June 1915
Henri is healing. Not from a wound - he has not been hit, not a scratch, which is in itself a kind of statistical miracle. He is healing from something else, something that has no name in 1915 and will not have one for a long time. The battalion doctor would call it nervous exhaustion, if Henri went to see him, which he does not. The men call it 'le cafard'. Henri has the cafard.
It shows itself in small things. He no longer sleeps. No, that is not accurate - he sleeps, but the sleep does not rest him, because the sleep is full of noise, of faces, of the scream of the plasterer from Souillac, of the silence of the law student. He wakes exhausted, his jaw clenched, his body stiff. He eats without appetite. He does his watches, his fatigues, his corporal's work. But something has gone out in the mechanism, a cog that used to turn without his thinking about it and that no longer turns.
The shepherd sees it. The shepherd sees everything, with the silent attentiveness of men used to watching animals. One morning, at the rest billet, he sits down beside Henri and says nothing for ten minutes. Then he says: 'My neighbour's dog, at Rocamadour, he bit a kid once. After that, he couldn't go near children. He shook. He was a good dog. It took him time.'
Henri looks at the shepherd. He does not know whether Lacombe has just compared him to a traumatised dog or offered him the finest thing one man can offer another - the recognition of pain without naming it. Probably both.
'How long?' Henri asks.
The shepherd shrugs. 'As long as it took.'
The regiment is at rest, if you can call it rest, this billet in a village behind the lines in Artois where the men sleep in barns, drill in the mornings and wait in the afternoons. Wait for what - nobody says. The next spell in the line. The next offensive. The next batch of dead. Waiting is the texture of this war, its underlying fabric, and the men sink into it as into a sagging mattress.
Marcel Auriange does not wait. Marcel acts. He has found in the village an abandoned hand press - an old printing press, in the back room of a closed-down print shop whose owner has been called up. Marcel looks at it the way Henri would look at a library. He cleans it, greases it, hunts for ink and paper, and one evening he comes to Henri with an idea.
'Corporal, what if we did a newspaper?'
Henri looks at him. A newspaper. In a rest billet, between two spells in the line, with a press dating from Napoleon III and stolen paper. Marcel is not mad - he is a typesetter, it is his trade, and making a newspaper is like making a cake for a pastry cook: it is what you know how to do and it is what keeps you alive. Henri understands that. He also understands the risk - a soldiers' newspaper, however harmless, even approved by the command, is a space for speaking, and speech in wartime is a dangerous thing.
But Henri is a schoolmaster. Speech is his trade too. He says yes.
The paper will be called Le Poilu du Causse, because half the regiment comes from the Lot and the Quercy. Marcel sets the type, Henri writes, the shepherd contributes nothing but agrees to have his silhouette drawn for the front page - a massive man leaning on a rifle, with a caption in Occitan that nobody on the staff understands. The first issue comes out on 20 June, in a run of fifty copies. It contains an editorial by Henri on the post ('The vaguemestre is our saviour and our executioner'), a recipe for bacon soup by one of the battalion cooks, a poem by Fayolle that is bad but touching, and a drawing by Marcel of a trench rat reading the paper, with the caption: 'A loyal reader at last.'
The battalion commander reads it, raises an eyebrow, and says nothing. The paper is harmless. It is even useful - it keeps the men busy, it passes humour around, it creates bonds. The commander is an intelligent man, which is not all that common, and he knows that a man who laughs is a man who holds on.
The Artois offensive has run out of breath but is not officially over. Joffre relaunches it in June, in fits and starts, local attacks that nibble, that cost, that change nothing. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette is taken, for good, on 9 June, after weeks of savage fighting on that accursed plateau. The price: thousands dead for a limestone spur from which you can see the slag heaps of Lens. It is a point on a map. It is an ossuary.
Verdier attends the aftermath of the battle with the clinical detachment that has become his shell. He inspects the captured positions, the German trenches taken and turned round, the concrete dugouts the 75 did not dent - he was right, he knew it, it gives him no pleasure. He notes, he measures, he photographs. He wants to understand why the Germans hold out so well, and he understands: depth. The Germans dig to three, four, five metres. They pour concrete. They reinforce. Their dugouts withstand everything except a direct hit from a very heavy-calibre shell. The French army digs to a metre and a half and roofs its dugouts with logs and earth. The difference is the one between a house and a shack.
Verdier writes a technical report. Ten pages, diagrams, calculations of material strength. He recommends digging deeper, using concrete, copying German methods. The report goes up the chain. It will be partly applied - in a year, in two years, when thousands more men have died so that the obvious can become doctrine.
In Lyon, June brings the heat into the workshop, and a letter from Paul that changes everything.
Paul is wounded.
Not badly - a splinter in the left arm, the biceps muscle torn, the bone intact. Evacuated to a hospital behind the lines, somewhere in Picardy; he cannot say where. The letter is written with his right hand, in a shaky, slanting script that looks nothing like Paul's. 'Don't worry, it's nothing. The left arm, what's more. I won't be able to work metal for a while but I'll still be able to hold you.'
Jeanne reads the letter and something breaks and mends at the same time. The fear she has been carrying for eleven months, that permanent, muffled fear that never left her even in her sleep, that fear bursts all at once and turns into something else - into a violent, physical relief that makes her shake from head to foot, standing in the kitchen in Vaise, the letter in her hand. He is wounded. He is alive. He is wounded, so he is behind the lines, so he is not fighting, so he will not die today, or tomorrow, or next week. The wound as a blessing. It is monstrous. It is the logic of 1915.
She goes to Rose's that same evening, without waiting for Sunday. Rose opens the door, sees Jeanne's face, and says: 'Is he wounded?' Jeanne nods. Rose says: 'The arm?' Jeanne says yes. Rose lets her in, makes coffee, and says the thing only a widow can say to a wounded man's wife: 'All the better.'
Jeanne sits down and drinks the coffee and does not cry. She is past crying over good news. She will cry when there is none left.
Henri learns of Paul's wound from a letter from Jeanne that arrives on 18 June. He reads it and nods. His brother-in-law, whom he hardly knows - a few visits to Lyon, family meals, a taciturn man whose trade-union opinions and silence he did not share - has joined the brotherhood of the wounded. Henri ought to be relieved. He is, in a way. But relief is a complicated emotion in 1915, because you cannot rejoice at one man's wound without thinking of those who were not so lucky, those who died, those who are buried in the chalk of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette without a name and without a cross.
He writes to Jeanne: 'Glad Paul is alive. Tell him I'm thinking of him.' It is short. It is all he can manage.
To Louise, he writes something else that evening. Something longer, truer. The cafard is passing - not disappearing, it will never disappear completely, but settling, tucking itself into a corner of his head where it can coexist with the rest. And the rest is Louise, is the school, is the regiment's paper, is the shepherd telling stories about his dog, is Fayolle coughing and living, is Marcel setting lead type in a back room in Artois.
'Dear Louise. I'm better. Don't ask me better than what, I couldn't explain. Let's say I'd gone away and I'm coming back. The beans, the garden, Marthe Bouyssou's face - you don't know how much those things matter. They're the proof that the world is holding. Here, we've made a newspaper. The first issue made men laugh who hadn't laughed for months. It may be the most useful thing I've done since the start of this war.'
28 June. One year to the day since Sarajevo. Nobody notices, or if anyone notices, they do not say so. It is not the kind of anniversary you celebrate.
The France of June 1915 is a country transformed. Not only by the war - by the war, yes, but also by what the war has revealed. The flaws, the lies, the shortcomings. The army that had no helmets, no grenades, no heavy artillery. The command that sent men in red trousers against machine guns. The industry that was not ready. The whole country that had fallen asleep in the certainty of a short war and is waking up to the reality of a war without end.
But France adapts. That is the lesson of June 1915 - adaptation. The factories run. The women work. The helmets protect. The grenades work. The heavy artillery is arriving, slowly, inadequately, but it is arriving. The trousers are blue. The country is learning war by making it, which is the worst way to learn and the only one there is.
Clemenceau, in L'Homme enchaîné, sums up the situation with his usual brutality: France makes war the way it does everything else - late, in disorder, and with a courage that makes up for the incompetence. It is not untrue. It is not fair either. But Clemenceau has never looked for fairness. He is looking for effectiveness, and effectiveness is still a long way off.
On 30 June, Henri is sitting in the back room of the print shop, with Marcel, in front of the press. They are setting the third issue of Le Poilu du Causse. Marcel lines up the lead type in the composing stick with a watchmaker's precision. Henri corrects a proof in pencil. The evening light comes in through a dusty window.
It is a moment of peace. Not the peace of before - that one is dead, buried with the law student from Montauban. Another peace, smaller, more fragile, made of lead and ink and words lined up on paper. The peace of people making something in the midst of destruction.
Marcel says, without looking up from the composing stick: 'You know, Corporal, after the war I want to start my own paper. A real one. In Toulouse. A workers' paper.'
Henri looks at him. 'And what will you write?'
Marcel smiles. 'The truth.'
Henri does not say that the truth is a complicated thing, that nobody wants it whole, that even he, the secular schoolmaster, the republican, the man of the Enlightenment, censors his own letters before the censor gets to them. He does not say that. He says: 'I'll read your paper.'
Marcel nods and puts a piece of type back in the case. Outside, in the distance, the artillery rumbles. Always.