, and I do not ask. But I want you to know this: I hold on here because there is something afterwards. That something is you. If I am wrong, tell me so and I shall understand. But if I am not wrong, do not draw back. Not now.'
The letter takes eight days. Louise reads it sitting in her kitchen in Capdenac, in the evening, by the lamp. And something gives way in her - the dam of fear, the wall of caution, the distance she had begun to build. She replies that same evening, in one go, without a single crossing-out: 'You are not wrong. Forgive me. I was afraid, that is all. It will not happen again.'
In Paris, the war is becoming more and more political. The Chamber sits, the Senate sits, and the members begin to ask the questions the censorship prevents the press from asking. Why is there a shortage of shells? Why do the soldiers have no grenades? Why the red trousers, which kill as many men as the German machine guns? Why no helmets, when shell splinters are smashing skulls by the thousand?
The red trousers. They are the symbol of everything. In 1911, when a Minister of War proposed replacing them with a less visible uniform, a deputy replied: 'The red trousers are France!' Three years later, the red trousers are a target. The army knows it. Joffre knows it. Everyone knows it. In February, the decision is finally taken - uniforms will be made in horizon blue, the colour of the French sky, because the colour of the sky kills less than the colour of blood. The first ones will arrive in the spring. In the meantime, the men die in red.
Clemenceau seizes on it, naturally. He seizes on everything. The shells, the grenades, the trousers, the helmets, the supply services, the strategy - everything is material for a furious editorial in L'Homme enchaîné. The censors suspend him again, for ten days this time. He comes back fiercer. He has understood that the war is not won only at the front - it is also won behind it, in the factories, in the ministries, in that colossal bureaucratic machine that is France at war and that creaks in every joint.
Verdier is thinking about grenades.
It is a concrete, immediate, vital problem. The Germans have grenades - Stielhandgranaten, stick grenades that can be thrown thirty metres and explode in the opposing trench with terrifying effectiveness. The French have almost none. A few archaic models, as dangerous to the thrower as to the target. And in a trench war, where the lines are sometimes fifty metres apart, the grenade is king. Not the rifle, not the gun - the grenade. The object a man can throw over a parapet, into a communication trench, round the corner of a traverse.
The soldiers improvise. Verdier has seen homemade grenades in his sector, made from food tins, black powder, nails and a fuse. Makeshift things, rigged up by ingenious and desperate men, which go off one time in three and sometimes kill the man throwing them. The army of the world's third industrial power is reduced to making grenades out of bully-beef tins. Verdier notes this in his monthly report with a cold irony that borders on insubordination.
28 February, a Saturday. Henri's sector is quiet - 'quiet' in the 1915 sense, meaning nobody has died today. Evening falls early. Henri is in the dugout with the shepherd, Fayolle and Marcel Auriange. The others are on the fire step. The candle flickers. The shepherd is mending a boot with wire. Fayolle is asleep, mouth open. Marcel is reading a three-week-old newspaper, the only one they have, and muttering.
Henri takes out Louise's last letter. He rereads it, for the fourth or fifth time. 'You are not wrong.' He smiles. It is a discreet smile, almost invisible, which only the shepherd catches, and the shepherd says nothing because the shepherd never says anything, but he nods imperceptibly, as if a smile in a trench were the most natural thing in the world and the most precious.
Outside, the rain starts again. March tomorrow. Spring will come back. And with the spring, the offensives.
Henri knows it. He does not think of the spring as a hope. He thinks of it as a threat.