April 1918
The Germans are back.
Not in Picardy - in Flanders. On 9 April, Ludendorff launches his second offensive, on the Lys, between Armentières and Ypres, against the British and the Portuguese. The Portuguese Expeditionary Corps, two ill-equipped, ill-trained divisions, placed in a secondary sector because nobody believed the Germans would strike there, is swept away in a few hours. The gap is open. The Germans pour through it.
Henri is not in Flanders. He is still in Picardy, in a stabilised sector, consolidating the positions held at the end of March. But the echoes reach him - the communiqués, the rumours, the troop transfers. The war has become a series of battering-ram blows that Germany delivers at different points on the front, each time with massive force, each time hoping for the breakthrough. Picardy in March. Flanders in April. Where next? The Aisne? Champagne? Nobody knows. Everyone is waiting for the next blow.
On 11 April, Haig issues an order of the day that will go down in history. 'Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.' Backs to the wall. The British have their backs to the wall, and so do the French, and Haig's words cross the lines and the languages and reach Henri's trench through an English newspaper that a liaison officer has left at battalion headquarters.
Marcel translates. Not Marcel himself - Marcel is in Toulouse, with his paper. But Henri has kept Marcel's reflexes, that habit of reading the papers with a critical eye and a pencil in hand. 'With our backs to the wall' - the phrase is strong, almost beautiful, and it tells a truth the communiqués hide: the Allies are at the edge. If one more blow gets through, if one more sector gives way, everything collapses.
The shepherd, when Henri sums up the situation for him, says: 'The wolf's circling. He's looking for the weak spot.' Henri looks at him. That is exactly it. The wolf is circling. He has struck in Picardy, he is striking in Flanders, and he will strike somewhere else, and each time the flock has to huddle up, re-form, plug the hole. And each time the flock is a little thinner, a little more tired, a little closer to the limit.
The Battle of the Lys goes on until the end of April. The British hold. Ypres holds - Ypres, Ypres again, the town that is the symbol of Britain's whole war, the town defended since 1914, the town for which hundreds of thousands of men have died. The Germans advance fifteen kilometres, take Armentières, threaten the Channel ports, and then stop. Once again the same pattern - the attacker stretches, wears himself out, loses his momentum. Once again the tactical breakthrough fails to become a strategic victory.
Verdier watches from his staff post and notes: 'Second offensive. Same result. Significant territorial gain, strategic result nil. The Germans are gaining ground but not winning the war. And each offensive weakens them as much as it weakens us. The difference: we have the Americans behind us. They have nothing behind them.'
That is the fundamental calculation of 1918. The attrition is mutual, but the reserves are not. Germany is burning its last divisions. The Allies are burning too, but behind the Allies there is an ocean, and on the other side of the ocean there are a hundred million Americans and the world's leading industrial power. Time is working against Germany. Every day that passes without a decisive breakthrough is a day won by the Allies. Every American division that lands in France changes the balance. The sand is running through the hourglass, and it is running the wrong way for Ludendorff.
Henri spends April in Picardy, in a sector that is being fortified. No more fighting on the move - they are digging again, laying wire, rebuilding trenches. Position warfare comes back into its own, for a while, while Ludendorff prepares his next blow.
It is a strange month, suspended between two storms, and Henri uses it as he uses everything - to prepare, to organise, to teach. The evening school starts again. Not in a barn this time - in a second-line dugout, by candlelight, with the slate and the wooden letters. The shepherd is making progress. He reads simple sentences now, slowly, following with his finger, mouthing each word under his breath. The morning paper - the official communiqué pinned up at battalion headquarters - is his reading exercise. Henri watches him make out the words, one by one, with the patience of a man who has spent his life waiting for ewes to graze, and he thinks that this patience is the most underrated virtue of the war.
Pélissié no longer needs lessons. Pélissié reads and writes fluently. He has even begun reading Henri's Montaigne, which astonishes everyone except Henri, who knows that the peasants of the Lot have a concrete, direct intelligence that grasps Montaigne better than many men of letters, because Montaigne writes like a peasant - from experience, not from theory.
Pélissié puts down the Montaigne one evening and says: 'He says every man carries in him the whole form of the human condition.'
Henri looks at him. 'Yes.'
Pélissié thinks about it, for a long time, with the slowness that is his. Then he says: 'Even us.'
'Us most of all,' says Henri.
On 15 April, Henri receives a parcel from Louise. Not a parcel of food - a parcel of words. Louise has gathered her pupils' drawings, the ones from the term, and she sends them to Henri with a note: 'For your men. The children made them for the soldiers. Marthe Bouyssou has drawn a cat. I wonder why.'
Henri opens the parcel in the dugout and spreads the drawings out on the bunk. Suns, houses, flags, flowers. Drawings by children of six, seven, eight, done in coloured pencil on exercise-book paper. And Marthe Bouyssou's cat - a grey cat, with one eye shut and a torn ear, which looks so exactly like Verdun the cat that the shepherd leans over and says: 'That's him.'
It is not him - Marthe Bouyssou has never seen Verdun the cat. Louise must have described the cat in a letter, and Marthe drew from the description, and the result is a miracle of transmission - from Louise's words to Marthe's pencil, from Figeac to the trench, a cat that travels by letter and arrives intact.
Henri pins the drawings up in the dugout, as in 1914, as in 1915. Children's drawings on the timber walls, among the splinters and the nails. The yellow sun of 1914 is still there, in his memory, the first drawing, a Labastide-Murat child's. And now Marthe Bouyssou's cat, 1918. Four years between the two. Four years of war, and children still draw suns and cats.
In Lyon, April brings Paul home.
Not the soldier's homecoming - the man's. Paul leaves hospital on 5 April, his left arm in a sling for the last time. The doctor has said what there was to say: the arm will work, but not as it did. The biceps is destroyed, the shoulder is stiff, the strength will not come back entirely. Paul will be able to work - not as a fitter, not with metal, not at the forge. Some other work. Office work, perhaps. Work with his head.
Paul goes home to Vaise. He pushes open the door of the flat he has not really lived in since August 1914 - four years away, broken up by leaves and hospitals, four years in which Jeanne has lived alone within these walls and made them hers. Paul comes in and looks around him. The kitchen is the same and not the same. The furniture is the same, but there are new things - a union calendar on the wall, a pile of dispatch notes on the table, an account book beside the stove. Jeanne's traces. The traces of a woman who has lived.
He sits down at the table. Jeanne is at the factory. Paul is alone in the flat, for the first time in four years, and the silence is no longer the silence of absence - it is the silence of return, a full, heavy silence that holds everything that has changed and everything that will have to be learnt again.
In the evening, Jeanne comes home. She opens the door and sees Paul sitting at the table, and for a second she does not understand, because Paul at the table in the evening light is a picture from before, a picture from 1914, and pictures from before no longer exist. Then she understands. Paul is here. Paul has come home. Not on leave - home.
'You're here,' she says.
'I'm here,' says Paul.
It is the same exchange as Henri and Louise's, on the platform at Figeac, in December 1916. The same words. The same weight. But Jeanne and Paul's words carry something different - not the promise of the future, but the reckoning of the past. Four years of war. A broken arm. A woman transformed. A couple who will have to reinvent themselves or lose each other.
Paul knows it. Jeanne knows it. They eat their soup in silence, and the silence is the first word of their new life.
The days that follow are an apprenticeship. Not the apprenticeship of reading, as for the shepherd - the apprenticeship of living together. Paul and Jeanne have to learn all over again how to live together, and it is harder than anyone imagines, because living together means sharing a space, habits, decisions, and Jeanne has got used to deciding alone, and Paul has got used to deciding nothing at all.
The first conflicts are tiny. Paul leaving his things on Jeanne's chair. Jeanne putting Paul's tools in the wrong drawer. Paul wanting to eat at six, Jeanne not getting home until seven. Surface friction, hiding deeper faults - Paul who no longer knows where his place is, Jeanne who will not give up hers.
Rose, when Jeanne tells her about it, says: 'It's normal. My husband, if he'd come back, it'd have been the same. You've lived four years without each other. It takes time to make room again.' Rose has the wisdom of widows who look at other people's happiness with the clear sight of those who no longer have it.
The turning point comes on 20 April. Paul goes with Jeanne to the union. Not because she asks him to - because he asked her, in October, on the station platform: 'You're the one teaching me.' Jeanne takes him at his word. She takes him to the meeting of the women's section, one Tuesday evening, in the hall of the Bourse du Travail. Paul is the only man. Forty women and one man with his arm in a sling, sitting at the back of the hall, listening.
He listens to women workers talk about pay, working conditions, crèches, dignity. He listens to women who have kept the factories, the transport, the public services running for four years, and who know they will be sent home when the men come back. He listens and says nothing, because he has nothing to say, because anything he could say would be out of place, and the silence of a man who is listening is sometimes the most useful thing a man can offer.
In the evening, in the kitchen, he says to Jeanne: 'I understand now.'
'Understand what?'
'Why you're fighting.'
It is Paul Vauterin's second turning point. The first was the letter of 1916, the one that said 'nor the women'. The second is this April evening in 1918, in a kitchen in Vaise, when a wounded factory hand tells his wife, a factory hand herself, that he understands why she is fighting. Not for herself alone. For all of them.
On 30 April, Henri writes to Louise. The routine of letters, the thread tying Figeac to Picardy, the umbilical cord of paper and ink.
'Dear Louise. Spring is here and the war goes on but I'm alive and the men are alive and the cat is alive, which sums up the situation. Our daughter is seven months old and I haven't seen her grow, and that's the one wound of this war I'll never heal.
Your pupils' drawings are pinned up in the dugout. Marthe Bouyssou's cat is the masterpiece of the collection. The shepherd says it's the spitting image of Verdun. The shepherd also says he'll read Madelou's next letter on his own, without my help. I believe him. I watched him read the communiqué this morning, slowly, with his finger, and when he'd finished he said: "That's a load of balls." It's Antoine Lacombe's first piece of literary criticism, and it's perfectly just.
I love you. I'm coming back.'
Louise receives the letter on 8 May, in the school playground, under the fig tree, which has leaves now, and little Jeanne is on her knee pulling at the leaves, and Louise reads the letter and laughs as she reads the shepherd's literary criticism, and little Jeanne laughs too, because her mother's laughter is the funniest thing in the world.
Somewhere in Picardy, somewhere in a dugout of timber and earth, a schoolmaster second lieutenant touches his wedding ring, and a shepherd strokes his cat, and a peasant reads Montaigne, and the war waits for its next blow, and the world holds.
Through letters. Through drawings. Through words on a slate. Through women in factories. Through children in schools. Through cats in haversacks. Through everything that appears in no communiqué and yet is the only reason the communiqué exists.
The world holds.