October 1917
The shepherd has got to R.
Twenty letters of the alphabet in two months. The pace has picked up - not because Lacombe has got quicker, but because he has understood the system. The letters are no longer arbitrary drawings to be memorised one by one - they are parts of a mechanism, like the parts of a fence or the knots of a net, and once you have understood the mechanism, the parts fit together. The shepherd thinks like a shepherd, and Henri teaches like a shepherd - every letter is an animal, every syllable is a fold, every word is a flock.
The wooden letters are worn down by Lacombe's fingers. Henri has carved new ones, smaller, more precise. In the evening, in the dugout, the shepherd lines up his letters on the bunk the way a child plays with bricks, except that this child is thirty-seven years old, has hands that have killed men, and a cat on his knees.
Pélissié watches Lacombe's progress with a satisfaction he does not show but Henri can guess at. Pélissié writes without mistakes now - letters of twenty-five, thirty lines to his wife, in which he tells of the trench with the precision of an official report and the dryness of a man who does not know how to embellish. 'It rained. The soup was cold. The cat caught a rat. The second lieutenant got a photo of his daughter.' It is raw literature, unadorned, and Henri, who sometimes reads over Pélissié's shoulder with his permission, finds these letters truer than anything he has read since the war began.
In Russia, everything is collapsing.
The news comes in scraps, confused, contradictory. Lenin's Bolsheviks are gaining strength. Kerensky's provisional government is tottering. The Russian army is no longer fighting - soldiers are deserting by whole regiments, walking home, taking the trains, occupying the stations. The peasants are sharing out the great landowners' estates. The Eastern Front is dissolving like sugar in water.
Verdier follows the Russian death throes with the cold attention of a surgeon watching a patient die. Every Russian division that dissolves is a German division freed for the west. The calculation is simple and terrifying. At least forty German divisions will be transferred to the west by the spring. Forty divisions means five hundred thousand men. Five hundred thousand more men facing an exhausted French army and a British army bled white by Passchendaele.
Passchendaele. The other catastrophe of October. The British offensive in Flanders, launched in July, has turned into a nightmare of mud that outdoes anything the Somme produced. The British are advancing a few hundred metres a week, over ground that is no longer earth but soup, under rain that never stops. The losses are appalling. The village of Passchendaele, the objective of the offensive, will be taken on 6 November, after three and a half months of fighting, for a gain of eight kilometres. The cost: two hundred and fifty thousand men. British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders. The children of the Empire, drowned in Belgian mud.
Henri knows almost nothing of Passchendaele. His sector on the Aisne is hundreds of kilometres from Flanders, and news of the British front arrives filtered, vague, distant. But he sees the trains of wounded passing through the stations behind the lines, when he is at rest, and the khaki uniforms tell a story he knows by heart. The same mud. The same shells. The same bodies.
On 7 October, Henri receives a letter from Jeanne. Not his daughter - his sister. Big Jeanne, the one in Lyon.
Jeanne has heard about the birth. Henri wrote to her from Figeac on 11 September, a quick note: 'It's a girl. Jeanne. Three kilos two hundred grams. All's well. You're an aunt and a godmother.' The word 'godmother' had not been discussed - Henri decided it alone, on the train back, with the certainty of things that go without saying.
Jeanne's reply has taken three weeks - civilian post is slow, slower than the army post, which is one of the paradoxes of this war. Jeanne writes:
'My dear Henri. Your letter came one evening when I was tired, and I read it standing in the kitchen and then I sat down, which I never do, as you know. A girl. Jeanne. My name on a baby. It's the loveliest and the most unfair thing you could have done to me - lovely because it's lovely, unfair because now I'm going to cry every time someone says "Jeanne" and it's her and not me. I'm joking. Half joking.
Godmother. I accept. Tell Louise I accept and that I'll come and see my goddaughter as soon as the factory lets me go, which means probably never, but I'll go all the same.
Paul is pleased for you. He said: "Your brother, a father. Who'd have thought it." That's his way of being moved.
Rose said: "Another Jeanne. We'll end up forming a union." That's her way of being pleased.
Love to you. Give Louise a kiss. Give the little one a kiss from me. Tell her her aunt is waiting for her. Tell her her aunt has a stamp with her name on it and a stool with no back and a fight that isn't over. Tell her all that. She won't understand. She'll understand later.'
Henri reads the letter and puts it in his pocket with the others, and his pocket is an archipelago, every letter an island, and the islands make a country.
Mid-October. The everyday war takes over again after the lull of the summer. The Aisne front has come back to life - no offensive, but trench raids, local attacks by a company or a battalion to improve the positions. Pétain is testing his troops. He wants to know whether the French army can still attack - not a great offensive, not a Chemin des Dames, but limited, methodical operations, as at Verdun in August.
Henri's regiment takes part in a raid on 15 October. Objective: a German salient threatening the battalion's right flank, a bulge in the enemy line from which flanking fire comes. The operation is carefully set up - four days of preparation, aerial reconnaissance, a detailed fire plan, limited objectives, a withdrawal planned once the salient is taken. It is pure Pétain - modest, precise, economical.
Henri leads his platoon in at four in the morning, in the dark, without a preliminary barrage - a silent raid, with grenades and knives, the oldest and most terrifying form of war. The men crawl forward across no man's land, cut the wire with shears, and slip into the German trenches before the enemy wakes.
The salient is taken in twenty minutes. Three Germans killed, eight prisoners, a machine-gun nest destroyed. Henri's platoon has no one killed. One wounded - a September reinforcement, a grenade splinter in the forearm, nothing serious.
The shepherd took part in the raid. His thigh slows him down, but in a night raid silence counts for more than speed, and silence is Lacombe's mother tongue. He slid into the trench like a fox into a henhouse, without a sound, and did his job with the cold competence of a man who would rather be elsewhere but knows that 'elsewhere' does not exist.
When they get back, the battalion commander congratulates Henri. 'Well led, Castayrol. Nobody killed.' Nobody killed. It is the highest compliment of the war in 1917 - not ground won, not prisoners, not glory. Nobody killed.
In Lyon, October is the month Paul comes home on leave.
Five days. It is the first long leave since the summer, and Paul arrives at Perrache on a Tuesday evening, the 16th, with a pack too light and a face too thin. Jeanne is waiting for him. She sees him get off the train and she recognises him - not as in July 1916, when he was a ghost. Paul is still thin, still marked, but he is here. Present. In his eyes, something that looks like will.
They go home to Vaise. Paul eats. Paul sleeps. The first day belongs to the body - the body finding its bearings again, finding the bed, the warmth, the absence of danger. The second day belongs to the mind - Paul talks. Not about the war, not yet. About afterwards. About what he will do when he comes back. The union. The factory. Rights.
On the third day, Paul does something he has never done. He goes with Jeanne to the factory. Not inside - to the gate. He waits for her in the morning where she gets off the tram, he watches her go in with the other women, he sees the line of overalls converging on the Berliet gates, and he stands on the pavement, cap in hand, and he watches.
In the evening he says to Jeanne: 'I saw.'
Jeanne says: 'Saw what?'
'All of it. The women going in. The women coming out. The factory running. I saw what you do. What all of you do.'
He does not say thank you. It is not one of Paul's words. But 'I saw' is more than thank you. It is recognition. The man who sees what the women do, at last, after three years of war and two years away, the man who looks and understands.
On the fourth day, they go together to the municipal crèche in Vaise. Rose leaves little Jeanne there in the mornings, and Jeanne wanted Paul to see. Paul looks at the children, the cradles, the women dropping them off, the women collecting them. He looks at little Jeanne and he says: 'You lot did this.'
'We pushed,' says Jeanne.
Paul nods. And in that nod Jeanne sees something she has never seen in her husband - not admiration, not respect, something rarer: acceptance. Acceptance that the world has changed, that women have changed, that his wife has changed, and that the change is not a threat but a victory.
On the fifth day, Paul leaves. The station, the platform, the train. The ritual. But this time, as he is about to get into the carriage, Paul turns round and says to Jeanne: 'When I come home, you're the one teaching me.'
'Teaching you what?'
'The union. How you do it. The figures, the reports, all that sort of thing. I was a factory hand. You've turned into something else. I want to learn.'
The train whistles. Paul gets on. Jeanne stays on the platform and watches the train go, and something in her that has been tight for three years loosens a notch. Not completely. One notch. Enough to breathe.
At the end of October, the news from Russia turns dramatic. The Bolsheviks are preparing their coup. Lenin, back from exile, is pushing for insurrection. Kerensky's government is clinging on, but everyone can see it is finished. The question is no longer whether Russia will leave the war, but when.
Henri watches these events from afar, with the distance of a man whose world has shrunk to the size of his platoon, his letters, his daughter growing up in Figeac without him. He knows the fall of Russia will change everything. He knows the Germans will come west with all their strength. He knows 1918 will be the year of truth. But this knowledge is abstract, distant, like storm clouds on the horizon. What is concrete, what is real, is the shepherd's slate, Pélissié's letter, the photograph of Jeanne in his pocket, the cat purring.
31 October, evening. The dugout. The candle. The shepherd is tracing words on the slate - not names this time, whole words. 'Ewe.' 'House.' 'Little.' Henri corrects, guides, encourages. The wooden letters are lined up on the bunk, and the shepherd touches them with his fingertips before he traces them, as if checking their shape with his skin before trusting them to the chalk.
Henri watches him and thinks of his daughter. Jeanne is seven weeks old. Louise writes that she smiles - not a real smile, a reflex, but a smile all the same. That she holds her head up. That she looks at the fig tree through the window with eyes that are beginning to see.
The shepherd traces 'maison' on the slate. M-A-I-S-O-N. Six letters. A word that holds everything - the walls, the roof, the wife, the children, the dog, the flock. The world before. The world after.
Henri says: 'That's good.'
The shepherd says: 'It's not enough. I want to write the letter.'
'Christmas,' says Henri. 'We said Christmas.'
The shepherd nods. Two months. Two months to go from words to sentences, from sentences to the letter. It is tight. It is the same kind of reckoning as Verdier's reckonings - tight but possible, if all goes well, if nothing breaks, if the war leaves them the time.
If. Always if.