July 1917
Summer settles in and the war changes its face.
Not on the French front - the French front is motionless, convalescent, held by a Pétain who refuses to move and is right to refuse. But elsewhere. In Flanders, the British are preparing a massive offensive round Ypres - the Third Battle of Ypres, the one that will be called Passchendaele, after a Belgian village that already no longer exists. In Russia, Kerensky launches a last desperate offensive against the Germans, which fails within a week and finishes off the Russian army. And on the Atlantic, the German submarines are sinking ships by the hundred, trying to starve Britain out before the Americans arrive.
Henri knows almost nothing of all this. Henri knows that his sector is quiet, that the soup is passable, that leave comes round, and that Louise is seven months pregnant. His world has shrunk to the size of his trench and his correspondence, and it is enough of a world, a world on a human scale in a war that has lost all human measure.
On 3 July he receives a letter from Louise that makes him laugh - a real laugh, the kind that startles the shepherd and makes the cat look up.
'My dear Henri. Your child has decided my bladder is a drum. It plays the drum at three in the morning, which is no decent hour for a musician. Your mother says you did the same. I'm beginning to understand where your stubbornness comes from.'
Henri shows the letter to Fayolle, who laughs too, and to Pélissié, who does not laugh but whose eyes crinkle, which is the equivalent of a burst of laughter in a man who never laughs. The shepherd asks: 'It plays the drum?' Henri explains. The shepherd nods and says: 'Lambs do the same. They kick.' It is a comparison Louise might find debatable, but in Lacombe's world it is a compliment - lambs that kick are lambs that live.
On 4 July, an American battalion marches through Paris.
On 14 July, the national holiday.
It is the third national holiday of the war, and this one has a particular taste. The Americans are here. Not in numbers - a few regiments, barely formed, landed in June. But they are here, and the women of Paris throw flowers, and the newspapers run headlines on the brotherhood of the democracies, and for one day, a single day, France believes again that victory is possible.
At the front, 14 July is a day like any other, with extra plonk. Henri hands out the extra ration to his platoon and gives a sober toast: 'To the Republic.' The men drink. The shepherd drinks. The cat does not drink but sniffs the wine with a disdain that confirms its standing as the only sensible creature in the regiment.
In the afternoon, Henri does something he has not done for a long time. He sits down in a corner of the second-line dugout, takes out a pencil and paper, and writes. Not a letter - a piece of writing. The first since Le Poilu du Causse went silent. It is not a newspaper article, not an editorial. It is something else, something without a precise form, part testimony and part reflection, about the evening school, about Pélissié, about Lucien, about men learning to read in the trenches.
He writes for two hours, crosses out, starts again, crosses out again. It is not literature - it is a schoolmaster trying to say what teaching means in a world that destroys everything. He does not know who it is for. For Louise, perhaps. For himself, perhaps. For the child who will be born in two months and will one day ask its father what he did in the war, perhaps.
He finishes it in the evening, by candlelight, and folds it into his pocket without reading it over. He will read it later. Or not. Writing is an act, not a result. The act is enough.
On 20 July, the news from Russia comes like a thunderclap.
The Kerensky offensive has failed. The Russian army is disintegrating. Whole regiments are deserting, soldiers are walking home, officers are being lynched by their own men. The revolution is devouring the army from within, and the Germans are advancing in the east unopposed. Russia, the ally, the steamroller, the counterweight that forced Germany to fight on two fronts, is dying.
Verdier reads the reports and does the sum he has been doing since January. If Russia falls, Germany frees fifty divisions, perhaps more. Fifty divisions transferred to the west means a million more men facing the French and the British. The Americans will not be ready before the spring of 1918 at the earliest. So there will be a window - between the fall of Russia and the arrival of the Americans - in which Germany will have numerical superiority in the west for the first time since 1914.
Verdier writes in his notebook: 'The race. Everything comes down to a race. The Germans against time. Us against the Germans. The Americans against distance. Whoever gets there first will win.'
He does not yet know that this race will be run in the spring of 1918, on the plains of Picardy, and that it will be the greatest battle of the war. But he senses it, with the instinct of a soldier who has spent three years reading the future in columns of figures.
At the end of July, something happens to Henri that appears in no report, no communiqué, no official history. Something small, personal, final.
The shepherd receives a letter.
Not a letter dictated to the neighbour, as usual. A letter written by his daughter. His daughter, eleven years old, who has learnt to write at the village school and is writing to her father for the first time.
'Dear Papa. It's me, Madelou. The mistress helped me a bit but it's me writing. Mama is well. The ewes are well. Nòu is big now, he minds the flock with Grandpa. He is white with a black patch on his ear. He is nice but he eats shoes. Mama says you're coming home soon. Is it true? Your Madelou who loves you.'
Henri reads the letter aloud, in the dugout, as he reads all the shepherd's letters. He reads slowly, clearly, in the schoolmaster's voice. And as he reads, he sees Lacombe's face change. Not move - change. As if something under the skin were shifting, something buried for months, since Flòc's death, since the wall, since the silence. Something coming back up.
When Henri finishes reading, the silence lasts five seconds. Then the shepherd says: 'Read it again.'
Henri reads it again. All of it. From the beginning. 'Dear Papa. It's me, Madelou.'
The shepherd listens, eyes closed. The cat is on his knees. The men of the section are there, around him, and nobody moves, because everyone understands that what is happening is sacred, as sacred as a wedding or a birth - a man hearing his daughter's voice for the first time in his life, a written voice, a voice of letters traced on paper by an eleven-year-old hand.
When Henri finishes the second reading, the shepherd opens his eyes. He looks at Henri. And he says something Henri will never forget, something that justifies all the evening schools, all the lessons in barns, all the slates and all the candles:
'Teach me.'
Henri shows nothing. Not in front of the others. But his hands shake a little as he puts away Madelou's letter, and the shepherd sees it, and they both know what has just happened.
That same evening, after the watch, Henri takes out the slate. Pélissié's slate, worn, cracked, bearing the traces of a hundred lessons written and wiped away. He puts it down in front of the shepherd. The shepherd looks at it as he would look at an unfamiliar tool - with respect and suspicion.
'A,' says Henri. And he traces the letter on the slate.
The shepherd takes the chalk. His fingers are thick, calloused, shepherd's fingers that have held newborn lambs and fence posts and a Lebel rifle for three years. The chalk vanishes in his hand. He traces an A. Badly. Enormous. Lopsided. But an A.
'A,' says the shepherd.
Pélissié, writing his letters in his corner, looks up and watches. He says nothing. But in his peasant's eyes Henri sees something like pride - the pride of a man who knows the road can be travelled, because he has travelled it himself.
Fayolle, lying on his bunk, says: 'Welcome to the club, Lacombe.'
The shepherd does not answer. He looks at the A on the slate and he does it again. And again. And the candle burns, and the cat sleeps, and the war waits outside, and in a dugout on the Aisne a shepherd of thirty-seven is learning the first letter of the alphabet, because his eleven-year-old daughter has written to him and he wants to answer her in his own hand.
In Lyon, July brings the heat and a letter from Paul that worries Jeanne.
Paul writes little. His letters are short, factual, a report on his health and a word of affection, nothing more. But the mid-July letter is different. Longer. Darker. Paul talks about tiredness - not physical tiredness, that he never mentions, but the other kind, the kind that has no name, the kind that makes the days all alike and the future a blank wall with no door.
'I don't know any more why I'm here. Before, I knew. For France, for you, for the lads. Now I'm here because I'm here, and that's the only reason. The Stéphanois says the same. We do what we do, we do it well, and we wait. But wait for what?'
Jeanne reads the letter three times. She recognises the words - they are the same as the words of the women at the factory when tiredness takes them, when the days are too long and the meaning too short. The exhaustion of the why. The weariness of no longer knowing what the effort is for.
She does not know what to answer. Words of comfort are worn out, promises are empty, and Jeanne is not a woman to say things she does not mean. She writes what she has: the facts. The crèche that works. Rose and little Jeanne, who are well. Henri and Louise, waiting for the baby. The stools in the shop. The production figures. The stamp with her name on it.
She writes him the world as it is, not as it ought to be. And at the end she adds: 'You ask me wait for what. Wait to come home. Wait to find me again. Wait to see everything we've built while you were fighting. That's not nothing, Paul. That's not nothing at all.'
She posts the letter and walks to the tram in the July evening, and Lyon is hot and bright and full of women in overalls coming home from the factory, and Jeanne is one of them, and she walks with them, and they are not nothing.
On 31 July, Henri is in the dugout. The candle. The notebook. Night writing.
'31 July 1917. The shepherd is learning to read. He has got to E. A, B, C, D, E. Five letters in ten days. It is slow. It is immense. The hands that hold the chalk are the same hands that kill men and stroke a cat. Everything is in those hands. The whole war. The whole peace.
Louise is entering her eighth month. The child moves a great deal, she says. Especially at night. An insomniac, like its father. Pierre or Jeanne. September.
Marcel has written to me. He leaves hospital next month. He is going to Toulouse. He already has premises for his paper. He says he will call it La Voix du Midi. He says the first number will carry a subtitle: "Founded in a trench". I think he is joking. With Marcel, I am never sure.
The war waits. It waits for the Americans. It waits for the tanks. It waits for the Germans to move. Everyone is waiting. And while we wait, the shepherd learns E, and the child kicks, and somewhere in Toulouse a compositor is looking for premises for a paper.
That is the war in July 1917. Waiting. And in the waiting, life growing.'