April 1916
The shepherd comes back too.
Not from the same place as the cat, not in the same way. Lacombe arrives in billets on 4 April, on foot, with a crumpled hospital discharge slip in his pocket and a stick he has cut himself from an ash branch. The thigh has healed - more or less. He limps. The hospital doctor said he could ask for a post in the rear, a posting to a depot, office work. Lacombe refused. The doctor insisted. Lacombe looked at him without a word until the doctor stopped insisting.
He comes into the barn, puts down his stick, and the cat Verdun jumps off the empty bunk and comes to rub himself against his good leg. Lacombe crouches down - slowly, with a grimace he shows to no one but the cat - and picks him up. The cat purrs. Lacombe says: 'You're here.' The cat is here. The shepherd is here. The section is here.
Henri watches him settle in and says nothing. There is nothing to say between a sergeant and a soldier who comes back, except what silence says better than words - you've come back, I'm glad, we carry on. Fayolle shakes Lacombe's hand, which is new, because Fayolle touched nobody before Verdun. Marcel gives a jerk of the chin that means welcome. Pélissié does not look up from his slate - he is writing a letter, his third, with the fierce concentration of a man learning to speak a foreign language in his own country.
In the evening, Henri notices that the shepherd has grown thinner. Not by ten kilos - by something else. An inward shrinking, a withdrawal. Lacombe was already a man of silence. The silence has deepened. His eyes, once watchful, with that vigilance of a shepherd keeping an eye on the flock, have become more fixed, more distant. He looks through things. Henri recognises the symptom - he has seen it in others, he felt it in himself after Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. The cafard. The 1916 word for something that will not have a clinical name until much later.
He says nothing to the shepherd. He does what he knows how to do - he keeps him close, keeps him busy, gives him the cat to look after, the light fatigues, the small manual jobs the shepherd's hands can do without his head having to follow. Lacombe mends, whittles, sews, greases. His hands work. The rest will come. Or it will not.
Verdun goes on.
That is the thing to understand about Verdun - it does not stop. April, May, June, the months go by and the battle lasts, that perpetual bombardment, those assaults, those counter-attacks, that consumption of lives beyond understanding. The Germans take the village of Vaux, lose a ridge, retake a wood, lose a ravine. The French hold, give way, retake, hold again. The front sways a few hundred metres one way, then the other, like a monstrous breathing.
In April, the Germans widen the attack onto the left bank of the Meuse. Hill 304 and the Mort-Homme become the new slaughterhouses. The Mort-Homme - the Dead Man, a name that was already sinister before the war, taken from a local legend - becomes the symbol of everything. The Mort-Homme is taken, the Mort-Homme is lost, the Mort-Homme is retaken, the Mort-Homme is lost again. Whole regiments are wiped out for a mound of earth three hundred metres high. 'Wiped out' is not a figure of speech. It means: these men no longer exist.
Pétain is still holding. But Pétain is wearing out. His method - elastic defence, falling back on strong positions, artillery as the main weapon - is challenged by Joffre, who wants the offensive, always the offensive. Joffre finds Pétain too cautious, too defensive, too sparing of his soldiers - an extraordinary reproach in a situation where sparing the soldiers ought to be the first of virtues. On 1 May, Pétain will be 'promoted' - raised to command of Army Group Centre, which is to say removed from direct command at Verdun. His replacement will be Nivelle, a brilliant gunner, offensive-minded, charming, who promises to retake Douaumont and win. Nivelle is the opposite of Pétain. That is why he is chosen.
Verdier watches this waltz of generals with a disgust he can no longer keep within his notebooks. He writes, on 15 April: 'They are pushing aside the man who saved Verdun because he does not promise enough victories. They are replacing him with a man who promises everything. In this army, competence is a fault and charm is a qualification.'
Henri's regiment is still at rest, but the rest is shrinking. The drills start again - manoeuvres, firing practice, mock assaults. The men are being got ready for the next spell in the line. Not Verdun, this time - the rumour is that it will be the Somme, the great Franco-British offensive planned for the summer. But rumours are rumours, and Henri does not make plans on rumours.
He does something else. He starts the evening school again.
Pélissié now writes whole sentences. Not elegant sentences - a peasant's sentences, direct, practical, effective. 'The ewes are well.' 'Marie sold the cheese at the market.' 'The little one has grown.' Henri corrects the spelling, gently, without humiliating him, and Pélissié starts again, without complaining, without losing heart. He is a man who has ploughed fields of stone - letters hold no fear for him.
Young Lucien, for his part, has outgrown the class. He is now reading Henri's Montaigne, slowly, stumbling over the sixteenth-century words, but he is reading. One evening, he looks up from the book and says: 'Sergeant, is it true what he says, that to philosophise is to learn how to die?'
Henri looks at this sixteen-year-old kid asking him questions about Montaigne in a barn in the Meuse in April 1916, and he does not know whether to laugh or cry. He says: 'Montaigne says a lot of things. That's one of them. It isn't the only one. He also says that the greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.'
Lucien thinks about it. 'To belong to oneself,' he repeats, as if tasting the words. Then he goes back into the book. Henri watches him read and thinks of Lucienne Marty, his draughtswoman from Labastide-Murat, of whom he has had no news since the start of the war. He wonders whether she is still drawing. He wonders whether the canes he planted in his pupils, before the war, are still standing, like the ones in Louise's garden.
In Lyon, April brings the spring and a dispute.
The women in the inspection shop at Berliet are asking for seats. Not a rise this time - seats. The right to sit down while they work, because ten hours on their feet on a concrete floor wrecks legs, backs, veins. Rose has drafted the petition. Twenty-three signatures. Jeanne signed first, after Rose. It is a gesture she weighs up - signing first means being seen, being named, exposing yourself. The old Jeanne would not have signed first. The old Jeanne no longer exists.
The management refuses. The head of the workshop says seats would slow production. The foreman says the women only have to be tougher. An engineer says, with the condescending smile that is his own, that if the men worked standing up before the war, there is no reason why the women should not.
Rose explodes. Not in public - in the yard, at the break, in front of Jeanne and three other women. 'The men who did the work standing up, they could go for a piss whenever they liked, they got six francs, and nobody gawped at them while they changed. We've got none of that and on top of it we're supposed to shut our gobs?'
Jeanne says nothing. She thinks. She thinks the way Henri thinks in front of a map - methodically, looking for the weak point. And she finds it.
The next day, she goes to see the foreman. On her own. She says: 'Monsieur Garnier, production in Shop C has gone up twelve per cent since January. It's in the reports. If the women had seats, they'd last longer at the end of the day, and inspection errors would go down. You know that.'
Garnier looks at her. He knows. He knows because the figures say so, and figures do not lie, and Jeanne has just told him what he could not tell the management himself without looking soft. Garnier is not a bad man. He is a man caught between a management that wants production and women workers who want dignity, and he has no power over either.
Three weeks later, stools appear in the workshop. Not seats - stools, with no backs, in rough wood. It is half of what they asked for. Jeanne takes the half. Rose takes the half, swearing she will get the other one. The women sit down. Ten hours a day on a stool with no back is hard. It is better than standing.
Paul, somewhere in the Argonne, receives a letter from Jeanne telling him about the victory of the stools. He reads the letter and smiles, for the first time in weeks, a smile he shows to no one but the chap from Saint-Étienne. The man from Saint-Étienne says: 'Good news?' Paul says: 'My wife's won a battle.' The man from Saint-Étienne does not ask which one. He understands that the women are fighting too, in their own way, on a front the men cannot see.
At the end of April, Henri receives a letter from Louise that carries unexpected news.
Lucienne Marty - the draughtswoman, the prodigy of Labastide-Murat, the one Henri had mentioned to the inspector in 1914, the one he wondered whether she was still drawing - Lucienne Marty is drawing. She is still drawing. Louise found out by chance, when she ran into the schoolmaster who replaced Henri at Labastide, an old retired man called back for the duration of the war, who told her that the little Marty girl came to borrow pencils from the school on Sundays because at home there were no pencils.
Louise has done something. Without telling Henri, without asking permission, she has written to the schools inspector in Cahors - the same one who shrugged in 1914 - to report the case of Lucienne Marty, thirteen now, exceptional talent for drawing, father a sharecropper, mother on the farm. The inspector has replied. Not a shrug this time - a form. An application for a bursary at the higher primary school in Cahors, which has a section for industrial drawing. It is not the Beaux-Arts. It is a start.
Henri reads the letter and stays motionless for a long while, sitting in the barn, the paper on his knees. Louise has done what he swore to do in June 1914, on the evening of the leaving certificate, when he said to Lucienne 'We'll talk about it again'. Two years. Two years of war, and it is Louise who keeps the promise he could no longer keep.
He writes to Louise that evening, three lines:
'You've done for Lucienne what I could no longer do. It's the best thing that has happened to me since the start of this war. I love you.'
It is the first time he has written those words. Not 'I want to marry you', not 'if you'll have me' - 'I love you'. Two years of war to get to three words. But the three words are true, and that is the only thing that counts.
On 30 April, the order comes down. The regiment is going back into the line. Not at Verdun - on the Aisne, their old sector, which they find again the way you find a familiar nightmare. Rat Alley no longer exists - other names, other men, other holes. But the mud is the same, and the rats are the same, and the shells are the same.
Henri leads his platoon along the communication trench, at night, in single file. The shepherd limps behind him, the cat in his haversack. Fayolle walks in silence. Marcel carries his box of type. Pélissié walks as always - without a sound, without a hesitation. Lucien Combes, the sixteen-year-old kid who reads Montaigne, walks with a book in his haversack and a rifle on his shoulder, and Henri wonders which of the two is heavier.
The front takes them back. The front always takes them back.