May 1917
It begins with a refusal.
Not a shout, not a barricade, not a red flag. A refusal. Simple, bare, spoken by men standing in the yard of a billet, facing an officer who is ordering them back up the line.
'No.'
Henri is not there when it happens. It happens in another regiment, a regiment of the 2nd Colonial Division, on 18 May, somewhere south of Soissons. The men refuse to go up. Not to desert - they do not run away, they do not throw down their arms, they threaten nobody. They say no. They say: we won't go over the top for nothing any more. We'll hold the trenches, we'll defend ourselves if the Germans attack, but we won't go over any more. Not like that. Not for officers who promise the breakthrough and deliver the massacre.
Then it is another regiment. Then another. Then ten, twenty, fifty. In a few days, half the French army is affected. Not a revolt - a movement, vast, diffuse, spreading from billet to billet like a fever. The men do not coordinate, do not organise, have no leaders. They refuse, each in his own way, each with his own words, but the words are the same everywhere: we're done marching.
Henri hears of it on 20 May.
His regiment is still at rest, in a village behind the lines, and the rumour comes in through the cookhouses, the fatigues, those underground channels nothing can block. 'The 128th have refused to go up. The 36th too. And the 17th. And others.' The regimental numbers go round like beads on a rosary, and each number adds a bead to something that has no name but has a shape - the shape of men who have had enough, of exhaustion, of trampled dignity getting back on its feet.
Henri listens. He says nothing. He is an officer. An officer does not approve of a refusal to obey, whatever the reason. That is the rule. That is the oath. It is the thread that keeps the army standing, and if that thread snaps, everything collapses - the defence, the front, the country.
But Henri is also a man. A man who has lost eleven men out of thirty in six days, for three hundred metres of slope, in an offensive the commander-in-chief knew would fail - or should have known. A man who has seen Marcel carried away on a stretcher, his back laid open, the lead type in his haversack. A man who carries a child in his head and a ring on his finger, and who knows that every useless assault is a risk of never seeing that child born.
He says nothing. But he cannot help thinking.
The shepherd does not think. The shepherd senses. And what he senses, in the air of the billet, in the men's looks, in the tone of their talk, is what a shepherd senses when a flock is about to change direction - a nervousness, a tension, a collective movement that starts from nowhere and goes everywhere. Lacombe says to Henri, in the evening, in the dugout: 'It's going to move.'
Henri says: 'I know.'
'And us?'
Henri looks at the shepherd. Us. The section. The platoon. The men he has held together for twenty-eight months, through discipline, through trust, through the evening school and the paper and Fayolle's jokes and Pélissié's cheese and the cat. Will these men refuse too?
'We'll see,' says Henri.
On 25 May, it happens.
The regiment receives the order to go back up the line. Not to the Chemin des Dames - to a neighbouring sector, a 'quiet' sector, to relieve an exhausted regiment. It is not an assault. It is an ordinary relief, the normal rotation of trench warfare. But the words 'going up' have become poison. Going up means dying. Going up means Nivelle. Going up means the promise betrayed.
At ten in the morning, in the farmyard that serves as a billet, the battalion's three companies are drawn up. The battalion commander - the one who signed Henri's marriage leave, the one who read Le Poilu du Causse without batting an eyelid - the commander gives the order to move off.
The first company moves. The second company moves. The third - Henri's - does not move.
Not the whole of the third. A group, at the back of the yard, twenty or so men, recent reinforcements most of them, men who do not have the bonds of Henri's section, who do not have Verdun in their bodies or the Somme in their heads. They are standing, arms by their sides, and they do not move.
A sergeant shouts: 'Forward!' Nobody moves. The sergeant turns to the platoon's lieutenant. The lieutenant turns to the captain. The captain walks towards the group and says, in a calm voice: 'We're going up. It's a relief, not an assault.'
One of the men - a soldier of the class of 1916, twenty years old, his face shut - says: 'We can't tell the difference any more.'
The silence that follows is the heaviest Henri has ever heard. Heavier than the bombardment at Verdun, heavier than the machine guns on the Chemin des Dames. Because this silence is the sound of the army cracking.
Henri is twenty metres away, with his platoon, formed up, ready to move. His men have seen. His men have heard. He feels their stillness - not the stillness of discipline, the stillness of waiting. They are waiting to see what he will do. What Second Lieutenant Castayrol, the schoolmaster, the man who taught them to read, who shared the confit and the cheese, who held Fayolle's hand at Verdun and carried Marcel off the Chemin des Dames - what that man will do.
Henri walks towards the group. Not towards the captain - towards the men. He stops in front of the soldier who spoke, the one from the class of '16. He looks at him. The soldier looks at him. Twenty years old. Hard, tired eyes, eyes that do not ask permission.
Henri does not shout. He does not threaten. He does not talk about discipline, court martial, the firing squad. He says, in a low voice, loud enough for the group to hear: 'I know. We all know. But the lads of the 114th have been in the line for a fortnight and they can't hold on any longer. If we don't go up, they're the ones who cop it. Not Nivelle. Not the generals. Them.'
The soldier does not answer. But his face moves - something changes, a crack in the wall of refusal. Henri goes on: 'I'm not asking you to go up for victory. I'm asking you to go up to relieve them. We go up, we hold, we come back down. That's all.'
The silence lasts ten seconds. Then the soldier picks up his pack. Another picks up his. A third. The group comes apart, slowly, like a knot being pulled loose. The men take their places back in the ranks. The company forms up. The battalion moves off.
The captain looks at Henri. He says nothing. But he nods, once, and Henri knows that the nod holds more than thanks - it holds the recognition that what has just happened is graver and deeper than words can carry.
The regiment goes up the line. Without incident. The relief takes place normally, at night, in the communication trenches, the usual ritual. Henri settles his platoon into the trenches, checks the posts, organises the sentries. Everything is in order. Everything works.
But in the evening, in the dugout, Fayolle says: 'Lieutenant, they were right.'
Henri looks at him. Fayolle has never said anything like it. Fayolle is a soldier, a good soldier, a man who does his job without asking questions, not out of stupidity but out of an inner discipline. And Fayolle has just said 'they were right'.
'About what?' says Henri, though he knows about what.
'About refusing to go up for nothing. Nivelle sent us to the slaughter. Everybody knew it. The generals knew it. And we went up anyway. Why?'
Henri looks for an answer. The old answer - discipline, duty, country - no longer works. It has been worn threadbare by thirty months of broken promises. The new answer - the one he gave in the yard of the billet, the one about the mates you don't let down - is true but incomplete. Because the mates you don't let down are the same mates who die for nothing.
He says: 'Because we haven't found anything better.'
It is a schoolmaster's answer, not a hero's. It is an answer that acknowledges the problem without solving it. And it is the only honest answer Henri has.
Fayolle looks at him and nods. He is not satisfied. But he accepts, because Henri's honesty is the only thing he still believes in.
The shepherd, who has been listening without a word, puts the cat down on the bunk and says: 'When the ewes won't go, it's because they're being led badly. It's not the ewes that are the problem.'
It is the most political sentence Antoine Lacombe has ever spoken, and it says in a few words what Verdier has written in thirty pages of reports.
Nivelle was dismissed on 15 May. Replaced by Pétain. Pétain again. The man of Verdun, the methodical one, the prudent one, the one who counts the shells before he counts the dead. Pétain takes command of an army that is falling apart - forty thousand mutineers by the estimates, perhaps more, spread across fifty-four divisions. Half the French army.
Pétain does two things. The first: he stops the offensives. No more assaults. No more breakthroughs. No more promises. The French army will defend itself, hold its positions, and wait - for the Americans, for the tanks, for the moment. The second: he improves conditions. Leave, cut to almost nothing under Nivelle, is restored and increased. The food gets better. The plonk flows more freely. Rest periods are longer. Reliefs are more frequent. Pétain treats the soldiers as human beings, which is the most revolutionary thing a French general has done since the beginning of the war.
And Pétain does a third thing. He has men shot. Not many - not as many as legend will say. Fifty-four death sentences confirmed and carried out, out of hundreds pronounced. Ringleaders, deserters, examples. Pétain does not want to terrorise the army. He wants to mark a limit. The limit between legitimate refusal and disintegration. Between anger and chaos.
Henri learns of the executions through rumour, like everyone else. A soldier from the neighbouring regiment, shot on 20 May for inciting his comrades to disobedience. Henri does not know the man. He will never know the man. But he thinks of him, in the evening, in the dugout, and he wonders whether the man was right or wrong, and he finds no answer, because there is no answer to that question - there is only the war, which grinds up the men who obey and the men who refuse with the same indifference.
Marcel would have known what to say about it. Marcel would have had the words - the words of politics, of justice, of revolt. But Marcel is in hospital, his back in pieces, and the lead type is in Henri's haversack, and Le Poilu du Causse no longer exists.
In Lyon, the echoes of the mutinies arrive muffled, distorted by the censor. The newspapers publish nothing. But rumours filter through, by way of men on leave, the wounded, the letters the censor misses. Jeanne hears talk of 'disturbances' in the army, of 'movements' in certain regiments. Paul, in a letter at the end of May, writes a sentence the censor has let through, perhaps out of inattention: 'Everyone here's had enough.' Four words that say everything.
Jeanne does not judge. Jeanne is the wife of a worker and soldier and the sister of a schoolmaster and soldier, and she knows that having had enough is not cowardice - it is the sound dignity makes when it has been trodden on too long. She knows it because she has seen it at the factory, in the women who asked for stools and asked for crèches and asked to be paid what they are worth. The same sound. The same refusal.
Rose, when she hears the rumours, says: 'They should've refused sooner.' And Jeanne does not contradict her.
The end of May. Henri writes to Louise. He does not mention the mutinies - the censor would not allow it, and even without the censor he would not. He writes about the child.
'Dear Louise. How are you? How is the little boy - or little girl? Are you getting bigger? Are you eating well? Is your mother looking after you? Is the doctor in Figeac any good? If you have the slightest doubt, go to Cahors, to the hospital. I know it's a long journey, but I'd rather a long journey than a bad doctor.
I've been thinking about names. If it's a boy, I'd like Pierre. If it's a girl, I'd like Marie. But you decide. You're the one carrying. You're the one who chooses.'
Louise replies: 'I'm well. I'm getting bigger. My mother looks after me too much, if that's possible. The doctor in Figeac is a charming old man who says everything is normal. For names - yes to Pierre. For a girl, I'd rather Jeanne.'
Henri reads the reply in the dugout, and his sister's name in his wife's mouth goes through him like a current. Jeanne. Of course. How had he not thought of it?
On 31 May, Henri is on the fire step. The night is mild, the crickets are singing in no man's land, and the front is quiet - quiet as it has never been since the beginning of the war, because Pétain has ordered quiet, and quiet is the first remedy.
The shepherd is beside him. The cat is asleep somewhere. The war goes on, but it has changed its rhythm. The frantic rhythm of the offensives has given way to the slow rhythm of defence, of waiting, of rebuilding. The French army is resting, healing, mending itself.
Henri touches the ring. He touches the cigar box in his haversack. He thinks of Marcel, in hospital. He thinks of Louise, in Figeac, her belly round. He thinks of Lucien, in Cahors, getting ready for the training college. He thinks of Pélissié, who writes fifteen-line letters now. He thinks of the wooden dog in his pocket, and the puppy growing up on the causse. He thinks of Jeanne, in Lyon, fighting for crèches.
The world holds. It nearly did not hold. But it holds.
The shepherd says: 'Lieutenant.'
'Yes.'
'The child. When's it due?'
'September.'
The shepherd nods in the dark. 'Ewes lamb in May. But September's good for children too.'
Henri smiles. The shepherd cannot see it, but he feels it, the way shepherds feel things, through the air that changes round a man who is smiling.
June tomorrow. Summer. Waiting.