September 1915
The artillery preparation begins on 22 September.
In the three weeks before it, Henri lives in waiting. Waiting that is worse than the assault, because the assault at least keeps the body busy. Waiting leaves the body idle and the mind free to go round in circles, to work out the odds, to count the dead to come. Henri does not count. He prepares. He checks his platoon's kit, inspects the grenades, makes sure every man has his cartridges, his full water bottle, his field dressing. He studies the map. He picks out the objectives, the lines of advance, the fallback positions. He does everything a good sergeant should, methodically, the way he used to prepare his pupils for the leaving certificate - a syllabus, stages, a method.
But the leaving certificate never killed anyone.
The shepherd, during those three weeks, is even quieter than usual, which is saying something. He spends hours cleaning his rifle, greasing his boots, checking the seams of his pack. A shepherd's gestures before the transhumance - the careful tending of the tools before the mountain. Fayolle writes a great deal. Letters to his parents, letters to a girl in Puy-l'Évêque he has never mentioned and whose existence Henri discovers by chance, seeing the address on an envelope. Marcel is putting together a special issue of Le Poilu du Causse, the sixth, which he copies out by hand because the press was left behind in the previous village. Thirty copies, laborious, half of them illegible, with an editorial by Henri that says simply: 'We'll do what we have to do.'
On the evening of 21 September, Henri gathers his platoon in a second-line dugout. Thirty men sitting or crouching in the half-dark, their faces lit by two candles. Faces he now knows one by one - the shepherd, Fayolle, Marcel, Pélissié, and the others, the reinforcements of the winter and spring, the survivors of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the new men of July. Thirty men looking at him the way his pupils used to look at him when he was explaining Pythagoras' theorem, with that silent expectation that says: tell us it'll be all right.
Henri does not tell them it will be all right. He tells them what he knows. The time of the attack, the direction, the objectives. The first trench, the second, the communication trench. The instructions - advance by bounds, do not bunch up, use the shell holes, throw the grenades before going in. He speaks clearly, without a tremor, in that schoolmaster's voice that carries without shouting. And at the end he adds something that is not in the orders: 'We stay together. Whatever happens, we stay together.'
The shepherd nods. It is the only approval Henri needs.
On the morning of the 22nd, the artillery opens fire.
It is a barrage more powerful than anything anyone in the regiment has yet known. Twelve hundred guns along twenty kilometres - 75s, 155s, 220s, and for the first time 270s and 370s, those steel monsters that spit half-tonne shells fifteen kilometres. The ground shakes without a break. The air vibrates. The noise is no longer a noise; it is a physical pressure, a giant hand pressing on the chest, on the eardrums, on the belly. The men in the jumping-off trenches stay crouched, hands over their ears, mouths open to ease the pressure, and they wait.
The preparation lasts three days. Three days of continuous bombardment. Henri does not sleep. Nobody sleeps. They doze in snatches, between two series of salvoes, when the rhythm slackens for a minute, and they wake with a start when it picks up again. The food arrives cold and nobody is hungry. Water is rationed. The latrines cannot be reached; they relieve themselves in the communication trenches, in food tins, anywhere.
Verdier is at Tenth Army headquarters, in a reinforced cellar five kilometres behind the front. He follows the bombardment on his tables, hour by hour, battery by battery. He designed part of the fire plan himself - the time slots, the concentrations on the strongpoints, the calculated pauses to lure the Germans out of their dugouts before the firing resumes. It is murderous clockwork, and Verdier does it with the cold precision that is his nature. But at night, when the others are asleep, he goes out into the yard and looks at the northern horizon, where the sky flickers without stopping, orange and white, like a storm that will not pass, and he knows that under those lights men are dying in holes.
On the morning of 25 September, the bombardment lifts.
Six twenty-five. The whistles.
Henri goes over the top.
It is the third assault of his war, and it is no easier than the first. His legs shake, his heart pounds, his breath is short - the body knows what awaits it even when the mind pretends not to. But Henri is a sergeant now, and a sergeant does not shake in front of his men. He stands up, he climbs over the parapet, and he goes forward.
The ground between the lines is unrecognisable. Three days of bombardment have turned it into a lunar landscape - craters everywhere, so close together they overlap, the earth churned to a depth of three metres, the wire torn to shreds, the German trenches disembowelled. And the bodies. German bodies in the wreckage of the first line, men who did not have time to get down into the dugouts, or whose dugouts caved in. Henri steps over them.
The first trench is taken without resistance. Or rather, there is no first trench any more - just a collapsed ditch, full of rubble and dead men. The platoon moves on towards the second line, five hundred metres further. And that is where the machine guns wake up.
They are on the flanks, in positions the bombardment has not touched, side shelters, blockhouses buried under three metres of concrete and earth. The crossfire is instant, precise, deadly. Henri throws himself into a crater and shouts to his men to get down. They get down. But two do not - the barber's assistant from Brive is hit in the stomach; he falls forward, his hands on his belly, and he makes a sound Henri cannot describe and never will. Another, a July reinforcement whose surname Henri does not even know, is killed outright, a bullet through the heart.
The shepherd is beside Henri, in the same crater. Fayolle is twenty metres to the right, in another hole, alive. Marcel is somewhere behind; Henri cannot see him. Pélissié, the silent marksman, is lying flat on the lip of the crater and firing, methodically, at the loopholes of the blockhouse, with no chance of getting through the concrete but with the discipline of a man doing what he knows how to do.
Henri weighs it up. Two options. Stay in the crater and wait for reinforcements that may come. Or go forward, round the blockhouse on the right, where the ground is a chaos of wrecked trenches that offers cover. He chooses. 'Lacombe, Pélissié, with me. The rest, covering fire.'
They crawl. Fifty metres through the mud, flat on their bellies, rifles in the crooks of their elbows, while the bullets crack over their heads. The shepherd crawls the way he walks - without grace, without noise, with an animal efficiency. They reach a caved-in communication trench that leads round to the back of the blockhouse. Henri pulls the pin on a grenade. The shepherd pulls the pin on another. They throw at the same moment, into the opening of the trench, and the double explosion shakes the air. The machine gun falls silent.
They go into the blockhouse. Three dead Germans, two living ones who put their hands up. Kids, like their own. Fair-haired, filthy, terrified. Henri says: 'To the rear.' Pélissié escorts them. The shepherd sits down against the concrete wall and gets his breath back, for a minute, eyes closed.
The first day is a success. Relative, limited, dearly bought - but a success. The 7th Regiment has taken the second German line on an eight-hundred-metre front. To the left and right, other regiments have done as much, or less, or more. The whole attack front has advanced one to three kilometres. Vimy Ridge is close. It is there, ahead, a few hundred metres away.
But what should come next does not come.
It is May again. It is always May. The reserves are late. The communication trenches have been destroyed by the French bombardment itself - the shells that ploughed up the German ground also ploughed up the ground between the lines, and the supporting troops are floundering in a chaos of muddy craters, under fire from the German artillery, which has woken up and is pounding the rear. The orders do not arrive - the telephone lines are cut, the runners get lost, the signal lamps are invisible in the smoke. The command does not know where its troops are. The troops do not know what the command wants.
Verdier watches the May scenario play out again, hour by hour, with the precision of a recurring nightmare. The reports come in - fragmentary, contradictory, late. Here they have broken through, there they have been stopped, over there nobody knows. Vimy Ridge is within reach, and nobody manages to send enough men there fast enough. The Germans react - they bring up reserves along the roads of the plain, they counter-attack, they plug the gaps. The window closes.
On 28 September, Verdier writes in his notebook: 'Same failure. Same causes. We do not learn.'
That is not quite true. They learn. But they learn too slowly, and every lesson costs thousands of dead.
In Champagne, the other jaw of the offensive bites into empty air. The French Second and Fourth Armies attack on a thirty-five-kilometre front and advance three to four kilometres in three days - a spectacular gain, the biggest since the Marne. But in front of the second German position, the assault stops. The same causes, the same effects. The heavy artillery cannot keep up, the reserves are too far back, the Germans recover.
The September 1915 offensive - Artois and Champagne combined - will cost France a hundred and forty-three thousand men in one month. The territorial gain will be a few kilometres on two stretches of front, immediately fortified by the Germans with second and third lines. It is the third strategic failure of the year, after Champagne in February and Artois in May. The fourth if you count the local attacks of the winter. The breakthrough is a mirage that recedes every time you advance.
Henri is relieved on 30 September. His platoon has lost eight men - three killed, five wounded. The barber's assistant from Brive died in the field hospital on the 26th, of his stomach wound. He was twenty-one and he used to cut his comrades' hair on Sundays, with scissors he had kept in his haversack since mobilisation, like a talisman from his life before.
The shepherd is alive; the splinter in his shoulder from May did not stop him crawling through the September mud. Fayolle is alive, unhurt, with that new hardness in the eyes of twenty-year-olds who have been through two assaults. Marcel is alive, a dressing on his forehead - a superficial splinter, nothing serious; a centimetre more and it would have been his eye. Pélissié is alive. The peasant from Saint-Céré is alive, and he even spoke - in French, not in patois - on the evening of the 25th, in the captured blockhouse, a single sentence addressed to Henri: 'That was well done, Sergeant.' It is the first complete sentence Pélissié has spoken in Henri's presence since February.
Henri sits down in a barn behind the lines, his back against a brick wall. He takes off his boots. His feet are white, swollen, cracked. He looks at them as if they belonged to someone else. The shepherd sits down beside him and takes off his own. They stay there, barefoot, in the straw, and the shepherd says: 'Flòc wouldn't have liked that.'
Henri laughs. A short, dry laugh, surprising. The shepherd looks at him and does not smile, but his eyes say something that looks like satisfaction. Making the sergeant laugh is the shepherd's way of laughing.
In Lyon, Jeanne does not know that her brother has just taken a blockhouse with grenades. She knows the offensive is happening - the papers talk about it, triumphantly, as always. 'Great victory in Champagne.' 'Important progress in Artois.' The words are the same as in May, as in February. Jeanne no longer believes them.
Paul reads the communiqués with the cold rage of a man who knows. His arm is getting better. He squeezes the rubber ball a hundred times a day; the muscle is coming back, the strength is coming back. The doctor says he will be fit for service in a month. Fit for service. That is to say, sent back. That is to say, the trench again, the shells, the noise, the nights.
Jeanne says nothing. She watches Paul squeeze his rubber ball and she thinks of the letter she will have to write to Henri when Paul has gone back, the letter that will say 'he's gone back up', and the fear returns, intact, as if it had never left her.
On the evening of 30 September, Paul says to Jeanne: 'When I go back up, go and see the union. If the women want to fight for their pay, the union has to back them. It's not a favour. It's a right.'
It is the longest sentence Paul has spoken since he came back. Jeanne looks at him. The man in front of her is no longer the ghost of July. It is Paul. Damaged, changed, but Paul. And he has just given her the only thing he knows how to give - a fight.