February 1918
Madelou's letter arrives on the 3rd.
Not a letter dictated to the neighbour, not a letter with the schoolmistress's help. A letter from Madelou to her father, in answer to her father's letter. And in that letter, a sentence that does something to the shepherd which Henri has never seen a shell, an assault, a battle do in three and a half years.
'Dear Papa. I read your letter. It was you that wrote it. Mama was crying.'
The shepherd listens to Henri read the words - he cannot yet read fast enough to make them out on his own, but he hears them, and hearing is enough. 'Mama was crying.' Three words. Lacombe's wife, who has run the farm and the flock and the children for three and a half years, who never complains, who dictates her letters to the neighbour because the shepherd could not read and who has never said the shepherd could not read - that woman cried when she saw her husband's handwriting for the first time.
Lacombe says nothing. He takes the letter from Henri's hands, folds it, and puts it in his breast pocket - the same pocket in which Henri keeps the photograph of Jeanne and the ring and the wooden dog. The pocket of sacred things. The pocket of proofs that the world exists.
In the evening, the shepherd takes out the slate. Without Henri asking, without instructions, without a lesson. He writes. Not a letter to Madelou - not yet, he will write one on Sunday. Something else. The same kind of fragments Henri came across in January, those scraps of thought Lacombe traces in his navvy's handwriting. Henri does not look. He pretends to be marking an essay from Lucien Combes - the fourth he has received in the post, this one on 'the role of the school in society', a training-college subject Lucien handles with a maturity that astounds Henri. But out of the corner of his eye he sees the shepherd's fingers on the chalk, and he sees the words taking shape, and he does not read them, because the words are not for him.
What Lacombe writes, Henri will learn only later. Much later. When the shepherd gives him the exercise book - a schoolchild's exercise book bought at the depot, blue cover, lined pages - into which, over months, he will have copied the thoughts he first traced on the slate. A shepherd's thoughts. A soldier's thoughts. A man's thoughts.
'The ewes know when a storm is coming. They lie down. Men do not lie down. That is why they die more.'
'The cat is the only one who does what he wants. Everybody obeys except the cat.'
'The second lieutenant says reading is freedom. It is true. But writing is something else. To write is to exist.'
Mid-February. The tension rises like a fever.
The signs multiply. The aerial photographs show massive movements behind the German lines - columns of lorries, trains, bivouacs. The wireless listening posts pick up increased traffic. The prisoners confirm it: the offensive is coming. March. Perhaps late March. The Saint-Quentin sector.
Henri is not at Saint-Quentin. He is on the Aisne, fifty kilometres further south. But the Aisne is preparing too - because nobody knows whether the attack will not also strike here, or here and there at once, or anywhere along the seven hundred kilometres of front. Uncertainty is as much the Germans' weapon as their guns.
The defence works intensify. Henri has fall-back positions dug, support trenches, deep dugouts. Deep - Verdier's word, the word Verdier has been repeating since 1914. Dig deep, like the Germans. Three metres, four metres. Logs, sheets of corrugated iron, earth on top. Not concrete - there is no time for concrete, no means. But depth, thickness, protection.
The men dig. It is what they have been doing for three and a half years - digging. Digging trenches, digging communication trenches, digging graves. The spade is as much the tool of this war as the rifle. Pélissié digs the way he does everything - without a word, with the efficiency of a machine. The shepherd digs in spite of his thigh, more slowly than before, but with the stubbornness that is his mark. Fayolle digs and coughs, sweat on his forehead, short of breath. Henri watches him cough and promises himself he will have him evacuated before the offensive. He promises himself and knows he will not do it, because Fayolle will refuse, as the shepherd has always refused.
On 20 February, Verdier does something he has never done. He disobeys.
Not a spectacular disobedience, not a refusal of orders. Something more discreet, and more dangerous perhaps. He sends a copy of his January report - the one predicting the German offensive on Saint-Quentin - straight to Clemenceau.
Clemenceau has been prime minister since November 1917. At seventy-six, the Tiger at last has the power he has coveted since the war began. He governs with the brutality that is his nature, arrests defeatists, censors pacifists, backs Pétain, and tells anyone who will listen that France will not give way, that victory will come, that anyone who talks of a negotiated peace is a traitor. It is excessive, it is unjust, and it is exactly what France needs in February 1918 - a man who refuses to bend.
Verdier does not know Clemenceau personally. He sends him the report through a civilian friend, an engineer in the Ponts et Chaussées who knows the prime minister's private secretary. It is irregular. It goes against the chain of command. It could bring sanctions. Verdier does it anyway, because he knows Pétain has read the report and agreed with it, but that Pétain is not concentrating his reserves, and that if Clemenceau does not push, nobody will.
The report reaches Clemenceau's desk on 22 February. Clemenceau reads it. Clemenceau reads everything. And Clemenceau does what Clemenceau does - he summons, he questions, he decides. He summons Pétain, he questions Pétain, and Pétain confirms it: the offensive will come in Picardy, probably in March. Clemenceau asks: are the reserves in place? Pétain says: not entirely. Clemenceau says: see to it.
Verdier will never know whether his report changed anything. Decisions on that scale are the product of dozens of reports, dozens of conversations, dozens of pressures. But he has done what he had to do. He has passed the information over the wall. For the first time in four years, someone has read his note.
In Lyon, February brings news Jeanne was not expecting.
Paul is wounded. Again.
The letter arrives on the 15th - not from Paul, from the hospital. A printed form, filled in by hand: 'Private Vauterin, Paul, class of 1903, was admitted on 10 February to field hospital no. 34 with a shell-splinter wound to the left arm and left shoulder.' The left arm. The left arm again. The same arm as in 1916. As if the war had a preference, a favourite target, a grudge.
Jeanne reads the form in the kitchen at Vaise. She reads it again. She puts it down on the table. She stays motionless for a moment, hands flat on the table, and she listens to the silence of the flat, which is the silence of absence, the silence of all the nights without Paul, all the mornings without Paul, and that silence is so old now that it has become part of the walls.
She does not cry. She calculates. A field hospital means behind the front, far from the shells. If the arm is hit but nothing else, Paul will live. Paul will be sent to the rear. Paul may be invalided out this time - two wounds to the same arm, the muscles torn twice, the bone perhaps damaged. Invalided out. The words that were a terror in 1914 and a lifeline in 1918.
She writes to Henri: 'Paul's wounded. The left arm, again. Not serious according to the form. I'm waiting for news.' Then she goes round to Rose's and says the same thing, and Rose says: 'The left arm's the right one. It's the one you give.' Rose has the bitter wisdom of widows who measure wounds against death, and for whom a damaged arm is a victory.
Three days later, a letter from Paul arrives. Not a form - a letter, written with the right hand, in the slanting script she has known since the first wound. 'My shoulder's a mess. The arm too. The doc says I'm done. Invalided out. Coming home.'
Invalided out. Coming home. Four words that are the end of Paul's war, not the end of the war, but the end of his own war, and Jeanne reads those four words and puts the letter down and puts her hands over her face and stays like that, sitting in the kitchen at Vaise, her hands over her face, for a whole minute, and what she does behind her hands is nobody's business.
Henri learns of Paul's wound from Jeanne's letter, on 22 February. Then, two days later, of his discharge. Paul is coming home. Paul is out of the war. Henri receives the news in the dugout, between two watches, and he feels what Jeanne felt - the brutal, animal relief of knowing that a man of his family has come out of the machine alive.
He writes to Paul - the first letter he has written directly to his brother-in-law since the war began. A short letter, from second lieutenant to private, from man to man.
'Dear Paul. Glad you're out. The shoulder will mend, or it won't, but you're alive and you're going home and you'll be with Jeanne again and that's what matters. When you're on your feet, look after my sister. She needs you more than she lets on. And tell her from me that she's the strongest woman I know, and that includes a fair few soldiers.
Your brother-in-law. Henri.'
Paul will receive the letter in hospital, at Bourges, his arm in a sling, his shoulder bandaged. He will read it with his right hand, and he will smile, and the Stéphanois in the next bed - the Stéphanois who is wounded too, a bullet in the leg, nothing serious - the Stéphanois will say: 'Good news?' And Paul will say: 'My brother-in-law. He's all right.' And the Stéphanois will say: 'The one who keeps school?' And Paul will say: 'The one who keeps school.'
At the end of February, the days grow longer and the fear grows longer with them.
Henri knows the offensive is coming. Not from staff reports - from the body. Soldiers' bodies know, as animals' bodies know, when danger is near. The men sleep less, eat less, talk less. The shepherd strokes the cat more slowly, with movements that are farewells said over and over. Fayolle coughs and no longer laughs. Pélissié writes longer letters - thirty lines, forty, as if he wanted to say everything before it is too late.
Henri prepares. Methodically, calmly, with the rigour of a schoolmaster preparing for an examination. The positions, the orders, the fall-backs. The gas masks. The grenades. The ammunition. The dressings. Everything in its place, every man at his post, every movement planned. He cannot foresee the unforeseeable - the exact direction of the attack, the weight of the bombardment, the spot where the first shell will land. But he can prepare his men to react, to adapt, to survive. It is what he has been doing for four years. It is all he knows how to do.
On 28 February, the last day of the month, Henri writes to Louise. Not a long letter - he no longer has time for long letters. A note. A single paragraph.
'Dear Louise. Spring is coming and it will bring hard things, I can't tell you more. Know that I think of you and Jeanne every minute of every day, and that the thought is my dugout. Stronger than concrete. Deeper than the trenches. Give the little one a kiss from me. Say "ga" to her from me. And wait for me.'
Louise receives the letter on 8 March. She reads it in the haberdashery kitchen, the little one on her knee, and she understands what Henri does not say - that something is coming, something big, and that Henri is afraid, and that Henri's fear is his way of saying he cares about life more than ever.
She does not answer straight away. She takes the little one in her arms, goes out into the yard, sits down under the bare fig tree, and stays there a while, the child against her, her eyes on the black branches waiting for the spring. Then she goes in and writes a word - a single word, on a postcard, like the first time, like the 'yes' from the bridge at Capdenac.
'Always.'
The card reaches the front on 16 March. Henri reads it in the dugout and puts it in his pocket. Not the breast pocket - that one is full. His trouser pocket, against his thigh, against his skin. 'Always.' One word. Six letters. The weight of the world.
On 18 March, the German artillery begins ranging fire on the British positions north of Saint-Quentin. Verdier reads the reports and knows it will not be long. Three days, perhaps. Perhaps less.
The spring of 1918 is coming. And it is coming with everything.