March 1916
Henri will hold out for eight days at Verdun.
Eight days that are worth eight hundred. Eight days in which the very notion of time dissolves, replaced by a two-beat rhythm - bombardment, silence, bombardment, silence - in which the silence is only a variant of the noise, a quieter noise, a background noise made of cracking, groaning, things slowly collapsing.
On the first day, 27 February, three men of the platoon are killed by a single shell. They were in a shell hole next to his, fifteen metres away, and the 210 landed in it with the idiotic precision of chance. There is nothing left. No bodies to collect, no identity discs to recover. Three men who were there and are there no longer. Autumn reinforcements whose names Henri knew without knowing their faces - or their faces without knowing their names, he can no longer tell. The war at Verdun erases individuals. It erases everything.
On the second day, the bombardment is so intense that nobody can move for six hours. Six hours lying at the bottom of a hole, face in the earth, hands on his helmet, while the world explodes. The shells fall so close that the earth comes down on them in a continuous rain, heavy, mixed with metal and with things that should not be looked at. Henri counts the explosions out of reflex, then he stops counting, because counting is no use when the number is infinity. Beside him, Lucien Combes, the sixteen-year-old kid, is crying without a sound, his eyes open, not moving. Henri says nothing to him. There is nothing to say. He puts his hand on the boy's back and leaves it there, and the boy cries and the hand stays.
On the third day, the Germans attack. The infantry come out of the fog of smoke and advance in waves, grey figures in a grey landscape, and Henri's platoon fires. Pélissié fires. The shepherd fires. Marcel fires. Fayolle fires. They fire until the barrels of the Lebels are burning hot, and they throw grenades, and the Germans fall and others come, and those fall too, and at some point the Germans fall back and the silence returns, that deathly silence which is not a silence but the temporary absence of the unbearable.
After the attack, Henri counts his men. All alive. He does not understand how. The shepherd has a splinter in his thigh - his second, after the one in his shoulder in May 1915. He refuses to go down. He winds a dressing round his leg, pulls it tight, and says: 'It'll do.' Henri looks at him and knows it will not do, that the thigh will swell, perhaps go bad, but that he cannot force the shepherd to leave. Lacombe will stay. He will stay because leaving means leaving the others, and leaving the others is the one thing the shepherd from Rocamadour does not know how to do.
On the fourth day, the water runs out.
It is a problem nobody had foreseen, or that everyone had foreseen without doing anything about it. The water parties no longer get through - the communication trenches are destroyed, the carriers are killed on the way, the water bottles are holed by splinters. Henri's platoon has had no water for thirty-six hours. Thirst, in the cold of February turned into the cold of March, is not the same as summer thirst - it burns less, it is more insidious, a slow drying out of the mouth, the throat, the brain. The men lick the dew off the sides of the hole. They drink water from puddles, a brown, greasy water that tastes of churned earth and of worse things.
Marcel, the typesetter, the man with the solutions, comes up with an idea. He crawls to a neighbouring crater where rainwater has collected, dirty water but less dirty than the puddles in the trench. He fills three water bottles in an hour, under the shells, flat on his belly, a bottle in each hand and the third hooked to his belt. He comes back covered in mud, shaking with exhaustion, and puts the bottles down in front of Henri without a word. Henri says: 'Thank you.' Marcel says: 'It's not water, it's chalk soup.' The men drink the chalk soup like champagne.
On the fifth day, Henri loses a man he knows.
Brousse, the farmhand from Figeac, the one who could read but pretended he could not, the one who had come back to the evening class and was making good progress. Brousse is killed by a sniper, a bullet in the head, just as he was raising himself to glance over the edge of the hole. A trifling movement, a centimetre too much, a second too long, and Brousse topples backwards into the hole with a round hole above his left eye.
Henri looks at him. He ought to search the body, take the disc, the papers. He does it. Methodically, as he was taught, as he has taught himself over eighteen months of war. The disc, the service book, the letters. The letters are from Brousse's mother, a peasant woman from Figeac who writes large and badly, and Henri puts them in his breast pocket with his own, and he tells himself he will send them back to the mother, afterwards, and that 'afterwards' is an act of faith as absurd as all the rest.
On the sixth day, the relief is announced. Not by runner - the runner was killed on the way. By a signal from a neighbouring post, passed from hole to hole, from mouth to mouth. 'Relief tomorrow night.' Three words. The most beautiful words in the French language, at Verdun, in March 1916.
The sixth and seventh days are the longest. Because the relief is announced, because the end is in sight, because dying now would be an unbearable injustice. The men make themselves smaller in their holes. They move less, fire less, save everything - movements, ammunition, breath. They wait.
The shepherd is in a bad way. His thigh has doubled in size under the bandage, the skin is hot, the fever is rising. Lacombe says nothing, but Henri can see the sweat on his forehead despite the cold, and the way he clenches his teeth when he moves. Henri says: 'You're going down with the relief.' The shepherd does not answer, which is his way of saying yes when he does not want to say no.
The cat Verdun has been missing since the third day. Nobody has seen him. The shepherd looks for him sometimes, in the holes round about, but the cat is nowhere. Dead, perhaps. Gone, perhaps. Cats survive or they do not, and they answer to no one.
The relief arrives in the night of 6 to 7 March. Shadows in the smashed communication trenches, fresh men with eyes not yet dead, who look at the men they are replacing and do not recognise them as their own kind. Those going down have faces of earth, eyes of glass, bodies that walk by reflex, without thought, without will, like machines with their souls taken out.
Henri counts his men on the way down. Of the thirty in his platoon, he brings back twenty-two. Eight are missing. Three killed on the first day, Brousse on the fifth, one wounded man evacuated on the third, another on the fourth, two missing whom nobody can say are dead, buried alive, or lost in the chaos. Eight men in eight days. And that is a good tally. The neighbouring platoons have lost more.
The shepherd goes down limping, leaning on Marcel. Behind the lines, a doctor looks at the thigh, pulls a face, and sends Lacombe to the field ambulance. The shepherd leaves on a stretcher, and as the stretcher-bearers carry him off he grabs Henri's arm and says: 'The cat.' Henri says: 'I'll find him.' He does not know if it is true. But it is what has to be said.
Verdun goes on without them.
The battle does not stop because one regiment comes down. Others go up, take their place, hold, suffer, and come down in their turn. Pétain's noria is working - that permanent rotation that puts the whole French army through the mincer of Verdun, division after division, regiment after regiment. It is effective. It is humane, in the sense that the men do not stay long enough to go mad - not all of them, not always. It is also monstrous, because it means nobody is spared. Every French soldier will know what Verdun is. Every French family will have a man at Verdun.
Pétain holds. He holds through artillery - he has massed batteries on the left bank of the Meuse, 155s, 75s, naval guns, and they fire day and night on the German assault waves. He holds through logistics - the Voie Sacrée works, the lorries run, the ammunition arrives. He holds through will - that cold, methodical will which has nothing of Joffre's panache and everything of the stubbornness of a man who refuses to let go.
And the Germans are wearing themselves out. Falkenhayn was right in his logic - Verdun is bleeding France. But he was wrong in his calculation - Verdun is bleeding Germany too. The German divisions that attack are destroyed as surely as the French divisions that defend. The mincing machine grinds both sides. And nobody can stop, because stopping means admitting that all of it was for nothing, and that the thousands of dead died for a landscape of mud.
Verdier follows the battle from Artois, through the reports, the communiqués, the staff conversations. He is torn between admiration for Pétain and horror at what Pétain is forced to do. Holding Verdun costs more than giving it up would cost - in men, in ammunition, in energy. But giving up Verdun is unthinkable. The symbol is stronger than the calculation. And Verdier, the man of calculations, understands for the first time that war is not only a matter of figures. It is a matter of names. And Verdun is a name France cannot lose.
In Lyon, Jeanne does not know that Henri is at Verdun. The censorship forbids naming sectors. She knows that something terrible is happening somewhere, because the papers talk about it - for once, the censorship lets things through, because the government needs the country to know, to suffer with them, to accept the sacrifices. 'They shall not pass' becomes the watchword. Verdun becomes a sacred word, a totem, a cry.
Jeanne reads the papers at the factory, during the midday break. The women read together, standing round a paper laid on a workbench, and they fall silent. The communiqués are vague - 'violent fighting in the Verdun sector, our troops are resisting doggedly' - but the word 'doggedly' says everything. Doggedness is what you have when you have nothing else left.
Rose says: 'My husband died like that. They told me he fought doggedly.' The word, in her mouth, is naked, stripped of its glory. The doggedness of a dying man has nothing glorious about it. It is the last reflex of a cornered animal.
Paul is in the Argonne, not at Verdun. Not yet. Jeanne knows nothing of this, but it is an accident of geography that spares her the worst of fears. Chance is the only ally the women of 1916 have.
On 15 March, Henri writes to Louise. The first letter since Verdun. He is at rest, in a village behind the lines in the Meuse, thirty kilometres from the front, and he can write without his hands shaking. Almost.
'Dear Louise. I've come down. I can't tell you where from, but you'll understand if I tell you that nothing I'd been through before counted. What I've seen has no words. It would take a language that doesn't exist, or a silence that would say more than all the words.
The shepherd is wounded, evacuated. Not seriously, I hope. The others are holding on. Young Lucien is holding on. Pélissié is holding on. Marcel is holding on. There are fewer of us.
Tell me about your beans. Tell me about the school. Tell me about the bridge at Capdenac. Tell me about anything that isn't here.'
Louise receives the letter on the 22nd. She reads it and understands, without the word being written, that Henri has been at Verdun. She goes out into the school garden, the bean garden, dug over for the winter, bare. She sits down on the cold earth and stays there for ten minutes, her eyes on the empty canes, and she searches in herself for the words that will be the opposite of Verdun.
She replies that same evening. Four pages. The longest she has ever written. She tells him everything. The school, the children, little Marthe Bouyssou, who has grown ten centimetres and is starting to do joined-up writing. The garden she is going to replant in April, with tomatoes this time, because beans are all very well but tomatoes are beautiful. Her mother, who is a little better, who comes down to the shop in the mornings with a shawl and a stool. The neighbour's cat, which has had kittens, five of them, one of them ginger, like a ball of wool.
She fills four pages with the world that still exists. Not a word about the war. Not a word of complaint. Four pages of beans, of kittens, of joined-up writing, of tomatoes to come. Four pages of life, sent to a man coming back from death, to prove to him that life is still there, somewhere, between Capdenac and the bridge.
On 20 March, in billets, the cat Verdun reappears.
Nobody knows where he has come from. He walks into the barn where the platoon sleeps, thin, filthy, his ear torn a little more than before, and he jumps onto the shepherd's empty bunk - Lacombe's, who is in hospital - and curls up there as if he had never been away.
Fayolle says: 'Bloody hell.'
Marcel says: 'He's done Verdun.'
Henri strokes the cat. The cat purrs. It is a ridiculous sound, that purring, in a world that is falling apart. It is the most necessary sound Henri has heard in weeks.
That evening he writes to Louise, a postscript to the letter he has already sent, a scrap of paper he will slip into the next envelope: 'The cat has come back. You see. We come back.'