January 1917
The third winter is the winter of hunger.
Not famine - not yet, not in France. But something has tightened in the country, a slow, gradual strangling that touches everyone. Prices have been rising for two years and they do not come down again. Bread that cost forty centimes a kilo in 1914 now costs sixty-five. Sugar has doubled. Coal is rationed in the towns. The queues grow longer outside the bakers', outside the grocers', outside the coal yards, and the women standing in them - always the women - grit their teeth and count the coins in their purses.
At the front, hunger is of another order. The food arrives, it always arrives, the army's supply system works with a regularity Verdier would admire if he had time to think about it. But the quality is falling. The bully beef is fattier, more stringy. The bread is darker, heavier, cut with maize or rye flour. The plonk is sourer. And the quantities, while not insufficient, are no longer enough for bodies worn out by thirty months of war, cold, mud and strain.
Henri watches his men grow thin. Not all at once - continuously, like erosion. Faces hollow, uniforms hang loose. The shepherd, who was massive, is now merely solid. Fayolle, who was lean, has become thin. Marcel, who has never been stout, seems translucent at times, when the candlelight catches his face from below and brings out the bones. Only Pélissié holds out - his peasant's body, fed for twenty-four years on cheese and soup, has reserves that town bodies do not.
Henri writes to Louise at the beginning of January: 'Send confit if you can. And cheese. And sausage. Anything that comes from the Lot and tastes of something. Here the food tastes of the war - that is to say, of nothing.'
Louise sends a parcel. Confit, ewe's-milk cheese, walnuts, a jar of plum jam. Louise's mother - Henri's mother-in-law now, a word that makes him smile every time he thinks of it - has added a dry sausage, a real one, the kind they make on the farms of the causse from pigs fattened on chestnuts. The parcel takes twelve days. When it arrives, on 20 January, Henri shares it with the section, and the men eat confit of duck in a trench on the Somme with the eyes of shipwrecked men setting foot on dry land.
Joffre has gone.
It is the news from the end of December, announced while Henri was getting married, and it shakes the army without anyone showing it. Joffre, the commander-in-chief, the victor of the Marne, the father of the offensives, the stout, placid man of Chantilly, has been replaced. Promoted Marshal of France - an honorific title, a first-class funeral - and set aside. In his place, Nivelle. Robert Nivelle, the hero of Verdun, the man who took back Douaumont, the brilliant gunner who speaks English and charms the politicians.
Nivelle has a plan. Nivelle always has a plan. And this plan is simple, seductive and catastrophic: a massive offensive on the Chemin des Dames, in Picardy, which will break through the German front in forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours. Nivelle says it, repeats it, promises it. He says it to President Poincaré, he says it to the premier, Briand, he says it to the British, he says it to anyone who will listen. The breakthrough in forty-eight hours. The end of trench warfare. Victory.
Verdier learns of Nivelle's appointment and of the plan that comes with it in the first days of January. He is transferred once again - this time to the staff of the Reserve Army Group, the one that will be committed to Nivelle's offensive. It is an important post, a post of trust, and Verdier accepts it with the resignation of a man who knows that his competence will be put to the service of a plan he believes to be bad.
He studies the plan. The Chemin des Dames - that ridge between the Aisne and the Ailette which Henri knows, which Henri held for months in 1914 and 1915. The Germans have been dug in there for two years. They have excavated, concreted, fortified. The cellars of the ruined villages have become underground barracks. The stone quarries, the 'creutes', are natural fortresses that nothing can destroy. Verdier looks at the aerial photographs and sees what Nivelle refuses to see - a position that cannot be taken, or can be taken only at the price of a massacre that will make the earlier offensives look modest by comparison.
He drafts a note. He always drafts notes. This one is the harshest he has ever written - ten pages that take the plan apart point by point, with figures, maps, fire calculations. The conclusion admits of no appeal: 'The offensive as conceived cannot succeed in forty-eight hours. It probably cannot succeed at all, unless we accept losses exceeding those of the Somme and Verdun combined.'
The note goes up. It is read. It is rejected. Nivelle has the government's confidence, and a government that has confidence in a general does not read notes that say otherwise.
Verdier files the reply and does his job.
In Lyon, January brings the cold and a fight.
The Berliet works have cut the heating. Coal economies - coal is rationed, war industry has priority, but inspection shops are not a priority within war industry, and the women work in a cold that numbs the fingers and slows the movements. Jeanne sees the inspection errors rising - defective parts getting through because hands are too cold to feel the burrs, eyes too tired to see the cracks.
She writes a report. It is the first time Jeanne has written a report - a real report, with figures and arguments, like the ones Henri writes for the major and Verdier writes for the staff. She works out the error rate for November, for December, for January. The curve is rising. She works out the cost of the defective parts sent back by the assembly shops. The figure is significant. She puts the report on the desk of the deputy manager, the one who gave her two days for the wedding. The deputy manager reads the report and says: 'You're right.'
The heating is restored the following week. Not to the level it was before - to a level that is enough. Fingers work. Errors fall. Jeanne does not crow. She notes the result and moves on to the next problem.
Rose, who is still nursing little Jeanne while working ten hours a day, says: 'You've turned into an efficient pain in the backside, Jeanne.' Jeanne answers: 'My brother taught me. He says figures are a weapon.' Rose says: 'Your brother's a good sort.' Jeanne says: 'He's a schoolmaster.'
At the front, January is the month the Germans do something nobody had foreseen.
They pull back.
Not under Allied pressure - on their own initiative. Falkenhayn has gone, replaced by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the pair who now command the German army. And Hindenburg has decided to shorten the front. Instead of holding the Somme salient, which is costly in men and material, the Germans are secretly building a new fortified line twenty kilometres behind it - the Hindenburg Line, a masterpiece of military engineering, with deep trenches, reinforced-concrete blockhouses, belts of barbed wire fifty metres wide, and zones of systematic destruction in front of it.
In January the first signs appear. French patrols find abandoned German trenches, evacuated villages, booby-trapped roads. Verdier reads the reports and understands at once what is happening. The Germans are withdrawing to a stronger, shorter, more economical position. They are freeing divisions for other fronts. They are turning the ground they leave into a desert - trees felled, wells poisoned, roads mined, houses booby-trapped. Scorched earth. Methodical, merciless, efficient.
And Nivelle's plan, designed to attack positions the Germans have held for two years, is going to strike thin air - or worse, a new line whose defences nobody knows.
Verdier drafts an urgent note. 'The German withdrawal fundamentally alters the conditions of the planned offensive. The positions targeted by the original plan will be abandoned. The attack will fall on the Hindenburg Line, of whose exact trace and fortifications we are ignorant.' The note is passed on. Nivelle reads it. Nivelle changes nothing. The plan is the plan. The offensive will take place in the spring. On the Chemin des Dames.
Henri knows nothing of Nivelle, or of the Hindenburg Line, or of strategic manoeuvres. He knows that the cold has come, that the mud is frozen, that his men are hungry and cold and sleepy, and that the sector is quiet, with a quiet that looks like boredom and is in fact the warrior's rest - that dead time between two storms which soldiers use to sleep, write, dream and survive.
He writes to Louise every three days. The letters of Henri married are different from the letters of Henri engaged - shorter, more direct, more tender too, with a tenderness that no longer needs to justify itself. He writes 'my wife' with a quiet pride that shows through the ink. He writes about the men, the cat, the paper. Marcel is preparing a special number of Le Poilu du Causse, the fifteenth, which will carry an article by Pélissié - eight lines this time, on trimming the ewes' hooves in January, a text Marcel sets with the solemnity of a compositor who knows that every word of it has been wrested from illiteracy by one man's will and one schoolmaster's patience.
The shepherd is better. Not well - better. The puppy Nòu is growing up on the causse, and the letters from Lacombe's wife, dictated to a neighbour who can write, come more regularly now, with news of the flock, the farm, the little girl. The shepherd listens to them - he cannot read them, Henri reads them to him, and it is a strangely intimate moment, the schoolmaster reading aloud the shepherd's wife's letter, in the dugout, by candlelight, with the cat purring. Lacombe listens in silence, his eyes closed, and Henri sees his lips move sometimes, as if he were answering inside.
Henri has offered to teach Lacombe to read. The shepherd has refused. Not the way Pélissié refused the first time - with that hesitation that was a yes in disguise. No - a real refusal, curt, final. Lacombe does not want to read. Lacombe does not want his wife's letters to pass through his own eyes. He wants them to pass through Henri's voice, because Henri's voice has become the channel, the bridge, the rope that ties him to the world, and changing the channel would be betraying something he cannot name.
Henri does not quite understand. But he accepts. It is one of the lessons of the war - you do not need to understand in order to accept, and you do not need to accept in order to respect.
On 31 January, a distant event, an event that makes no noise in the trenches but will change everything.
Germany announces unrestricted submarine warfare. From 1 February, every ship, neutral or belligerent, sailing in the waters around Great Britain and France will be sunk without warning. The German submarines - the U-boats - have been ordered to fire on anything that floats. It is a colossal gamble. Germany knows that this decision will probably push the United States into the war - the Americans will not tolerate their ships being sunk. But the German high command calculates that the submarines will starve Britain out in six months, before the Americans can intervene.
It is a bad calculation. The worst of the war, perhaps. Because the United States will enter the war, and their entry will change the balance of the world.
Henri knows nothing of it. Verdier knows a little more, through the diplomatic reports that filter down to the staffs. He notes in his notebook on 31 January: 'The Germans have just made a major strategic error. They are going to bring the Americans into the war. And the Americans have men, steel, oil and money. A great deal of all of it. Too much for Germany.'
Then he adds, underneath, in a smaller hand: 'But the Americans will not be ready for a year. Eighteen months, perhaps. We must hold until then. And Nivelle wants to attack in the spring.'
He closes the notebook. Outside, the January cold bites into the soil of France, and the war enters its third year with the slowness of a river that does not know how to stop.
On the evening of the 31st, Henri is in the dugout. The cat is asleep. The shepherd is asleep. The men are asleep. Henri alone is awake, the ring on his finger, the notebook open. He does not write. He thinks of Louise, in the room above the haberdashery, in Figeac, between sheets that smell of lavender. He thinks of Jeanne, in the kitchen at Vaise, her hands on the table, the figures in her head. He thinks of Lucien Combes, at Gourdon, preparing for the training-college examination with a bloodstained Montaigne and a leg that no longer bends.
He touches the ring. Three grams. The weight of the world.
And the world holds, because people hold, everywhere, in kitchens and trenches and factories and haberdasheries, without knowing one another, without seeing one another, tied together by threads that nobody sees and nobody cuts.