December 1915
The relief takes place on 8 December, at night, as always.
Henri leads his platoon along the communication trenches, in single file, towards the rear. Thirty men - minus the autumn's losses, plus the November reinforcements; the count is never the same. They walk without a sound, in the mud, backs bent, with the automatic caution of men who have learned that the last shell is sometimes the worst. The shepherd brings up the rear. Fayolle is in the middle. Marcel carries the cigar box with the paper's lead type, which he lets no one else touch. Pélissié walks the way he does everything - without a word, without a hesitation. The cat Verdun is in the shepherd's haversack, head poking out, ears flat.
They pass the men going up. Another regiment, unknown faces, eyes you cannot see in the dark. The rite of passage - those going down and those going up, the damned and the damned, interchangeable. A sergeant from the other regiment asks Henri in a low voice: 'The sector?' Henri says: 'Quiet. Minenwerfer in the mornings, nothing at night. The saps on the right, they're moving.' The other man nods and goes on. That is all. No handshake, no good wishes. Just the information that saves lives, passed from one man to another in the dark.
At three in the morning, they are behind the lines. A road, lorries, and the noise stops. Not all at once - gradually, like a hum dying away. Henri looks up and sees stars, real stars, not flares, and the absence of threat in that sky is so strange that it makes him dizzy.
The lorries take them south. A long way. Further than the usual rest, further than the barns behind the lines in Artois. They drive for hours along potholed roads, in the cold, squeezed onto the wooden benches of Berliet lorries - Berliet lorries, and Henri thinks of Jeanne, of the factory, of the bolts she checks, and he wonders whether her hands have touched a part of this lorry that is carrying him.
At dawn, they get down in a village in Picardy that the war has not touched. A real village. Houses standing. Painted shutters. A church with its steeple. A café with a sign. Civilians who watch them get down from the lorries with a mixture of curiosity and fear - soldiers from the front frighten the people behind the lines, with their grey faces, their muddy uniforms, their smell.
Henri gets down from the lorry, puts his foot on dry ground, looks around him, and does not move for ten seconds. Ten seconds of nothing. Ten seconds in which he is just a man standing in a village, under a December sky, and nobody is shooting.
The shepherd gets down after him, takes the cat out of his haversack and puts it on the ground. Verdun sniffs the air, looks right, looks left, and walks off with a sovereign step towards the nearest barn. The shepherd watches him go and says: 'He knows the way.'
Rest. Real rest.
The first days are strange. The men do not know what to do with their bodies. Sleep, yes - they sleep for hours, whole days, a leaden sleep that mends nothing but numbs. Eat, yes - the food is better behind the lines, hot, varied, served in mess tins that do not stink of rat. But after the sleep and the food, there is the silence, and the silence is an enemy nobody expected.
Henri watches his men come undone, slowly, like springs being released. Fayolle sleeps sixteen hours a day for the first week, then he starts walking, alone, in the fields around the village, walks of three or four hours with no purpose, no explanation. Marcel finds a bistro with an out-of-tune piano and spends afternoons banging on it - he cannot play, but the noise reassures him. Pélissié sits in the yard of the farm where he is billeted and does not move, hands on his knees, eyes on the horizon, for hours. Nobody asks him anything. They know.
The shepherd finds a dog. Not a patou - a mongrel, small, black, which hangs around the field kitchen and steals the bones. Lacombe tames it in three days, with the infinite patience of men who keep flocks. The dog follows him everywhere. The cat Verdun observes this betrayal with the magnificent indifference of cats and moves in with the priest, who feeds him better.
Henri does not fall apart. Not because he is stronger - because he keeps himself busy. It is his nature. The schoolmaster does not know how to do nothing. He organises light fatigues in the mornings - cleaning weapons, moderate physical exercise, kit inspection. In the afternoons, he leaves the men free. And in the evenings, in the barn that serves as their billet, he does something unexpected.
He teaches.
The idea came to him on the third day, watching Pélissié in the yard. Pélissié who can neither read nor write, Pélissié who speaks only patois, Pélissié who is twenty-four and shoots better than anyone but cannot make out a poster. Henri said to him: 'Pélissié, would you like to learn to read?' Pélissié looked at him, for a long time, the way he looks at everything - with that slowness of the peasant who does not answer before he has understood the whole question. Then he said: 'Why not.'
That same evening, Henri sets up a class in the barn. A slate found at the priest's, a stub of chalk, a candle. Pélissié, of course. But also three other men from the platoon who cannot read, or read badly - a farmhand from Figeac, a charcoal burner from Souillac, a boy of fifteen who got in by lying about his age and whom nobody has sent home. Four pupils. Henri becomes again what he is - a schoolmaster. Letters, syllables, words. Ba, be, bi, bo, bu. The Boscher method, simplified, adapted, given by a man in horizon blue to men in horizon blue, in a barn in Picardy, in December 1915.
Marcel watches from his corner, his back against a post, and he smiles. Marcel's first real smile since September.
On 15 December, Henri is given four days' leave. He does not go to Cahors, not to Labastide, not to his mother's. He goes to Figeac.
Louise is waiting for him at the station. She is thinner than in March. The tiredness is in her face, in the shadows under her eyes, in the way her shoulders sit a little higher than before, a little tenser. But when she sees him get off the train she smiles, and that smile undoes everything else.
They walk through Figeac. It has become their ritual, their own geography - the same streets, the same café, the same plane trees. But this time, Henri takes Louise's hand as they walk, without saying anything, and she lets him keep it, and they walk hand in hand through the streets of a small town in the Lot in winter, and nobody looks at them, because everybody knows them, and two engaged people hand in hand in wartime is the most normal and the most precious thing in the world.
Henri meets Louise's mother. A dry, small, worn-out woman, with sharp eyes that size him up in three seconds. She says: 'So you're the soldier.' Henri says: 'I'm the schoolmaster.' The mother gives the ghost of a smile. He has passed the test. Not the test of courage - the test of the right answer.
They have supper together, the three of them, in the kitchen above the haberdashery. Soup, cheese, wine. Henri talks about the school in Labastide, his pupils, the leaving certificate. He does not talk about the war. The mother does not ask. Louise has put her hand on his under the table, and she leaves it there for the whole meal, and Henri eats with his left hand, clumsily, because not for anything in the world will he let go of that hand.
On the second day, they are alone. The mother has closed the shop and is asleep. Louise takes Henri to see the school - her classroom, the benches, the blackboard, the garden behind. The beans are long finished, the garden is bare, dug over for the winter, but the canes are still standing, like little wooden skeletons waiting for spring.
Henri looks at Louise's classroom and sees his own. The same blackboard. The same benches. The same walls. The same mission. He says: 'After the war, I'll ask for Figeac. We'll be in the same town. We'll be able to...' He does not finish. Louise says: 'We will.'
On the third day, Henri does something he has not done since August 1914. He goes into a bookshop and buys a book. Montaigne, the Essays, a pocket edition, the cover battered, the pages yellowed. He puts it in his haversack next to the German Goethe. Two books. Two languages. Two enemies who have read the same things and are killing each other anyway.
On the fourth day, the departure. The station. The platform. Louise stands straight, her face composed. Henri gets into the carriage. Through the lowered window, he looks at her. She says: 'You're coming back.' It is not a question. It is an order. Henri says: 'I'm coming back.'
The train leaves. Louise stays on the platform until the train has disappeared. Then she goes back to the haberdashery, opens the shop, and serves the first customer of the day. Life goes on. Life is what goes on.
In Lyon, Christmas is coming and Jeanne is getting organised.
Paul has written that he will not be there - no leave before January at the earliest. Jeanne will spend Christmas alone, for the second time. But this time she will not be alone. Rose will come, with her two children. Marie next door will come, with her baby born in September - a boy his father has not yet seen. And Germaine, a workmate from the factory, a widow too, with no children, will come, because spending Christmas alone in a maid's room is more than she can bear.
Jeanne prepares the Christmas Eve supper with an energy that surprises even her. She goes shopping at the market in Vaise, haggles for a chicken - a real chicken, not rabbit passing itself off as chicken - buys potatoes, carrots, a piece of Gruyère, and a bottle of Saint-Joseph she pays too much for but that Paul would have approved of. She cooks all day on the 24th, in the little kitchen in Vaise, and the smell of roast chicken fills the flat and drifts down the stairwell and brings the neighbours up to ask what is going on.
What is going on is a women's Christmas. Five women and three children in a workers' flat in Vaise, around a chicken and a bottle, with candles on the table and no tree, because trees cost too much. Rose tells a funny story about a foreman at Berliet who tripped over a pipe. Marie feeds her baby in the corner, without embarrassment, because embarrassment is a luxury nobody has any more. Germaine cries for a moment, pulls herself together, drinks a glass, and sings a song from her part of the country, the Limousin, in a cracked voice that silences everyone.
Rose's children fall asleep on the floor, on blankets. Marie's baby sleeps against his mother. And the women stay sitting there, around the cleared table, with the wine that is left, and they talk. Not about the war - about everything else. About men, work, money, neighbours, bosses, what will come afterwards. They talk like women who have discovered one another, who have found in the absence of the men not a freedom - the word would be obscene - but a space. A space where their voices carry, where their decisions count, where their tiredness is their own and not someone else's.
Jeanne looks at these women around her table and thinks something she will tell no one, not even Rose, not even Henri: 'I'm not unhappy.' It is complicated. It is true. She misses Paul, the fear is there, the tiredness is there, but in the middle of all that, in this kitchen, with these women, Jeanne is not unhappy. And that discovery is as troubling as the war itself.
At the front, the second Christmas of the war passes without a truce.
The staff have given strict orders - no fraternising, no spontaneous ceasefire, no repeat of December 1914. Harassing fire is compulsory on the 24th and the 25th, to prevent any coming together. The war has learned from its own weaknesses. Compassion is a breach, and it is being plugged.
Henri is in billets, far from the front, and his Christmas is different. The barn is decorated - holly branches, candles, drawings hung from the beams. The men have organised a Christmas Eve supper with whatever came to hand. One of the battalion cooks has requisitioned two geese from a farmer nearby, paid for in army vouchers that the farmer eyes with suspicion. There is wine, improved plonk, and somebody has found some calvados.
Henri eats with his men. The shepherd is sitting next to him, the black mongrel lying at his feet, the cat Verdun on his knees - reconciled, for now, by the warmth of the stove and the smell of goose. Fayolle sings a song from the Lot, in a tenor voice nobody knew he had. Marcel raises a glass 'to those who are no longer here', and the silence that follows is the heaviest of the evening. Pélissié, who can now write his first name - Jean-Pierre, two words he traces on the slate with an engraver's concentration - raises his glass without saying anything.
Henri thinks of Louise, in the kitchen in Figeac, with her mother. He thinks of Jeanne, in Lyon, with her women around the table. He thinks of Paul, somewhere in the north, in a hole. And he thinks of the law student from Montauban, the barber's assistant from Brive, the plasterer from Souillac, the joiner from Cahors, Lieutenant Marsal who read Stendhal. Of all those Marcel's toast has just called into the barn, between the living and the candles.
31 December 1915. The second New Year of the war.
Verdier is alone in his office, on the staff of the Tenth Army. He has sent his orderlies away. In front of him are a glass of cognac and his notebook. He writes:
'Summary of 1915. Three major offensives. Territorial gain: negligible. French losses for the year: some three hundred and fifty thousand killed, more than a million wounded and missing. Nothing has been resolved. Everything remains to be done.
1916 will be different, apparently. The British will be ready. The artillery will be strengthened. The coordination will be better. I note these promises. I have heard them before.
What I know: the Germans are preparing something. My sources are vague, but the movement is there - troop transfers, concentrations of artillery, an axis I cannot yet identify. They are not going to wait for us to attack. They are going to strike first. The question is where.'
He closes the notebook. He drinks the cognac. He looks out of the window at the starless night.
The answer to his question will come in February. It will be called Verdun.