January 1916
The rest continues and the men are coming back.
Not all of them. Not entirely. But something is knitting together again in Henri's platoon, slowly, like a bone mending. The faces are getting their colour back. The bodies are putting on weight again - the food behind the lines, without being good, is regular, hot, sufficient. The lice are retreating under methodical delousing and weekly showers - real showers, in a tin hut with lukewarm water, a luxury so extravagant that the men talk about it as an event. Fayolle has put on three kilos. The shepherd, who was already massive, has become downright imposing, fed by the soup and walked for hours by the black mongrel.
The evening school is working. Pélissié can now read words of three syllables. He stumbles over the compound sounds - the 'ou', the 'an', the 'in' - but he keeps at it with that silent stubbornness which is his way of being in the world. The farmhand from Figeac, one Brousse, is making faster progress - he could read a little, in fact, but he was ashamed of reading badly and pretended not to read at all. The charcoal burner from Souillac gave up after two weeks. Not for lack of will - for lack of sight. He cannot see well enough to make out the letters on the slate, and spectacles are as out of reach as a motor car. Henri wrote to the battalion doctor asking for a pair of surplus spectacles, any pair at all, and the doctor shrugged. But he looked, and he found a pair at the bottom of a crate of medical supplies, round spectacles, far too strong, which make the charcoal burner look like an owl. The charcoal burner puts them on, looks at the slate, and says: 'Bloody hell.' He can see the letters. He comes back to the class.
The fifteen-year-old - his name is Lucien Combes, he comes from Gourdon, he lied in 1914 and said he was born in 1894 instead of 1900, and nobody checked because rifles were needed - Lucien is Henri's best pupil. By the end of January he is already reading fluently. He devours everything that comes his way - the paper, the letters of those comrades who let him read them, Henri's Montaigne, which he does not understand but reads anyway, his forehead creased. Henri looks at him and sees another Lucienne Marty - that quick, thwarted intelligence that asks for nothing but a way through. If the boy survives the war, if someone opens a door for him... Henri catches himself making plans. Plans for afterwards. It is the first time in months that he has thought of 'afterwards' as anything but a mirage.
Joffre is planning.
The Chantilly conference has set the framework - a simultaneous offensive on every front in the spring of 1916. The sector chosen for the Franco-British effort is the Somme, where the two armies meet. It is a logistical choice as much as a strategic one - the junction of the two armies is the natural point for a joint offensive. The British will at last have their mass army, the Kitchener divisions, hundreds of thousands of volunteers trained for a year. The French will commit forty divisions. Together, they will break through.
Verdier receives the first elements of the plan in January. He is not directly involved in preparing the Somme - he is still on the staff of the Tenth Army, in Artois - but he sees the movements, the transfers, the stocks building up. And he sees something else. The Deuxième Bureau's reports point to German movements towards the eastern part of the French front, towards the Meuse, towards a sector nobody is watching because nobody expects a German attack.
Verdier looks at the map. The Meuse. Verdun. A salient pushing into the German lines, poorly defended - Joffre stripped the sector to feed the offensives of 1915, took away guns, troops, reserves. The forts of Verdun, those colossi of concrete and steel built after 1871, have been partly disarmed. Their guns have been sent to other fronts. Verdun is an empty shell.
And the Germans are bringing up divisions. Verdier counts - the reports are fragmentary, but the movement is clear. Trains, convoys, concentrations of artillery. Not towards Artois. Not towards Champagne. Towards the Meuse.
He writes a note on 18 January. Three pages. 'The indications converge on a major German offensive in the Verdun sector. The forces involved suggest a main effort, not a diversion.' He passes it on. The note goes up the chain. It reaches Chantilly. Joffre reads it - or someone reads it for him. The answer comes back down: 'The commander-in-chief does not believe there will be a serious attack on Verdun.'
Verdier files the answer in his folder. He has done his job. What comes next is not his to decide.
In Lyon, January is the month Paul does not come home on leave.
Jeanne was waiting. Paul's last letter said 'perhaps January', and Jeanne clung to that 'perhaps' like a lifebuoy. But the days pass, the postman passes, and Paul's letters no longer mention leave. They talk about mud - Paul is in a sector of the Argonne, a hell of gutted forests and muddy ravines - about the cold, about his comrades. The chap from Saint-Étienne who made him laugh is still there. He is a mechanic, like Paul, a man of iron and grease, and together they mend the things that break - rifles, stretchers, stoves, flesh. Paul does not say he mends flesh. He says he helps the stretcher-bearer.
Jeanne reads between the lines and finds only silence. She concentrates on what she can touch - the factory, the union, Rose, daily life. Daily life is the only solid ground.
Rose has a new idea. Not a rise this time - a deeper demand. She wants working conditions. Regular breaks. Seats - the women in the workshop work standing up ten hours a day, and by the end of the day their legs are so swollen they can hardly walk. Separate changing rooms, because the women change in a corner of the workshop behind a sheet hung up on a line, and the foreman watches. Rose says this last point with a cold anger that leaves no doubt about what 'watches' means.
Jeanne hesitates. Not about the substance - about the form. She knows that every demand exposes them. They are already called 'unpatriotic' when they ask for a rise. If they ask for seats and changing rooms, they will be called fussy. But Rose has a sentence that settles it: 'If wanting to sit down isn't patriotic, then patriotism's a load of shit.'
Jeanne does not repeat the sentence. But she thinks it. And on 25 January, she goes with Rose to a meeting of the metalworkers' union, women's section - a section that did not exist before the war and that now has eight hundred members in Lyon. The hall is full. Women from every workshop, every factory - Berliet, Lumière, Gillet, the powder mills. They are tired, they are angry, and they are together. It is the first time Jeanne has seen it - women together, not in a kitchen, not at a wash-house, but in a meeting hall, to talk about their rights.
A woman stands up to speak. Jeanne does not remember her name, but she remembers the sentence: 'Our husbands are fighting for France. We are fighting to live. Both deserve respect.'
On 28 January, Henri is ordered to report to the divisional depot for a fifteen-day course. A sergeants' course - infantry tactics, map reading, platoon command. It is the sign that the army is preparing something big and needs trained NCOs, not just hardened ones. Henri leaves the platoon to the shepherd - not officially, the shepherd has no rank at all, but everyone knows that when the sergeant is away, it is Lacombe who holds the fort.
The course takes place in a requisitioned château, forty kilometres from the front. Classrooms. Blackboards. Maps pinned to the walls. Henri sits down at a desk and listens to a captain explaining the creeping barrage, the technique Verdier recommended in his reports and which is beginning to find its way into doctrine - artillery fire that moves forward ahead of the infantry, metre by metre, like a curtain of fire sweeping the ground. It is a revolution. It is also a nightmare of synchronisation - if the artillery moves too fast, it leaves the infantry behind, exposed. If it moves too slowly, the infantry walks into its own shells.
Henri takes notes. He is a good pupil, an excellent pupil even, because he knows how to listen and how to ask the right questions. The instructor, a captain, notices him. 'What were you, Sergeant?' 'A schoolmaster.' 'It shows.' It is the second time he has been told that. Henri begins to wonder whether the schoolmaster and the soldier are not the same thing seen from two different sides - a man who explains, who organises, who holds a group together, who makes things work.
During the course, he shares a room with a sergeant from a Breton regiment, a fisherman from Douarnenez called Le Bihan, who hardly talks but drinks hard. In the evenings they have a drink together, a cider Le Bihan has sent to him in parcels from Brittany. The Breton has been through Charleroi, the Marne, Artois, Champagne. All the great slaughterhouses. He has a wound in the thigh that makes him limp, and he says something Henri does not forget: 'The trick, Sergeant, is not to love your men. If you love them, you can't send them.'
Henri does not answer. He knows Le Bihan is wrong. Or rather, that Le Bihan is right for himself and wrong for Henri, because Henri cannot not love his men. The shepherd, Fayolle, Marcel, Pélissié, young Lucien - he loves them the way a master loves his pupils, with a tenderness that does not rule out strictness and a strictness that does not rule out tenderness. And he will send them all the same. That is the contradiction the war manufactures - to love and to send, to protect and to expose, to hold on and to lose.
On 31 January, Henri is back in billets. The shepherd reports to him - all is well, nobody is dead, nobody is sick, the cat Verdun has caught a rat as big as a rabbit and left it outside the commander's dugout like a trophy. The commander was not pleased. The cat does not care.
Pélissié comes to find Henri in the evening, after the class. He has something in his hand - a scrap of paper, folded in four, covered in slow, shaky, painstaking writing. Henri unfolds the paper. It is a letter. Five lines. 'Dear Marie. I am well. We are at rest. I think of you and the little ones. The sergeant is teaching me to write. Your husband, Jean-Pierre.'
Henri looks at Pélissié. Pélissié looks at him. There is nothing to say. Henri folds the letter, puts it in an envelope, writes the address Pélissié dictates - a farm near Saint-Céré, a hamlet whose name cannot be pronounced in French - and gives it to the vaguemestre.
It is the first letter of Jean-Pierre Pélissié's life. And that evening, in his notebook, Henri writes nothing about the war. He writes: 'Pélissié has written to his wife. Tonight, I know why I am a schoolmaster.'
The rest is coming to an end. The regiment will go back up to the front in February. And February will be the month when everything tips over.