May 1915
The train sets them down at Aubigny-en-Artois, twenty kilometres behind the front, on the night of 3 May. Henri gets down from the carriage and breathes a different air - not better, not worse, but different. The Aisne smelled of clay and river. Artois smells of coal. It is mining country, slag heaps, miners' terraces. A landscape as flat as your hand, criss-crossed with straight roads and canals, and on the horizon the black silhouettes of pithead frames pointing at the sky like gallows.
The regiment is billeted in a half-empty village - the civilians have gone; what remains is a priest, three old men and some cats. Henri sleeps in a barn that smells of hay and not of mud, and that luxury, after seven months on the Aisne, makes him almost happy. The shepherd from Rocamadour sleeps outside, against a wall, because he can no longer bear enclosed spaces. Nobody remarks on it. Everyone has their own arrangements with the war.
For five days, there is waiting. They clean their weapons, check their kit, draw grenades - grenades at last, real grenades, F1 models that work, not rigged-up food tins. Marcel Auriange takes one apart with the methodical curiosity of a typesetter discovering a new typeface. 'Neat bit of work, that,' he says. The shepherd looks at the thing with suspicion. He does not like things that explode. Nobody likes them, but the shepherd admits it.
And then the orders arrive.
The Artois offensive begins on 9 May at ten in the morning.
The artillery preparation has been going on for four days. Since the 5th, the French guns - the 75s, but also, for the first time in significant numbers, heavy pieces, 155s, long 120s - have been pounding the German lines without a break. The ground shakes for kilometres around. The windows of the houses still standing shatter. The animals flee. The noise is such that you cannot hear yourself speak, even at the rear, and the men waiting in the jumping-off trenches live for four days in a world of vibration and deafness.
Henri waits. His battalion is in the second wave - it will not attack first, it will follow, it will exploit the breach if breach there is. Meanwhile, he looks over the parapet at the German line vanishing under the explosions, the geysers of earth and smoke, and he tells himself that nothing can survive under that. Nothing.
At ten, the whistles blow. The first wave goes over the top.
What happens in the next twenty minutes is what happened in Champagne, what happened at Ypres, what will happen again and again, because the French army has not yet understood - or has not wanted to understand - that the bombardment has not destroyed the deep dugouts, that the machine guns are intact under their casemates of concrete and logs, and that the men leaving the trenches are targets.
But this time, something different happens. In some places, they get through. The preparation has been enough, the wire is cut, the machine guns are knocked out, and the French infantry get into the first German line. North of Arras, the Moroccan Division - tirailleurs, zouaves, legionnaires, hardened men, ferocious men - drives into the front to a depth of four kilometres in a few hours. It is the breakthrough. The real breakthrough. Vimy Ridge is within reach.
Verdier is at Tenth Army headquarters when the reports come in. Four kilometres. In a morning. His heart quickens - not with excitement, not with joy, but with something like a cautious, dangerous hope. If the reserves follow, if they exploit it now, straight away, in the next few hours, before the Germans pull themselves together...
The reserves do not follow.
That is the tragedy of May 1915. It is the tragedy of the whole war, concentrated into a single day. The reserves are too far back. The roads are choked. Communications are cut - the telephone wires, laid on the ground, are severed by the shells, and the orders take hours to arrive. The command does not know what is happening in the front line. The Moroccan Division waits for reinforcements that do not come. The hours pass. The Germans pull themselves together, bring up their own reserves, counter-attack. The breach closes.
Verdier watches the reports come in, hour by hour, and sees the breakthrough turn into a dead end. At five in the evening, he knows it is over. The window has closed. They had victory in their hands and let it slip, because the machine is too heavy, too slow, too stupid to exploit what the men have won with their blood.
He leaves the command post. He walks to a tree, a lime, the only one still standing in a farm garden. He leans against the trunk and stays there for five minutes, eyes closed. Then he goes back in and returns to work.
Henri goes up on 10 May.
The second wave, his, is thrown into the furnace to widen and consolidate the previous day's gains. The regiment advances over captured ground - that is to say, over destroyed ground, a chaos of disembowelled trenches, French and German corpses mingled, twisted wire, smoking craters. The smell is indescribable. Henri breathes through his mouth and goes forward.
The objective is a German strongpoint on the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette plateau, a limestone spur that overlooks the plain and that the Germans have held since the autumn. The strongpoint has a number - strongpoints have numbers in staff reports. For the men who have to take it, it is a wall of sandbags and concrete, with loopholes from which machine-gun barrels poke out.
The assault goes in on 10 May at three in the afternoon. Henri leads his section - the shepherd, Fayolle, Marcel, the plasterer from Souillac, the café owner's son from Martel, the peasant from Saint-Céré, the law student from Montauban. Ten men. They leave the trench taken the day before and run - run is too strong a word; they go forward bent double, stumbling in the shell holes, rifle in one hand, grenade in the other.
The machine guns open fire.
The plasterer from Souillac is the first to fall. A burst in the legs; he collapses screaming, a high-pitched scream that Henri will hear in his nightmares for years. The law student falls next, without a sound, a bullet in the head, dead before he hits the ground. Henri throws himself into a shell hole and stays there, face in the earth, while the bullets crack over him like whiplashes.
The shepherd is beside him. Fayolle too, white as a corpse but alive. Marcel is ten metres further on, in another hole, and Henri sees him raise his arm to throw a grenade - a precise movement, controlled, astonishingly calm. The grenade bursts against the sandbags. A second follows. Then a third, thrown by a man Henri cannot see, and something changes in the noise - the machine gun falls silent.
They get up. They go forward. They get into the strongpoint. What happens next, Henri will never write down, not in his notebook, not in his letters, not anywhere. There are things writing cannot carry.
The strongpoint is taken. The plasterer is evacuated. The student is dead. Of ten, there are eight. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette is a name that will never again leave Henri's mouth without his jaw tightening.
The offensive goes on all through May. It is a methodical slaughter. The ridge is taken, lost, retaken, lost again. Every metre of ground costs men. The regiments take turns, go up, fall, are replaced. The communiqués speak of 'continuous progress'. The reality is a charnel house on a chalk plateau where the bodies pile up faster than they can be buried.
The 7th Regiment is relieved on 17 May, after a week in the line. Henri does the count. Of the company of two hundred men that went up on the 10th, a hundred and thirty-eight are left. Sixty-two are gone - killed, wounded, missing. In a week. The shepherd is alive, with a splinter in his left shoulder that he has refused to have treated with anything but a tight bandage. Fayolle is alive; he is still coughing. Marcel is alive, unhurt, with something new in his eyes that Henri recognises - that fixed, slightly absent look of men who have seen things too close.
The café owner's son from Martel is in hospital, both feet shattered by a shell splinter. He will not come back to the regiment. He will not go back to the café in Martel either - not on his own feet, at any rate.
Henri does not write for a week. Not to Louise, not to Jeanne, not to his mother. He cannot. The words are broken.
In Lyon, Jeanne does what Rose suggested.
On 20 May, twenty-seven women from the inspection shop at the Berliet works collectively ask for a rise. Not a strike - nobody says the word. A request. A petition, drafted by Rose, signed by all of them, handed to the foreman, who passes it to the head of the workshop, who passes it to the management.
The text is simple. They earn three francs fifty a day. The men who did the same work before the war earned six francs. They are asking for four francs fifty. It is modest. It is reasonable. It is revolutionary.
The management does not reply at once. The foreman sulks for three days. An engineer comes down to the workshop, watches the women working, takes notes, leaves. And on 28 May, the answer comes: four francs. Not four fifty. Four.
Rose is furious. 'Four francs, that's charity. It's to shut us up.' Jeanne does the arithmetic. Four francs instead of three fifty, six days a week, makes three francs more a week. Twelve francs a month. Twelve francs is the price of two pairs of shoes, a month's coal, the difference between counting and breathing. She says to Rose: 'We take it. And we'll ask again.'
Rose looks at her. 'You're tougher than you look, Jeanne.' Jeanne does not answer. She does not think she is tough. She thinks she is alive.
On 25 May, Henri finally writes. To Louise, a short letter, the shortest he has ever sent.
'Dear Louise. I'm alive. I've lost men. I can't say any more. Your pupils' beans - are they growing? Tell me they're growing.'
Louise receives the letter on 2 June. She reads it standing in the school playground, between two breaks. The children are playing around her. The sun is shining. The beans are growing.
She replies that same evening: 'They're growing. The radishes too. Marthe Bouyssou ate the first one and pulled a face because it was hot. The children laugh, Henri. The children still laugh.'
Verdier writes the report on the Artois offensive in the first days of June, but it is a report on May. The figures are as follows: a hundred and two thousand French casualties in one month. For a territorial gain of three kilometres on a front of ten. A hundred and two thousand men. Three kilometres.
He closes the file. He puts it next to the files on Champagne, December, February. The shelf is filling up.
And he thinks of that half-hour on 9 May when the breakthrough was possible, when four kilometres of depth lay open, when victory was waiting at the end of the road - if the reserves had been there, if communications had worked, if the command had dared. If, if, if. The ifs of May 1915 will haunt Verdier until the end of the war and beyond.
He writes in his notebook, on 31 May: 'We now know how to break through. We do not yet know how to exploit it. The first question is technical. The second is human. It is the second that will kill us.'