July 1915
The regiment goes back into the line on 3 July.
It is a different sector, further north than Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, in the labyrinth of trenches that runs between Arras and Lens. The landscape is unrecognisable - what were beet fields and villages of red brick have become a grey expanse, churned up, where the houses are nothing but heaps of rubble and the trees black stumps. Henri walks along the communication trench and passes a wayside calvary of which only the base remains, the cross carried off by a shell. The shepherd crosses himself, which surprises Henri - he did not know Lacombe was a believer. Or perhaps Lacombe is not a believer. Perhaps the gesture comes before belief, a reflex of the body older than thought.
The sector is what is called an 'active' sector - which is to say that the tacit arrangement of 'live and let live', the one Henri knew on the Aisne with the Saxons, does not exist here. The Germans opposite are Prussians, Guards regiments, and they give nothing away. Harassing fire day and night. Flares every five minutes. Snipers who punish the slightest head that shows. And the Minenwerfer - trench mortars that drop heavy bombs at short range, with the noise of a train coming off the rails, and turn a dugout over like a molehill.
Henri meets the noise again. The noise he had almost forgotten during the weeks of rest, that noise which is not a sound but a state, a permanent vibration of the world. He meets the fear again. The fear too he had almost forgotten, put away in a drawer with the cafard, and it comes back all at once, intact, on the first evening, when a Minenwerfer bomb lands twenty metres from the dugout and makes the earth shudder like an animal.
Fayolle has stopped coughing. It is the only improvement. The rest has done him good, the June heat has dried out his lungs, and he has come back into the line with a new vigour that reassures Henri. The boy - for he is still a boy, despite the man he killed, despite Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, despite everything - has found his rhythm. He stands his watches, throws his grenades, eats his soup, and in the evenings he writes to his parents in Puy-l'Évêque, letters the censor lets through because they contain nothing forbidden. 'I'm well. It's hot. The soup is good.' The soup is not good. But Fayolle lies as everyone lies, out of love, out of pity, out of the impossibility of saying.
Paul is in Lyon.
Discharged from the hospital in Picardy at the end of June and transferred to the auxiliary hospital set up in the Lycée du Parc, he arrived on 2 July with his arm in a sling and twenty kilos lighter than in August 1914. Jeanne came to meet him. She saw him get off the train at Perrache and did not recognise him. Not because of the arm, not because he was so thin - because of the eyes. Paul has the eyes of a man who has seen something he will not tell, and Jeanne understands by instinct that she must not ask.
They go home to Vaise by tram. Paul looks at the city through the window. Lyon has not changed - the quays, the bridges, the pale stone façades, the plane trees. And yet everything has changed, because it is Paul who has changed, and the world of before is a garment that no longer fits him. He looks at the people on the tram - women, old men, children, men in civilian clothes who are not at the front for reasons he does not want to know - and he feels nothing. No anger, no contempt. Nothing. A void.
Jeanne senses it. She does not take his arm - the left one is wounded, the right one is carrying the suitcase. She walks beside him, at his pace, and when they reach the flat she opens the door and says: 'This is home.' As if it were necessary. As if Paul needed reminding.
Paul goes in. He looks at the kitchen, the table, the chair, the stove. He puts down the suitcase. He sits down. He says: 'Smells good.' That is all. Jeanne has made a pot-au-feu, with beef she paid too much for at the market in Vaise, because there had to be beef, because beef is life from before, it is Sunday, it is normal.
They eat. Paul eats slowly, carefully, like a man learning again. The meat, the vegetables, the broth. He does not talk about the war. He does not talk about the hospital. He says: 'The pot-au-feu is good.' He says: 'You've got thinner too.' He says: 'Thank you.' Then he falls silent, and Jeanne clears the table, and Paul stays sitting there, his eyes on the window that looks onto the courtyard, and evening falls on Vaise and on them.
In the night, Jeanne wakes with a start. Paul is shouting. He is sitting up in bed, his eyes open, and he is shouting something she does not understand - a name, perhaps, or an order, the words of the trench. She touches his right shoulder, gently. He turns towards her and does not recognise her for three seconds. Three seconds. Then he says: 'Sorry.' He lies down again. He does not go back to sleep. Nor does Jeanne.
It will go on for weeks.
Verdier takes three days' leave in Paris, the first since January. He sees his children. Pierre has grown - twelve now, legs too long, a face hesitating between childhood and adolescence. Marguerite is nine and has plaits she hates. They greet their father with an awkward politeness that wrings Verdier's heart more than all the casualty reports he has filed. His children do not know him. He is a uniform that comes to dinner.
Madeleine makes dinner. Properly. The way she does everything - properly. The roast, the potatoes, the salad. Verdier eats and looks at his wife and tries to see her, not as a figure in a kitchen but as the woman he married thirteen years ago, in the church at Chartres, on a June day that smelled of lime blossom. He cannot do it. The war has dug a trench between them that did not exist before - or that already existed, but that life together concealed, and that absence has revealed the way water reveals the cracks in a wall.
On the second evening, after dinner, when the children are in bed, Madeleine says: 'Étienne, when is it going to end?' It is the first personal question she has asked him since he arrived. Verdier looks at her. He could lie. He ought to lie. All husbands lie, all soldiers lie, it is the rule. But Verdier is a man of figures, and figures do not lie, and Madeleine deserves better than a lie.
'Not this year. Perhaps not next year.'
Madeleine nods. She does not cry. She puts away the plates and says: 'The children need you.' It is not a reproach. It is a statement, set down on the table like a fact, and Verdier hears it and does not know what to do with it.
He leaves two days later, at dawn. Pierre is asleep. Marguerite is asleep. Madeleine is standing in the hall in her dressing gown. They look at each other. Verdier kisses his wife on the forehead. Madeleine says: 'Be careful.' Verdier says: 'Yes.' He goes down the stairs. The door closes.
At the front, July is a month of bloody stalemate. The Artois offensive is officially over, but the local fighting goes on, that trickle of daily deaths that has become the norm. Henri holds his sector. One day is like the next - watches, fatigues, alerts, shooting, the post, the soup, broken sleep. The war has become a trade. A dangerous, absurd, exhausting trade, but a trade, with its skills, its routines, its hierarchies.
The fourth issue of Le Poilu du Causse comes out on 12 July, set by Marcel in a second-line dugout with the lead type he carries around in a cigar box. No press this time - Marcel has found a homemade way of copying with carbon paper that gives twenty legible copies and ten more that can more or less be deciphered. Henri has written an article on trench names - why the men christen the communication trenches, the dugouts, the listening posts. 'We name what we live in. We live in what we name. To give a name to a hole in the ground is to make it a place. And a place is already a little like home.' The battalion commander reads the article and sends for Henri. 'It's well written, Corporal. What were you, before?' 'A schoolmaster, Major.' The commander nods. 'It shows.'
That is all. No praise, no reprimand. But from that day on, the commander remembers Henri's name, which, in the machinery of the army, can mean many things - a promotion, a transfer, a posting to the rear. Or nothing at all.
At Capdenac-Gare, the school is closed for the summer. Louise has a month ahead of her, a month without children, without lessons, without the noise of the playground. It is a silence that weighs on her. During the school year, the school keeps her standing - the timetables, the preparation, the marking, the garden. Without the school, she is a woman alone in a small town where the men are missing, where conversation turns on the war, the dead, the rising prices.
She helps her mother in the haberdashery. She tidies the reels of thread, the buttons, the ribbons. The customers come less often - you buy less cloth when you are in black; one cloth is enough, and it lasts. Her mother says nothing about the war, nothing about Henri, nothing about anything. She is a woman who was left, and who built herself around silence the way an oyster builds around a grain of sand.
Louise writes to Henri almost every day in July. Long, detailed letters describing the Lot in summer - the heat on the white stones, the sunflowers, the figs ripening on the courtyard wall, the sound of the crickets in the evening. She writes the world that still exists, the world that is waiting, the world after. It is her way of fighting.
Henri receives these letters the way you receive water in the desert. He reads them, rereads them, puts them away in his breast pocket, which is now a small library of creased paper. And he replies, when he can, with shorter, drier letters, because his own world cannot be described - or not in the words you send to a woman you love.
But on 20 July, he writes something different. Something that came to him in the night, in the dugout, listening to the shepherd's breathing.
'Dear Louise. When it's all over - and it will all be over, even if I don't know when - I want to marry you. I say it like that, straight out, because going round things is a luxury I no longer have. If you'll have me as I'll be, and I don't know what I'll be, say yes. If you want to think about it, think. But know that this question is the only clear thing in my head for months.'
The letter takes ten days. Louise receives it on 30 July, in her mother's haberdashery, between two customers. She reads it. She rereads it. She goes out into the courtyard, sits on the stone step, and says yes out loud, all alone, in the July heat, with the crickets and the figs and the white sky of the Quercy.
She writes a word - just one, on a postcard showing the bridge at Capdenac - and she posts it before she can change her mind.
'Yes.'
On 31 July, the war is a year old. Henri is on the fire step, in the warm Artois night, and he is not thinking about the anniversary. He is thinking about a postcard that is somewhere between Capdenac and the front, in a mail bag, on a train, in a lorry, and that carries a word of one syllable which holds the world.
He has not received it yet. He will not receive it until 5 August. But he knows. He knows what it will say, the way you know dawn will come after the night, not out of certainty but out of necessity.
The shepherd is beside him, at the next loophole. They look out at no man's land in the dark. A flare goes up, lights up the wire, the holes, the weeds, falls back. The silence returns.
Lacombe says, quietly: 'Fine night, Corporal.'
Henri says: 'Yes.'
It is the same word. It is not the same yes. But both are true.