January 1918
The coldest winter of the war.
That is what the men say, and men remember winters the way peasants remember harvests - precisely, selectively, infallibly. The thermometer drops to minus fifteen in the trenches of the Aisne, which means the water freezes in the water bottles, the Lebel's mechanism jams unless it is oiled every two hours, and the sentries' feet turn into blocks of pain after thirty minutes on watch. Henri cuts the watches to one hour. The company officer protests - the regulations say two hours. Henri says: 'The regulations haven't got their feet in the trench.' The company officer is a lieutenant of twenty-three, arrived in October, who was not at Verdun, not on the Somme, not on the Chemin des Dames, and who looks at Second Lieutenant Castayrol with that mixture of respect and irritation young regular officers feel towards old officers from the line. The lieutenant gives way. The watches go to one hour.
The cold changes men. Not in their courage - in their bodies. Faces hollow, hands crack, bronchitis sets in. Fayolle is coughing again - the cough that has been his since 1914, which comes and goes with the seasons like a tide, and comes back every winter a little stronger, a little deeper. Henri listens to him cough in the night and thinks he ought to be evacuated, that the cough will kill him if the shells do not, but evacuating Fayolle means losing Fayolle, and losing Fayolle means losing a piece of the section, and the section is the only thing holding everything else together.
The shepherd does not suffer from the cold. Or if he does, he does not show it. The winters of the Causse de Gramat have armoured him - the mistral, the snow, the nights out with the flock. Lacombe wraps the cat in his greatcoat, against his belly, and the cat accepts the indignity with the resignation of animals who know that survival comes before pride.
The shepherd writes.
It is the new thing in January 1918 - Lacombe writes. Not only letters to Madelou, not only words on the slate. He writes. Every evening, when the fatigues are done and it is not his watch, he takes the pencil, the paper, and he traces words. Slowly, laboriously, with the blacksmith's application that is his. Lists, at first - the names of the ewes, the jobs on the farm, the things he will do when he gets home. Then sentences - scraps of thought, observations, fragments.
One day Henri finds, lying on the shepherd's bunk, a scrap of paper Lacombe has forgotten. Five lines.
'The cat is asleep. The second lieutenant is writing. Fayolle is coughing. Outside it is cold. It is the war.'
Henri reads the five lines and puts them back exactly where he found them. He says nothing to the shepherd. But in the evening he writes in his notebook: 'Lacombe writes things he shows nobody. Not letters - thoughts. The shepherd of Rocamadour thinks on paper. It is the most unexpected thing in this war, and this war has produced a great many.'
The threat is taking shape.
Everyone can feel it now - not only the staff officers, not only Verdier and his calculations. The men in the trenches feel the change. The night patrols bring back clues - German positions strengthened, new wire, dugouts shored up. The German artillery is more active, not in volume but in precision, as if it were ranging, as if it were taking its bearings. And the prisoners talk - prisoners always talk, mostly without meaning to, through a word, a look, a nervousness that gives them away.
Henri questions a prisoner on 15 January. A Saxon corporal, twenty-five, his face grey with tiredness, taken in a night raid. The questioning is brief - Henri is not in intelligence, he asks the basic questions, the name of the unit, its strength, the reliefs. The Saxon answers mechanically, in German, and Henri understands one word in three. But he understands the word 'Frühling' - spring. And he understands the word 'Angriff' - attack. And he understands the Saxon's look when he says those words - a look that is not fear but certainty.
In the evening Henri takes the Goethe out of his haversack. The German book, picked up in a dugout in October 1915, which has travelled with him for more than two years. He holds it in his hands and looks at the Gothic letters he cannot make out, and he thinks of the Saxon of twenty-five, who perhaps reads the same Goethe, and who knows that the spring will bring the attack, and knows it with the same resignation with which Henri knows the spring will bring the defence.
He puts the Goethe down beside the Montaigne. Two books. Two languages. Two sides. The same winter.
In Lyon, January is the month of restrictions.
The ration cards arrive. Not strict rationing yet - that will come in 1918 - but the first cards for bread, sugar, fats. Each family is issued a book of coupons, and each coupon entitles the holder to a fixed quantity. Bread is limited to three hundred grams a day per person. Sugar to five hundred grams a month. Some days there is no meat to be had, and when there is, it costs twice what it cost in 1914.
Jeanne does the accounts. Her housekeeping accounts, which are as exact as her inspector's accounts, because the same rigour applies to bolts and to lentils. The wages hold. Not generously, not comfortably, but they hold. Jeanne eats less than before - not by choice, by arithmetic. When it is a choice between coal and meat, you choose coal, because cold kills more surely than hunger.
Rose is in the same position, only worse. Three children, one wage, prices rising. Bertrand the foreman gives a hundred francs a quarter for little Jeanne - it is regular, it is not enough, it is what he can do. Rose does not ask for more. Rose asks for nothing. It is Jeanne who does Rose's accounts, on Sundays, at the kitchen table, with the same pencil and the same paper as for the dispatch notes at the factory. Rose's accounts do not balance. They have not balanced for months. Rose fills the gap by skipping meals - every other day she has no supper, she gives her share to the children, and she goes to bed on an empty stomach.
Jeanne finds out in January, by chance, dropping in on Rose one evening. Rose is sitting in her kitchen, the children in bed, in front of a bare table. No soup, no bread, nothing. Jeanne says: 'Aren't you eating?' Rose says: 'Not hungry.' Jeanne looks at her. Rose holds her gaze. They have known each other for nearly three years now, and lies do not pass between them.
Jeanne goes home, takes some bread, some cheese, a pot of soup she had made for the next day, and comes back to Rose's. She puts it all on the table. Rose says: 'Jeanne...' Jeanne says: 'Eat.' In Henri's voice, the sergeant's voice, the second lieutenant's, the schoolmaster's. The voice that does not argue.
Rose eats. And Jeanne sits down opposite her and does not eat, because the soup was for tomorrow and tomorrow Jeanne will manage. The women of 1918 always manage.
From that day on, Jeanne and Rose pool their meals. Not officially, not with a contract - with a kitchen agreement, a women's agreement, a survival agreement. What Jeanne has, Rose has. What Rose has, Jeanne has. Rose's children eat at Jeanne's table two evenings a week. Jeanne eats at Rose's on Sundays. It is saucepan socialism, without theory, without a flag, and it works better than all the systems men have invented in books.
Verdier no longer sleeps.
Not the sleeplessness of before - the kind from the start of the war, the kind with figures going round in his head. Another sleeplessness, deeper, calmer. The sleeplessness of a man who sees the storm coming and knows he can do nothing but check the shutters.
The Deuxième Bureau reports are now unequivocal. Germany has transferred thirty-three divisions from east to west since November. More are following. By the spring, the German army will field a hundred and ninety-two divisions on the Western Front, against a hundred and fifty-six for the Allies. Numerical superiority is on the German side for the first time since the Marne.
But where will they attack? That is the question that keeps Verdier awake. Not Lorraine - too heavily fortified. Not Verdun - too costly, the Germans have learnt that. Not the Aisne - too little strategic gain. Artois? Picardy? Flanders? Verdier spends his nights over the map, with his coloured pencils, his reports, his aerial photographs. He draws axes, calculates distances, weighs possibilities.
The answer emerges little by little, like a photograph in a developing bath. Picardy. The junction between the French army and the British army. The weak point - the point where two armies meet is always the weak point, because coordination between two commands is more fragile than coordination within one. The Germans know it. They will strike there, at the joint, to split the Allies, drive the British back to the sea and the French back to Paris.
Verdier writes a report on 20 January. It is the most important report of his career - twenty pages, maps, calculations of force, a conclusion that admits of no appeal: 'The main German offensive will fall on the Saint-Quentin-La Fère sector, at the Franco-British junction, probably in March or early April. The forces engaged will be of the order of sixty to eighty divisions. The artillery preparation will be of the hurricane type - short, massive, with intensive use of gas. The objective will be the separation of the Allied armies and the capture of Amiens.'
The report goes up the chain. Pétain reads it. Pétain agrees - he has reached the same conclusions. But Pétain cannot concentrate all his reserves in Picardy, because Germany might also attack in Champagne, or in Lorraine, or everywhere at once. The defence must be elastic, the reserve central, the response rapid. Those are words. The reality is that the French army is spread over hundreds of kilometres and cannot be strong everywhere.
On 25 January, Henri receives news from Louise that makes him smile in the middle of the winter.
'My dear Henri. Your daughter is four months old and has decided that the neighbour's cat is the most interesting thing in the world. She follows it with her eyes with a concentration that reminds me of you marking exercise books. She doesn't talk yet, of course, but she makes sounds like "ga" and "beu", which isn't Montaigne but it's a start.
My mother is mad about her. That's the only word. My mother, who has never shown a feeling in her life, who has never told me she loved me, who has a heart as dry as the causse in August - my mother takes Jeanne in her arms and sings her songs. Songs. My mother sings. If you'd told me that three years ago, I'd have sent for the doctor.
School has started again. Émile has given me back my class, in good order, with a note: "Your pupils are insufferable and magnificent." It's the best description of a class I know.
Lucienne Marty has sent a drawing for the little one. A cat. Another cat. But what a cat - fine lines, precise, alive. The cat looks as though it's moving on the paper. I've pinned it up over the cradle. Jeanne looks at it and says "ga". I think it's a compliment.'
Henri reads the letter in the dugout, and the smile that rises is a father's smile, a smile he did not know before September and discovers each time with the same astonishment. Verdun the cat, the trench cat, is lying on the shepherd's bunk and looking at him with the sovereign indifference that is its way of being in the world. Henri wonders whether the neighbour's cat and the trench cat are of the same breed, and whether the cats of the whole world have made a secret pact to be the only sensible creatures in this war.
At the end of January, the atmosphere changes.
It is imperceptible to those who are not paying attention, but Henri pays attention. The orders are changing - more work on defences, fewer offensive drills. Fall-back positions are prepared, the second lines strengthened, the ammunition dumps buried deeper. The French army is getting ready to take a punch. The word is not said, but the actions say it.
The battalion commander calls his officers together on 28 January. In a farm cellar, around a map, he sets out the situation with a frankness the officers of 1914 would never have had. 'The Germans are going to attack in the spring. We don't know exactly where. We must be ready for anything - hold our positions, fall back if necessary, counter-attack if possible. The orders will come. In the meantime, prepare your men.'
Prepare your men. Henri goes back down into the trench and looks at his men. Twenty-eight, with the autumn reinforcements. The shepherd, Fayolle, Pélissié - the old hands, the indestructibles. And the others, the reinforcements of 1917, lads of twenty most of them, who were not at Verdun, not on the Somme, who know the trench but not the assault, who know how to hold on but not how to take a punch.
How do you prepare men to take the biggest punch of the whole war? Henri does not know. He does what he knows how to do - he organises, he checks, he teaches. The fall-back positions. The signals. The drill for a massive bombardment. The movements that save lives - get down, crawl, breathe through cloth when the gas comes. The gas masks - every man has one now, a rough-and-ready device but an effective one, which has to be put on in six seconds, eyes shut, in the dark, under shellfire.
The shepherd practises with his gas mask with the same care he puts into everything. Six seconds. Five. Four. The cat, terrified of the mask, refuses to go near Lacombe when he is wearing it, which is the shepherd's only defeat of the war.
31 January 1918. The last evening of January. The dugout, the candle, the notebook.
Henri does not write in his notebook that evening. He looks at the photograph of Jeanne, the little one, in the candlelight. The blue eyes beginning to see the world. The round, serious face, not smiling in the photograph because babies do not smile for photographers, but smiling, back there in Figeac, at the neighbour's cat.
He touches the ring. He touches the cigar box. He touches the wooden dog in his pocket. His talismans. His weapons.
The shepherd is asleep, the cat against his chest. Fayolle coughs in his sleep. Pélissié is asleep, the slate beside him, a letter under way, always a letter under way. The reinforcements are asleep, huddled together, young, thin, unknowing.
Outside, the January cold bites into the ground, and somewhere to the east, in German barracks nobody can see, divisions are assembling, trains are loading, guns are rolling west. The spring is coming. The attack is coming. Everything is coming.
Henri closes his eyes. He thinks of Louise, in the room above the haberdashery, little Jeanne in the cradle beside her, the neighbour's cat curled up on the doormat. He thinks of the fig tree in the yard. Of the beans that will come up in May. Of the bridge at Capdenac. Of the blue dress.
He thinks: I will come back. I will come back because I have promised, and I keep my promises, and someone is waiting for me who says 'ga' to a cat.
The shepherd snores. The cat purrs. The candle dies. And the longest year of the war begins in the dark.