April 1917
On 2 April, Wilson asks Congress to declare war on Germany. On 6 April, the United States officially enters the war.
The news reaches the front through the newspapers, through the officers, through rumour. Henri reads it in a communiqué pinned up at battalion headquarters. The United States. A hundred million inhabitants. The foremost industrial nation in the world. Factories, steel, oil, money, and men - millions of men who have never seen a trench and who will come.
The reactions are mixed. The staff are jubilant - in theory. The politicians greet the event with grandiloquent speeches on the brotherhood of the democracies. But in the trenches the news is received with a collective shrug. Marcel sums it up: 'That's good. When are they getting here?' Nobody knows. The Americans have no army - not a war army, not a trench army. They will have to be recruited, trained, equipped, shipped over. A year, at the very least. Probably more.
A year. In a trench, a year is an eternity. A year is four seasons of mud, shells, dead men. A year is twelve months of survival to be reckoned, day by day, hour by hour. The Americans will come. But they will come for those who are still alive.
Henri thinks of the child. September. The child will be born before the Americans arrive. It is an absurd calculation, but it is the kind of calculation the war forces on you - you measure time in births, in leaves, in reliefs, because ordinary calendars no longer work.
The offensive is set for 16 April. Everyone knows it. Everyone. The soldiers, the civilians, the newspapers - and the Germans. That is the scandal of the Nivelle offensive: the secret is no secret. The plans have leaked, the orders have circulated, the troop concentrations can be seen from the air, and the Germans have had weeks to prepare. A French prisoner, captured on a patrol, was carrying a detailed operation order. The Germans know where the attack will come, when it will come, and in what strength.
Verdier learns of the leak on 8 April, from a Deuxième Bureau report. He sits at his desk for five minutes, motionless, the report in his hands, and he thinks of all the men who are going to die because an NCO was carrying a paper he should never have carried. Then he gets up and goes to see General Micheler.
Micheler is a tormented man. He commands the Reserve Army Group, the one that is to exploit Nivelle's breakthrough, and he does not believe in the breakthrough. He has said so. He has written it. He has said it to Nivelle's face. Nivelle has not changed his mind. And Micheler, who is a disciplined soldier, is preparing an exploitation he does not believe in, with troops he knows are doomed, under a plan he knows is bad.
Verdier goes into Micheler's office and says: 'General, the enemy knows the plan.'
Micheler looks at him. 'I know, Verdier.'
'We can't attack under these conditions.'
Micheler is silent for a moment. Then he says: 'We shall attack. Those are the orders.'
Verdier goes out. He goes back to his desk. He picks up his fire plans again. He does his job. Because that is what Verdier does - he does his job, even when the job consists of preparing a catastrophe.
On 9 April, the British attack at Arras. It is the diversion, the hammer blow in the north that is meant to pin down the German reserves before the sledgehammer falls in the south. The attack succeeds - the Canadians take Vimy Ridge at last, the ridge the French could not take in 1915, and they take it in a few hours, with an impeccable artillery preparation and superbly trained troops. It is a success. It is a model. And it is useless, because the success at Arras changes nothing about the disaster being prepared further south.
Henri has been in the jumping-off trenches facing the Chemin des Dames since the 10th. His platoon holds a communication trench at the foot of the ridge, between the village of Craonne and the California plateau - names that will become scars in the French memory. He looks at the slope rising in front of him, steep, wooded, bristling with fortified positions, and he does what he has always done before an assault - he prepares his men.
But this time the preparation is different. The men are not the same. Not physically - in their morale. Something has worn away in the preceding weeks, a slow erosion of trust, a crumbling of the inner discipline - not the discipline of gestures, which remains intact, but that of the soul, which is wavering. The men do what they are told. They do not believe that what they are told makes sense.
Henri sees it in Marcel, who has stopped making jokes. In Fayolle, who writes his parents longer letters than usual, as if he wanted to say everything before it is too late. In the shepherd, who strokes the cat with a hypnotic slowness, his eyes elsewhere. Even Pélissié, the imperturbable, has something different in his eyes - not fear, but resignation, that mute acceptance of the inevitable which is the saddest form of courage.
On 15 April, the eve of the assault, Henri assembles his platoon. Thirty men. He looks at them, one by one, and he makes no speech. No words about the country, victory, honour. He says what he always says: 'We stay together. We follow the barrage. We use the ground. And if it all goes to hell, we adapt.'
Then he adds something he has never said before: 'I know what you're thinking. I think the same. But we're going anyway, because to the right and to the left there are men going too, and we don't let them down. Not for Nivelle. Not for France. For them.'
The shepherd nods. That is enough.
16 April 1917, six in the morning. It is raining.
It is raining and it is cold. A late-winter cold, not a spring one, a damp cold that gets into the bones and stiffens the fingers on the rifles. The artillery preparation, which has been going on since the 5th, has been inadequate - too dispersed, too shallow, unable to destroy the creutes, the underground quarries where the Germans are waiting, under cover, untouched, their machine guns ready.
The whistles blow. Henri goes over the top.
He climbs. The slope is slippery, the earth greasy, the shell holes full of water. The creeping barrage is ahead of him, but it is too far ahead - the artillery is moving too fast, the infantry cannot keep up, and the gap between the curtain of fire and the climbing men opens like a wound. And in that wound, the machine guns.
They are everywhere. In the creutes, in the blockhouses, in the intact trenches the bombardment has not touched. The crossfire is instant, total, murderous. Henri throws himself into a shell hole halfway up the slope and shouts to his men to get down. They get down. But some do not get down, because you cannot get down when you are dead.
The March reinforcement, a lad whose face Henri does not yet know, is killed five metres from the jumping-off trench. He has not taken ten steps. Another falls forward, hit in the legs, and slides down the slope like a sledge, and nobody can go and fetch him because the fire is too heavy.
Henri is in his hole. The shepherd is beside him. Fayolle is three metres lower down, in another hole. Marcel is on the right, behind a stretch of wall that was once a house. Pélissié is somewhere - Henri cannot see him.
The assault is stopped. Along the whole length of the front, hundreds of platoons like Henri's are pinned to the ground, halfway up the slope, under the machine guns. The creeping barrage has gone on without them, useless, pounding empty ground a hundred metres higher up. The Nivelle offensive has failed in its first hour.
But Henri does not yet know that the offensive has failed. He knows that he is in a hole, that his men are scattered across the slope, and that he has to do something. The schoolmaster in him thinks. The officer in him decides.
He cannot go up. The ridge cannot be taken, the machine guns cover every metre of ground. He cannot go back down - going back down under fire would be worse than staying. He can wait. Wait for the artillery to come back, for reinforcements to arrive, for something to change. But waiting means dying by inches, because the German shells are beginning to fall on the slope, seeking out the men in their holes.
Henri does the only thing possible. He gathers them. With gestures, with short shouts, crawling from one hole to the next under fire, he gathers his men into a network of linked craters, a semblance of a position, a semblance of a defence. Eight men here. Six over there. Ten further down. Six men are missing at roll call. Six out of thirty. In one hour.
The day lasts a century. The Germans counter-attack at midday, coming down from the ridge, and Henri sees the grey uniforms appear between the shattered trees. His platoon fires. Pélissié fires with his rifle propped on the lip of the crater. The Germans fall back. They will come again. Henri knows it.
At four in the afternoon, a runner arrives, crawling. The order is to hold the positions gained - that is, the shell holes halfway up the slope. There will be no second assault today. Henri reads the order and folds it up without expression.
Forty-eight hours, Nivelle had said. The first hour is gone. Henri's platoon has gained three hundred metres in height and lost six men. It has not even reached the first German line.
On the 17th, the rain turns to snow.
Snow in April. On the bodies, on the wounded, on the living shivering in their holes. Henri has not slept. Nobody has slept. The stretcher-bearers have not been able to get up - the fire is too heavy, the slope too exposed. The wounded from the day before are still there, in the neighbouring holes, and their cries have turned into moans, and the moans have turned into silence, and the silence is worse than the cries.
The assault resumes at nine. Henri goes up with what is left of his platoon - twenty-four men. They advance a hundred metres, take a stretch of German trench, and are thrown out by an immediate counter-attack. They take the trench back. The Germans take it back. It is a mechanical, absurd back-and-forth, a cave-dwellers' fight in holes of mud, with grenades, sometimes with the bayonet, with a savagery that has nothing human left in it.
At midday, Henri loses Marcel.
Not killed. Wounded. A shell splinter in the back, between the shoulder blades, which throws him forward into the mud of the trench. Henri is on him in three seconds. The blood runs, black on the horizon blue. Marcel is breathing - fast, shallow, eyes open, face white. He says: 'Lieutenant.' Henri presses a field dressing onto his back. The splinter is large, deep. The shepherd helps turn Marcel over, prop him against the trench wall. Fayolle calls for the stretcher-bearers with a shout that will not be heard.
Marcel grabs Henri's arm. 'The box,' he says. 'The type.'
Henri understands. The cigar box. The lead type of Le Poilu du Causse. Marcel always carries it with him, everywhere, every time they go up the line, like a talisman. Henri searches Marcel's haversack and finds the box, intact, the little lead blocks lined up in their compartments, every letter in its place.
'Keep it,' says Marcel. Then his eyes close.
He does not die. The stretcher-bearers arrive an hour later, miraculously, by a communication trench nobody knew about, and Marcel is carried away on a stretcher, unconscious, his face turned to the grey sky, the snow melting on his closed eyelids.
Henri puts the cigar box in his own haversack, next to the Montaigne and the Goethe. He will carry it to the end.
On the 18th, the 19th, the 20th, the fighting goes on. The Nivelle offensive is not over - it is not over because Nivelle refuses to admit failure, because the government hesitates to stop it, because the machine once set going does not know how to stop. Local attacks, partial assaults, recaptures, counter-attacks. The Chemin des Dames holds out. The ridge stays German, except at a few points, a few salients won at the price of blood spilt without measure.
The figures for the first week are catastrophic. A hundred and twenty thousand French casualties. For an insignificant gain of ground. The breakthrough in forty-eight hours is a lie that everyone knows and nobody utters.
Henri's regiment is relieved on 22 April. Of the thirty men in his platoon, nineteen are left. Eleven are missing - three killed, seven wounded, Marcel among them, one missing. Eleven in six days. More than a third. And that is the tally of a platoon that got off lightly.
Henri comes down from the Chemin des Dames at nightfall, through the communication trenches, in single file, as always. The shepherd limps behind him. Fayolle walks in silence. Pélissié walks. The cat is in the shepherd's haversack. They pass the men going up, and this time the ritual of passing is different. The men coming down do not speak. But they look at the men going up, and in their eyes there is something the earlier reliefs did not have. Not fear. Anger.
Henri reaches the rear on 23 April, a billet in the Aisne valley. He sits down in a barn, he takes off his boots, he looks at his feet. His feet are white. His hands are shaking. The ring turns on his finger.
He takes out Marcel's cigar box. He opens it. The lead type is there, in order, every letter in its place. A, B, C, D. The alphabet. The beginning of everything. The letters that make words, the words that make sentences, the sentences that make newspapers, the newspapers that make men laugh who no longer laugh.
He closes the box.
The shepherd sits down beside him. The cat lies down between them. The silence is total.
Outside, the spring of 1917 has come, indifferent, scandalously beautiful. The cherry trees are in blossom. The birds are singing. And in the trenches of the Chemin des Dames, men go on dying for a promise that never existed.
Henri does not know it yet, but something has broken. Not in him - in the army. The thread that held everything together, discipline, trust, the mute acceptance of the unacceptable - that thread is snapping. And when it snaps, the sound will be the one nobody wanted to hear.
The mutinies.