March 1918
On 21 March 1918, at twenty to five in the morning, six thousand German guns open fire at once on a seventy-kilometre front.
It is the greatest bombardment in history. Greater than Verdun, greater than the Somme, greater than anything the war has produced in four years. High-explosive shells, gas shells, smoke shells, mixed in a scientifically measured cocktail - the gas first, to blind and choke, the high explosive next, to destroy, the smoke last, to cover the infantry's advance. Five hours of bombardment. A million shells. The earth itself seems to rise and not come down again.
Henri is not in the zone of impact. He is on the Aisne, fifty kilometres to the south. But he hears it. At twenty to five in the morning, in the dugout, the shepherd is the first to open his eyes - animal instinct, the kind that senses danger before the mind is awake. Then Henri hears it. A continuous rumble, low, deep, coming from the north and not stopping. Not an ordinary bombardment - an endless roll of thunder, without a pause, without a breath. The ground shakes. The walls of the dugout tremble. The candle, which nobody has lit, would be no use - the noise says everything.
Henri gets up. He goes out of the dugout. The night is black, cold, starry overhead, but to the north the horizon is flickering, orange and white, like a storm that never stops, and the rumble fills the air with the density of a liquid.
The shepherd is behind him. Lacombe looks north and says what there is to say: 'This is it.'
This is it. The offensive. The one Verdier predicted, the one everyone has been waiting for, the one that comes with the pent-up weight of fifty German divisions freed from the Russian front. Germany is staking everything. All it has - the men, the guns, the ammunition, the new tactics, the storm troops trained for months - is thrown into this attack. If it succeeds, the war is over. If it fails, Germany will have nothing left.
At twenty to ten, the German infantry emerges from the fog.
A natural fog, thick, heaven-sent - nature offers the Germans what their plan had not provided for. The Sturmtruppen, the elite storm troops trained in infiltration tactics, advance in small groups, bypass the strong positions, slip through the gaps, outflank the defenders. This is no longer the war of 1914 - lines in close order, the frontal assault. It is a new war, fluid, fast, deadly. The Germans have learnt too. They have learnt from Verdun, from the Somme, from Cambrai. They have invented something - the war of movement in a landscape of trenches.
The British army, Gough's Fifth Army, takes the full force of the blow. The lines crack. Not at one point - along the whole front. The forward trenches are overrun within hours. The support positions are bypassed, cut off, reduced. Communications are cut. Command loses touch with its units. It is chaos - the same chaos as in August 1914, but the other way round. This time it is the Allies who are falling back.
The British fall back eight kilometres on the first day. Then ten. Then fifteen. In three days the Fifth Army no longer exists as a coherent force. The units fight their way back, in isolated groups, without orders, without contact, with an individual courage that cannot make up for the collective collapse. The Germans are advancing at a speed nobody has seen since the Marne - twenty kilometres a day, thirty in places.
Verdier lives through the first day in a state he does not recognise - not fear, not excitement, something between the two. His predictions are coming true, point by point, hour by hour. Saint-Quentin, the Franco-British junction, the attack in strength, the fog of gas, the storm troops. It is all there, exactly as in his January report. He was right. Being right is no use when the shells are falling.
At headquarters, it is controlled panic. The reports come in - fragmentary, contradictory, terrifying. The British are falling back. The Germans are advancing. The junction between the Allied armies is threatened. If the Germans take Amiens - the railway junction, the logistical lung - the French and British armies will be cut off from each other. The British will be driven back to the sea. The French will be driven back to Paris. It is Schlieffen again, four years on, by another road.
On 23 March, Henri gets the order.
The regiment is to move north, urgently, to plug the gap. The lorries arrive in the night - Berliets, Berliets again, as at Verdun - and the men climb aboard in the controlled disorder of an emergency move. Henri loads his platoon into two lorries. The shepherd climbs in last, the cat in his haversack, the ash stick in his hand. Fayolle coughs as he climbs in. Pélissié wedges himself into a corner without a word.
The lorries drive north, through the night, on roads choked with columns converging from everywhere - artillery, cavalry, infantry, supply trains, ambulances. Everyone is going the same way. Towards the hole. Towards the gap. Towards the place where the British are falling back and the Germans are advancing.
And in the other direction, on the same roads, the refugees. The civilians fleeing. Women, children, old people, with carts, handcarts, bundles. Henri sees them from the back of the lorry, in the glare of the headlamps, faces white with tiredness and fear, and he remembers August 1914, the columns of Belgians on the roads of the retreat, and he understands that the war has come full circle.
The shepherd looks at the refugees and says nothing. But his hand tightens on the cat's haversack, and Henri sees it tighten, and he knows what the shepherd is thinking - ewes when they bolt, ewes when the wolf is behind them, and the shepherd running to gather them in.
On 24 March, the regiment goes into action.
Not in a trench - there are no trenches any more. The Germans have gone past the fortified lines, they are in open country, in a landscape of fields and villages the war had not yet touched, intact villages, with walls standing and roofs and windows, and that normality is stranger than the usual devastation. Henri is fighting in a country that looks like peace.
The platoon is deployed in defence across a road, at the entrance to a village whose name Henri does not keep - a Picardy village, brick houses, a church, a café with its sign still up. The Germans come from the east, in columns, in the open, and Henri opens fire with his men from the windows of the houses and the low garden walls. It is a war he does not know - not the trench, not the communication trench, not the mud. The war of movement. The war of August 1914, but with the weapons and the experience of 1918.
The Germans are stopped. Not by Henri's platoon alone - by the resistance that is organising itself everywhere, at a thousand points, chaotically but effectively. French units come up from the rear, slot into the holes, plug the gaps. The British, those who are left, those who were not overrun, fight with the fury of men with their backs to the wall. And the Germans, for all their élan, are beginning to stretch - the supply lines are getting longer, the reinforcements are not arriving fast enough, the storm troops are advancing but the heavy artillery is not keeping up.
It is the same problem as in 1914, in reverse. The attacker is advancing too fast for his supplies. The Germans are discovering what the French discovered on the Marne - that the war of movement has its own limits, and that the greatest of those limits is the empty belly of a soldier who has marched thirty kilometres.
On 26 March, something happens that saves the war.
At Doullens, in the town hall of a small town in Picardy, the Allied leaders meet in haste. Poincaré, Clemenceau, Pétain, Haig, Foch, Milner. The crisis is a matter of survival. The British want to fall back towards the sea, to protect the Channel ports. The French want to fall back towards Paris, to cover the capital. The two movements diverge. If each pulls his own way, it is the end.
Clemenceau decides. With the brutality that is his nature and that is, on this 26 March 1918, the only thing that can work. He imposes Foch as coordinator of the Allied armies. Not a council, not a committee - a command. One man to coordinate the French, the British, and soon the Americans. One man to decide where to put the reserves, where to hold, where to give ground.
Foch accepts. Haig accepts, because he has no choice. Pétain accepts, with the reserve that is his but with the discipline that is also his. And from 26 March, for the first time in the war, the Allied armies have a single leader.
Verdier hears of Foch's appointment in the evening. He knows Foch - everyone knows Foch, the former commandant of the École de Guerre, the theorist of the offensive, the man of the Marne who said: 'My right is broken, my left is falling back, situation excellent, I am attacking.' Foch is everything Verdier is not - flamboyant, instinctive, optimistic. But Foch has something the others do not: the ability to see the whole. Not one front, not one army - the whole. And the whole, in March 1918, is the only thing that counts.
Verdier notes in his notebook: 'Foch supreme commander. It is the right choice or the wrong one. Probably both. But it is a choice, and in a crisis a choice is better than indecision.'
Henri fights for eight days.
Eight days of fighting in open country, from village to village, from road to road. It is not the trench - it is movement, falling back, counter-attacking, constant improvisation. Henri discovers that he is good at it. Not because he is brave - he is brave, but everyone is brave, bravery sets nobody apart after four years. Because he is adaptable. The schoolmaster who adapted his lesson to each pupil, the sergeant who adapted his trench to each piece of ground - the second lieutenant adapts his defence to each situation. A low wall here. A ditch there. A house turned into a strongpoint. A wood turned into an ambush.
The shepherd is in his element. Open ground, movement, space - it is his world, the world of the causse, the world of the shepherd walking with his flock. Lacombe hardly limps any more, the adrenaline has wiped out the pain, and he moves through the Picardy landscape with a fluency the trench never allowed him. The cat, for its part, hates it. The cat is a trench animal, a creature of routine, and movement terrifies it. It stays buried in the haversack, ears flat, and comes out only at night.
Fayolle fights. He coughs and he fights. On the 27th, during a counter-attack, Henri sees him running beside him, rifle in hand, mouth open to breathe because his lungs are no longer enough, and he runs all the same, and he fires, and he advances, and Henri thinks that Fayolle is the bravest man he knows, not because he is not afraid but because he is fighting with a body that is betraying him.
Pélissié kills. It is the right word - Pélissié kills with the same efficiency he brings to ploughing a field, without visible emotion, without hesitation, with the precision of a marksman who knows what his rifle can do. The officers have noticed him again. But nobody offers to make him a sniper any more. It is understood that Pélissié does not hunt. He defends himself.
On 28 March, the German advance slows. Not all at once - gradually, like a river spreading out across a plain. The storm troops are exhausted, the supply lines are too long, and the Allied reserves are arriving - French divisions from the south, British divisions from the north, and the first American units, still green, still inexperienced, but there. The line steadies. Not solidly yet - it sways, it gives in places, it holds in others. But it does not break.
Amiens is saved. The junction holds. The Allied armies are not cut off from each other. Foch has held the line, not by genius but by doggedness - by throwing every available reserve into the gap, by refusing to give up Amiens, by bellowing 'no more falling back' at anyone who wants to fall back.
Henri is relieved on 30 March. His platoon has lost seven men in eight days - four killed, three wounded. Seven out of twenty-eight. A quarter. The heaviest toll since the Chemin des Dames. But the old hands are there. The shepherd, Fayolle, Pélissié. All alive. The cat too, shaken, filthy, thin, but alive.
In Lyon, Jeanne lives through the eight longest days of her war.
The newspapers say almost nothing - the censorship is total, stricter than ever. But rumours get through, as always, through the stations, the hospitals, the leave cut short. The Germans are attacking. The British are falling back. The French are going up the line. The front is broken. Paris is threatened.
Paul is in Lyon, in hospital, his arm in a sling. He reads the communiqués with the eye of a soldier who knows how to read between the lines. 'Our troops are resisting doggedly on new positions.' New positions - that means falling back. Doggedly - that means losses. Paul knows. And Paul is helpless, pinned to a hospital bed with an arm that no longer works, while his comrades are fighting.
Jeanne goes to see him every evening after the factory. She climbs the hospital stairs on tired legs, sits on the edge of the bed, and holds Paul's right hand - the only hand that works. They do not talk about the offensive. They do not talk about Henri, who is somewhere in the north, in the furnace. Often they do not talk at all. They hold hands, and the silence between them is no longer the silence of absence - it is the silence of presence, the silence of two people who are together in fear and have no need to say so.
On the evening of 28 March, Paul says: 'It'll hold.' It is not a question. It is a soldier's certainty, founded on nothing but instinct and experience. 'The Boches are stretched. They're going too fast. It'll hold.'
Jeanne squeezes his hand. She does not know whether Paul is right. But she knows that Paul needs to be right, and she knows that needing to be right is sometimes the only thing that separates hope from despair.
On 31 March, Henri writes in his notebook. Not in a trench dugout - in a barn behind the lines in Picardy, lying on the straw, the cat asleep on his chest.
'31 March 1918. They came. They came with everything they had, and they did not break through. Not yet. Not here. Not us. The line holds. Foch holds. We hold.
Seven men lost. Seven names in the notebook. Seven families who will receive a printed form with the words "died of wounds" or "killed in action" or "missing in action". Seven men who were here ten days ago and are here no longer. The world is lighter by seven men and heavier by seven absences.
The shepherd is alive. Fayolle is alive. Pélissié is alive. The cat is alive. I am alive. Louise has sent me a word - "always". Six letters. The weight of the world.
The Germans will come again. Not here perhaps, but somewhere. They have other blows to strike. But the first blow was not enough. And the Americans are coming. I have seen them, on the roads, in columns, lads of twenty who look like our lads of twenty in 1914 - the same eyes, the same ignorance, the same absurd courage. They will learn. They will pay the price of learning, as we paid it. But they are here. And when they are ready, it will be over.
When. Not if. When.'
He closes the notebook. He touches the ring. He touches the photograph in his pocket. Little Jeanne, six months old, who says 'ga' to a cat. The world he is fighting for is a world of 'ga' and cats and ripe figs on a wall in Figeac. It is a tiny world. It is the only world worth having.
The shepherd snores. The cat purrs. The straw smells of straw and not of death. And somewhere, in the March dark, the front holds.