February 1917
The Germans are pulling back.
Henri discovers it on 4 February, on a routine patrol. His platoon is moving forward into no man's land, at night, as always, crawling between the shell holes towards the German wire to check the defences. But something is wrong. No flares. No firing. The silence - not the tense silence of an enemy lying in wait, but the empty silence of an enemy who is no longer there.
Henri sends Pélissié ahead to scout. Pélissié crawls off, vanishes into the dark, comes back twenty minutes later. 'There's nobody there, Lieutenant. The trench is empty.'
Henri moves forward with the whole platoon. They enter the German trench. Empty. The dugouts have been cleared out, the bunks taken down, the stoves carried off. There is litter left behind - tins, German newspapers, a broken pair of spectacles, a diary Henri picks up and cannot read. And traps. Marcel all but sets his foot on a wire stretched across the communication trench - a wire connected to an explosive charge that would have killed the whole section. Henri sees the wire a second before Marcel, grabs his arm, and says 'Stop' in a voice he does not recognise as his own, a toneless voice, pure, that stops Marcel dead.
The shepherd, behind, has seen it too. He crouches, examines the trap, and disarms it with the slow, precise movements of a shepherd undoing a knot in a fleece. He says: 'There'll be more.' He is right. Every step forward is a step into ground that is mined, booby-trapped, poisoned. The Germans have not pulled back out of weakness. They have pulled back by method, leaving a deadly desert behind them.
The German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line speeds up in February. Along a front of a hundred kilometres, between Arras and Soissons, the Germans abandon the Somme salient and fall back in good order to their new fortified line. It is a masterly operation, carried out with a discipline Verdier cannot help admiring, in spite of everything. The Germans destroy everything they cannot take with them. The villages are dynamited systematically - not one after another, but all at once, in coordinated explosions that shake the ground for kilometres. The orchards are cut down. The roads are broken by mine craters. The bridges are blown. The wells are poisoned with arsenic or cyanide.
Henri advances through this landscape of desolation with a new horror - not the horror of combat, which he knows, but the horror of destruction that is gratuitous, methodical, calculated. A village of which nothing remains but the cellars, and in the cellars charges waiting for the step of a French soldier. An apple orchard sawn off at the base, the trees lying like corpses, and between the trunks wires stretched taut, leading to buried shells. A church of which nothing remains but the bell tower, standing in the middle of nothing, like a finger pointing at an absent God.
Marcel looks at this landscape and says, for the first time without irony, without distance: 'That's hatred.' Henri does not correct him. It is not hatred - it is strategy. But the strategy that produces this looks like hatred's twin.
The shepherd walks through the ruined village, looking around him with the eyes of a man who knows the land. He sees the wells blocked, the ditches filled in, the tracks mined. He says: 'It'll take years to put that right.' He is right. Mutilated earth does not heal in a season. Felled orchards do not grow back in a year. Poisoned wells do not run clean in a month. The Germans have not only destroyed a landscape. They have destroyed a future.
Verdier follows the withdrawal with feverish attention. Every day the reports bring him new information on the Hindenburg Line - its trace, its defences, its depth. It is worse than he imagined. The line is a system of fortification in depth, not a single trench but a network of three, four, five successive lines, joined by concreted communication trenches, protected by belts of wire fifty metres wide, covered by reinforced-concrete blockhouses with machine guns firing in enfilade. The Germans have taken six months to build it, with prisoners of war and civilian labourers, and the result is the most powerful defensive position the war has ever produced.
And Nivelle wants to attack the Chemin des Dames, which is not the Hindenburg Line but is its natural extension, a ridge fortified for two years, with the same cellars, the same creutes, the same defences in depth.
Verdier drafts another note. It is the third. Each note is more urgent than the last. 'The German withdrawal shows that the enemy has chosen the defensive on the Western Front. He will concentrate his forces on prepared positions and await our attacks. In these conditions, a frontal offensive on the Chemin des Dames can succeed only at the price of losses out of all proportion to the ground gained.'
The note is read. The note is filed. Nivelle changes nothing. The plan is the plan.
Verdier begins talking to the other staff officers, discreetly, in corridors, in the mess, during breaks. He is not the only one with doubts. General Micheler, who commands the Reserve Army Group and is Verdier's superior, has doubts too. General de Castelnau has doubts. Several corps commanders have doubts. The unease rises through the hierarchy like damp through a cracked wall. But Nivelle has the government behind him, and a government that has promised the country victory cannot back down without losing face.
In Russia, the world tips over.
The first news arrives at the end of February - confused, fragmentary, unbelievable. Riots in Petrograd. Strikes. Soldiers refusing to fire on the crowd. The Tsar tottering. The news crosses Europe like a shock wave and reaches the trenches through newspapers and rumour. Henri reads a terse communiqué in a paper from the rear, dated 28 February: 'Serious disturbances are reported in Petrograd.'
Russia. The ally. Immense Russia, with her millions of soldiers, who has held the Eastern Front since 1914 and forces Germany to fight on two fronts. If Russia falls, if Russia gives way, Germany will bring everything to the west, and the figures Verdier has been calculating for three years will become a nightmare.
Henri does not think in strategic terms. Henri thinks in simple terms: if the Russians stop fighting, the Germans will have more men, more guns, more of everything, and the chances of getting back to Figeac will shrink. It is a selfish calculation and it is a vital one.
Marcel thinks differently. Marcel is a man of the left, a reader of Jaurès, a man who believes in the International. The news from Russia troubles him and excites him at the same time. 'If the Russian workers are rising, it means the war can be stopped by the people. From below, not from above. That's what Jaurès said.'
Henri looks at Marcel. 'Jaurès is dead, Marcel.'
'What he said isn't.'
Henri does not answer. He has no opinion on the Russian revolution. He has an opinion on survival, and survival says that the winter is cold, that the Germans are pulling back to stronger positions, and that the spring will bring an offensive nobody wants to talk about but everybody can feel coming.
In Lyon, February is the month of cold and anger.
There is no coal. Not only at the factory - everywhere. The flats in Vaise are frozen, the stoves are turned right down, the women sleep in their coats. Jeanne puts two blankets on her bed and gets up every morning in a kitchen where the water in the jug has frozen. She thinks of Paul, who is in a trench where it is colder still, and the thought does not warm her but it puts things in proportion.
Rose is back at the factory full time. Little Jeanne is four months old and is looked after by a neighbour, an old woman who charges three francs a day - almost a day of Rose's wages. The arithmetic is cruel: Rose works ten hours for five francs, hands over three for minding the baby, and has two francs left to feed three children and herself. Two francs. The price of two kilos of bread. It is not enough, and it is all she has.
Jeanne does Rose's accounts one Sunday evening, at the kitchen table in Vaise, with the pencil and paper she uses for the dispatch notes at the factory. The figures do not lie. Rose cannot live. Not on these wages, not with this rent, not with three children. Something has to change.
Jeanne goes to the union. It is the third time. She knows the way now, the stairs, the office, the man with the grey moustache. This time she has not come about wages or stools. She has come about crèches. 'Women working in the war factories need someone to mind their children. The State asks women to work. The State has to give them the means to work. A crèche at the factory, paid for by the employer or by the State - it's not a gift. It's a condition.'
The man with the moustache listens. He takes notes. He says: 'It's a good idea. But the bosses will say it's not their problem.'
Jeanne says: 'The bosses said women couldn't run their factories either. We're running them.'
The man looks at her. He sees in front of him a woman of thirty-one, thin, calloused, tired, who talks like a union delegate and reasons like an engineer. He does not know that three years ago this woman was charring for middle-class families. He does not know that two years ago this woman did not know what a union was. He sees the result, not the road, and the result impresses him.
'I'll pass it on,' he says.
Jeanne nods. She will pass it on too. To the women's section, to Rose, to the women in the shop. The crèche will not come straight away - it will come in 1918, too late for Rose, too late for many. But the seed is sown, like Louise's beans, and seeds come up in the end.
On 20 February, Henri receives a letter from Lucien Combes.
'Sergeant - sorry, Lieutenant. I've sat the examination. I've passed. I start at the training college in Cahors in September. The principal said my file was "remarkable for a self-taught candidate". I didn't tell him my school was a barn and my teacher was a sergeant in wire spectacles.
I still limp. The doctor says it won't get better. But you don't need to run to teach. You need the head, the heart and the voice - you said so yourself.
Your pupil. Lucien.'
Henri reads the letter in the dugout, in the evening, the cat on the shepherd's knees. He reads it again. Then he hands it to Marcel, who reads it aloud to the whole section, because some news is not for keeping to yourself.
When Marcel has finished reading, the silence lasts three seconds. Then Fayolle says: 'Bloody hell, Sergeant, you've gone and made a schoolmaster.' Marcel says: 'Lieutenant.' Fayolle says: 'Bloody hell, Lieutenant, you've gone and made a schoolmaster.'
The shepherd says nothing. But he takes out of his pocket the drawing Lucien made of the cat, the one Henri found in the dugout last May, and he looks at it for a moment. The drawing is crumpled, stained, but the cat is still there, eyes half closed, tail curled round. The shepherd puts the drawing away and strokes the real cat, which is identical to the drawing and could not care less.
Henri writes in his notebook that evening: 'Lucien has passed. A lad from Gourdon who could not read a year ago will be a schoolmaster. If I die tomorrow, that will be enough. That will justify everything.'
At the end of February, the news from Russia becomes clearer. The Tsar has abdicated. A provisional government has been formed. Russia is in revolution, and nobody knows whether she will go on fighting.
At the same moment, on the other side of the Atlantic, the United States breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany. President Wilson, re-elected in November on the slogan 'He kept us out of war', is changing his mind. German submarines are sinking American ships. Opinion is shifting. America's entry into the war is no longer a question of if. It is a question of when.
Verdier notes in his notebook: 'Both pans of the scales have just moved at once. Russia goes out, America comes in. It is a question of timing. If the Americans arrive before the Germans transfer their divisions from the east, we win. If not, everything will be decided in 1918, and 1918 will be the most dangerous year of the war.'
Henri does not think about 1918. Henri thinks about the coming spring, about the offensive everyone can feel, about the Hindenburg Line waiting, about his men who are growing thin and holding on and do not know why they are holding on but hold on all the same.
On 28 February, in the evening, the shepherd takes the puppy out of his pocket. Not the real puppy - the photograph. He looks at it in the candlelight. Nòu has grown, in the photograph. He is no longer a white ball - he is a young dog, with paws too big for him and ears that flop.
'He'll be good,' says Lacombe.
Henri looks at him. Good. The shepherd speaks of the dog the way a master speaks of a pupil. And Henri understands that the dog is the same thing as Lucien, the same thing as Pélissié, the same thing as Louise's beans - something that grows, something that will be, something that proves the world does not stop.
'He'll be good,' the shepherd says again. And he puts the photograph away.