October 1915
Autumn comes down on the front again like a lid. The rain returns, the days grow shorter, and with them the vague hope the September offensive had kindled goes out like a candle in a draught. The communiqués no longer speak of a breakthrough. They speak of 'consolidating the positions won', which means, translated from military language into human language, that you dig yourself into the holes you have taken and wait for the enemy to do the same.
Henri consolidates. His platoon holds a stretch of German trench taken on 25 September, turned round, refitted, and it is a strange experience to live in the enemy's holes. Everything is reversed - the loopholes point the wrong way, the dugouts open towards the rear, the communication trenches lead to the Germans instead of to the French. Everything has to be redone, rebuilt, and the men dig, again, always, with the resignation of the navvy who knows that earth is his lot and that the earth never ends.
The German dugouts impress everyone. Verdier was right in his reports - the Germans dig to three or four metres, shore up with solid timber, pour concrete when they can. The dugout Henri's section takes over is an underground room three metres by two, with bunks one above the other, a stove, and shelves. Shelves. The shepherd from Rocamadour touches the shelves and says: 'They meant to stay.' Marcel says: 'So do we, now.'
On the shelves, things have been left. A book in German - Henri does not read German, but he recognises the author's name, Goethe, and he puts the book in his haversack. A framed photograph - a family, a man in civilian clothes, a woman, two children, in a garden with a wrought-iron gate. Henri stands the photograph against the wall of the dugout, facing the wall, and nobody touches it. A comb, a toothbrush, a cracked mirror. The debris of an ordinary life transplanted underground, identical to theirs, symmetrically identical.
On 8 October, Henri receives two pieces of news.
The first through official channels. The battalion commander sends for him and tells him he has been cited in regimental orders for his conduct on 25 September - the taking of the blockhouse, the flanking move under fire, the initiative. The citation is written in the terse style of the army: 'Displayed, under violent machine-gun fire, remarkable coolness and initiative, leading his men in the assault on a fortified enemy position.' Henri reads the citation, folds it, and puts it in his pocket. He does not know what to do with it. It is not modesty - it is the impossibility of reconciling the word 'remarkable' with the memory of the barber's assistant from Brive, his hands on his belly, in the mud.
The second through a letter from Jeanne. Paul is going back. The doctor has declared him fit. He will report to his depot on 20 October and leave for the front in the days that follow. Jeanne writes it in her own way - without pathos, without complaint, with that dryness which is her reticence. 'Paul is leaving soon. His arm is better. He says to tell you he's thinking of you.'
Henri puts the letter away. He thinks of Paul, whom he does not know well but knows better than before, because war creates kinships that peace had not foreseen. Paul has seen what Henri has seen. Paul knows what Henri knows. And Paul is going back into it.
In the evening, in the German dugout, Henri writes to Louise. He says nothing about the citation or about Paul. He talks about a blackbird. A blackbird he saw that very morning, perched on a wire picket, singing. A blackbird in October, on a wire picket, in Artois. It is absurd and it is magnificent. Louise will understand.
In Lyon, Paul's last three weeks are a countdown.
Jeanne lives it as a second amputation - the first when he left in August 1914, the second now, knowing this time what 'leaving' means. The first time, she did not know. The first time, she had ignorance for a cushion. This time, she has the shouting in the night, the absent look, the arm stitched back together, and an intimate knowledge of what the war does to bodies and to minds.
Paul prepares with an efficiency that chills Jeanne. He packs his things, has his greatcoat darned by the neighbour, who sews better than he does, checks his military papers. He does things in order, methodically, like a man who has learned that disorder kills. And in the evenings, sitting at the kitchen table, he talks. Not about the war - about afterwards. About what will have to be done when it is over. About the union, workers' rights, women's pay. He talks like a man giving himself reasons to come back, planting flags in the future to force himself to go there.
One evening, on 15 October, he says to Jeanne: 'If I don't come back, you carry on.'
Jeanne puts down the tea towel she was holding. 'You'll come back.'
'If I don't come back,' Paul repeats, and his voice is calm, without emphasis, without a tremor. 'You carry on. The factory, the union, the pay. It's not over because I'm not here. It's not over because one man's missing.'
It is the hardest and the tenderest thing Paul has ever said to Jeanne. It is a testament and a declaration of love at the same time, and Jeanne hears it as such. She does not cry. She says: 'All right.' And she picks up the tea towel again.
Rose comes the following Sunday. It is the last time she will see Paul before he leaves, and something changes in the way she looks at him - more direct, more naked. For three months of Sundays, Rose and Paul have passed each other without saying much, he taciturn, she outspoken, each in their own register of silence. But that Sunday, Rose watches Paul getting his kit together and says, in the kitchen, to Jeanne: 'He's solid, your man.' It is the word of a widow who knows what leaving means, addressed to a woman who is about to learn it again.
When Paul goes out into the courtyard to smoke, Rose says to Jeanne: 'He's solid, your man.'
Jeanne says: 'I know.'
On 20 October, Paul leaves. It is morning, the same morning as in August 1914, the same street, the same corner. Paul goes down the rue de la Claire with his kit, and Jeanne watches him from the window this time, not from the door. He does not look back. Not this time. Jeanne stays at the window until he has turned the corner, and then she stays another minute, looking at the empty corner, and then she gets ready for the factory.
The war is spreading.
Not only in France - everywhere. The Dardanelles, that senseless expedition launched by the British in the spring to force the Straits and reach Constantinople, is bogging down into disaster. The Allies are pinned down on the beaches of Gallipoli, under Turkish fire, in conditions as appalling as on the Western Front. They will evacuate in January - the only successful operation of the whole campaign will be the withdrawal.
And the Balkans are tipping over. On 6 October, the Austro-German armies invade Serbia from the north. On the 15th, Bulgaria enters the war on the side of the Central Powers and attacks Serbia from the east. The little country that held out for a year, that drove back three Austrian offensives, is caught in a vice. The Serbian army fights, falls back, fights again, and begins a retreat that will become one of the most terrible epics of the war - the crossing of Albania, in winter, through the mountains, with the wounded, the civilians, the old, the hunger, the cold, death at every step.
France sends troops to Salonika, in Greece, to try to support Serbia. Too late, too little. The Salonika expedition will become what Clemenceau, with his usual cruelty, will call 'the biggest internment camp in the world' - hundreds of thousands of men immobilised in northern Greece, between malaria and boredom, without advancing or retreating.
Verdier follows these developments with the detachment of a man who has enough problems on his own front. But he notes, in his notebook, an observation that says a great deal: 'The war is stretching out in space as it stretches out in time. It no longer concentrates. It spreads. It is the sign that neither side can win quickly, and that the side that wins will be the one that lasts longest. That is to say, the one with the deepest resources - in men, in materiel, in money, in patience. Patience is a war material. Nobody says so.'
Mid-October. A tiny event in Henri's trench.
A cat arrives. Where from, nobody knows. A grey cat, thin, with a torn ear and one eye half closed. It appears one morning in the communication trench, walks straight towards the section's dugout, goes in, looks around, and settles on the shepherd's bunk as if it belonged to it by right.
Lacombe looks at it. The cat looks at him. A silent negotiation begins, of the kind shepherds have conducted with animals for thousands of years. The shepherd takes out a bit of bully beef - the tinned beef everyone hates - and puts it down in front of the cat. The cat sniffs it, eats, and curls up.
'What's he called?' Fayolle asks.
The shepherd thinks about it. 'Verdun,' he says.
Nobody knows why Verdun. The shepherd does not explain. The cat is called Verdun, and he stays.
Marcel, naturally, puts the cat in the next issue of Le Poilu du Causse. A drawing of Verdun sitting on a loophole, with the caption: 'Our new recruit. Does not bite. Does not shoot. Does not eat the soup. The only sensible soldier in the regiment.' The battalion commander reads the issue and smiles - a real smile, not a commander's smile.
The cat sleeps on the shepherd's bunk. The shepherd sleeps on the floor. That is the proper order of things.
On 28 October, Louise writes a letter that is not like the others.
'My dear Henri. My mother is ill. The doctor says it's her heart. She has trouble climbing the stairs in the shop. I'm doing all I can, but I'm at school during the day and in the evening I have to cook, clean, keep the haberdashery's accounts. I'm not complaining. But I wanted you to know, because I promised you I'd hide nothing from you, and hiding nothing also means not hiding the tiredness.'
Henri receives this letter on 5 November. He reads it in the dugout, the cat Verdun on the shepherd's knees beside him, and he measures for the first time the distance between his war and Louise's. He is fighting Germans. Louise is fighting daily life, illness, loneliness, exhaustion - and she is fighting without a uniform, without stripes, without a citation in regimental orders. Nobody will cite Louise for 'remarkable coolness and initiative'. Nobody will give medals to the women who keep the country standing while the men defend it.
He writes to her that same evening. 'Dear Louise. You are braver than I am. That's not a turn of phrase - it's a fact. Hold on. We'll hold on together, each on our own side of this war, and when it ends we'll both be standing and we'll never let go of each other again.'
31 October. A year and three months of war. The front has not moved, or so little that the map of December 1914 and the map of October 1915 are almost identical. Same lines, same positions, same names of destroyed villages. The blood spilled between the two maps could fill the Lot from its source to the Garonne.
Henri is on the fire step. The night is cold, clear. The cat Verdun is lying on the parapet, its eyes glowing in the dark, and it stares at no man's land with the motionless intensity of a predator that has no prey left.
Somewhere in that night, Paul is walking towards his trench. Somewhere, Jeanne is sleeping alone in a bed that is too big. Somewhere, Louise is sitting up with her mother. Somewhere, Verdier is filing his papers. Somewhere, France is sleeping, or pretending to.
Winter is coming. The second one.