March 1917
Spring hesitates. It takes a few steps, draws back, comes on again. One day of sun, three days of grey, a flurry of snow that melts as it touches the ground. The trenches swing between mud and frost, unable to choose, like the rest of the world.
Henri is back on the Aisne. The regiment has followed the German withdrawal from the Somme, moving forward cautiously through the devastated ground, clearing mines, probing, advancing. And now they are here, facing the ridge of the Chemin des Dames, facing those positions Henri held in 1914, in 1915, on the French side, and which the Germans have held since, fortified, concreted, dug in. Henri looks at the ridge through his periscope and recognises it - that line of wooded hills overlooking the Aisne valley, the villages clinging to the slopes, the stone quarries whose black mouths pierce the cliff like eyes.
He says to the shepherd: 'I've been here. In '14. We were on the other side.'
The shepherd looks at the ridge and says: 'It's high.'
It is high. That is the problem. Attacking uphill, against entrenched positions, against an enemy who can see you coming - Verdier has written it in his notes, Henri can see it with his own eyes. The ground says everything. The ground says the assault will be a massacre.
The men sense it. Not through orders, which say nothing yet. Through the atmosphere. The troop movements, the concentrations of artillery, the ammunition dumps piling up, the field hospitals being set up. And the rumours, that underground circulation of information which is the army's true nervous system. We'll attack in April. The Chemin des Dames. The breakthrough in forty-eight hours.
Marcel brings the rumour back one evening, after talking to a sergeant from a neighbouring regiment. 'They say Nivelle's promised victory in two days. Two days, Lieutenant. Like in '14. As if we'd learnt nothing.'
Henri does not answer. It is not for him to comment on the high command in front of his men. But his silence says what he does not say, and Marcel hears it.
On 8 March, news arrives that shakes the world without shaking the trenches.
The Russian revolution deepens. The Tsar abdicated on 2 March - the date differs according to the calendar. A provisional government, led by Prince Lvov, takes power. Russia is a republic, or something like one. The French newspapers hail the revolution with an enthusiasm that surprises Henri - the fall of an autocrat ought to please French republicans, and it does, but behind the enthusiasm there is anxiety. Will Russia go on with the war?
The provisional government says yes. Kerensky, the Minister of War, swears that Russia will fight to the end. The Allies breathe again. But Verdier does not breathe again. He reads the reports of the military attachés in Petrograd and sees what the politicians do not want to see - an army falling apart, soldiers fraternising with the enemy, regiments refusing to go up the line. Russia says she is fighting. Russia is fighting no longer.
Marcel reads the news from Russia closely, and Henri watches him out of the corner of his eye. Marcel is a man of the left, a reader of Jaurès, a compositor who dreams of a workers' paper in Toulouse. The Russian revolution resonates in him like a tuning fork. Russian soldiers refusing to fight - is it courage or cowardice? Is it betrayal or clear sight? Marcel does not ask these questions aloud. Not yet. But Henri reads them in his eyes, and he knows that these questions, if they are ever asked in a French trench, will be more dangerous than German shells.
On 12 March, Henri receives a letter from Louise that contains a sentence.
A single sentence, in the middle of an ordinary letter about school, the pupils, the garden she is getting ready for the spring. A sentence slipped in between two others, the way you slip a note into a book.
'I think that I am pregnant.'
Henri reads it again. He puts the letter down. He picks it up. He reads the sentence again. The words are clear, simple, plain. Six words. 'I think that I am pregnant.' Not 'I am pregnant' - 'I think'. Louise's caution, her honesty, her way of never asserting what is not certain.
He sits down in the dugout. The cat is on the shepherd's knees. The candle is burning. Outside, a shell lands two hundred metres away, and the ground shakes, and Henri does not feel it, because the ground is already shaking inside him, with a trembling that has nothing to do with the war.
A child. Perhaps. Probably. Conceived in December, in Figeac, in the room under the eaves, in the sheets that smelt of lavender. A Christmas child, a leave child, a war child. A child that would be born in September, if all goes well, if Louise is well, if the world holds until then.
Henri says nothing to anyone. Not yet. Not until Louise is sure. He folds the letter and puts it in his breast pocket, with the others, and he touches the ring, and the ring is cold and round and certain, and the world has changed in six words.
He writes to Louise that same evening. A short, clumsy letter that circles the six words without repeating them, because repeating them in a trench would sully them.
'Dear Louise. Your letter. The six words in the middle. I've read them ten times. If it's true - and I hope it's true more than I've ever hoped for anything - then everything I've done in this war has a meaning I couldn't see. Take care of yourself. More than usual. More than anything. And tell me soon.'
On 20 March, Louise confirms it. The doctor in Figeac has confirmed it. Three months gone. All is well. The child will be born in September.
Henri reads the confirmation in the dugout, in the evening, and this time he cannot keep the secret. He looks up and the shepherd is looking at him and sees something on Henri's face he has never seen - not a smile, not joy, something deeper, older, something that comes from the species and not the individual.
'Lieutenant?' says Lacombe.
Henri says: 'Louise is expecting a child.'
The silence lasts two seconds. Then Fayolle says 'Bloody hell' with a tenderness the words have never had. Marcel says 'Congratulations' with a gravity Henri has never seen in him. Pélissié says nothing but takes an apple out of his haversack - where that apple has come from in March 1917 is one of Pélissié's mysteries - and sets it down in front of Henri, like an offering.
The shepherd says: 'Boy or girl?'
Henri says: 'I don't know.'
The shepherd nods. 'Same thing. A little one's a little one.'
It is the wisest sentence Henri has heard since the beginning of the war, and it comes from a shepherd who cannot read.
In Lyon, Jeanne learns the news from a letter of Henri's dated 22 March. Her brother is going to be a father. Her brother's wife is expecting a child. Jeanne sits down in her kitchen and stays there a moment, the letter in her hands, with a feeling she takes a while to name. Joy, yes. Joy for Henri, for Louise, for the child to come. But something else too. Something more personal, more painful. The miscarriage in 1913. The belly she never had. The child she never carried.
She puts the letter away and does not cry. The Castayrols do not cry. But she writes Henri a note - not a long letter, a note: 'I'm happy for you. You'll be good parents. The child will be lucky.'
And she writes to Louise, a longer letter, a letter from woman to woman, a letter that does not speak of the miscarriage but carries its shadow, in the advice she gives - eat well, sleep well, don't carry anything heavy, don't stand for too long. The advice of a woman who knows what it is to lose.
Rose, when she hears, says: 'Your brother's making babies in the middle of the war. Good for him. That's thumbing his nose at the Boches.' It is Rose's way of saying that life is stronger than death, and it is the truest way.
The end of March. The offensive is coming and everyone knows it and nobody believes in it.
That is the difference between 1917 and 1914. In 1914 the men believed. They believed in a short war, in a quick victory, in élan. In 1917 they no longer believe in anything - except the evening soup, the morning post and the next relief. Faith has been killed by Verdun, by the Somme, by thirty months of broken promises. Nivelle promises the breakthrough in forty-eight hours. The men listen and shrug. They have heard the same promise from Joffre, from d'Urbal, from Foch. The promise is always the same. So is the result.
Henri feels this disbelief in his platoon the way a schoolmaster feels a class drifting away from him. It is not rebellion - not yet. It is worse. It is indifference. The men will do what they are told to do, they will go over the top, they will fight. But they will not believe it will be any use. And a man who fights without believing is a man who fights by halves.
Marcel asks the question everyone is thinking: 'Lieutenant, is it true Nivelle said forty-eight hours?'
Henri looks at him. 'I don't know what Nivelle said.'
'But you know what you can see.'
Henri does not answer. What he can see is the ridge of the Chemin des Dames, up there, fortified, bristling with machine guns, guns, men waiting for them. What he can see is the ground rising, the wire, the creutes in the cliff that are natural fortresses. What he can see is what Verdier sees in his reports and Nivelle refuses to see in his plans.
He says: 'We'll do our job.'
It is an officer's answer. It is not an answer. Marcel knows it. Henri knows it. But it is the only answer possible in an army where discipline is the last thread holding everything together, and where cutting that thread would be worse than the offensive itself.
On 31 March, Henri writes in his notebook. Not by candlelight this time - by daylight, in a dugout in the second line, with the spring sunshine coming in through the entrance and lighting the page.
'31 March 1917. Louise is expecting our child. The offensive is coming. The two things are true at the same time, and I do not know how to hold them together in my head. On one side, the world beginning - a child, a September, a future. On the other, the world that may end - an assault, a ridge, machine guns.
I am afraid. Not as before. Not afraid of the noise, of the shells, of death. A new fear. The fear of missing. The fear of not being there when the child comes. The fear of never seeing its face.
Before, I held on for Louise. Now I hold on for someone I do not yet know, who has no face, no name, who is an idea in its mother's womb, and that idea is stronger than anything I have ever known.
April tomorrow. The Chemin des Dames. Forty-eight hours, says Nivelle.
Forty-eight hours. We shall see.'
He closes the notebook. The cat jumps onto his knees. Henri strokes it. The cat purrs. The sun warms the entrance to the dugout, and in the distance the ridge of the Chemin des Dames stands out against the blue sky like a clenched jaw.