August 1915
The card arrives on the 5th.
Henri is in the dugout, in the second line, when the vaguemestre comes round. 'Castayrol.' Henri takes his letters - two from Jeanne, one from his mother, and a postcard. The bridge at Capdenac, in sepia. He turns the card over. One word. 'Yes.' Louise's handwriting, quick, slanting, the Y a little shaky, the tail of the s left trailing.
He looks at the card. He turns it over. The bridge. The word. He turns it back again. The bridge at Capdenac spans the Lot, and the Lot runs between cliffs, and the cliffs are white, and the sky is white, and the word is there.
Marcel watches him from the other end of the dugout. 'Good news, Corporal?' Henri puts the card in his breast pocket, with the letters, the notebook, his mother's note. He says: 'Yes.' Marcel smiles. The shepherd, who was asleep, opens one eye, assesses the situation, and closes it again. All is well.
But all is not well.
Joffre is preparing the great autumn offensive. Not a local attack, not a bit of nibbling - the breakthrough, the real one, the final one. Two simultaneous attacks, in Champagne and in Artois, with colossal resources. The whole summer is given over to the preparation. The trains run day and night, loaded with shells, guns, fresh regiments. The depots fill up. The roads behind the lines are rivers of materiel. The French army is going to strike with everything it has, and this time, Joffre swears, it will be enough.
Verdier receives the preparatory orders on the staff of the Tenth Army. He reads them. The attack in Artois will go in in September, on the same sector as in May - Vimy Ridge, the outskirts of Lens, the Douai plain beyond. But with more of everything. More guns - twelve hundred pieces of artillery on a twenty-kilometre front. More shells - stocks built up over three months. More men - seventeen divisions for the Tenth Army alone, plus the British, who will attack on the northern flank, at Loos.
Verdier does his calculations. That is what Verdier does - he calculates. And for the first time, the figures are not absurd. There are almost enough heavy guns. Almost enough shells. Almost enough reserves. Almost. The word comes back in every column of his table, and Verdier knows that 'presque' - almost - is the most dangerous word in the French language, because it permits hope without guaranteeing the result.
He prepares the fire plans with a new rigour. He has learned from May. He knows now that the artillery preparation must last days, not hours. That the wire must be cut by special shells, not by shrapnel. That the deep dugouts yield only to the 220s and the 270s. That the reserves must be close, ready, and that the communications must be doubled, tripled. He knows all that. The question is whether the system is capable of applying it.
Henri's regiment is taken out of the line in mid-August to prepare for the offensive. Another billet behind the lines, more barns, more waiting. But this time the waiting has a different colour. The men know they are going to attack. They do not know where or when, but they see the signs - the reinforcements arriving, the assault drills they are made to rehearse in fields turned into training grounds, the dummy trenches they take and retake under the eyes of officers who take notes, time them, correct them.
Henri drills his section. Out of the trench, advance by bounds, down, up again, throw the grenade, forward, occupy the position. The movements of death, choreographed, methodical. The shepherd does as he is told without a word. Fayolle is quick, agile - the war has built him up, hardened him, transformed him. The kid from Puy-l'Évêque has vanished. In his place, a soldier. Marcel observes, carries out, and in the evening he says to Henri: 'We're rehearsing our own funeral, Corporal.' Henri lets it pass. He knows Marcel needs to say these things, like a safety valve, and that saying them will not stop him fighting when the time comes.
The peasant from Saint-Céré - Pélissié is his name, a gnarled man who speaks only patois and who learned to use a rifle the way you learn to use a scythe, by movement and repetition - Pélissié has become, without anyone noticing, the best shot in the section. He misses nothing. The officers have noticed; he has his marksman's certificate, the hunting horn sewn on his sleeve, and now they want to make him a sniper, one of those loners who crawl out into no man's land with a rifle and a telescopic sight and kill a man a day, methodically. Pélissié refuses. He does not say why - he never says why - but Henri understands. Killing at a distance, through a loophole, is an act of war. Killing by aiming at a man's head, seeing his face, choosing your target, is something else. Pélissié wants nothing to do with that something else. Henri backs him up with the lieutenant. Pélissié stays in the section.
In Lyon, Paul is healing.
The arm is scarring over, slowly. The doctor at the hospital in the Parc says the muscle is damaged but the function will come back, not entirely, not as before, but enough. Paul does his exercises - squeezing a rubber ball, lifting his arm, turning his wrist. It hurts and he does not complain, because complaining about an arm that is mending when others have lost both is indecent.
But the arm is not the problem. The problem is everything else. The nights. The shouting. That absent look that takes Paul by surprise, in the middle of a meal, a conversation, a walk, and carries him somewhere else - to a place Jeanne cannot reach and that he does not talk about. Paul does not talk about the war. Not a word. When Jeanne tries, gently, carefully, he shuts like a strongbox and changes the subject. When neighbours ask, he says 'all right' and walks off.
Jeanne learns to live with this silence. It is a second apprenticeship, after the one of absence - the apprenticeship of empty presence, of the man who is there without being there, of the body regained and the mind lost. She does not know how to do it. Nobody knows how to do it. There are no instructions for living with a man the war has broken, no booklet, no orders. Every woman invents, alone, in her kitchen, the way to bring a man back from where he has gone.
What she finds, by instinct, is routine. The pot-au-feu, the coffee, the evening paper, the walk in the park when the weather allows. Ordinary gestures, repeated, like cradles. Paul holds on to them, slowly, clumsily. One morning in the third week, he goes down to buy the bread. It is the first time he has gone out alone. He comes back with the bread and an expression on his face that Jeanne had not seen for a long time - not a smile, not yet, but the outline of a man who remembers that he knows how to walk down a street.
Rose comes round on Sunday. She looks at Paul with the frankness of widows who no longer owe politeness anything. She says to Jeanne, in the kitchen, while Paul is in the courtyard: 'He'll come back. Not the same, but he'll come back.' Jeanne nods. She would like to believe it. She half believes it, which is a great deal in August 1915.
And Paul asks a question that changes everything.
One evening, at table, cutting his bread with his right hand - the knife in the right hand, the loaf wedged against his chest, a one-armed man's gesture he learned in hospital - he says: 'You work at the factory.'
It is not a question. It is a statement. He has known since Jeanne's letters, but he has never mentioned it, and Jeanne has not dared bring it up, waiting for him to raise the subject. Here it is.
'Yes.'
Paul cuts a slice. Slowly. 'Do you like it?'
Jeanne looks for her words. Like is not the word. You do not inspect bolts ten hours a day because you like it. But there is something else. 'It holds me together.'
Paul nods. He chews. He swallows. Then he says something Jeanne was not expecting, something that comes from the man of before, the trade unionist, the militant: 'How much are they paying you?'
'Four francs.'
'How much does a man get for the same job?'
'Six.'
Paul puts down the knife. He looks at Jeanne. And in his eyes, for the first time since he came back, something lights up. Not the warmth of before, not the gentleness. Something else. Anger. The good anger, the kind that builds, the kind he had listening to Jaurès at the Bourse du Travail, a century ago, in January 1914.
'That's bloody disgusting,' he says.
Jeanne looks at him. And she smiles. Because the man who says 'that's bloody disgusting' about an injustice is Paul. Not the ghost. Paul.
On 25 August, Henri is promoted to sergeant.
The promotion comes down in a curt note, three lines in the battalion orders. 'Corporal Castayrol, Henri, class of 1910, is promoted sergeant with effect from 25 August 1915, for his conduct under fire and his qualities of command.' The battalion commander, the one who read Le Poilu du Causse, put his name forward. The company commander backed it. There it is.
Henri sews the stripes on his sleeve with thread borrowed from the shepherd - Lacombe always has thread, string, leather, the materials of the pastoral life that he carries everywhere like talismans. Two gold stripes on horizon blue. It is paltry and it is immense. Paltry because the stripes change nothing about the mud, the noise, the dying. Immense because Henri now has responsibility for a whole platoon - thirty men instead of ten. Thirty lives that depend in part on his decisions, his vigilance, his instinct.
Marcel is the first to congratulate him, with his kindly irony: 'Sergeant Castayrol. The Republic's schools can take you anywhere.' Henri smiles. The shepherd says: 'Doesn't change anything, eh.' It is not a question. Henri says: 'Doesn't change anything.' And it is true - between them, it changes nothing. The hierarchy of the section is not the hierarchy of the stripes. It is the hierarchy of trust.
He writes to Louise - his fiancée; he can use the word now, even if the engagement is only a 'yes' on a postcard. He tells her about the promotion. He does not tell her that the promotion means more responsibility, more time in the front line, more risk. He says: 'They've given me stripes. I don't know if I deserve them, but I'll do my best.' It is a schoolmaster's sentence, not a warrior's. It is exactly what he is.
End of August. The army is drawing itself taut like a bow. Everyone feels the offensive coming. Leave is cancelled. The drills intensify. The artillery columns move up towards the front, endless, in the summer dust, the horses sweating, the gunners sitting on the limbers.
Henri receives the order on the 28th. His battalion will attack in September, in the Souchez sector, at the foot of Vimy Ridge. He opens the map - a 1:20,000 map, the first he has been entrusted with as a sergeant - and he sees the ground. The German trenches, one, two, three successive lines, with blockhouses, communication trenches, machine-gun nests. And behind them, the ridge. The ridge from which you can see the plain, the slag heaps, the roads. The objective.
He folds the map and puts it in his haversack. He says nothing to his men. Not yet. They know anyway. The men always know before they are told. It is one of the mysteries of the army - information travels by channels nobody controls, looks, silences, rumours, and when the order comes down it surprises no one.
That evening, the shepherd takes out a piece of bacon he has been keeping since God knows when and grills it on Marcel's stove. The smell of hot bacon fills the dugout. The men eat. Nobody talks about September.
Outside, the stars. The summer night, immense, indifferent.
On 31 August, Henri writes in his notebook: 'A year of war tomorrow. Sergeant. Engaged. Alive. That is already three more things than I hoped for.'