August 1917
The shepherd has got to M.
Thirteen letters in five weeks. It is slower than Pélissié, slower than Lucien, slower than the charcoal-burner from Souillac with his owl spectacles. But it is Lacombe, and Lacombe learns the way he does everything - with the stubborn slowness of a man who has spent his life following ewes across a causse where nothing is hurried, where time is measured by the seasons and not by clocks, where the grass grows when it wants and the cheese ripens when it ripens.
Henri has adapted his method. With Pélissié he used the slate and the chalk, the classic Boscher method, syllables, a straight line of progress. With the shepherd, that does not work. Lacombe does not think in lines. He thinks in circles, in cycles, in returns. He needs to touch the letters, to feel them under his fingers, to tie them to concrete things. So Henri has invented a system. He carves the letters on pieces of wood - little squares of ash the shepherd whittles himself - and Lacombe handles them, lines them up, combines them. It is a shepherd's alphabet, an alphabet of wood and hand, and the shepherd learns with his fingers as much as with his eyes.
M matters. M is the first letter of Madelou. When Lacombe traces the M on the slate - a lopsided M, shaky, too big, but an M - he looks at the letter with an intensity Henri has never seen in any of his pupils, neither at Labastide nor in the trench. This M is the beginning of his daughter's name. This M is the door.
Pélissié, who has now mastered joined-up writing and reads the paper slowly and carefully but without a mistake, watches the shepherd's progress with the distant kindness of an elder. One evening he sits down beside Lacombe and shows him how to form the A without lifting the chalk - a trick Henri taught him a year ago. The shepherd accepts the advice without a word, which is his way of saying thank you. Two peasants from the causse, one from Saint-Céré and one from Rocamadour, bent over a slate in a dugout on the Aisne, in August 1917. Verdier, if he saw it, would not know what to do with it in his tables. It fits in no column. It has no figure. And yet it is the most important thing happening in that trench.
Louise is entering her ninth month.
Her letters have changed their rhythm. Shorter, further apart - not because she likes writing less, but because her body is taking over, because the belly is heavy, because her nights are broken up by the little drummer's blows, because the August heat over the Lot is crushing for a woman carrying a child of eight and a half months. She writes sitting in the yard behind the haberdashery, in the shade of the fig tree, with a cushion at her back and a glass of water within reach.
'My dear Henri. I'm enormous. It's the only word. Enormous. I can't see my feet any more. My mother says it's normal. The doctor says it's normal. Everything is normal, apparently, except that I don't recognise myself in the mirror and climbing the stairs in the shop takes five minutes.
School starts again in three weeks and I shan't be able to go back. The inspector has granted me leave, grudgingly, because maternity leave for a schoolmistress doesn't really exist in the regulations - the regulations were written by men who've never carried a child, which explains a great deal about the regulations.
Émile will take my class in September. He still limps but he teaches well, and the children love him because he tells funny stories. Not as funny as yours, he says. I think he's exaggerating.
The school garden is ready for the autumn. The tomatoes have done well, the beans too. Marthe Bouyssou, you remember, the one who pulled a face over the radish - she's thirteen now and she wants to be a schoolmistress. I told her it was possible. I told her it was the finest job in the world. I didn't lie.
Come back soon. Your child is waiting for you. And so am I.'
Henri receives the letter on 8 August, in the dugout, and he reads it twice, and the second time he stops at 'she wants to be a schoolmistress' and stays a while with the sentence, as you stay with a glass of good wine, turning it, tasting it. Lucienne who draws. Lucien who will be a schoolmaster. Marthe who wants to be a schoolmistress. The seeds. The seeds he planted, that Louise watered, that are growing in the Lot while the war destroys the north of France. Seeds are stronger than shells. It is an absurd thought, and it is the most solid truth Henri knows.
15 August, the Assumption. The front is quiet. Henri has given half his platoon the afternoon off - no fatigues, rest in the second-line dugouts, the plonk a little more generous than usual. It is the Pétain method applied to a single platoon - treating men as men, not as matériel.
In the afternoon, in the barn that serves as a rest billet, Henri does a strange thing. He takes out Marcel's cigar box, opens it, and looks at the lead type. Then he takes out some paper, some ink he has found at the depot, and he sets type. Letter by letter, word by word, by hand, without a press, laying the type on the inked paper and pressing with the back of a spoon. It is makeshift, slow, clumsy - Henri is no compositor, his hands do not know Marcel's movements. But the letters are there, and the words take shape, and after three hours Henri has set one page.
Le Poilu du Causse. Number 16.
A single article, signed 'H.C.': the piece he wrote in July, the one about the evening school, about men learning to read in the trenches. Ten copies, printed with a spoon, illegible in places, smudged with ink. Ten copies that look like nothing and are everything.
He hands the copies out in the evening. The men read - those who can read, and those who are learning read what they can. Pélissié deciphers the whole article, slowly, his finger under the lines, and when he has finished he looks up and says to Henri: 'It's true, what you write.' The shepherd cannot read the article yet, but he holds his copy in his hands and looks at it with the same intensity he brings to the wooden letters. Fayolle reads aloud for those who cannot, and his voice carries through the dugout, clear, steady, the voice of a man of twenty-two reading a text about men learning to read, and the circle closes.
Henri sends a copy to Marcel, in Toulouse, with a note: 'Number 16. No press. No compositor. Lead type and a spoon. You'd have done it better. But you weren't here, so I did it.'
Marcel will reply three weeks later: 'I cried reading it. Not from emotion. From the typography. It's the worst setting I've ever seen. But the text is good. Keep the box. One day we'll do another one together.'
In Lyon, August is the month of heat and anxiety.
Jeanne thinks of Louise. She thinks of the child about to be born, of her brother at the front, of the distance between father and child - four hundred kilometres of trenches, roads, trains. She wrote to Louise in July offering to come to Figeac for the birth, but the factory will not let her go in September. Production is up, and the manager will not replace his head inspector for a birth that is not hers. Jeanne insisted. The manager refused. The figures, this time, are working against her.
Rose said: 'Let it go. Your sister-in-law's got her mother, her brother, the midwife. She doesn't need you there. She needs to know you're holding on here.' Rose has the cutting clear sight of women who have given birth alone, without a husband, without a sister, with a neighbour and a clean sheet. Jeanne hears the lesson and does not go.
But she makes up a parcel. A parcel from Lyon to Figeac, with everything she can find - matinée jackets, swaddling bands, a bonnet knitted by Germaine, her workmate from the Limousin, a wooden rattle turned by a man in the shop who makes toys on Sundays, and a note: 'For Pierre or Jeanne, from an aunt who is waiting for you. Welcome to the world, little one.'
The parcel leaves on 20 August. It will reach Figeac before the child.
On 20 August, Verdier witnesses an event that does not make the front pages but that counts.
The French attack at Verdun. Not a great offensive - a limited operation, carefully prepared, carried out by the Second Army in the sector of the Mort-Homme and Hill 304. The objectives are modest, the means considerable, the preparation impeccable. It is the Pétain method brought to perfection - a short assault, on a narrow front, with crushing superiority in artillery, limited objectives, and an immediate halt once the objectives are reached. No breakthrough, no promise, no forty-eight hours. Just one blow, clean, precise, and then stop.
The operation succeeds. Completely. The positions are taken in a few hours, with moderate losses, and the Germans do not take them back. It is the proof that the French army can still attack - provided it does not attack the way Nivelle did.
Verdier reads the report on the operation with a feeling he has not often had in this war - satisfaction. Not joy - the technical satisfaction of a man who sees that the methods he has been urging for three years are working at last. The creeping barrage has worked. The limited objectives have worked. The coordination has worked. Everything he has written in his notes, his reports, his notebooks, is there, proven, confirmed, in the chalk of Verdun.
He writes to Madeleine that evening, a letter unlike the others. He writes about the operation - without classified details, without figures. He writes about method, about rigour, about what it means to do things properly. And he adds, in the middle of a paragraph about artillery, an unexpected sentence: 'Tell Pierre his father is doing useful work. For the first time, I believe that is true.'
The end of August. The child is coming.
Henri counts the days. Not the days of the war - Louise's days. The birth is expected in the second week of September. The doctor in Figeac says all is well. Louise's mother says all is well. Louise says all is well. Everyone says all is well, and Henri, in his trench, four hundred kilometres away, cannot check, cannot touch, cannot see, and helplessness is a more refined form of torture than shells.
He has applied for leave in September. The battalion commander has passed it on. The answer has not come. Henri waits, as he waits for everything in this war - with a patience that is not patience but the absence of any alternative.
On 25 August he writes Louise a letter that is not a letter but a secular prayer, the prayer of a man without God addressing the only power he believes in - life.
'Dear Louise. I may not be there when the child comes. If I'm not there, know that I'll be there all the same - in your head, beside you, my hands on your hands. I don't believe in God, you know that. But I believe in you. And I believe in this child I haven't seen yet and already love the way you love the things you've built together - with certainty, without conditions.
Call him Pierre if it's a boy. Jeanne if it's a girl. Tell the child its father is a schoolmaster. Not a soldier. A schoolmaster. That's the word I want it to hear first.'
Louise receives the letter on 2 September. She puts it away in the drawer of her bedside table, under the book by Francis Jammes she sent Henri three years ago, the one with which it all began, the one that travelled from Figeac to Labastide-Murat in a white envelope and held three lines and a poem and the future.
On 31 August, the shepherd writes his first word.
Not a whole word - a name. Five letters, lined up on the slate, in the navvy's handwriting that is his, each letter as big as a fist. M-A-D-E-L. Henri corrects him - the last two are missing. O-U. Lacombe wipes it all out and starts again. M-A-D-E-L-O-U. Seven letters. His daughter's name. Written in his own hand. For the first time.
The shepherd looks at the word on the slate. He says nothing. He looks. The cat, on his knees, looks too, with that perfect indifference of cats to human achievements.
Then Lacombe takes a sheet of paper, Henri's pencil, and copies the word out. Slowly. Laboriously. Each letter like a step on a mountain path. M-A-D-E-L-O-U.
Below the name he adds, letter by letter, sweating, another word Henri has not dictated, a word he has put together on his own, in his head, assembling the wooden letters one by one.
P-A-P-A.
Henri looks at the paper. Madelou. Papa.
He says nothing. There is nothing to say. He folds the paper and gives it to the shepherd, and the shepherd puts it in an envelope, and Henri writes the address, and tomorrow the vaguemestre will carry off the second letter of Antoine Lacombe's life.
The first said 'Madelou'. The second says 'Papa'.
It is the same letter.