October 1916
The shepherd no longer speaks.
It is different from the silence of before. The silence of before was chosen - Lacombe spoke little because he had no need to speak, because his gestures said what his words did not, because silence was as much his mother tongue as Occitan. This silence is something else. It is a wall. Lacombe stands his watches, eats his soup, cleans his rifle, strokes the cat. But he is no longer there. He is behind the wall, in a place where nobody can go and fetch him, and Henri watches him drift away day after day with the helplessness of a man watching someone drown in calm water.
He tries. Not with words - words are no use with Lacombe, they never have been. He tries with gestures. He puts the shepherd next to him on the fire step, always. He gives him the fatigues he knows Lacombe does well - repairs, shoring up, work with the hands. He makes sure the cat is there, always there, that warm, purring presence which is perhaps the only bridge between Lacombe and the world.
Fayolle sees it too. One evening, in the dugout, he sits down beside the shepherd and says: 'Lacombe, do you want me to tell you a joke?' The shepherd does not answer. Fayolle tells the joke anyway - a story about a priest and a hen that everyone knows and nobody finds funny. The shepherd does not laugh. But he turns his head towards Fayolle, for a second, and in his eyes there is something that is not quite dead. Fayolle tells a second joke. Then a third. He will tell one every evening for the whole of October, with the quiet stubbornness of a man who has decided not to let go.
Marcel takes another approach. He brings Lacombe things. Small things - an interesting bit of wood, an empty cartridge case with a strange shape, a German greatcoat button engraved with an eagle. Objects of no value, no use, but objects to touch, to turn over in the hands, anchors in the real. The shepherd takes them, looks at them, puts them in his pocket. He does not say thank you. But he keeps them.
Henri writes in his notebook, on 8 October: 'Lacombe is sinking. The men are holding him up. Not me - them. Fayolle and his jokes. Marcel and his pebbles. Pélissié, who sits down beside him without a word, the way you sit beside a wounded animal. The section is doing what I cannot do. The section is cleverer than the sergeant.'
The Somme is wearing itself out.
The October rains turn the battlefield into a swamp. The mud of the Somme passes into legend - a mud thicker, deeper, deadlier than anything the war has produced so far. Men sink into it up to the waist. The wounded drown in it. Mules are swallowed up with their loads. The guns get bogged down and can no longer fire. The war itself gets stuck, in the literal sense of the word, and the assaults become ordeals in which it takes an hour to cover two hundred metres, not because of the enemy but because of the earth.
Henri leads an assault on 12 October. It is a company attack, four platoons, against a line of fortified shell holes the Germans are holding five hundred metres away. The objective is modest - two hundred metres of mud to be gained. The price is immodest - the company loses twenty-eight men in three hours, for a gain the next shell will wipe out.
Henri comes back from that assault covered in mud from head to foot, unrecognisable, with that expression in his eyes that front-line men recognise without needing it named. He has lost nobody from his core - the shepherd, Fayolle, Marcel, Pélissié are alive. But he has lost two August reinforcements, men he was beginning to know, beginning to bring in, beginning to protect. Two more for the notebook. Two names, two dates.
The battalion commander sends for him in the evening. Henri expects an order, a mission, a fatigue. The commander looks at him and says: 'Castayrol, you're being put forward for second lieutenant.'
Henri says nothing for five seconds. Second lieutenant. An officer. The boy from Cahors, the son of the post-office clerk who died of tuberculosis, the schoolmaster of Labastide-Murat, an officer. In the army of the Republic, in 1916, it is possible. It is even common - the war has killed so many regular officers that the army promotes capable NCOs, men from the ranks who know how to command, who have proved themselves, who have the respect of their men. Henri has all that.
'I accept,' says Henri. Then he adds: 'On condition that I keep my platoon.'
The commander raises an eyebrow. Ordinarily, a new second lieutenant takes command of a platoon in another company, even another battalion. That is the rule - you do not command men you have served alongside as a soldier, because familiarity erodes authority. But Henri is not ordinary, and the commander knows it.
'I'll see what I can do,' says the commander.
He does what he can. Henri will keep his platoon.
The promotion takes effect on 20 October. Henri sews the gold star on his sleeve, a single star, the second lieutenant's, the lowest rank among the officers and the most exposed of the war. Second lieutenants die more than the others, statistically, because they are at the head of their men and they wear insignia the enemy snipers can pick out.
Marcel is the first to salute. An ironic, theatrical salute that makes the whole platoon laugh. 'Second Lieutenant.' Henri corrects him without smiling: 'Lieutenant.' Marcel smiles: 'The difference is lost on me.' The shepherd says nothing. But in the evening he puts down in front of Henri something he has carved during the day - a little wooden dog, a patou, whittled with a knife from a piece of ash. The paws, the muzzle, the tail. Flòc. It is the first gesture Lacombe has made since the dog died, and Henri understands that it is not a present - it is a farewell. Lacombe is giving Flòc to Henri because he can no longer carry him himself. The weight is too heavy.
Henri puts the wooden dog in his breast pocket, with the letters, the notebook, his mother's note. His pocket is a world.
In Lyon, October brings the autumn and a change.
Jeanne is appointed head inspector of Shop C. It is a title that did not exist six months earlier - it was created by the Berliet management to give the most experienced women an official responsibility, without giving them the title of foreman, because foreman is a man's title, and words are fortresses harder to take than trenches.
Head inspector. Jeanne now supervises twenty-two women. She checks the parts the others have checked. She passes the batches. She signs the dispatch notes. She has a stamp - a rubber stamp with her name on it, 'J. Vauterin', which she presses onto the papers with a blue ink that stains her fingers. A stamp. It is paltry and it is immense. A stamp with her name on it means she exists in the machine, that she is no longer interchangeable, that she has a function and a signature.
Rose, back at the factory for two weeks now - little Jeanne left with a neighbour for two francs a day - watches her stamp her first dispatch notes and says: 'You're the boss now.' Jeanne says: 'I'm the one in charge.' The nuance is the same as Henri's - second lieutenant, not lieutenant. Head inspector, not foreman. The nuances say everything.
Her pay goes up to five francs. Five francs a day. It is less than the six francs of the man she has replaced, but it is more than any woman worker in Lyon earns, and Jeanne knows it, and she knows too that the gap of one franc is the next fight, and that the fight will come.
She writes to Paul: 'They've given me a post. I'm head inspector. I've got a stamp.' The sentence about the stamp makes her smile as she writes it, and she imagines Paul smiling as he reads it, and that imagined smile across four hundred kilometres of war is a line as solid as the field telephone.
Paul replies, a fortnight later: 'Well done on the stamp. When I get home, you can stamp me too.' Jeanne laughs out loud, alone in her kitchen. The Paul of before is there, in that sentence. Damaged, but there.
The war spreads further.
In Romania, disaster. Romania came into the war in August, on the Allied side, lured by the promise of Transylvania. It was a trap. The German and Bulgarian armies converged on Romania with deadly efficiency, and in October Bucharest is under threat. Romania will fall in December. One more ally swallowed up, one more front opened, more resources to be supplied.
At Verdun, France takes it back. Nivelle has prepared his counter-offensive with care - the artillery is massive, the troops are fresh, and on 24 October the French retake Fort Douaumont. The fort that fell in February, almost without a fight, is retaken in a few hours, by a masterfully prepared assault. The symbol is powerful. Douaumont is won back. Verdun holds.
Verdier learns the news with professional relief. He writes in his notebook: 'Douaumont retaken. Eight months to recover what should never have been lost. But the country's morale needed it. Sometimes the symbol is worth more than the position.'
It is the first time Verdier has written such a thing - he, the man of figures, the man of calculations, acknowledging that war is not won only with guns. It is won with names too. Verdun, Douaumont - names that ring like flags. France needed Douaumont not for its strategic value, which is modest, but for its moral value, which is immense.
On 25 October, Henri writes to Louise.
He does not tell her he is a second lieutenant. Not yet. He wants to tell her some other way than by letter. He wants to tell her in person, the next time he sees her, in Figeac, on the station platform, showing her the star on his sleeve. It is vanity, a feeling so out of place in a trench that Henri smiles to himself at it.
What he writes to her is something else. A question.
'Dear Louise. I know we said we would marry after the war. But the war doesn't end. And I wonder whether we oughtn't to marry during it. Not for the gesture - for the fact. Because I want you to be my wife in the eyes of the law, not only in my letters. Because if anything happens to me, I want you to have rights, a name, a pension - not only memories. It isn't romantic, I know. It's practical. But the practical and love aren't enemies, and you know that better than I do.
Tell me what you think.'
The letter takes ten days. Louise receives it on 4 November, at the haberdashery, between two customers. She reads it standing behind the counter, with the reels of thread behind her and the buttons in the drawers and her mother sitting on her stool at the other end of the shop.
She does not reply that evening. She thinks about it all night, in her bed, her eyes on the ceiling. Marrying during the war. Marrying a man she has seen for six days in two years. Marrying a soldier who may die tomorrow. It is mad. It is reasonable. It is exactly what Henri wrote - practical and love at the same time. And Louise is a schoolmistress, a woman who knows that feelings without acts are words, and acts without feelings are emptiness, and that the two together are the only solid thing.
She replies the next day: 'Yes. Yes again. Always yes. But this time I want to tell you in person. Ask for leave.'
On 31 October, the shepherd speaks.
It is evening. The dugout. The candle. The cat on Lacombe's knees. Fayolle has just told his joke of the day - the thirty-first, he numbers them now, and they are getting worse and worse, which is probably the point. Marcel is sorting his lead type in the cigar box, an absent-minded gesture that is his meditation. Pélissié is asleep, his face on his arm, his slate beside him with an unfinished sentence on it.
The shepherd strokes the cat. And he speaks.
'My wife's sent me a puppy.'
Henri turns his head. Everyone turns their head.
'Not the puppy. A photo. A patou puppy. He's called Nòu. It means new.'
Lacombe takes a photograph out of his pocket, small, grey, blurred. You can see a white shape, barely distinct, in a farmyard. It could be anything. It is a puppy.
He passes the photograph round. The men look at it, one by one, with the seriousness you bring to looking at family photographs - because it is a family photograph, because Lacombe's dog is his family as much as his wife and daughter, and nobody in this section finds that strange.
The shepherd takes the photograph back, puts it in his pocket, and says: 'He looks fine.'
Three words. Then he falls silent. But the wall has moved. The wall has not come down, perhaps it will never come down completely, but it has moved, and Henri looks at Fayolle and Marcel and sees in their eyes the same relief he feels - the shepherd is still there. On the other side of the wall, but still there.
Henri takes out the little wooden dog.
He slides it across to Lacombe.
The shepherd looks down. Then he picks it up and puts it in his pocket, next to the photograph.
The cat purrs. The candle smokes. Outside, the October rain falls on the Somme, and the front does not move, and men die, and a patou puppy grows on a farm on the Causse de Gramat, and the world holds because invisible threads hold it - a puppy, a cat, a joke, a stamp, a yes.