November 1916
The Somme is dying.
Not all at once - slowly, the way everything dies in this war, through exhaustion. The November rains drown what was left of the battlefield. The ground is no longer ground, it is an ocean of mud in which the armies float without moving forward. The attacks stop, one by one, like candles being blown out. On 13 November the British take Beaumont-Hamel - a village they should have taken on 1 July, five months earlier, and whose capture has cost more men than most towns contain. It is the last act. The Battle of the Somme is officially over.
The tally. It has to be read slowly, because these are figures that can only be taken in one at a time. The Allies have lost six hundred and twenty thousand men - killed, wounded, missing. The Germans around four hundred and fifty thousand. More than a million men in all, for a gain of ten kilometres over a thirty-kilometre front. The front is still there. The Germans are still there. The war is still there.
Verdier reads the figures in a summary report, at headquarters, and he does what he always does - he files them. He puts the report in the 'Somme' file, next to the 'Artois', 'Champagne' and 'Verdun' files. The shelf sags. The files pile up. Every file is a paper cemetery.
But Verdier is not the same man he was in 1914. The methodical officer who wrote notes nobody read has changed. Not in his method - in the way he sees. He has seen the tanks. He has seen the creeping barrage work. He has seen the French army, on the Somme, fight the war properly for the first time - advancing behind its artillery instead of running ahead of it. And he has seen the British learn in five months what the French took two years to learn. The learning is happening. Too slowly, too dearly, but it is happening. And somewhere in that slowness, Verdier sees the shape of victory - not the victory of 1916, perhaps not that of 1917, but victory. The one that will come when there are enough tanks, when the artillery is accurate enough, when the armies know how to coordinate steel and flesh.
He writes to Madeleine on 20 November. Not a duty letter - a real letter. The first in months. He writes to her about the children, he asks how Pierre is getting on at school, whether Marguerite still loves dancing, whether the roof of the house in Chartres has been mended. Ordinary questions, a father's questions, clumsy, late, inadequate. But questions. Madeleine will reply - properly, as always, but with a detail she has never included before: Pierre reads the war communiqués every morning, standing in the kitchen, before he leaves for the lycée, and he marks the positions on a staff map he has pinned to his bedroom wall. Pierre is thirteen and he is fighting his father's war on the wall of a child's bedroom. Verdier reads that passage and sits motionless at his desk for a long time.
Henri gets his leave.
Four days, at the end of November. Second Lieutenant Castayrol leaves the Somme on a foggy morning and takes the train south. He wears the star on his sleeve and a question in his pocket, and the two weigh the same.
At Figeac the station is cold, the platform wet with rain. Louise is there. She sees the star before she sees the face. Her eyes drop to the sleeve, come back up to Henri, and she says: 'Second lieutenant?'
Henri says: 'Second lieutenant.'
Louise says: 'You could have said so in your letter.'
Henri says: 'I wanted you to see.'
She smiles. It is the smile Henri crosses the war to see - not a broad smile, not a smile of joy, a smile of recognition, the smile of someone who understands why the other has done what he has done.
They walk towards the haberdashery. The fine rain of the Quercy, the kind that does not really wet you but soaks into everything, wraps round them. Henri takes Louise's hand. They do not speak. They have no need to. The question is in Henri's pocket, and the answer is in Louise's letter, and each knows the other by heart.
In the evening, in the haberdashery kitchen, her mother in bed, Henri says: 'I'd like us to marry at Christmas. If I can get leave.'
Louise says: 'Your mother?'
'I'll write to her.'
'And mine?'
'I'll ask her tomorrow.'
Louise looks at him. 'You're afraid of my mother.'
Henri says: 'I've taken a blockhouse with grenades. Your mother's more frightening.'
Louise laughs. Henri laughs. It is a kitchen laugh, an end-of-the-evening laugh, a walnut-wine laugh, the laugh of two people who love each other and are getting married and do not know what tomorrow will bring and do not care, tonight, in this kitchen, with the rain on the shutters and the fire in the stove.
The next day, Henri asks Louise's mother for her daughter's hand.
It is a ritual from another age, a formality the war could have swept away and has not, because forms last longer than walls. Henri sits down facing the mother, in the closed shop, between the reels and the buttons, and he says what he has to say - that he loves Louise, that he wants to marry her, that he is a second lieutenant with decent pay, that he intends to go back to teaching after the war, that he will ask for a post in Figeac.
The mother listens. She listens the way she listens to everything - showing nothing, hands on her knees, back straight. Then she says: 'You're a schoolmaster.'
'Yes, madame.'
'Do you drink?'
'No, madame. Wine, in moderation.'
'Are you a believer?'
'No, madame.'
The mother nods. In her eyes, having no religion is not a fault - it is proof that he is honest, because a man who lies about his faith to please a mother-in-law is not a man to be relied on.
'Louise is all I have,' says the mother. It is not an objection. It is a fact, set down on the table like an entry in a ledger.
Henri says: 'I know.'
'Then take care of her.'
That is all. No speech, no emotion, no tears. A contract. Louise's mother is a woman who was abandoned by one man and is giving her daughter to another, and the only guarantee she asks for is the one no paper can give - care. Henri promises it. He does not know whether he will be able to keep that promise. He makes it anyway, because the promises you cannot guarantee are the only ones worth making.
On the third day, Henri and Louise go to the town hall in Figeac. The banns will be published. The wedding is set for 24 December, if Henri gets leave. If. The word of the war. Everything has been if, for two years. If I survive. If the sector is quiet. If the major agrees. If the train runs. If, if, if. A whole life hanging on a word of two letters.
Henri goes back to the front on 28 November. The train, the roads, the lorries, the communication trench, the trench. The mud of the Somme drying slowly in the cold of late November. The shepherd, who welcomes him with the cat, the wood fire in the dugout, and a silence which this time is a good silence - the silence of someone who has been waiting for someone to come back and sees him come back.
'All right, Lieutenant?' says the shepherd.
Henri looks at him. Lacombe has said 'Lieutenant', not 'Sergeant'. It is the first time he has used the new rank. It is his way of accepting it.
'All right,' says Henri. 'I'm getting married at Christmas.'
The shepherd nods. Then he says: 'You'll need a witness.'
Henri had not thought of it. A witness. A wedding needs witnesses, and his own are in a trench on the Somme, not in a town hall in the Lot. He looks at Lacombe. Lacombe looks at him.
'It's not me you want,' says the shepherd. 'I'm not fit to be seen.'
Marcel, who has been listening from his corner, looks up from his box of type. 'Nor me. But if you want an anarchist compositor as your witness, I'm available.'
Fayolle says: 'And me, am I too young?'
Pélissié says nothing, but he looks at Henri with his peasant's eyes, and in those eyes there is something like the pride of being counted, even without a word said.
Henri thinks. The witness will have to be in Figeac on 24 December. That means leave, a seat on a train, a thousand-kilometre journey there and back. It is almost impossible. But almost, in 1916, is the only word worth having.
'Émile,' says Henri. Louise's brother. Émile Soulié, the schoolmaster at Capdenac, the one who started it all by talking to his sister about Henri. Émile has been invalided out since March - a knee wound in Champagne that makes him limp. He is at Capdenac. He will be the witness.
And for the second witness, Henri will write to Jeanne. His sister. The one who holds the biscuit tins and the factories and the accounts and the invisible threads of the world.
In Lyon, Jeanne receives the letter on 2 December.
'Dear Jeanne. I'm getting married. On 24 December, at Figeac. Louise - you know. I'd like you to be my witness. If you can come, come. If you can't, I'll understand. But I'd like you to be there.'
Jeanne reads the letter in the kitchen at Vaise, in the evening, when she gets home from the factory. She reads it again. Her brother is getting married. Her brother, the schoolmaster, the soldier, the second lieutenant, the one who writes her letters about beans and cats and never about the war, the one she has not seen since the summer of 1914, the one whose letters she keeps in a biscuit tin that no longer shuts - her brother is getting married.
She puts the letter down on the table. She looks out of the window. Evening is falling on Vaise, the street lamps come on one by one along the rue de la Claire, and Jeanne thinks of the little boy from Cahors who read Jaurès aloud to her in his student room, a hundred years ago, in another world.
She will go. She does not know how - the factory, the journey, the days off she does not have. But she will go. Because you do not miss your brother's wedding, even in wartime. Especially in wartime.
She asks the shop foreman for two days. The foreman says no. Jeanne goes to see the deputy manager. The deputy manager says no. Jeanne puts down on the deputy manager's desk the production figures for Shop C since her appointment - twelve per cent up, error rate down, not one day lost. The deputy manager looks at the figures. He says: 'Two days.'
Jeanne comes out of the office and does not smile. But her shoulders are straight, and her step is firm, and she now knows something Rose taught her without meaning to: figures are a weapon, and weapons are for opening doors.
On 30 November, in the trench on the Somme, Henri writes out his application for leave. It is a form, an administrative paper, a military request. 'Second Lieutenant Castayrol, Henri, requests special leave of four days from 22 December 1916, on the grounds of marriage.' He fills in the form in his schoolmaster's hand, neat and legible, and passes it to the battalion commander.
The commander reads the application, looks up and says: 'You're getting married, Castayrol?'
'Yes, Major.'
'At Christmas?'
'Yes, Major.'
The commander signs. There are things a commander does not refuse, even in wartime, even in the middle of the Somme, even when every man counts and leave is scarce. A man who is getting married is a man who believes in the future, and a man who believes in the future is a man who holds on.
'Congratulations, Castayrol. Bring back some cake.'
Henri salutes and goes out. He has the leave in his hand. Four days. Christmas. Figeac. Louise.
The shepherd sees him come back into the dugout and reads the answer on his face. Lacombe says: 'All right?'
Henri says: 'All right.'
The shepherd takes the little wooden dog out of his pocket and puts it in Henri's travelling haversack. 'Wedding present,' he says. Then he falls silent, and the cat purrs, and the candle smokes, and the Somme is over, and something is beginning.