November 1917
Russia falls.
On 7 November - 25 October by the Russian calendar, and history will keep both dates, as if time itself could no longer count - the Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd. The Winter Palace, seat of the provisional government, is stormed by Red Guards and the Kronstadt sailors. Kerensky flees. Lenin proclaims the power of the soviets. And the new government's first decree is a decree on peace - immediate peace, without annexations or indemnities, the peace Jaurès dreamt of and Lenin imposes with the brutality of a man who does not dream.
The news crosses Europe in a few hours. In Paris, there is consternation. The Russian ally no longer exists. The Eastern Front is going to disappear. German divisions are going to pour into the west. Everything Verdier has been calculating for months becomes reality, all at once, like a dam giving way.
Verdier receives the news in his office on the morning of the 8th, in a telegram from General Headquarters. He reads the telegram, puts it down, takes out his map of the Eastern Front, and draws a cross on it. The Eastern Front is dead. Then he takes out his map of the Western Front and begins to calculate. Forty German divisions available for transfer. Perhaps fifty. Time needed for the transfer: three to four months. The first German reinforcements will reach the west in February. The bulk will be in place in March, in April at the latest. The German offensive will come in the spring. It is a mathematical certainty.
And the Americans? Verdier consults the reports. A hundred thousand Americans in France in November 1917. Badly trained, badly equipped, with no experience. It will take a million to tip the scales. A million men cannot be trained in three months. The American army will not be operational until the summer of 1918 at the earliest.
The window. Verdier sees it taking shape on his map like a crack in a wall. Between the spring, when the Germans will attack with their regained superiority, and the summer, when the Americans will be ready, there will be three, four, perhaps five months in which France and Britain will stand alone against the greatest concentration of forces Germany has ever deployed in the west.
He writes in his notebook on 8 November: 'Critical window: March to July 1918. If we hold, we win. If we do not hold, we lose everything. It is as simple as that. The whole war, three and a half years of blood, will come down to these few months.'
At the front, the news of the Russian revolution has a strange effect. Not fear - ambivalence. The men in the trenches know that the fall of Russia is bad news militarily. But the men in the trenches are also factory hands, peasants, clerks, and the Russian revolution speaks a language they understand - the language of those who have had enough, who refuse to die for leaders who do not die, who want peace and bread and dignity.
Marcel would have known what to think. Marcel would have had the words, the framework, the analysis. Marcel is in Toulouse, his back in pieces, in premises in the rue des Filatiers where he is setting up his paper. Henri receives a letter from him on 12 November, the first in two months.
'Dear Lieutenant. The Russian revolution - what do you make of it? I think it proves Jaurès was right - the people can stop the war. The Russians have done it. The question is at what price, and whether the price will be worth it. Lenin isn't Jaurès. Jaurès believed in democracy. Lenin believes in power. It's not the same thing.
La Voix du Midi comes out on 1 December. First number. Four pages. I've found a second-hand press and an apprentice who knows nothing but wants to learn. He reminds me of someone. Me, maybe.
Keep the box. One day you'll give it back and we'll have a drink.
Your compositor. Marcel.'
Henri reads the letter and smiles. Marcel is alive, Marcel is thinking, Marcel is setting up his paper. The world goes round. And the question Marcel asks - the Russian revolution, what do we make of it? - is the question nobody asks aloud in the trench and everybody asks in silence.
Henri does not ask the question. Not of his men, not of himself. He does not have the luxury of political thought - he has the luxury of survival, which is luxury enough. But he sees. He sees the looks that change when Russia is mentioned. He sees the murmuring in the cookhouses, the conversations that stop when an officer goes by. He sees the crack from May that has not entirely closed, in spite of Pétain, in spite of the leave, in spite of the rest. The French army is holding, but it is holding the way a cracked glass holds - as long as nobody knocks it.
Fayolle asks the question one evening, in the dugout, with the directness of a lad of twenty-two who does not know how to beat about the bush. 'Lieutenant, if the Russians have stopped the war, why not us?'
The silence in the dugout is total. The cat raises its head. The shepherd opens his eyes. Pélissié stops writing.
Henri looks at Fayolle. He sees the face of this lad who was twenty when he came in as a reinforcement in September 1914, who killed a man at twenty, who has been through Verdun and the Somme and the Chemin des Dames, and who is now twenty-two with the eyes of a man of forty. Fayolle is not speaking to provoke. He is speaking out of exhaustion.
Henri chooses his words. Every word counts. One word too many and discipline cracks. One word too few and trust breaks.
'Because the Germans are in France. Not in Russia. If we stop, they stay. And they stay in our country.'
Fayolle thinks about it. It is a simple argument, an argument about ground, not politics. The Germans are in France. Ten departments occupied. Lille, Laon, Saint-Quentin, Cambrai. French towns under the German boot. French civilians under German administration. If the army stops, they will not leave. If the army stops, they will stay, and France will be cut in two, and what is left of France will no longer be France.
Fayolle says: 'And when the Americans get here?'
'When the Americans get here, we'll finish it. Together. And we'll go home.'
'When?'
Henri does not lie. He does not know how to lie, and he does not want to lie, and he cannot lie to a man who has trusted him for three years. 'I don't know. Next summer, perhaps. The autumn. I don't know.'
The shepherd, who has been listening without a word, speaks up. His voice is low, slow, with the accent of the causse. 'When the wolf's about, the ewes don't run off. They huddle up. The wolf's here. We huddle up.'
It is the shepherd's answer. It is not politics. It is instinct. And instinct, in this war, is worth more than all the analyses.
Fayolle says nothing more. The dugout returns to its usual silence. The cat settles down again. Pélissié goes back to his writing. The crack has not disappeared. But it has not widened. Not tonight.
In Lyon, November brings the cold and a fight Jeanne did not expect.
The Berliet management announces a reorganisation of the shops. Three inspection shops merged into two. Posts abolished. And Jeanne's post - head inspector of Shop C - is on the list.
Not a dismissal. A 'redeployment'. She is offered a post as an ordinary inspector in the new merged shop, at the same pay but without the title, without the responsibility, without the stamp. A step backwards. An erasure.
Jeanne receives the news one Tuesday morning, in a note from the deputy manager. She reads the note standing in the corridor of the offices, and something in her stiffens - not anger, not fear, something harder, colder. The certainty that what is happening is not a reorganisation but a retreat. The men are starting to come back - the men invalided out, the lightly wounded found other work, the men recalled to the factories. And every man who comes back is a woman's post that disappears. It is not put like that. It is put in terms of 'rationalisation' and 'skills'. But the mechanism is clear.
Jeanne goes to see Rose. Rose says what Jeanne is thinking: 'They're getting shot of us. We ran their factory for three years and now the men are coming back, we're out.'
Jeanne is not going anywhere. She asks for a meeting with the deputy manager. She brings her figures - three months of production reports, error rates, comparisons between shops. She puts the figures on the desk and says: 'Shop C has the best quality rate in the works. If you abolish the head inspector's post, you lose the system that gets those results. It's not me you're losing. It's the method.'
The deputy manager looks at the figures. He knows the figures. He knows Jeanne is right. But the figures are not the only factors - there is company policy, pressure from the men's unions who want their posts back, the government preparing for the return of the demobilised. Jeanne is fighting against a current, and the current is stronger than the figures.
The post is abolished on 25 November. Jeanne is redeployed as an ordinary inspector. Same pay, same work, no title. The stamp disappears. The blue rubber 'J. Castayrol' is put away in a drawer in the offices, and Jeanne watches it disappear with a sharp awareness that the stamp is more than a stamp - it is a name, an existence, proof that she was someone.
Rose says: 'It's the start. When the war's over, they'll sack the lot of us.'
Jeanne says nothing. She thinks of what Paul said in October: 'When I come home, you're the one teaching me.' She thinks of the stools, the crèche, the fights won. And she thinks of the fights lost, this one, the stamp, the title, the place. And she knows Rose is right - when the men come back, the women will be pushed back. Not all of them. Not everywhere. Not without a fight. But the movement will be there, powerful, inevitable, carried by a world that is not ready for women to be anything other than what they were before.
She writes to Henri: 'They've taken my post away. Not my work, my post. The title, the stamp. I'm an inspector again, like before. It doesn't matter. It does matter. I don't know how else to put it.'
Henri receives the letter on 5 December. He reads it and understands, with the precision of a man who has seen captured positions retaken by the enemy, that Jeanne has just lost a piece of ground. Not the war. A piece of ground. And pieces of ground can be taken back.
He replies: 'What's been learnt can't be unlearnt. What's been done can't be undone. They can take away the stamp. They can't take away what you know, what you are, what you've proved. The stamp will come back. Maybe not the same one. Maybe not in the same place. But it'll come back.'
On 20 November, the British do something that changes the war.
At Cambrai, on a ten-kilometre front, four hundred and seventy-six British tanks, three hundred and seventy-eight of them Mark IVs, attack the German lines without an artillery preparation. It is the first massed tank attack in history. The tanks advance in formation, crush the wire, cross the trenches, and the infantry follows, shielded by the steel monsters. In a few hours the British break through the Hindenburg Line to a depth of eight kilometres - the deepest breakthrough since the Marne.
The bells ring in England. For the first time since the war began, the bells ring for a victory. But the victory does not last. Reserves are lacking, tanks break down, and the Germans counter-attack on 30 November and take back half the ground won. Cambrai ends in a draw.
Verdier reads the reports on Cambrai with feverish intensity. Three hundred and seventy-six tanks. The Hindenburg Line broken. In a few hours. Without an artillery preparation. It is the proof. The proof that tanks can break the front, that the trench is not invincible, that steel can beat concrete. The proof that the war can change its nature.
He writes in his notebook: 'Cambrai proves everything I have been writing for two years. The tank is the decisive weapon. Not these tanks, too slow, too fragile. The tanks to come. Faster, more reliable, in greater numbers. A thousand tanks on a twenty-kilometre front, with the infantry behind and the artillery overhead and the aeroplanes in front. That is victory. Not courage. Steel.'
He adds, underneath: 'But we must hold until the tanks are here. And holding means surviving the spring of 1918.'
The shepherd has got to sentences.
Short, simple, clumsy sentences. 'The dog is white.' 'The house is big.' 'Madelou is pretty.' Each sentence is a world, each word a step along a path Lacombe travels with the stubborn slowness that is his nature and that nothing - not the war, not the shells, not tiredness - can speed up. Henri does not speed it up. He knows, with a schoolmaster's instinct, that every man has his own pace and that forcing the pace breaks the momentum.
On the evening of 28 November, the shepherd writes his first sentence without help. Henri is not in the dugout - he is at battalion headquarters, in a meeting with the battalion commander. When he comes back, the shepherd is sitting on his bunk, the slate on his knees, the cat beside him. The slate bears a sentence of six words, traced in lopsided, enormous letters that spill over the frame.
'I am thinking of you Madelou.'
Henri looks at the slate. The shepherd looks at him. His eyes are clear, clearer than they have been for months, and in those eyes there is the same thing that was in Pélissié's eyes when he wrote his first letter, the same thing that was in Lucien's eyes when he read Montaigne - pride. Not vanity. Pride. The pride of a man who has done something difficult and knows he has done it.
Henri says: 'It's nearly Christmas. You'll be ready.'
The shepherd nods. 'I'll be ready.'
Fayolle, lying on his bunk, says: 'Bloody hell, Lacombe, you can write.' The shepherd does not answer. But the cat purrs, which is answer enough.
30 November. The dugout. The candle. The notebook.
'30 November 1917. Nearly three and a half years. The year is ending in ruins and promises. Russia has fallen. The Americans are coming. Cambrai has shown that tanks can break through. The shepherd is writing sentences. My daughter is nearly three months old. Louise is holding on. Jeanne is holding on, in spite of the lost stamp.
December tomorrow. Christmas. The shepherd has told me he will be ready. Ready to write a letter to his daughter. Eleven years old, Madelou. Eleven years old, and her father has never written to her. Tomorrow, or next month, or at Christmas, he will write to her. In his own hand. With his shepherd's handwriting, his shepherd's words, his shepherd's tenderness.
And I, what shall I write to my daughter, when she can read? What shall I tell her about this war? I do not know. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I shall show her Marcel's cigar box, and Lacombe's wooden letters, and Lucienne's drawing, and Pélissié's letter, and I shall say to her: there. That is what men did in the mud. Not killing. Not destroying. Learning. Writing. Drawing. Holding on.
That is what your father did in the war. He kept school.'