May 1916
The Aisne has not changed. That is what strikes Henri as he takes over the sector again - the absolute stillness of this front, which is the same as in October 1914, the same ridges, the same ravines, the same distances between the lines. Eighteen months of war and not a metre of difference. The trenches are better built, deeper, better shored up. The dugouts are solid. The belts of wire are thicker. But the landscape itself is identical - that no man's land Henri knows by heart, that he could draw with his eyes shut, every shell hole, every picket, every old corpse that is no more now than a bulge in the earth.
The Germans opposite are no longer the Saxons of before. They are Württembergers, men from the south of Germany, and relations with the enemy are different - tenser, more unpredictable. The tacit arrangement of 'live and let live' does not exist with these troops. The Minenwerfer come over at no set hours, the snipers are active, and the night patrols are frequent. Henri adapts. That is what he does - he adapts, he observes, he adjusts. On the first evening, he identifies the enemy firing points, the most exposed loopholes, the dead ground. By the second evening, he has reorganised the sentry posts. By the third evening, his men know the sector as if they had always lived there.
The shepherd has settled back in. His thigh hurts when he walks too long, but at the loophole, crouching, motionless, he is the same - that massive, silent presence that reassures the men around him without his needing to speak. The cat Verdun has taken up his habits again, his night patrols, his sovereign naps. The section is intact. It is a word that ought not to exist in the twenty-second month of the war, and yet - the hard core is there. The shepherd, Fayolle, Marcel, Pélissié, the cat. The old hands. The ones who last.
Verdun devours.
In May, the Germans relaunch the offensive on the right bank of the Meuse. Fort Vaux is attacked with a new fury. Major Raynal and his garrison hold out for seven days in the underground galleries of the fort, without water, without food, with the Germans above them pumping gas into the corridors and digging holes in the concrete to drop grenades through. Raynal sends his last carrier pigeon on 4 June with a message that will become famous - the pigeon will arrive, dying, poisoned by the gas, and will be awarded the Légion d'honneur. The fort falls on 7 June. Raynal is captured. The Germans, astonished by his resistance, receive him with military honours.
But Henri is not at Verdun. He is on the Aisne, and on the Aisne the war is the everyday kind - the war of detail, of routine, of death doled out drop by drop. A man killed by a sniper on 3 May. A man wounded by a splinter on the 7th. A neighbouring platoon that loses four men at once on the 12th, when a Minenwerfer bomb lands on a dugout. The trickle. Always the trickle.
Marcel brings out the tenth issue of Le Poilu du Causse. Ten issues. A year of the paper. Marcel is proud of it, in his discreet way, and Henri is proud of him, in the way of a sergeant who does not say such things. The tenth issue contains an editorial by Henri on teaching - not school teaching, the teaching of war. What the war teaches men. 'It teaches us that we can bear the unbearable. It is a lesson we could have done without.' The battalion commander reads the editorial and says nothing, which is his way of approving.
The issue also contains Pélissié's first contribution. Three lines, in his own hand, under the title 'The Season': 'The ewes lamb in May. My wife sees to it. The lambs are white on the causse.' Henri corrected one mistake - 'lams' without the 'b' - and Pélissié copied out the whole text again rather than accept the crossing-out. A man who writes three lines in a trench newspaper is a man who exists as something other than a number in a register. Henri knows it. That is why he started the paper.
Mid-May. An event that does not concern the front but that will change it.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement is signed on 16 May, in secret, between France and Britain. It is a partition of the Ottoman Middle East, drawn in pencil on a map, by two diplomats sketching borders across countries they do not know. France will have Syria and Lebanon. Britain will have Mesopotamia and Palestine. The peoples who live there have not been consulted. They will not be.
Henri knows nothing about Sykes-Picot. No soldier knows anything about Sykes-Picot. It is a secret, classified, locked in the safes of the Quai d'Orsay. But the secret will shape a century, and the lines drawn in pencil in May 1916 will breed wars that last longer than this one. History has its ironies, and this is one of the cruellest - while men are dying in the mud for metres of ground in France, other men are drawing whole countries in pencil in hushed offices.
In Lyon, May brings news that shakes Jeanne.
Rose is pregnant.
It is Rose herself who says so, one Sunday, in the kitchen in Vaise, between two sips of coffee, with the same brutal frankness she brings to everything. 'I'm pregnant. Three months.' Jeanne puts down her cup. Rose is a widow. Rose has no husband. The arithmetic is simple, and Jeanne does not do it out loud.
Rose looks at her and says: 'It's the foreman from Shop B. The night one. Not Garnier - the other one. Bertrand.'
Jeanne says nothing. She waits.
'It's not what you think. Well, yes, it is what you think, but I wasn't forced. He didn't force me. It happened, that's all. In January. I was on my own, he was there, we had a drink after the night shift, and there you are.' Rose shrugs, but the shrug is too heavy to be sincere. 'He's an idiot, Bertrand. But he's not a bad man. He doesn't know yet.'
Jeanne takes it in. She does not judge. Not because she is tolerant by nature - she is a daughter of her time, and her time judges. But something has changed in her. The factory, the war, the nights alone, the women together - all of it has widened the frame. A widow who sleeps with a man, in 1916, after two years of war, after losing a husband, after bringing up two children alone, after working ten hours a day standing and then sitting on a stool with no back - that woman has the right to look for warmth where she can find it.
'Are you going to keep it?' Jeanne asks.
'I'm going to keep it,' says Rose.
'And Bertrand?'
'Bertrand can do what he likes. The child will be mine.'
It is said. Jeanne takes Rose's hand across the table, as Louise took Henri's hand at the café in Figeac, and she squeezes it. Rose does not cry. Rose never cries. But her fingers squeeze back, hard, and that is enough.
Henri knows nothing of Rose, or of Bertrand, or of the child to come. He knows that Jeanne is working, that Jeanne is fighting, that Jeanne has become someone else - or rather someone who was already there and whom peacetime kept from coming out. Jeanne's letters have changed over the past year. More assured, longer, more precise. The old Jeanne wrote that the weather was fine and the lilac was pretty. The new Jeanne writes the factory's production figures, the union's demands, the market prices. Henri hardly recognises her and admires her utterly.
He writes to Jeanne on 20 May: 'You know our mother must be proud of you. She won't have said so - mothers don't say these things. But she'll have thought it so hard that everyone heard.'
Jeanne receives the letter on the 27th and puts it away in the overflowing biscuit tin. She does not cry. She is past that. She rereads the sentence about their mother and smiles, because Henri is right - their mother never says anything, but thinks so hard the walls shake.
At the end of May, the news from Verdun grows darker. Fort Vaux has fallen. The Germans are four kilometres from the town. The communiqués speak of 'heroic resistance', which means the resistance is desperate. Pétain, from his lofty post as army group commander, still weighs on the battle, but it is Nivelle who is in direct command, and Nivelle promises the counter-offensive. Soon. Always soon.
Henri's men read the communiqués and say nothing. They know what Verdun means. They were there, eight days, in February, and those eight days are branded into them like a burn. Fayolle never talks about Verdun. Marcel talks about it sometimes, with that analytical distance which is his protection. The shepherd does not talk about it, but at night he cries out in his sleep, words that make no sense, orders perhaps, and the cat Verdun lies down on his chest and stays there until the cries stop.
Young Lucien is drawing. That is new. Nobody knew he could draw. One evening, Henri catches him in a corner of the dugout, bent over a scrap of cardboard, a pencil in his hand. He is drawing the cat. Not a child's drawing - a precise, observed drawing, with the fur, the posture, the half-closed eye. Henri looks and thinks of Lucienne Marty, for the second time in a month. The world makes artists everywhere, on the farms of the causse, in the trenches of the Aisne, and the world crushes them almost as fast as it makes them.
'That's good,' says Henri. Lucien blushes and hides the drawing. Henri does not ask to see it. But he writes in his notebook: 'Lucien draws. The cat. Good. One to watch.'
One to watch. The phrase of a schoolmaster who cannot help being a schoolmaster, even in a hole.
On 31 May, the night is mild over the Aisne. May ending, June coming. Summer is drawing near, and with summer the great Somme offensive, which everyone talks about without anyone knowing anything precise. Henri is on the fire step. No man's land is quiet, bathed in moonlight, almost beautiful if you forget what it holds.
The shepherd is beside him, his leg stretched out on the fire step. The cat is on the parapet, his eyes glowing. Somewhere in the night, a nightingale is singing. A nightingale, in May, on the Aisne. The lark in the morning, the nightingale at night - Shakespeare, the play whose title Henri could not remember. Romeo and Juliet. That's it. The lark and the nightingale, morning and evening, war and peace, the lovers parting at dawn.
Henri thinks of Louise. Of the blue dress. Of the hand on his at the café in Figeac. Of the word 'yes' on the postcard of the bridge at Capdenac. Of the future, that distant country whose map he does not know but which he knows exists, because Louise writes him letters that are the proof of it.
The nightingale sings. The shepherd listens.
'Fine bird,' says Lacombe.
It is the longest sentence he has spoken since he came back from hospital.
Henri nods. 'Fine bird.'
They listen together, in the night, the sergeant and the shepherd, and the nightingale sings for no one and for everyone, and May goes by.