April 1915
Spring comes back, and this time it is not pretending. The apple trees blossom in the ruined orchards, weeds grow on the parapets, and in no man's land, between the wire and the corpses, the poppies are beginning to break through. It is obscene, that kind of beauty. Henri looks at it every morning through the loophole and does not know what to make of it. The war ought to be ugly all the time, out of decency. But the war does not care about decency, and the poppies grow because the earth has been turned over and seeds have no morals.
Marcel Auriange looks at the poppies with a political eye. 'Things grow well in churned-up earth. After the war, these fields will be the most fertile in France.' Henri does not know whether that is cynicism or hope. With Marcel, it is often both.
April also brings the flies. Not yet the clouds of summer, but the first ones, the scouts, which find the latrines and the bodies and settle in. The battalion doctor gives a talk on hygiene - hands, water, food - a perfectly sensible talk and a perfectly impracticable one in a place where drinking water is a luxury, hands are always dirty, and food is served in mess tins the rats have visited in the night. Henri listens to the doctor with the respect he owes a man who is doing his best in a world that makes his work impossible.
The Artois offensive is being prepared.
Henri does not know it yet, but he will soon feel it. The signs are there for anyone who can read them - the artillery convoys moving north, the fresh regiments marching along the roads behind the lines, leave cancelled, the air reconnaissance flights multiplying. The French army is preparing its great spring blow, and the whole front feels it the way you feel a storm coming - a tension in the air, a dull electricity.
Verdier is transferred. He is posted to the staff of the Tenth Army, the one that will attack in Artois, under General d'Urbal. It is a promotion in disguise - they recognise his technical competence, his precise reports, his ability to organise. They do not recognise his warnings, but that was never part of the bargain. Verdier packs his things - a suitcase, a tin trunk, his maps - and leaves the Aisne for Artois in the first week of April. He crosses a country at war that no longer resembles anything he knew. Roads broken up by the convoys, villages half emptied, makeshift billets in barns, field hospitals in schools. Soldiers everywhere, equipment everywhere, everywhere that massive and imperfect organisation which is the French war effort.
He arrives at Tenth Army headquarters on 8 April and discovers the plans. The attack will go in on a ten-kilometre front, between Arras and Lens, towards Vimy Ridge and the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette plateau. The objective is ambitious - break through the first and second German lines, emerge into the Douai plain, cut the enemy's communications. Verdier looks at the map and sees what he always sees: the German trenches, the machine-gun nests, the concrete dugouts, the sloping ground that gives the advantage to the defender. He also sees the resources assembled - more than in Champagne, more heavy artillery, shells in greater quantity. But still not enough. The calculation is the same. Verdier does it again, for form's sake. Still not enough.
He no longer says so. He draws up the fire plans, the firing timetables, the plans of advance. He does his job.
Henri's 7th Regiment is not involved in the Artois preparations. It stays on the Aisne, in its trench, in its routine. But the effects are felt. Artillery is taken from them - batteries of 75s dismantled and sent north. Men are taken from them - specialists, grenadiers, sappers, sent as reinforcements. The sector grows thin. The reliefs become less frequent. Instead of eight days in the front line, it is ten, then twelve. The men are wearing out.
Fayolle has started coughing again. The autumn cough, back with the damp of spring. The doctor looks at him, sounds his chest, nods. 'Chronic bronchitis. He ought to be evacuated.' But evacuating a man in April 1915, when the Artois offensive is sucking up every reserve, means losing a rifle. The company commander refuses. Fayolle stays. He coughs, he spits, he stands his watches, he eats his soup, and in the evening he curls up in the dugout and Henri hears him choking in the dark.
Henri writes the battalion doctor a letter in due form, closely argued, as he would have written to the schools inspector to defend a pupil. The doctor reads the letter, puts it away, and says to Henri: 'I know, Corporal. But it's not me who decides.' Henri nods. He understands. The chain of command, that mechanism which dilutes responsibility until nobody is responsible for anything.
At Capdenac-Gare, Louise is living through her third term of the war.
The school has changed. Not in its walls - the same rooms, the same benches, the same blackboard. But in its children. The fathers have gone. Some are dead. The children know it - not all in the same way, not all at the same moment, but they know. Louise sees nine-year-old girls who no longer smile, ten-year-old boys who play at war in the playground with a new violence, six-year-olds who ask when Daddy is coming home, and whom she cannot look at as she answers.
She holds on. It is the word she uses in her letters to Henri - 'I'm holding on'. As the soldiers hold on at the front, the schoolmistresses hold on at home. It is not the same danger, not the same fear, but it is the same endurance, the same stubbornness in keeping something working in a world that is coming apart.
She has started a project with her pupils. A garden. Behind the school there is a patch of waste ground nobody uses, and Louise has got permission from the mayor to cultivate it. The children dig, plant, water. Radishes, beans, lettuces. It is an object lesson, officially. In reality it is something else - it is giving the children something to grow in a world that destroys everything. Louise does not put it that way, but that is exactly what she is doing.
She writes to Henri: 'The beans have come up. You can't imagine little Marthe Bouyssou's face when she saw the first leaf come out. As if she had just discovered that the world could still make things.'
Henri reads this letter in the dugout, by candlelight, and he has to put the paper down for a moment because his eyes are stinging, and it is not the smoke.
Mid-April. The French army does something that does not make the front pages but will change the face of the war.
The first helmets arrive.
The Adrian helmet, named after the general who designed it, is a steel dome weighing seven hundred grams, horizon blue, topped with a crest that is there to deflect splinters. It is not a heavy helmet, not a knight's helm - it is a compromise between protection and portability, and it will never stop a direct bullet. But it stops splinters, debris, the stones flung up by explosions, all those little things that have been smashing skulls by the thousand since the start of the war.
Henri gets his on 18 April. He turns it over in his hands, weighs it, puts it on his head. It is heavy, cold, it pinches at the temples. The shepherd from Rocamadour puts his on and says: 'Looks like a chamber pot.' Everyone laughs - Henri included, which does not happen often any more. The helmet is ugly, uncomfortable, and it will save thousands of lives where Joffre's offensives will have cost them.
Marcel Auriange, putting his on, says the thing nobody wants to hear: 'It means we're staying a long time. If they're giving us helmets, it's because we're staying.' Nobody laughs this time.
On 22 April, far from Henri's sector, far from Artois, far from everything the war has been until now, something happens at Ypres that changes the rules.
The Germans open six thousand cylinders of chlorine along a seven-kilometre front. A yellow-green cloud, pushed by the north wind, rolls towards the French trenches held by Algerian tirailleurs and territorials. The men see the cloud coming. They do not understand. Then the gas reaches them, and they understand. Chlorine attacks the lungs, burns the eyes, the mucous membranes, the bronchial tubes. The men choke, vomit, collapse. Those who can run, run. A seven-kilometre breach opens in the Allied front, gaping, and the Germans hardly advance into it, because they themselves do not quite believe what they have just done.
It is the first large-scale gas attack of the war. Gas. The weapon the Hague Conventions forbid, the weapon civilised nations were never to use. The Germans use it. The Allies will soon use it in their turn. The war goes up a notch in horror, and there are many notches still to come.
The news takes a few days to reach Henri's sector. It comes through the rumours, distorted, magnified, terrifying. 'The Boches have let off gas. The tirailleurs are all dead. The gas burns your skin, your eyes, it gets through everything.' Henri listens. The shepherd listens. Fayolle listens. Marcel asks the question everyone is asking: 'And what have we got against that?'
Nothing. In April 1915, the French army has nothing against gas. No mask, no filter, no protection. The first instructions arrive at the end of April, pathetic: in the event of a gas attack, press a wet cloth over the nose and mouth. A wet cloth. Against chlorine.
Marcel looks at Henri. 'A wet cloth, Corporal.' Henri does not answer. There is nothing to answer.
In Lyon, Jeanne knows nothing about the gas. The papers do not mention it, or so little, and so late. The censorship does its job. What Jeanne knows is that Paul is still alive - a card of 15 April, the field post stamp, the pre-printed sentences, the signature. Alive on the 15th. Since then, silence.
Rose still comes on Sundays. Her children are growing - the elder is six now; he will start school in October. Rose says she wants him to learn, to go far, not to end up in a factory like her. Jeanne recognises the words - they are Henri's, the ones he says about his pupils on the causse. School as a way out. Education as the escalator. The Republic as a promise.
Rose also has an idea. She wants to ask for a rise. Not on her own - with the other women in the workshop. 'If we all ask at the same time, they can't sack all of us. They need us.' Jeanne hesitates. Asking for a rise in wartime, when the men are dying at the front, is risky. They will be called selfish, profiteers, bad Frenchwomen. Rose shrugs. 'The bad Frenchwomen keeping their factories running, that's us. Let them find better.'
Jeanne is not ready. Not yet. But the seed is planted, like Louise's beans.
On 30 April, Henri receives an order. The 7th Regiment is leaving the Aisne sector. Destination: Artois.
He packs his things - Louise's letters in his breast pocket, the notebook, the blue muffler, the brand-new Adrian helmet. The shepherd rolls up his blanket. Fayolle coughs as he packs his haversack. Marcel Auriange buckles his pack with the efficiency of a man who has understood that speed is a form of survival.
They leave the trench at night, through the communication trenches, in single file. Henri looks back once, towards the line he has held for seven months, Rat Alley, Market Square, the Café de la Paix. He will never see them again. Other men will hold them, lose them, take them back. The trench will remain.
Behind them, in no man's land, the poppies grow in the dark.