February 1916
The cold of February 1916 is different. It is no sharper than the year before, with the same bite, the same frost cracking underfoot, the same leaden sky. But it is different because it carries something the other winters did not. A waiting. Not the soldiers' usual waiting, that resignation which comes before orders. A vaster waiting, more muffled, that weighs on the whole front like a change in atmospheric pressure. Something is coming. Everyone feels it. Nobody knows what.
Henri learns it on 12 February, when the regiment leaves its rest billets. Destination: the East. Not Artois this time - the Meuse. Verdun.
The name does not mean much to him. It is a garrison town, a citadel, a name on the map of France he used to show his pupils in the geography lesson. Verdun, sub-prefecture of the Meuse, on the right bank of the Meuse, a fortress since Vauban, strengthened after 1871 by a ring of reinforced-concrete forts. Douaumont, Vaux, Souville, Thiaumont - names that are still only names.
The shepherd packs his haversack. The cat Verdun - the cat that bears the name of the place they are going to, without anyone knowing or intending it - jumps into the haversack and settles in. The shepherd looks at him and says: 'He knows.' The black mongrel will not follow. It stays in the village, left with the priest, and Lacombe strokes it one last time, for a long while, without a word, then he gets up and leaves.
The lorries take them east. Two days on the road. The landscapes change - flat Artois gives way to the hills of Champagne, then to the forests of the Argonne, then to the Côtes de Meuse, those wooded ridges that climb gently towards the front line. Henri watches France go by from the back of the lorry and tells himself it is a beautiful country. He tells himself so with the cold lucidity of a man who knows that the beauty of the country will protect him from nothing.
Verdier knows.
Since January, the reports have been piling up. In front of Verdun, the Germans have assembled a concentration of artillery without precedent in military history - twelve hundred guns, among them 305s, 380s, 420s. Giant mortars. Howitzers that fire one-tonne shells twenty kilometres. Verdier read the figures and felt his stomach turn, which has not happened to him for a long time.
The German commander-in-chief, Erich von Falkenhayn, has a plan. Not a plan for a breakthrough - a plan of attrition. Bleed France white. Choose a point the French army cannot abandon - for strategic, symbolic, political reasons - and grind its reserves down there, division after division, in an industrial mincing machine. Verdun is that point. Verdun, the symbol, the bolt on the Meuse, the name that rings like a flag. France will not let go of Verdun. France will wear itself out there.
Joffre still does not believe the offensive is coming, or pretends not to believe it, or believes it but not enough to divert his own plans. The Somme remains the main objective. Verdun is a secondary sector, stripped, poorly prepared. When the first warnings become certainties, in mid-February, it is almost too late.
Almost. Not quite. Reinforcements are rushed up. Henri's regiment is one of them.
On 21 February 1916, at a quarter past seven in the morning, the German artillery opens fire on Verdun.
It is a bombardment beyond anything the war has produced so far. A million shells in ten hours on a fifteen-kilometre front. The ground is turned over to a depth of several metres. The forests disappear - not 'the trees fall', no: the forests disappear, the trunks pulverised, the stumps torn out, until nothing is left but a pulp of earth, wood and metal. The French trenches cease to exist. The dugouts, too shallow, are opened like tins. The men inside them cease to exist too.
Henri is not yet in the line on the 21st. His regiment is in reserve, twenty kilometres south of Verdun, in a village that is shaking. Literally - the ground vibrates underfoot, the windows of the houses vibrate, the air vibrates. The noise is beyond noise. It is a physical presence, a wall of sound that crushes the chest and cancels thought. Henri is standing in a farmyard, surrounded by his men, and he listens to Verdun burn.
The shepherd stands motionless, his eyes to the north. The cat has come out of the haversack and taken refuge in the barn, under a heap of hay, and he will not come out all day. Fayolle's face is white - not with fear, not yet, but with that instinctive understanding that what is coming is on another scale. Marcel says nothing, for once. Pélissié looks north like the shepherd, and on his closed peasant's face Henri reads something he has never seen there - the resignation of an animal that smells the slaughterhouse.
Henri gathers his platoon. He makes no speech. He checks the kit, the grenades, the cartridges, the dressings. He says: 'We'll be going up tonight, probably. Get some rest.' Nobody rests.
On the 22nd, the Germans attack. Their infantry leave their trenches behind the barrage and advance through a landscape that is no longer a landscape - a lunar surface, grey, smoking, where nothing is left standing. The French front lines are wiped out. The survivors fight in isolated groups, in shell holes, without contact, without orders, without hope of immediate relief. They fight all the same.
The Bois des Caures. That is where the French resistance clings on, on the 22nd, in what is left of a forest - stubs of trees, shattered stumps, bare earth. Two battalions of chasseurs, commanded by Colonel Driant - an officer of fifty-nine, a deputy, a writer, who warned the Chamber that Verdun had been stripped bare and was not listened to. Driant and his chasseurs hold for two days in that hell. Driant is killed on the evening of the 22nd, falling back with his men. His last words, they say: 'My God.' Or perhaps nothing. Last words are often made up by those who remain.
On 25 February, Fort Douaumont falls. The most powerful of the Verdun forts, the one nobody thought could be taken, is captured by a German detachment that walks in almost without resistance - because the fort has been disarmed, stripped, reduced to an empty shell by Joffre's decisions. The news is a thunderclap. Douaumont has fallen. France is stunned. The government is stunned. Joffre is stunned, or pretends to be.
And that is when Pétain enters the scene.
Philippe Pétain, sixty, général de division, cold, distant, methodical. A man the army did not like before the war - too cautious, too defensive, a heretic in a world that swore only by the offensive à outrance. The war has proved him right, and the war is carrying him upwards. On 25 February, he takes command of the defence of Verdun.
Pétain organises. He is an organiser, not an orator, not a dashing hero - an organiser. He does what nobody had done: he gives the defence a structure. The artillery first - he brings back guns, installs new ones, creates a coordinated network of fire that covers every metre of the ground. The road next - the only road linking Verdun to the rear, the departmental road from Bar-le-Duc, a ribbon of tarmac seventy-five kilometres long that Pétain turns into a vital artery. The lorries will run on it day and night, bumper to bumper, one every fourteen seconds, carrying the men, the ammunition, the food. They will call it the Voie Sacrée - the Sacred Way. And the rotation - the 'noria' - the system that sends fresh divisions up and brings exhausted divisions down, so that nobody stays too long in the furnace. Nearly three-quarters of the French army will pass through Verdun.
Verdier learns of Pétain's appointment with mixed feelings. He knows Pétain by reputation - a man who believes in firepower, not in élan, a man who counts the shells before he counts the dead. A man like himself. For the first time since the start of the war, Verdier thinks the command might be in the right hands. Not pleasant hands. Competent ones.
Henri's regiment goes up on 26 February, by the Voie Sacrée.
It is an experience that those who lived through it never forgot and never managed to tell. The lorries drive through the night, along that single road which is Verdun's umbilical cord, and on either side of the road there is blackness, and ahead there is the glow of the front lighting the sky from below, and the lorries move towards that glow like insects towards a lamp.
Henri is standing in a lorry, squeezed among his men. The noise grows as they get closer. The ground shakes under the wheels. Sometimes shells fall on the road - not often, the German artillery concentrates its fire further forward, but sometimes a stray shell strikes the tarmac and the lorry in front vanishes in a geyser of earth and metal. They do not stop. They go round and carry on.
They get down at three in the morning in what is left of a village south of Douaumont. 'Village' is a memory - there is nothing left but heaps of stones and a cellar. The company commander leads them towards the lines along what are no longer communication trenches - vague furrows in ground that has been turned over so many times it no longer looks like anything on earth. Henri walks and looks around him and recognises nothing. Not a tree, not a hedge, not a wall. Nothing. The surface of the moon, only dirtier.
They take up position in a network of shell holes linked by the beginnings of trenches. This is where they will hold. Henri places his men - the shepherd on the left, Marcel on the right, Fayolle in the centre, Pélissié at the forward observation post. The cat Verdun is in a hole somewhere, invisible. Young Lucien is shaking. He is sixteen. Henri puts a hand on his shoulder and says: 'Stay close to me.'
Dawn breaks over Verdun. It is a grey, dirty dawn that shows nothing good. In front of them, the ground climbs towards Douaumont, towards the lost fort, towards the German lines. Behind them, France.
Henri opens his notebook. He writes quickly, in pencil, in a hand that is no longer the schoolmaster's - a cramped, slanting, urgent hand:
'26 February. Verdun. Nothing I have seen before prepared me for this. The landscape no longer exists. The air stinks of powder and flesh. The noise is constant, it is part of the world, it is the world. The men are calm. I do not know why. I do not know why I am calm. Perhaps beyond a certain point fear turns over and becomes something else. I do not know the name of that something else.'
He closes the notebook. The bombardment starts again.