July 1916
On 1 July 1916, at half past seven in the morning, the British leave their trenches.
North of the Somme, on a twenty-five-kilometre front, tens of thousands of men stand up together, climb over the parapets, and walk towards the German lines. They walk. Not run, not crawl - walk. In line, at regular intervals, rifles at the slope, backs straight, in step. Those are the orders. British doctrine says the German trenches are destroyed, the wire is cut, the machine guns are knocked out, and all the infantry have to do is advance and occupy. The doctrine is wrong.
The German machine guns are intact. The deep dugouts have protected them, as every time, as Verdier said, as everyone knew except those who gave the orders - or who knew and gave them anyway. The Germans come up out of their dugouts, bring their machine guns into action in a few seconds, and fire into the lines advancing in step.
What happens then is the most terrible thing the war has produced in a single day. The men fall in whole rows, like wheat under the scythe, and those behind keep walking because those are the orders, and they fall in their turn. The Pals battalions - those units of volunteers formed among friends, among neighbours, among workmates, the pals from Sheffield, the lads from Accrington, the schoolteachers from Leeds - the Pals die together, as they enlisted together, and whole streets in English towns will be in mourning on the same day.
By the end of 1 July, the British army has lost fifty-seven thousand men. Nineteen thousand dead. In one day. It is the bloodiest day in British military history. More dead in one morning than in all the wars of the nineteenth century put together. And in the evening, the lines have hardly moved.
South of the Somme, it is another story.
Henri attacks at half past seven, at the same time as the British to the north, but in different conditions. The French army has learned. Two years of lessons paid for in blood, and the lessons are bearing fruit at last. The creeping barrage works - the artillery moves forward ahead of the infantry, metre by metre, and the men follow the curtain of fire closely, so closely that splinters from their own shells rain down on them, and too bad, because the only chance of surviving is to reach the German trench before the machine guns come up out of the dugouts.
Henri runs. Not walks - runs. Bent double, rifle in one hand, grenades in the other, eyes fixed on the wall of smoke and earth moving ahead of him. His men run with him. The shepherd limps but runs. Marcel runs. Pélissié runs. Lucien runs. Fayolle runs. They run through a noise that is no longer a noise but the end of the world, the ground exploding under their feet, the air no longer air but a mixture of smoke, dust, metal and screams.
The first German trench is reached in twelve minutes. The barrage has ploughed it up, the Germans coming out of it are dazed, covered in earth, half deaf. The grenades finish the job. Henri jumps into the trench and finds himself face to face with a German of his own age, perhaps younger, who puts his hands up. Henri pushes him towards the rear with a jerk of his rifle and moves on. No time. The second trench is three hundred metres away.
The second trench falls too. And the third. The French sector advances two, three, four kilometres in the day. It is a success. A real success, bought with blood but with blood measured out - the French losses of 1 July are a fraction of the British. Experience counts. The creeping barrage counts. Running instead of walking counts. Every lesson of 1914, of 1915, of Verdun, is written into the flesh of these men and these officers, and it saves lives.
Henri loses two men on 1 July. Two. Not ten, not twenty - two. A May reinforcement, hit by a splinter crossing no man's land. And the charcoal burner from Souillac, the one who learned to read with the owl's spectacles, killed by a bullet in the chest as he jumped into the third trench. Henri sees him fall. He does not stop. He cannot stop. He goes on, and the charcoal burner stays behind him, lying in the German trench, the round spectacles askew on his face, his eyes open on a sky he no longer sees.
On the evening of 1 July, Henri's platoon is dug in on the captured positions, four kilometres ahead of their starting lines. They dig, reverse the parapets, put out wire. Henri does the count. Thirty men at the start, twenty-eight in the evening. The shepherd is alive, a splinter in his helmet that has raised a lump on his forehead without piercing the steel - the Adrian helmet has saved Lacombe. Fayolle is alive, unhurt. Marcel is alive. Pélissié is alive. Lucien is alive.
The cat Verdun stayed behind, in the barn. Cats do not go over the top. It is one of the few forms of wisdom the war cannot corrupt.
The days that follow are a repeat of what Verdier knows by heart - the initial success that cannot be exploited. The French are advancing in the south, but the British are pinned down in the north, and the offensive cannot progress on one side alone. The front stabilises again. The Germans bring up reserves, dig new lines, install new machine guns. And the Battle of the Somme turns into what every battle of this war turns into - a siege, a pounding, a metre-by-metre nibbling.
Verdier, on the staff of the Sixth Army, lives through 1 July with a feeling he has never known - the satisfaction of a job well done. The creeping barrage worked. The French troops reached their objectives. The losses are heavy but in proportion to the gain. For the first time, Verdier feels that the French army knows how to make war. Not win the war - make war. Properly. Technically. With method.
Then the reports from the British sector come in, and the satisfaction turns to horror. Fifty-seven thousand casualties. In one day. Verdier reads the figures and stays motionless at his desk for a while, the report in his hands, unable to put it down. He thinks of the Yorkshire colonel, the one who spoke French, the one he told not to advance in lines. He will never know whether the colonel survived.
He writes in his notebook, on 2 July: 'Today the British paid for the lessons we paid for in 1914. They will pay for them again. War is learned in dead men, and there is no short cut.'
The battle goes on all through July. Attack after attack, day after day. The names of Picard villages become the names of battles - Fricourt, Mametz, La Boisselle, Thiepval, Pozières. Names nobody knew and nobody will forget. The British learn, fast, at the price of blood, and their tactics improve week by week. But the front moves slowly, metre by metre, wood by wood, farm by farm.
Henri is in the line for three weeks in July. Three weeks of continuous fighting, of local attacks, of German counter-attacks, of bombardments and sleepless nights. It is different from Verdun - less concentrated, less apocalyptic, but more wearing in another way, because the effort is constant, without respite, without the paroxysmal violence that at least has the merit of ending.
On 14 July - the national holiday, the irony of it - the regiment attacks a fortified wood whose name Henri will not remember. Not because he forgets it, but because the wood no longer has a name once you are inside it - it is a tangle of broken trunks, branches, churned earth, wire caught on the stumps, and in that chaos Germans firing from everywhere and nowhere.
The attack succeeds. The wood is taken. The price: five men from Henri's platoon. Five. One of them hurts.
Lucien Combes. The sixteen-year-old kid. The one who read Montaigne. The one who drew the cat. The one who learned to read in the barn in Picardy in December 1915 and had been devouring books ever since.
A mortar splinter, in the undergrowth, as the platoon was moving forward between the trees. The boy is hit in the stomach and the thigh. Henri is beside him in three seconds. There is blood everywhere, black on the horizon blue, and Lucien looks at him with eyes that have not yet understood. 'Sergeant,' he says. Henri presses a dressing on his stomach and shouts for the stretcher-bearers. The stretcher-bearers come. Lucien is carried away.
Henri will not know for three days that Lucien has survived. Three days of silence, three days of uncertainty, three days in which Henri does his job, holds his platoon together, commands his men, and carries in his chest a weight unlike any other - because Lucien is not only a soldier, Lucien is a pupil, and losing a pupil is losing the future, and losing the future is losing the reason for everything.
On the 17th, the news comes. Lucien is in hospital. Alive. The stomach is hit but not the organs. The thigh is fractured. He will not come back to the front. He will not walk as he used to. But he will live.
Henri receives the news standing in the communication trench, passed on by a runner, and he leans against the earth wall and closes his eyes. The shepherd is behind him. Lacombe asks nothing. He waits. Henri opens his eyes and says: 'Lucien's alive.'
The shepherd nods. Then he says, with that economy of speech which is his own: 'All the better. He draws well.'
In Lyon, Jeanne is living through a summer of work and heat. The Berliet works are an oven in July - the sheet-metal shops bake in the sun, and the women work in temperatures that climb to forty degrees, with the metal dust sticking to their sweat. The stools are there, but in July the wooden stools burn their thighs through their skirts. Rose, six months pregnant, is still working. Her belly under her overall, her feet swollen, her face streaming. She refuses to stop. 'If I stop, I lose my place. If I lose my place, I can't feed the kids.' Rose's arithmetic is relentless, and Jeanne can find nothing to say against it, because there is nothing to say against it.
Jeanne has had news of Paul - a card, the field post stamp, the signature. Alive on 8 July. Alive. The word is enough. Paul is still in the Argonne, far from the Somme, and Jeanne does not know whether to be relieved or worried, because the Argonne kills too, the Argonne eats men too, and being far from the great offensive protects you from nothing.
She writes to Henri without knowing he is on the Somme. She tells him about the factory, Rose, the heat. And at the end she adds a sentence that comes from far away, from a place in her she had never explored before the war: 'Sometimes I wonder what we'll be, afterwards. Not you and me - all of us. The women. We can't go back. We can't go back to being what we were. I've got a factory worker's hands and the head of a woman who can count, and nobody's taking them away from me.'
Henri receives this letter on 25 July, in a dugout on the Somme. He reads it and rereads it and puts it away with the others, in the breast pocket that no longer closes, it is so full.
On 31 July, the Battle of the Somme is a month old. The tally is as follows: the Allies have advanced three to eight kilometres depending on the sector, on a thirty-kilometre front. The combined losses of both sides exceed three hundred thousand men. The front is still there. The Germans are still there. The breakthrough has not happened.
Henri is relieved on 28 July. His platoon has lost nine men in a month. Nine out of thirty-two. Lucien among them, evacuated. The charcoal burner from Souillac among them, dead. And seven others whose names he will write in his notebook, one by one, with the date, because someone has to keep the names, and the sergeant is the one who keeps the names.
In the rest billet, the cat Verdun is waiting for them in the barn, lying on the shepherd's bunk, with the superior air of one who has not moved. The shepherd picks him up, settles him against his shoulder, and sits down. His thigh hurts. His forehead still bears the mark of the dented helmet. He is thirty-six and looks sixty.
Marcel sits down beside him. Fayolle sits down. Pélissié sits down. Henri stays standing for a moment in the barn doorway and watches evening fall over Picardy. The fields are golden, the wheat is high, and somewhere a peasant is bringing in the harvest, because the harvest does not wait, even when the world is at war.
He thinks of Louise. Of Lucien, who will live. Of the charcoal burner, who will read no more. Of Pélissié, who can now write his wife's name. Of the Montaigne in Lucien's haversack, somewhere in a hospital, stained with blood.
He goes into the barn and shuts the door.