December 1917
The shepherd writes his letter on 19 December.
Not on the 24th, not at Christmas - six days before. Because the shepherd is ready six days before, and when the shepherd is ready, he sees no reason to wait. Lacombe's patience is boundless when he is learning, and nil when he knows.
It is evening. The dugout. The candle. The cat is asleep. Fayolle is on watch. Pélissié is writing his own letter in his corner, with the ease of a man who has travelled the road and no longer looks back. Henri sits facing the shepherd, the slate between them, the paper beside it, the pencil laid down.
The shepherd picks up the pencil. Henri says nothing. No instructions, no guidance. Lacombe knows what he wants to write. He has composed it in his head for weeks, word by word, sentence by sentence, with the same method he used for his wooden letters - put together, check, put together again. The letter is written in his head before it is written on paper. The paper is the last stage, not the first.
He writes. Slowly. Every letter traced with a care that makes the candle shake, because the shepherd presses on the pencil as if he were carving in stone, and the table shakes, and the candle shakes, and the shepherd's shadow on the wall of the dugout is huge, bent, intent.
Henri watches. He does not correct. Not this time. This letter is Lacombe's, not the schoolmaster's. The mistakes will stay. The clumsiness will stay. The truth will stay.
The shepherd takes forty minutes. Forty minutes for twenty-three words. Then he puts down the pencil, blows on the paper the way you blow on an ember, and hands it to Henri.
Henri reads.
'Dear Madelou. Its Papa who writes. I think of you and of Mama and of the ewes. Is Nòu big? I loveyou. Papa.'
Twenty-three words. Not a sentence more. Not a word too many. The handwriting is that of a man who learnt to form his letters at thirty-seven, in a trench, between two bombardments, with a shepherd's fingers and a soldier's pencil. The letters are too big, uneven, leaning every which way. The apostrophe in 'It's' is missing. The m of 'Mama' looks like an n. 'Love you' is written as a single block, the seven letters welded together, as if the words refused to be separated.
Henri looks at the letter. He looks at the shepherd. Lacombe is waiting, his eyes on Henri, with that mute expectation which is the pupil's before the master, and also the father's before the witness - look, this is my child, tell me it is good.
Henri says: 'That's good, Lacombe.'
The shepherd takes the letter back. He folds it. He folds it again - in four, in eight, in sixteen, until it is a little square of paper that fits in his palm. Then he unfolds it, folds it again normally, in three, and puts it in the envelope Henri has got ready. Henri writes the address. The shepherd looks at the address and recognises it - not all the words, not yet, but the name of the village, and his wife's name, and those letters he knows the way he knows the stars above the causse.
The vaguemestre will take the letter tomorrow. It will reach Rocamadour on the 26th or 27th. Madelou will read it. She may recognise her father's handwriting, or she may not, because her father's handwriting has only existed for three months and Madelou has never seen it. But she will read 'Papa' at the bottom of the letter, and that word she will recognise.
Henri does not sleep that night. Not because of the noise - the sector is quiet, the artillery silent, the winter night deep and cold. He does not sleep because something has been completed, and completions, like births, keep you awake.
The shepherd of Rocamadour can write. Antoine Lacombe, thirty-seven, shepherd on the Causse de Gramat, private in the 7th Infantry Regiment, man of silence, man of hands, man of beasts - Antoine Lacombe can write his daughter's name and the words 'I love you'. Three years of war to get to this. Three years of mud, blood, shells, lice, rats, dead men, and at the end of those three years a man writes to his daughter for the first time in his life.
Henri thinks of all the pupils he has had. The children of Labastide-Murat, the ones who sat their leaving certificate in June 1914, Lucienne Marty and her pencil, Fernand Lavergne and his accents. Pélissié and his slate. The charcoal-burner from Souillac and his owl spectacles. Lucien Combes and his Montaigne. And now Lacombe, the last, the slowest, the most unlikely, the finest.
He opens his notebook and writes, in almost total darkness, by the light of a candle end:
'19 December. Lacombe has written his letter. Twenty-three words. It is the shortest letter in the world and the longest to write - thirty-seven years to learn, three months to trace. I have never taught anything more important. Not grammar, not history, not arithmetic. A father's words to his daughter. That is all. That is everything.'
Christmas 1917. The fourth.
Henri has no leave. The September leave used up his entitlement for the year, and Christmas leave is rare - the army is wary of troop movements on the roads, crowded stations, late returns. Henri spends Christmas in the trench, with his men, for the fourth time.
But this Christmas is different from the others. Not because the war is gentler - it is not. Not because there is more hope - there is not. Different because Henri is a father, and little Jeanne is three and a half months old, and in Henri's pocket there is a photograph of her that Louise sent in November, a photograph in which the little one has her eyes open and gazes at the lens with that gravity of babies who seem to contemplate the world with the wisdom of those who know nothing about it yet.
On the evening of the 24th, the platoon is at rest, in the second line. The dugout is heated by a makeshift stove - a pierced tin drum, fed with wood and coal, which smokes and heats badly but heats. Henri has received a parcel from Louise - confit, walnuts, a cake, and a tiny piece of knitting, a white matinée jacket knitted by Louise's mother, which the little one has worn and which smells of milk and lavender. Henri holds the matinée jacket in his hands and lifts it to his face and breathes in, and the smell is a door opening onto a world four hundred kilometres away.
He passes the jacket to the shepherd. Lacombe takes it, looks at it, sniffs it, and passes it to Fayolle. The thing goes round the section, from hand to hand, the way the photographs go round, the way the letters go round, and every man holds this little thing of white wool that is proof that a child exists and the world has not stopped.
Pélissié holds the jacket longer than the others. He looks at it with his peasant's eyes, and Henri sees something in those eyes he has not seen before - tenderness. Pélissié has two children, back there on the causse, and he has not seen them for months, and this matinée jacket that is not his children's is his children's all the same, because all the children of the war are the same children, and matinée jackets are universal.
Christmas dinner is modest. Louise's confit, a tin of bully beef made better, fresh bread that has arrived by some miracle, plonk, and the cake. Henri cuts the cake into equal portions - one per man, sixteen portions, no favourites. The cat is given a piece of confit and accepts it with the condescension that is its trademark.
After the meal, Henri does something he has not done for a long time. He reads aloud. Not a letter, not an article - a piece of writing. The piece he wrote in July, the one about the evening school, the one he printed in number 16 of Le Poilu du Causse. He reads it in the dugout, by the glow of the stove, and the men listen, and the piece is about them, about Pélissié, about Lucien, about the charcoal-burner, about Lacombe, about the school in the barn, the letters on the slate, the words growing in the mud.
When he finishes reading, nobody speaks. The silence is that of men who have just heard something true and have no need to comment on it. Then the shepherd says, in his low voice: 'That's us, that is.'
That is all. It is enough.
In Lyon, Jeanne spends her fourth Christmas of the war.
The same ritual as the year before - Rose, the children, Marie, Germaine, the chicken, the wine, the candles. But the circle has grown. There are two Jeannes at the table now - big Jeanne and Rose's little one, who is fourteen months old and walks holding on to the chairs and says 'Mama' and 'no' and nothing else, which is vocabulary enough to rule the world. Rose's eldest boy is seven and goes to school and asks questions about the war, which Rose answers with her usual frankness: 'Your father died in the war. War is wicked. Eat your soup.'
Jeanne has had news of Paul - a card dated 18 December, the signature, the army stamp. Alive. The word that is enough and not enough. Paul is somewhere in the north, she does not know where, and the threat of the spring weighs on her without her being able to name it. She knows, by instinct, from rumour, from the talk at the union, that the Germans are preparing something big. Everyone knows. No one says it.
What she does say is something else. After the meal, when the children are asleep and the women are still round the table, Jeanne talks about the stamp. About the lost post. About what it means - not for her alone, but for all the women who took up posts during the war and will lose them when the men come back. Rose listens, Germaine listens, Marie listens. And the conversation that follows is perhaps the most important conversation of Jeanne's war - not a speech, not a manifesto, just five women round a table, in a kitchen in Vaise, talking about what they will not let go.
Rose says: 'The vote.' Jeanne says: 'The pay.' Germaine says: 'The right to work without asking permission.' Marie says: 'The crèche.' And the fifth woman, a neighbour from upstairs, a widow of forty who has never opened her mouth in public in her life, says: 'Respect.'
The word drops onto the table like a coin. Respect. It is the word that holds all the others - the vote, the pay, the work, the crèche. Respect for the women who kept the country standing while the men defended it. Respect for the women who ran the factories, fed the children, nursed the wounded, carried the dead. Respect for the women who will not be going back to the wash-house.
Jeanne does not put it in those terms. Jeanne does not make speeches. But she writes to Henri on 26 December a sentence that sums it all up: 'We won't go back. Whatever they do, whatever they say, we won't go back.'
Verdier spends Christmas alone.
Not by choice - by duty. The staff does not take 25 December 1917 off, because the Germans do not take it off either, and the reports keep coming in, and every report confirms what Verdier already knows: the spring offensive is coming. It is coming with the certainty of sunrise. German divisions are pouring in from the east, the trains are running day and night on the lines through Belgium and the north of France, and the aerial photographs show concentrations of artillery beyond anything yet seen, even at Verdun.
Verdier works on 25 December. He revises the defence plans, checks the fall-back positions, calculates the reserves needed. He does what he has been doing for four years - he prepares. But this time he is preparing something different. He is not preparing a French offensive. He is preparing the defence against the greatest offensive Germany has ever launched.
He writes to Madeleine on Christmas evening. A short letter, a little less empty than the ones before. He asks after Pierre - fifteen now, his map still on his bedroom wall. After Marguerite - twelve, who wants to be a nurse, which terrifies Verdier though he does not say so. And he adds a sentence he has never written: 'Next year will be difficult. But it may be the last. Tell the children. Not the "difficult". The "last".'
31 December 1917. The fourth New Year of the war.
Henri is in the dugout. The last dugout of 1917. The last candle of 1917. The last notebook opened in 1917.
He writes:
'31 December. Summing up. Alive. Married. A father. Louise is well. Jeanne - the little one - is growing. Jeanne - the big one - is fighting. Paul is holding on. The shepherd has written his letter. Pélissié writes novels. Fayolle still laughs. Marcel is making a newspaper in Toulouse. Lucien will be a schoolmaster.
Losses for the year: the Chemin des Dames, the dead of April, Marcel wounded, many men's faith. Gains for the year: a daughter, a shepherd's letter, proof that men can learn anywhere, any time, even in the mud.
1918 will be the year of truth. The Germans will come. The Americans will come. Will they both arrive at the same time? No. The Germans first. We shall have to hold. Hold again. Hold always.
The ring on my finger. The photograph in my pocket. Marcel's box in my haversack. The shepherd's wooden letters in the ammunition box. Lacombe's wooden dog in my pocket.
Three grams of gold. Twenty-three words on a sheet of paper. A baby who smells of lavender. A cat that purrs. Those are my weapons. They will be enough.'
He blows out the candle. The shepherd is asleep, the cat against his chest, the letter to Madelou somewhere in a mailbag between the Aisne and the causse. The ring turns on Henri's finger in the dark. And 1918 begins, the last year of the war, but nobody knows it yet.
Nobody knows it. Everyone hopes it.