November 1915
The second winter is worse than the first, because now they know.
The first winter, everything was a discovery. The mud, the cold, the rats, the lice - everything was new, everything was astounding, and the astonishment cushioned the shock. The second winter, they know. They know exactly what is coming. They know the feet will swell, the walls will cave in, the soup will arrive cold, the rats will be bigger, the lice will come back despite the delousing. And knowing is worse than discovering, because knowing means foreseeing, and foreseeing without being able to prevent is the exact definition of helplessness.
Henri feels it in his men. Not a revolt - nobody is revolting, not yet, not in 1915. But a sagging. A weariness that is no longer physical, that goes deeper, that touches something essential in the mechanism of the soul. The movements are the same, the watches are stood, the orders are followed. But the light behind the eyes is fading. The shepherd talks even less than before, which is quite an achievement. Fayolle no longer laughs at all. Marcel keeps writing the paper, but his articles have lost their bite - they are correct, informative, and empty.
Henri looks for something to do. It is his schoolmaster's reflex - when the class drifts off, you change the method, you look for the lever, you start things up again. But there is no lever in a trench. There is no method against the second year of war. There is only presence - being there, talking, listening, checking feet, handing out tobacco, passing letters round, keeping the dugout clean. Small, repetitive, insignificant gestures, which are the only thing standing between order and collapse.
The cat helps. It is absurd but it is true. Verdun the cat goes about the trench like a landowner on his estate, lies down on the knees of the men on watch, catches rats with an efficiency the shepherd admires professionally, and bestows his favours with a sovereign arbitrariness that is the subject of heated debate in the section. Why does Verdun sleep with the shepherd but eat with Fayolle? Why does he refuse to go near Marcel? Nobody knows. The cat has his reasons which reason knows nothing of. And these discussions, these squabbles about nothing, these minutes of normality around an animal that does not care about the war, are a medicine nobody prescribed and that works better than the plonk.
Joffre takes stock.
It is a terrible balance sheet, and he knows it, but he does not put it that way. From Chantilly, he writes reports for the government, reports that acknowledge the failure without using the word. The September offensive did not break through. The May offensive did not break through. The February offensive did not break through. Three attempts, hundreds of thousands dead, and the front is in the same place. The logical conclusion would be to abandon the strategy of breakthrough. Joffre does not abandon it. He postpones it. In the spring of 1916, he says, with the British at last fielding a mass army - Kitchener's volunteers, enlisted in 1914, trained at last, equipped at last - with more heavy artillery, more shells, more of everything, they will break through.
Verdier listens to these plans from Tenth Army staff. He does not believe in them. Not that the resources are insufficient - for the first time, they are beginning to be serious. But Verdier has understood something Joffre refuses to see: the problem is not the quantity of force, it is the nature of the war. As long as defence has the advantage - and it has, structurally, in a trench war - no quantity of artillery will be enough. Something else would be needed. Something that does not exist yet.
The British are working on an idea. Verdier has heard about it, through indirect channels, staff rumours. An armoured vehicle, on caterpillar tracks, able to cross trenches and wire. A tank. The word does not exist yet. Nor does the thing, or hardly - prototypes cobbled together in English workshops, far from the front. Verdier notes the information in his notebook without comment. He will see.
On 6 November, an inter-Allied conference is held at Chantilly. French, British, Russians, Italians - all round the table, for the first time, to coordinate strategy. It is progress, on paper at least. Until now, every army has fought in its own corner, to its own plans, without consultation. The conference decides that 1916 will be the year of the simultaneous offensive - everyone will attack at the same time, on every front, to stop the Germans moving their reserves from one theatre to another.
It is a good plan. The war will see to destroying it.
In Lyon, Jeanne is living through her second absence.
Paul has gone back up. Somewhere in the north - she does not know where; the censorship cuts everything. The cards arrive, the pre-printed sentences, the signature. Alive on 28 October. Alive on 5 November. Alive on the 12th. The same ritual as before, the same waiting, the same thump of the heart when the postman comes down the street.
But Jeanne is no longer the woman of 1914. The factory has changed her. Rose has changed her. Paul himself has changed her, with his evening words, his sentence about the union, his 'you carry on'. Jeanne is now a worker who knows what she is worth, knows what she is paid, and knows that the difference between the two is an injustice.
On 10 November, she does something she would never have done a year earlier. She goes to the Bourse du Travail.
It is a building she knows from the outside - Paul used to go there, before, to the evening meetings, the rallies. Jeanne had never gone in on her own. She pushes the door, climbs the stairs, and looks for the metalworkers' union office. A man is sitting behind a desk cluttered with papers. In his fifties, grey moustache, arm in a sling - invalided out. He watches Jeanne come in with the polite surprise of a man not used to seeing women in this office.
Jeanne says: 'I work at Berliet. We're paid four francs for work that's worth six. We asked for a rise in May, we got fifty centimes. It's not enough.'
The man looks at her. 'Are you a union member?'
'No.'
'Is your husband a member?'
'Yes. He's at the front.'
The man nods. He takes out a form and puts it in front of Jeanne. 'Sign there.' Jeanne signs. She is a union member. It is a tiny gesture, a name on a piece of paper, and it is a giant step, because that step is one the women of 1915 hardly ever take, and those who take it do not go back.
She walks home to Vaise in the November cold, and she walks straighter than on the way there. When she writes to Paul that evening, she says: 'I did what you told me. I went to the union.' She does not say she was afraid when she pushed the door. Paul does not need to know that.
Louise's mother is getting worse.
Louise's letters change tone in November. The handwriting is the same, the tenderness is the same, but underneath there is a tiredness Louise can no longer hide. Her mother can no longer run the haberdashery. Louise gets up at five to open the shop before leaving for school, and in the evening she goes back after class to close up, count the till, tidy the reels. On Sundays she does the week's accounts, the housework, the cooking, the washing. And in between all that, she teaches. Thirty-two pupils, eight of whom have lost their fathers.
She does not complain. Not in her letters, not out loud, not to her mother. She keeps going. It is Louise's verb - to keep. Keep school, keep shop, keep house, keep the pot boiling, keep going. But the body has its limits, and in November Louise catches a cold that will not go, that goes down into her throat, then into her chest, and leaves her with a dry cough that is like Fayolle's - except that she does not know Fayolle and does not know that a twenty-year-old man is coughing like her in a hole four hundred kilometres away.
Henri feels the change in the letters. Not what she says - what she no longer says. The details of the garden, the stories about the pupils, the descriptions of the Lot - all that is thinning out, replaced by shorter, drier sentences that say the essential and cut the rest. Henri recognises the sign. He has seen men draw in like that, under fatigue, when the energy is only enough for the bare necessities.
He writes to her on 20 November, a letter that is not a love letter - or rather it is one, but of a practical, concrete love, the only kind that is any use in a war.
'Dear Louise. Don't carry everything. I know you carry everything, because that's you, and you don't know how to do otherwise. But Émile's brother-in-law is a carpenter in Figeac, isn't he? Ask him about the shop roof that leaks. And the grocer on the square, the one you told me about, the widow - ask her to do some hours in the haberdashery. You can't hold up the school and the shop and your mother and yourself. Nobody can. It isn't weakness, it's arithmetic.'
It is a schoolmaster's letter. It is a sergeant's letter. It is the letter of a man who has learned, in the mud, that survival is a matter of organisation and that solitary heroism is the shortest road to collapse.
Louise receives it and cries, which she never does, and she does what Henri says, which she never does either. She goes to see the carpenter. She goes to see the grocer. The roof is mended the following week. The grocer takes three afternoons in the haberdashery. Louise breathes. A little. Enough.
On 15 November, news reaches the regiment that shakes everyone. The battalion commander calls the officers and NCOs together in a second-line dugout. Standing in front of a map pinned to the wall, he announces that the regiment will be relieved in December and sent to rest for two months. Two months. It is unheard of. It is beyond hope. Two months behind the lines, far from the front, far from the noise, far from the mud. The NCOs look at one another. Nobody quite believes it. A trap, perhaps. A rest followed by an offensive worse than the ones before. But two months is two months.
Henri goes back down into the trench and gives the news to his platoon. The faces change. Not a smile - a letting go. Like a muscle too long clenched suddenly relaxing. Fayolle says: 'Two months?' The shepherd says nothing, but his shoulders drop three centimetres. Marcel says: 'Enough to bring out a luxury edition of Le Poilu du Causse.' Pélissié says nothing, as usual, but in the evening he offers tobacco to everyone, which for him is the equivalent of a speech.
The cat Verdun, informed through channels of his own, settles on Henri's pack and purrs. The purring of a cat, in a trench in Artois, in November 1915, is a sound so incongruous, so perfectly out of place, so absurdly normal, that Henri notes it in his notebook as he would a historic event: '15 November. Rest announced. Verdun purrs.'
The last days of November are quiet. The front is digesting the failure of September. Both sides dig in, fortify, watch each other. The shells fall out of habit more than intention. The snipers shoot without conviction. Even the war seems tired of itself.
Verdier uses the lull to write a long report on the lessons of 1915. It is a thirty-page document, dry, precise, merciless. He analyses the three offensives - February, May, September - their methods, their results, their costs. He identifies the recurring problems: insufficient heavy artillery, lack of coordination between infantry and artillery, slowness of the reserves, fragility of communications. And he proposes solutions - technical, concrete, costed solutions. The creeping barrage, which moves ahead of the infantry instead of stopping before the assault. Air liaison between the command and the troops. Forward ammunition dumps. Telephone lines buried in armoured cables.
The report is good. Verdier knows it. He also knows it will end up in a signature book, like the others. But this time, perhaps, someone will read it. Because the dead of 1915 are beginning to weigh on the shoulders of those who ordered them, and even a general ends up looking for a better method when the current one produces corpses and nothing else.
He sends the report and expects no answer. He has learned to write for the file, not for the reader. Someone, one day, will open the file. And that day, the solutions will be there, ready, with the figures and the diagrams.
On 30 November, Henri writes in his notebook. The candle is almost burnt down, the cat is asleep, the shepherd is breathing slowly beside him.
'Fifteen months. I have held on for fifteen months. The men have held on for fifteen months. Louise is holding on. Jeanne is holding on. Paul has gone back up and he will hold on too, because he has no choice, and men without a choice hold on longer than the others.
December soon. The rest. Two months without shells, without rats, without noise. I do not dare believe it and I believe it all the same. Perhaps that is what faith is - believing in something you do not dare believe.'
He blows out the candle. The cat opens one eye, closes it again. The shepherd does not move.
Outside, the November night is black and cold and still, and the front sleeps a bad sleep, full of dreams no one will tell.