March 1915
Spring does not come all at once this year. It seeps in by fits and starts, a day of sun between two weeks of grey, a bud on a shattered apple tree, a lark above no man's land singing as if nothing were the matter. Henri looks up at the lark and thinks of that line of Shakespeare a teacher at training college once taught him - the lark in the morning, the nightingale at night. He can no longer remember the play. He remembers the lark.
The trenches are changing. Not for the better, not for the worse - they are changing their nature. What was an improvised ditch in September, widened in October, strengthened in November, has become by March a system. An underground world with its own geography, its names, its habits. The front-line trench, the communication trench, the support trench, the forward listening posts. Every stretch has a name - given by the men, not by the staff. In Henri's sector there is 'Rat Alley', 'Market Square' - a widening where the soup is handed out - the 'Café de la Paix' - the sergeant's dugout, where there is sometimes mulled wine - and the 'Cul-de-sac', which lives up to its name. The Germans opposite probably have the same. Two parallel civilisations, separated by a hundred metres of death.
Marcel Auriange has adapted faster than Henri would have thought. The typesetter from Toulouse has the nervous intelligence of a skilled tradesman, an ability to observe, to understand how things work, to find solutions. It was he who made a stove out of a food tin and solid fuel, a rigged-up contraption for heating the soup in the dugout without going out under the shells. It was he who had the idea of weaving wattle hurdles from willow branches to shore up the trench walls, a technique he saw in a book on Vauban's fortifications, because Marcel reads books on Vauban's fortifications between watches, which astounds the shepherd from Rocamadour as much as it amuses Henri.
But Marcel still asks his questions. And the questions are getting harder. 'Why do they make us attack in Champagne if it doesn't work?' 'Why do the officers never come up to the front line?' Which is not quite true - the lieutenants and the captains are in the line, and they die in appalling proportions. But the colonels, the generals, the ones who give the orders, they stay at the rear, in the châteaux. Marcel says so. Henri does not contradict him. He only says: 'Questions are good. But you have to know when to ask them and who to.' Marcel looks at him with a half-smile that says clearly: I know, Corporal, I'm not stupid.
The Champagne offensive peters out in the March mud. The communiqués speak of 'appreciable results'. The reality: thousands of dead for an average gain of five hundred metres, on a front of a few kilometres, immediately sealed off by the Germans, who dig a second line as solid as the first. Joffre is not satisfied. Joffre is never satisfied. He wants more resources, more shells, more men. He is already preparing the next offensive, in Artois this time, for May. Always the same logic - break through, break through, break through. As if repeating a failure could produce a success.
Verdier receives the preparatory orders and studies them with the meticulousness that is his nature. The attack will go in on the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette plateau and Vimy Ridge, in Artois, with considerable forces - General d'Urbal's Tenth Army. The artillery preparation will be longer, denser. There are a few more heavy shells than in February - production is rising, the factories are running, women like Jeanne are making the munitions that men like Henri will fire or receive. But Verdier does the calculation again, and the calculation says the same thing: not enough. Not enough heavy calibre to destroy the deep dugouts. Not enough time to cut all the wire. Not enough reserves to exploit a breach if by some miracle one is opened.
He passes on his observations. They are noted. They are filed. The attack will go ahead anyway.
In Lyon, March brings the spring and the fatigue.
Jeanne has been working at the Berliet works for five months. Five months of ten hours a day, six days a week. Her body has hardened - calloused hands, shoulders strengthened by handling the parts, eyes tired from the precision of the inspection work. But it is another kind of fatigue that is overtaking her, more insidious. The fatigue of loneliness. The fatigue of empty evenings in the flat in Vaise, of a bed that is too wide, of silence. The fatigue of waiting for a postman who brings three-line cards and sometimes brings nothing.
Rose comes to see her on Sundays. It has become their ritual - coffee at Jeanne's, the children on the floor, the talk. Rose talks about everything with a bluntness that takes your breath away. About the pay - 'three francs fifty for the same work as a man on six francs, you think that's right, do you?' About the war - 'they say it's for the country, but the country never asked us what we thought.' About the future - 'when they come back, the ones who do come back, they'll want their jobs back. And what'll we do? Go back to the wash-house?'
Jeanne listens. She does not have Rose's words, that articulate anger, that ability to name things. But she feels that Rose is telling the truth. That something has shifted that will not shift back. That the women of 1915 are no longer the women of 1914, and that nobody has understood it yet, not the men at the front, not the politicians in Paris, not the bosses in their offices. Nobody except the women themselves, and they have no newspaper to say it in.
Jeanne writes to Henri: 'I work with a wonderful woman. Her name is Rose. Her husband was killed at Arras. She has two little ones. She says things I've been thinking under my breath for months.'
Henri receives the letter and smiles. His sister finding a friend. His sister coming out of her kitchen, out of her silence. He does not yet grasp the scale of what is happening. He cannot. He is in a hole.
On 10 March, the horizon blue arrives.
Not everywhere, not all at once. But the first new uniforms reach the depots at the rear, and gradually, in waves, the red trousers disappear. Henri gets his on 15 March - a blue-grey greatcoat, matching trousers, a képi covered in blue cloth. He takes off the red and puts on the blue and looks at himself and sees no difference, because the colour changes but the rest is the same - the same coarse wool, the same absurd cut, the same cold underneath. But the shepherd from Rocamadour sees the difference. He says, pulling on his blue trousers: 'It's better. They see us less.' And it is the longest sentence he has spoken since January.
The red trousers. How many men have the red trousers killed? No one will ever work it out. It is one of those details that sum up the whole absurdity of an age - a country sending its soldiers into battle in a uniform designed to be seen rather than to survive, because a member of parliament said it was France and a general staff said the attack had no need to hide. Horizon blue solves nothing - the machine guns kill whatever the colour - but it says something. It says that the French army has understood it was wrong. About the colour of the trousers. About the rest, it will take more time.
On 22 March, something happens in Henri's trench that appears in no communiqué.
It is a Sunday. The sector is quiet. The Germans opposite are Saxons - they know because a newspaper was found in an abandoned trench - and the Saxons have a reputation for being less aggressive than the Prussians or the Bavarians. A tacit understanding has settled over the sector for weeks: no firing at mealtimes, no firing at dawn when the water parties go out, no firing on Sunday mornings. It is not a truce - the officers would forbid it. It is an arrangement, a courtesy between people who are killing each other, something deeply human in the middle of the most inhuman thing there is.
That Sunday, a ball appears. A football, rolling into no man's land from the German trench. Nobody knows where it has come from. Nobody moves. The ball stays there, among the wire, incongruous, round and clean in that landscape of chaos, and the men on both sides look at it through their loopholes as if it had fallen from the moon.
Fayolle says: 'I'm going.' Henri grabs his arm. 'You stay here.' The ball stays in no man's land all day. In the evening, a shell lands next to it and bursts it. Henri writes in his notebook: 'A ball. Nobody dared go out to it. Nobody fired at it either. There is something in that I do not understand yet.'
Marcel Auriange understands very well. 'It's not a ball, Corporal. It's a test. They want to see how we react.' Henri looks at him. Marcel is probably right. Marcel is often right, which is both useful and tiring.
At the end of March, Henri is given leave. Three days. His first since August.
He takes the train at Fismes, changes in Paris - which he crosses without stopping, Gare de l'Est, the Métro, Gare d'Austerlitz - and arrives in Cahors on the evening of 28 March. His mother is waiting for him on the platform. She watches him get down from the carriage and does not recognise him at first - her son has lost ten kilos, his spectacles are mended with wire, his complexion is grey and he has an old man's hands. Then she recognises him and takes him in her arms and holds him tight, and Henri lets her, standing on the platform at Cahors station, in horizon blue, his pack at his feet, and for the first time in eight months he closes his eyes without being afraid.
He sleeps. Two days, almost without a break. He wakes to eat - unheard-of things, things from before: a cep omelette, duck confit, a walnut cake, coffee that tastes of coffee and not of dishwater. He eats and he sleeps and he hardly speaks. His mother does not press him. She watches him sleep from the doorway of the bedroom and she prays, in silence, without telling him.
On the third day, he takes the train to Figeac.
Louise is waiting for him at the station. She is wearing the same blue dress as the first time, in June, and Henri wonders whether it is chance or a sign and decides it is a sign. They walk through Figeac as they did the first time, but nothing is the same. Henri walks differently - slower, heavier, with that permanent vigilance of a body watching for danger even when there is none. Louise sees it. She says nothing. She slips her arm through his, naturally, as if she had always done so, and Henri feels the warmth of that arm against his own, and it is the most real thing he has touched in months.
They sit down at the same café as the first time. Henri drinks a glass of wine. His hands shake slightly - not much, just enough to make the wine quiver in the glass. Louise looks at his hands and says nothing. She puts her hand on his, on the café table, in Figeac, in broad daylight, in front of everyone. It is a tiny scandal in a provincial town in 1915 - a young lady touching a man's hand in public. Neither of them cares.
Henri says: 'When it's over, I'll ask for a transfer to Figeac. If you will have me.'
Louise says: 'I will have you.'
It is the first time she has called him tu. It is the first time anyone has said something so simple and so final to Henri Castayrol. He puts down the glass of wine. His hands no longer shake.
On 30 March, he is on the train back. Paris, Fismes, the depot, the communication trench, the trench. The shepherd from Rocamadour watches him come back and says: 'All right, Corporal?' Henri says: 'All right.' The shepherd nods. That is enough.
Henri takes up his place again in the dugout, his loophole, his routine. The mud, the rats, the noise. But something has changed. Not the world - the world is the same, muddy, dangerous, absurd. What has changed is the fixed point. Henri knows now what he is walking towards. Not victory, not glory - a woman in a blue dress at a station in the Lot, who said 'I will have you' with eyes that did not lie.
It is little. It is everything.