September 1916
The Somme eats.
That is the word that comes to Henri when he tries to think what the battle has become - a mouth. An immense mouth, open in the earth of Picardy, swallowing men, regiments, divisions, and never satisfied. Three months of fighting, and the front has advanced eight kilometres at most, three at least. Eight kilometres. About the distance between Labastide-Murat and the Delpechs' hamlet. Henri has walked that distance a hundred times, in an hour, across the causse. Here, it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
The regiment is in the line in a sector south of Bapaume, a landscape that is no longer a landscape. The earth has been turned over so many times by the shells that it no longer has a surface - it is a grey, uniform porridge that you sink into up to the knees and sometimes up to the waist. The villages marked on the map no longer exist. In their place, heaps of crushed brick and splintered beams, identified on the map as 'ruins of' followed by a name. The woods are fields of stumps. The roads are tracks of mud. And the trenches are no longer trenches - they are holes joined by holes, an informal network of shell craters in which the men live, fight and die.
Henri holds his sector with what is left of his platoon - twenty-six men after the August reinforcements. The core is there. The shepherd, solid despite the thigh that throbs on rainy days, the cat in his haversack when he goes up the line, the ash stick propped against the wall of the hole. Fayolle, twenty-one, lean as a rake, his eyes older than his face. Marcel, who has stopped asking questions because he knows the answers and the answers are no use. Pélissié, who now writes ten-line letters to his wife and corrects his own mistakes with a doggedness Henri admires as a form of courage.
On 15 September, the British do something nobody has ever done.
In the Flers-Courcelette sector, at dawn, massive shapes come out of the mist and advance towards the German lines. Steel machines, on caterpillar tracks, with guns on their flanks, crushing the wire, crossing the trenches, and moving across no man's land with a terrifying slowness and an apparent invulnerability. The Germans fire at them. The bullets bounce off. The shells, when they hit, damage them but do not always destroy them. The machines advance.
The tanks. The French do not yet have a word for them - they call them 'land battleships' or simply 'the machines'. There are forty-nine of them, British Mark Is, primitive contraptions, slow, unreliable, stifling for their crews, which break down one time in two and bog down one time in three. But when they work, they change everything. For the first time, a machine can cross no man's land without being stopped by the wire and the machine guns. For the first time, the infantry has a shield.
Henri does not see any. His sector is too far south, too far from Flers. But the news arrives during the day, through the network of rumours that is faster than the telegraph. 'The English have got machines. Sort of iron boxes that roll along. They go through the wire. They go over the trenches. The Boches run away from them.'
Marcel listens, his eyes shining. 'Armoured machines on tracks. That's what we need, Sergeant. Not élan, not courage - steel.' Henri nods. He thinks of Verdier without knowing who Verdier is, he thinks of that officer somewhere on a staff who understood long ago that courage is not enough against machine guns, and that something else is needed, something mechanical, industrial, new.
Verdier learns the news in the evening. A report from the British sector, dry, factual, detailing the machines' performance - their speed, their armour, their breakdowns, their effect on enemy morale. Verdier reads the report twice. He goes out into the headquarters yard, he looks at the September sky, and he thinks: there it is. There is the solution. Not these forty-nine half-broken prototypes - but what they announce. The machine that can cross the killing zone. If enough are built, if they are improved, if they are used in mass and not by the handful, everything changes. The front can move. The trench can be beaten.
He writes in his notebook, on 15 September 1916: 'Saw the first report on the British tanks. It is rudimentary, but it is the principle that counts. For the first time in two years, I can see how this war can end.'
He does not write 'when'. He writes 'how'. The difference is that of a man who has stopped believing in calendars.
The Somme goes on. The tanks have not broken through - too few, too fragile, too badly used. But they have shown something, and that something is working in people's minds. The British will order thousands. The French will launch their own programme. The war is changing its nature, slowly, under the mud, like an underground river looking for a way out.
Henri does not think about tanks. Henri thinks about tomorrow. The platoon goes over the top on the 17th, against a fortified village - or what is left of it - that must be taken to widen the salient. It is a local attack, a modest one, one scratch of the claw on a front that bears thousands. But every scratch has its dead, and Henri prepares the attack with the meticulousness he brings to everything - the lines of advance, the support positions, the signals, the grenades.
The attack on the 17th succeeds. The village is taken in two hours. The platoon loses three men - two wounded, one killed. The dead man is an August reinforcement, a lad from Montauban whose name Henri has known for three weeks. Three weeks. That is how long it took between arrival and death, between 'Morning, Sergeant' and the hole in the ground.
Henri does not write in his notebook that evening. He is too tired. The tiredness of September 1916 is no longer that of August 1914, the tiredness of discovery. It is a geological tiredness, laid down layer by layer, month after month, and it now weighs with a weight that nothing lightens. Not leave, not Louise's letters, not the cat's purring. It is the tiredness of the soul, the kind that has no cure but the end, and the end is not in sight.
In Lyon, September is the month Rose gives birth.
It is on the 22nd, a Friday, at the Charité hospital. Jeanne is told by a neighbour as she comes out of the factory - 'Rose went in this morning.' Jeanne changes, takes the tram, gets to the hospital. They will not let her in. She waits in the corridor, sitting on a wooden bench, with other women waiting for other things - news of the wounded, consultations, births. All the pain in the world in one hospital corridor.
At eleven at night, a midwife comes out and says: 'Vigier?' Jeanne stands up. 'A girl. All's well.' Jeanne sits down and lets out her breath. Then she goes in.
Rose is in a bed, her face grey with tiredness, her hair stuck to her forehead, the baby in her arms. It is a little girl, red, wrinkled, with clenched fists and a mouth searching. Rose looks at Jeanne and says: 'Her name's Jeanne.'
Jeanne opens her mouth and shuts it again. Rose smiles - an exhausted smile, cracked, magnificent. 'You didn't think I was going to call her Bertrand, did you?'
Jeanne laughs. For the first time in months, a real laugh, the kind that comes up from the belly and shakes the shoulders, and the women in the corridor look up, surprised, because laughter in a hospital in September 1916 is a sound as rare as the nightingale in the trenches.
Little Jeanne sleeps against her mother. Big Jeanne sits on the edge of the bed and says nothing, because there is nothing to say when a child is born into a world at war. It is a challenge. It is an act of faith. It is a declaration of war on war itself - life against death, the newborn's cry against the noise of the guns.
Rose says: 'Bertrand knows. He gave me a hundred francs and he said he'd acknowledge the baby.' It is said without emotion, as a fact. Bertrand is not a hero. He is not a swine either. He is a man of 1916 doing what he can with what he is, and a hundred francs and an acknowledgement is what he can.
Jeanne walks home to Vaise, in the September night, and she walks along the quai de Saône, and the river is black and smooth, and the street lamps are reflected in the water, and Jeanne thinks of Paul, of the belly she did not have, of the child who bears her name, and the night is mild and the war is far away and the war is everywhere.
On 25 September, Henri has news of Lucien Combes.
A letter. Not from the hospital - from the Lot. Lucien is at Gourdon, at his parents' house, convalescing. The thigh is mending, slowly. He limps, he will always limp. He will not go back to the front. And he writes his sergeant a letter that is the most beautiful thing Henri has received since Louise's 'yes' on the postcard.
'Sergeant. I read. I read everything I can find. I've finished the Montaigne, I've read it three times. My mother says I've gone mad because I read from morning till night. My father doesn't say anything but he looks at me as if I was a stranger. I am a stranger. The war has made me a stranger in my own house. But the books, you're the one who gave them to me, and books are the only place I feel at home.
I'd like to be a schoolmaster. Like you. I don't know if it's possible for a lad like me, one leg short and one leaving certificate short. But I'd like to.
Your soldier, Lucien Combes.'
Henri reads the letter in the dugout, by candlelight, the cat Verdun on the shepherd's knees beside him. The shepherd watches Henri read and asks nothing. He sees the sergeant's face change - not a smile, not tears, something between the two, something that has no name.
Henri replies that same evening. He writes quickly, in pencil, in that trench handwriting which is no longer the schoolmaster's but still bears his mark - clear, legible, orderly.
'Dear Lucien. It's possible. The training college accepts candidates without the certificate if they pass the entrance examination. You've got the head for it. The leg doesn't count for teaching - you need the head, the heart and the voice, and you've got all three. Prepare for the examination. Write to me, I'll send you questions. And read Montaigne a fourth time. You never finish Montaigne.'
He folds the letter and gives it to the vaguemestre. Then he opens his notebook and writes: 'Lucien wants to be a schoolmaster. If this war has been good for anything, it is for that.'
The end of September. The Battle of the Somme is not over. It will not end until November, when the mud and the cold make any operation impossible. The provisional tally is already appalling - hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, for a territorial gain that would fit into a pocket handkerchief on the scale of the map.
But something has changed. Not on the ground - in people's heads. The tanks. The aeroplanes, more and more numerous, more and more effective. The creeping barrage. The flamethrowers. The specialised assault troops. The war is mutating, passing from the age of the trench to the age of the machine, and those who can see it - Verdier, a few British officers, a few engineers - know that the front will not last for ever. It will be broken. Not by courage, not by élan, not by masses of infantry thrown against the machine guns. By steel, speed and intelligence.
But it will take time. Time and dead men. Always dead men.
On 30 September, in the evening, Henri is on the fire step. Autumn is coming, the nights are drawing in, the light fades earlier over devastated Picardy. The shepherd is beside him, as always. The cat is somewhere in the communication trench, invisible. The shells are falling in the distance, a dull rumble, routine, almost reassuring in its regularity.
The shepherd says: 'Sergeant.'
Henri turns his head.
'Flòc is dead.'
Henri says nothing. He waits.
'My wife wrote. Pélissié read me the letter this morning. He died in August. He was old. Thirteen. That's old for a patou.'
The shepherd looks out at no man's land. His face shows nothing. His hands are still on the parapet. But Henri sees, in the fading light, something glisten on Lacombe's cheek, and he looks away, because there are things you do not look at, even between a sergeant and his man.
They stay on the fire step, side by side, in the silence. And Henri understands something he knew without knowing it - that the shepherd has been holding on for two years for a dog. Not only for a dog - for his wife, his daughter, his flock, his land. But the dog was the thread. The thread that tied Lacombe to Rocamadour, to the life before, to the man he was. And the thread has just snapped.
Henri puts his hand on the shepherd's shoulder. He leaves it there. Lacombe does not move. The cat comes out of nowhere, jumps onto the parapet, and lies down between them, and it is one animal replacing another animal, and it is derisory, and it is all there is.