June 1917
Pétain repairs.
It is the right word - not 'commands', not 'directs', not 'inspires'. Repairs. As a mechanic repairs a machine whose parts are worn but not broken, whose engine is still running but grinding, smoking, threatening to stop. Pétain goes to the billets. He talks to the men. No grand phrases, no rhetoric - facts. Leave will be honoured. The food will be improved. Rest periods will be longer. The offensives are stopped. Nobody will go over the top for nothing any more. We shall wait for the Americans and the tanks.
Henri sees the effects of this repair in his platoon, week after week. The plonk is better - not good, better. The soup has meat in it, not just the idea of meat. Leave comes round regularly, and when leave is promised it is granted, which is a revolution compared with the Nivelle regime. Reliefs are more frequent - six days in the front line instead of ten or twelve. And above all, above all, there are no more attacks. They hold. They defend. They improve the positions. They dig, they concrete, they fortify. But they no longer go over the top against a ridge bristling with machine guns to win three hundred metres that will be lost the next day.
The platoon breathes again. Not all at once - slowly, like a drowned man being brought round. Fayolle starts laughing again. Not the great laughs of before, not a boy's laughs - short, dry laughs, but laughs. Pélissié writes twenty-line letters to his wife now, which is a novel for a man who could not hold a pencil a year and a half ago. The shepherd talks a little more, with his usual economy but without the wall, without that terrible absence of the autumn months. The cat is getting fat, which is the surest sign that things are improving - a cat that gets fat is a cat that eats, and a cat that eats means a billet that works.
But Marcel is missing. His absence is a hole in the section, a hole nobody fills because nobody can replace Marcel - his clear sight, his irony, his gift for naming things, his lead type and his paper that made men laugh who no longer laughed. Henri carries the cigar box in his haversack like an amputated organ. He takes it out sometimes, in the evening, and he looks at the letters, lined up in their compartments, and he thinks of Marcel touching them with his fingertips with the tenderness of a musician for his instrument.
News comes at the beginning of June. Marcel is in a base hospital, near Bourges. The splinter has been removed. The spine is untouched - a miracle, a matter of a centimetre. But the muscles of his back are torn, and Marcel will not be able to return to service. He will be invalided out. He will not be coming back.
Henri reads the news and does not know whether to be relieved or sad. Relieved, because Marcel will live. Sad, because Marcel will not be coming back. Both at once, as always in this war, where every piece of good news carries in it the shadow of a loss.
He writes to Marcel that same evening. 'Dear Marcel. I'm glad you're alive. I'm glad you're not coming back. It's the same sentence and it isn't a contradiction. Your box is with me. The type is waiting. The paper is asleep, not dead. When you start your paper in Toulouse, send me the first number. I'll read it. I promised you I would.'
On 10 June, Henri gets leave.
Three days. He takes the train south with a new urgency - Louise is six months pregnant, her belly is round, the child is moving, and Henri has not seen his wife since December. Six months. Six months of letters, of words, of sentences describing what the eyes cannot see - the belly growing, the morning sickness, the kicks in the night, the tiredness, the waiting. Henri has read all of it in Louise's letters, and he has imagined, and now he is going to see.
He arrives in Figeac on the morning of the 11th. Louise is at the station. And the belly is there.
Henri stops on the platform. He looks at Louise. He looks at the belly. He does not know what to do with his hands, which is absurd for a man who has taken blockhouses with grenades, but a soldier's hands are not a father-to-be's hands, and the two do not work in the same way.
Louise smiles. 'You can touch,' she says.
Henri puts his hand on Louise's belly, there, on the platform at Figeac station, in front of the postmistress and the stationmaster and an old gentleman waiting for the Cahors train. His hand lies flat on the dress, and under the dress there is skin, and under the skin there is someone.
The child moves. Henri feels the movement under his palm - a kick, light, precise, like a tiny fist knocking on a wall. He snatches his hand away, startled, and Louise laughs, and Louise's laugh on the platform at Figeac in June 1917 is the most necessary sound in the world.
Three days in Figeac. Three days of round belly, of kitchen, of slow walks through the streets of the little town - slow because Louise no longer walks as she did, she walks with that gait of a pregnant woman which is a sway, a constant negotiation with a centre of gravity that keeps shifting. Henri walks beside her and matches his step to hers - he who has matched his step to the trench, to the mud, to the slope of the Chemin des Dames now matches it to a woman carrying a child. It is easier. It is infinitely easier.
Louise's mother is transformed. The spare, silent woman has become a spare, busy woman, who cooks, who knits, who prepares. The child's room - the little room next to Louise's, which used to be a box room - has been cleared, cleaned, painted white by Émile one Sunday. A cradle has appeared, lent by a neighbour whose children have grown up. Matinée jackets, swaddling bands, bonnets pile up in a drawer, sewn by the mother and the neighbours and Louise's colleagues at the school, because a child born in wartime is everyone's child.
Henri watches these preparations with a wonder he hides beneath his schoolmaster's reserve. He knows nothing about children. He knows how to teach six-year-olds to read, how to make them recite the departments and their chief towns, how to mark a dictation and explain a fraction. But a baby means crying, milk, sleepless nights, things he has never done. He says to Louise, on the second evening: 'I don't know how you do it.'
Louise looks at him. 'You learn.'
It is a schoolmistress's answer. It is the only possible answer. You learn. As Pélissié learnt to write, as Lucien learnt Montaigne, as the shepherd learnt to survive without his dog. You learn because there is no other choice.
Henri leaves again on 14 June. The platform. The train. The ritual. Louise is there, her belly under her coat, her hands on her belly, and Henri climbs into the carriage and leans out of the window, and he looks at his wife, his pregnant wife, on a station platform in the Lot, in June 1917, and he engraves that image in his memory with the precision of a photographer, because that image is the one that will bring him back.
'You're coming back,' says Louise.
'I'm coming back.'
The train pulls out. Henri sits down. He touches the ring. He touches the cigar box. He closes his eyes. Behind his eyelids, Louise's face, the belly, the kick under his palm. And the train rolls north, towards the war, towards everything that is not a round belly and a smiling woman.
In Lyon, Jeanne is living a June that feels like a victory.
The crèche. It is coming. Not exactly as Jeanne asked for it - not a crèche at the Berliet works, not paid for by the employer. But a municipal crèche, in the Vaise district, open from six in the morning to seven at night, funded by the town hall and the Ministry of Munitions, for the children of women war workers. It is the result of months of petitions, union meetings, reports, pressure. Jeanne did not win it alone - it was the movement, the hundreds of women who asked, demanded, insisted. But Jeanne is part of the movement, and the movement bears her mark.
Rose puts little Jeanne's name down on the first day. Nine months old, round cheeks, the dark eyes of her father the foreman. Rose drops her daughter off at six in the morning and collects her at six in the evening, and in between she works, and in the evening she is tired but she is no longer ruined by the cost of minding. Two francs saved a day. Twelve francs a week. Fifty francs a month. It is the difference between surviving and living.
Rose says to Jeanne: 'It's thanks to you.' Jeanne says: 'It's thanks to us.' The nuance is not modesty - it is precision. Jeanne has learnt figures, reports, procedures. But she has also learnt that nothing gets done alone, that collective victories are the only ones that last, and that 'we' is sturdier than 'I'.
Paul, on leave at the beginning of June - three days, the first since the autumn - sees the crèche. He sees Jeanne taking Rose's little girl there in the morning before the factory. He sees the women dropping off their children, in overalls, in headscarves, their hands still cold from the journey. And he says to Jeanne, in the evening, in the kitchen: 'Was it you did that?'
'I pushed. Others pushed too.'
Paul looks at her. The man who came back from the Argonne, the man who cries out in the night, the man who wrote 'nor the women' in his letter of August 1916 - that man looks at his wife and sees someone he did not know before the war. Not a stranger - a version of Jeanne that was already there but that peacetime kept locked up, and that the war has set free, through absence, through necessity, through the empty space the women have filled.
Paul says: 'When it's all over, it mustn't be lost.'
Jeanne says: 'It won't be lost.'
She says it with the certainty of a woman who knows that some doors, once opened, do not close again. The vote - she still does not have it. Equal pay - she still does not have it. The title of foreman - she still does not have it. But the stools are there. The crèche is there. The stamp is there. And Jeanne is there, standing, with her calloused hands and her head that can reckon, and nobody is going to make her sit down.
At the front, June is quiet. The quietest since the beginning of the war. Pétain is keeping his promise - no offensive. The French army holds, defends, fortifies. The mutinies die down, slowly, smothered as much by Pétain's improvements as by the executions. The army pulls itself together. Not as it was - it will never be as it was again. The thread of discipline has been knotted back together, but it is thinner than before, and everyone knows it.
Verdier watches this convalescence with a technician's eye. He notes the good signs - morale rising, leave working, food improving. And he notes the bad signs - the exhaustion that remains, the numbers melting away, the heavy artillery that is still lacking. He writes in his notebook on 20 June: 'The French army is a convalescent in need of rest. Pétain knows it. He is giving it rest. The question is how long the rest can last. The Germans will not wait for us for ever.'
He thinks of the Americans. The first American contingents land in France in June - a few thousand men, a token, a drop in the ocean of the war. It will take a year for the American army to be ready. A year in which the French army must hold, without attacking, without collapsing, without losing hope.
A year. Henri counts in months, not years. September - the child. October - the relief. November - winter. December - Christmas, leave perhaps. January - two more years to get through. It is the reckoning of a man who measures the future in survival, not in victory.
On 30 June, Henri is in the dugout, the candle lit, the notebook open. The cat is on the knees of the shepherd, who is asleep. Fayolle is asleep. Pélissié is asleep, his slate beside him, a letter under way - he writes in the evening now before he goes to sleep, the way others pray.
Henri writes:
'30 June. Three years of war in two months. Louise is six months pregnant. The child will be here in September. Pierre or Jeanne. A saint's name or a sister's name. Both are good.
Marcel has written to me from hospital. He is better. He says he will walk but will not be able to carry heavy loads. He says he does not need to carry heavy loads to make a newspaper. He is right.
Lucien is preparing for the training college. He sends me essays to correct by post. I correct them in the dugout, in pencil, between two watches. It is absurd and it is normal. It is my life.
Pétain has given us time. I do not know how much. Enough for the child to be born, I hope. Enough for the Americans to arrive, I hope. Enough for this war to end - I no longer hope, I calculate. And the calculation says: not before 1918. Perhaps 1919.
The ring turns on my finger. Three grams. How much does the child weigh? Louise says it moves at night. That it kicks. That it keeps hours. A child that keeps hours. A schoolmaster already.'
He smiles in the dark. The shepherd snores. The cat purrs. The candle smokes.
And summer begins, and the war waits, and somewhere in a haberdashery in the Lot an unborn child kicks inside its mother, and the world holds by that thread too, that tiny thread, that thread of flesh, the strongest of them all.