June 1916
The heat comes back, and with it the flies.
The flies of 1916 are worse than those of 1915, because the ground has had two years to pile up what flies feed on. They are everywhere - on the food, on faces, in eyes, in wounds. The battalion doctor has insect powder handed out, which does no good, and strips of gauze to cover the mess tins, which do a little. Henri organises his platoon's hygiene with a maniac's thoroughness - the latrines cleaned twice a day, the mess tins covered, the dead buried as soon as possible. It is a war within the war, and it is a war that cannot be won.
Fayolle is ill. Not the cough this time - his stomach. Dysentery, running through the trenches like a brush fire, carried by fouled water, by the flies, by dirty fingers. Fayolle has a fever, cramps, and he empties himself at both ends in a corner of the dugout with the horrified modesty of a twenty-one-year-old who no longer has anything private. Henri has him evacuated to the aid post on 5 June, and this time he does not hesitate, he does not negotiate with the company commander - he gives the order. Sergeant Castayrol orders the evacuation of Private Fayolle, and nobody argues, because a man who cannot stand up cannot hold a rifle.
Fayolle leaves on a stretcher, his face grey, his eyes hollow. He grabs Henri's hand as he goes and says: 'I'll be back, Sergeant.' Henri says: 'I know.' He does not know. He never knows. But he says the words that have to be said, because the words that have to be said are the only medicine he has.
The Somme is being prepared.
Henri does not know it yet, but the 7th Regiment is one of the units earmarked for the great offensive. The operation is planned for the end of June, the beginning of July. It is the supreme effort, the convergence of everything the Allies have built up over a year - the British with their Kitchener divisions ready at last, the French with what is left after Verdun. The plan is ambitious: a Franco-British attack on a forty-kilometre front, north and south of the Somme, with a crushing artillery preparation and massive reserves. This time, says Joffre, it will be the breakthrough.
But Verdun has changed the equation. The French army, bled for four months, can no longer commit the forty divisions planned. It will commit sixteen. The weight of the offensive now rests on the British, who will put twenty-six divisions into line. It is a new army, eager, brave, and tragically inexperienced. Kitchener's volunteers are civilians in uniform - office clerks, factory hands, schoolteachers, miners - who have learned to march in step and to shoot but have never seen a shell land. They will learn. The price of the lesson will be appalling.
Verdier has been transferred. Since May, he has been on the staff of the Sixth Army, which will hold the French sector of the Somme, south of the river. It is the first time he has worked directly with the British, and the experience is disconcerting. The British officers are polite, competent, brave, and they know nothing. Not from stupidity - from youth. The British army of 1916 is a six-month-old army. The French army is a two-year-old army. Two years of blood, two years of lessons, two years of mistakes paid for dearly. Verdier looks at the British plans of attack and finds in them the same mistakes as the French plans of 1914 - the lines too close together, the objectives too ambitious, the excessive faith in the artillery preparation.
He tries to warn them. That is what Verdier does - he warns. He meets a British colonel, a charming Yorkshireman who speaks impeccable French, and he tells him: 'The German machine guns will survive your bombardment. Your men must advance by bounds, not in lines. They must follow the creeping barrage closely, very closely, even if it means taking losses from their own artillery.' The colonel listens politely, takes notes, and goes back to his headquarters. Verdier does not know whether the notes will be read. He does what he can.
On 10 June, Henri is relieved and sent into reserve twenty kilometres south of the Somme. The word goes round - it will be soon. The offensive. The big one. The men see the signs, the signs they have known by heart for two years - the artillery columns, the ammunition dumps, the field hospitals being set up, the airfields multiplying. The war machine is starting up, heavy, visible, relentless.
Henri uses the rest to write. To Louise first. A long letter, calm, precise, which talks about the summer, the wheat fields around the billet, a cherry tree in the garden of a requisitioned farm. He does not mention the coming offensive. The censor would forbid it, and even without the censor, he would not. You do not tell the woman you love that you are going over the top in three weeks. You tell her about the cherry trees.
'The cherry tree at the farm where we are is more laden than any I've ever seen. The cherries are black, small, sweet. The shepherd eats them by the handful and the stones pile up outside the dugout like ammunition of another kind. The cat tried one and pulled an extraordinary face. Marcel says he's a town cat. Lacombe says he's a fussy cat. I think he's a cat with taste.'
Louise receives the letter and smiles as she reads the bit about the cat. She does not know that behind the cherry trees there is the Somme. She knows that there is always something behind the cherry trees.
Fayolle comes back on 15 June. Thinner, pale, his eyes sunken, but on his feet. The aid post kept him eight days, fed him on rice and boiled water, purged him, patched him up after a fashion, and sent him back towards the front because rifles are needed. Fayolle takes up his place in the section again the way a traveller comes back to his house - with relief and a vague surprise that everything is still there. The shepherd makes room for him in the dugout. The cat comes and sits on his knees. Marcel gives him an issue of Le Poilu du Causse he missed. Fayolle reads it, eats some soup, and falls asleep.
Henri watches him sleep and does the count. Fayolle has been here since the beginning, since the reinforcements of September 1914. Twenty-one months. Twenty-one months of trench, of mud, of fear, of noise, with bronchitis, dysentery, two assaults, Verdun. And he sleeps like a kid, mouth open, fists clenched. He is twenty-one. Henri is twenty-six. Two more years, a hundred more years.
In Lyon, June brings a birth.
Not Rose's - Rose will not give birth until September. Marie's, the neighbour, whose second child is born on 12 June, a girl, in the flat above Jeanne's. The birth is difficult - the midwife is late, the labour is long, and Jeanne is there, because the women of 1916 are there for one another when the men are not. She holds Marie's hand, she heats water, she takes the firstborn in her arms to keep him away from the screams, and when the little girl is finally born, at two in the morning, with a cry that goes through the walls, Jeanne catches her in her own hands because the midwife still has not come.
It is the first time Jeanne has held a newborn. She has had no children. The miscarriage of 1913, which nobody talks about, and since then nothing. She and Paul do not talk about it. It is a silence between them, one more, a silence that is not indifference but pain held in.
Jeanne holds the little girl in her hands, warm, slippery, furious, alive, and something goes through her that is not regret - it is too simple to be regret. It is the raw knowledge of what she does not have, laid in her hands, screaming. She gives the baby to Marie. She cleans up. She goes down to her own flat. She sits in her kitchen and stays there in the dark, her hands on the table, the hands that have just held a life.
She does not talk about it. Not to Rose, not to Paul, not to Henri. There are silences that even sisters do not share.
On 24 June, the artillery preparation for the Somme begins.
Seven days of bombardment. Fifteen hundred British guns and nine hundred French guns open fire at the same moment on a forty-kilometre front. One and a half million shells in a week. The ground shakes as far as London, they say - it is probably not true, but the noise can be heard tens of kilometres away, a continuous rumble, day and night, that rattles the windows of the villages behind the lines and keeps people awake as far as Amiens.
Henri is in reserve, ten kilometres behind the front, and he can hear it. Everyone can hear it. The noise is the world. The men who were at Verdun recognise the sound and fall silent. The recent reinforcements listen round-eyed. Marcel, sitting outside the barn, his back against the wall, his eyes shut, listens to the barrage and says: 'It's bigger than Verdun.' Henri does not know whether that is true, but it is possible. The Somme is the greatest concentration of artillery in history. The word 'history' does not mean much in 1916, but the guns, they mean something.
During the seven days of preparation, Henri does what he knows how to do. He checks, he prepares, he organises. The grenades, the cartridges, the dressings, the water bottles, the rations. He studies the map - his sector of attack is south of the Somme, in a landscape of chalk hills, woods and fortified villages. The objectives are clear on paper. The paper does not show the machine guns.
On 28 June, he gathers his platoon for the last time before the assault. Thirty-two men. He looks at them, one by one, and he engraves their faces in his memory with a photographer's rigour, because he knows that some of those faces will not be there in a week.
He makes no speech. He says: 'You know what you have to do. Stay together. Listen to the orders. Use the ground. And if it all goes to shit, we adapt.' The word 'shit' in the mouth of Sergeant Castayrol, schoolmaster, man of the Enlightenment, is a linguistic event that Marcel makes a mental note of for the next issue of Le Poilu du Causse.
30 June. The eve of the offensive.
Henri writes three letters. To his mother, to Jeanne, to Louise. The one to his mother is short - 'I'm well, I'm thinking of you, eat the cherries in the garden for me.' The one to Jeanne is brief - 'Look after yourself. Paul sends you his love, I'm sure of it without even asking him.' The one to Louise is the longest, and he will not reread it, because rereading it would be admitting it might be the last.
'Dear Louise. Tomorrow will be an important day, and I can't tell you any more. I want you to know that if I've held on all this time, it's because you exist. That's not a turn of phrase - it's the exact mechanism of my survival. Every morning that I get up and do what I have to do, it's because there's an afterwards, and the afterwards is you. Figeac. The school. Your pupils' beans. The bridge over the Lot. The blue dress. The yes.
I love you. I'm coming back.'
He folds the three letters, gives them to the vaguemestre, and goes to sleep. He does not sleep. Nobody sleeps. The barrage thunders without a break, the earth shakes, and the men lie in the barn, their eyes open, each in his own night.
The shepherd strokes the cat. Fayolle grips his rifle. Marcel writes in a notebook. Pélissié sleeps, or pretends to - he has that peasant's knack of finding sleep anywhere, any time, like an animal that knows rest is a weapon. Lucien Combes, the kid who reads Montaigne, is curled up, the book against his chest, and his lips are moving in the dark - perhaps he is reading, perhaps he is praying, perhaps it is the same thing.
Tomorrow, 1 July 1916.
The Somme.