May 1918
The third blow falls on 27 May.
Not in Picardy. Not in Flanders. On the Aisne. On the Chemin des Dames. The very place where Henri fought a year earlier, the very place where Nivelle promised the breakthrough in forty-eight hours and delivered the massacre. The Germans strike where nobody expects them - or rather where everyone expected them without believing it, because the Chemin des Dames is a defensive sector, a strong position, a place where worn-out divisions have been sent to rest.
But Henri is no longer on the Aisne. Henri is in Picardy, a hundred kilometres to the north. And it is that distance that saves him.
On 27 May, at one in the morning, four thousand German guns open fire on the Chemin des Dames. The bombardment lasts two hours and forty minutes - short, intense, devastating, by the method the Germans perfected in March. At twenty to four, the infantry comes out of the fog of gas. The Allied lines - exhausted French and British divisions, put in this 'quiet sector' to recover - are overrun in a few hours. The Germans cross the Aisne, cross the Chemin des Dames, and burst into the valley of the Vesle. In one day they advance twenty kilometres. It is the greatest single day's advance since 1914.
Henri hears the news on the 28th, from a communiqué read out in haste at battalion headquarters. The Aisne. The Chemin des Dames. The names fall on him like stones - the Boyau du Rat, the Place du Marché, the Café de la Paix, the trenches he held in 1914 and 1915, the communication trenches where he learnt the war, the dugouts where he slept against the shepherd, the fire steps where he stood watch for months. All of it has fallen in a few hours. All of it is German again.
The shepherd sees Henri's face and understands. 'The Aisne?' Henri nods. The shepherd says nothing. There is nothing to say. The Aisne is a piece of their history, a piece of their flesh, and that piece has just been torn away.
The Germans advance for a week. They cross the Vesle and reach the Marne - the Marne, the river of 1914, the river of the miracle. On 3 June they are at Château-Thierry, eighty kilometres from Paris. Eighty kilometres. It is the shortest distance between the German army and the capital since September 1914.
Paris is under fire. Not from aeroplanes - from a monstrous gun, the 'Pariser Kanone', the Paris Gun, which fires shells a hundred and twenty kilometres. Parisians hear the explosions without knowing where they come from. The exodus begins again - the stations are packed, the roads south choked. The government considers leaving for Bordeaux, as in 1914. Clemenceau refuses. Clemenceau will not leave. Clemenceau says: 'I will fight in front of Paris, I will fight in Paris, I will fight behind Paris.' And this time that sentence, that brutality, is exactly what is needed.
Verdier lives through the last days of May in a state of cold tension that he masters by method - his calculations, his maps, his reports. The German offensive is dangerous, but Verdier sees something Ludendorff perhaps does not. The Germans are stretching. Again. As in March, as in April. They are advancing too fast, too far, into a salient that keeps lengthening and whose flanks are vulnerable. And every day that passes, the Americans are arriving - ten thousand a day now, by ship, at Brest, at Saint-Nazaire, at Bordeaux. Ten thousand a day. The sand is running.
Henri is not committed to the battle of the Aisne. His regiment stays in Picardy, in reserve, ready to be thrown in any direction. The waiting is unbearable - worse than fighting, because fighting takes up the body and waiting takes up the mind, and the mind is more dangerous ground than no man's land.
The men read the communiqués and fall silent. The Aisne. The Marne. Château-Thierry. Names they know, places where some of them fought, trenches they dug with their own hands. Fayolle, who was on the Aisne from September 1914 to April 1915, looks at the map in the communiqué and traces the front line with his finger. His finger passes over the spot where the Boyau du Rat used to be, and he says: 'We dug that trench in two days. October '14. The second lieutenant was a corporal then.'
Henri looks at him. Fayolle has a memory. Fayolle has the memory of the whole war, buried under the cough and the tiredness, intact. He remembers the Boyau du Rat, and the Place du Marché, and the first Christmas, and the truce that was not a truce. He remembers everything, which is a burden, but also a proof - the proof that these things existed, that these places were held, that these men lived.
The shepherd does not look at the map. He reads the communiqué - he reads now, with the slowness that is his but without help, without Henri's finger under the lines. He reads 'our troops have withdrawn to new positions' and says, with the same literary criticism as in April: 'That's a load of balls.' Then he adds, more quietly: 'They're on the Aisne.' And in his voice there is the same weight as in Henri's, because the Aisne is their river, their ground, their first front.
But at Château-Thierry, something happens that nobody expected - or rather that everyone expected without believing it.
The Americans fight.
The US 2nd Division, including a brigade of Marines, is thrown into the battle at the beginning of June, west of Château-Thierry, in Belleau Wood. The Marines advance against the German positions with a bravery that verges on recklessness - they attack across open ground, upright, like the French of 1914, like the British of 1 July 1916. They take terrible losses. And they do not fall back.
Belleau Wood will become the founding myth of the American army in France. Three weeks of fighting for a square kilometre of forest. The Marines learn there what the French learnt in 1914 and the British in 1916 - that courage is not enough, that machine guns have no respect for bravery, and that modern war is a matter of tactics as much as of will. But they learn fast. Faster than anyone had hoped. And above all, they are here. They are here, with their fresh divisions, their new ammunition, their enthusiasm intact, and every American division that goes into the line is a division that changes Verdier's calculation.
Verdier notes, on 6 June: 'The Americans are fighting at Belleau. Bravely, badly, effectively. They are making the same mistakes we made in '14. But they have what we did not have in '14: an experienced ally behind them who knows how to survive. And they have the numbers. My God, they have the numbers.'
In mid-May, before the blow of the 27th, Henri receives a letter from Lucien Combes.
'Lieutenant. The training college is wonderful. I read, I write, I do arithmetic, I do science, I do history. History above all. The history master talks about the Revolution and I understand things I didn't understand before, about liberty and equality and fraternity. Words that are carved over the doors of town halls and that people read without seeing, and that I see now, because I've seen what happens when they don't exist.
My leg is better. I still limp but less. The doctor says it's the best I can hope for. I told him I'd hoped for worse and got better, and he didn't understand.
Lucienne Marty has written to me. She's in Cahors too, at the art school. We see each other on Sundays. She draws all the time, everywhere, on everything - café tablecloths, the margins of newspapers, the backs of envelopes. I think she's a bit mad. I think it's necessary.
Your former pupil. Lucien.'
Henri reads the letter in the dugout and folds it and puts it away and thinks two things at once. Lucien studying history at the training college in Cahors. And Lucien seeing Lucienne Marty on Sundays. The former soldier who read Montaigne and the former pupil who drew faces in a single line. Two seeds planted in the Lot, one by Henri, the other by Louise, and the two seeds have found each other.
Henri smiles. The shepherd sees the smile and says: 'The lad?'
'The lad. And the lass.'
The shepherd asks for no details. He understands, with a shepherd's instinct, that when a lad and a lass find each other, it is the right order of things.
In Lyon, May brings Paul's return - not the physical return, that has been done since April, but the return to life. Paul starts work.
Not at the factory - his arm no longer allows it. At the union. The secretary of the metalworkers' section, an old militant, himself invalided out, is looking for someone to keep office hours, write up the minutes, file the papers. Paul puts himself forward. He can read, write, reckon. He knows the shops, the trades, the demands. And he has an arm in a sling that says better than any speech where he comes from and what he has given.
He starts on 6 May. Two francs a day - less than the factory, less than Jeanne, but it is a wage, and above all it is a place. Paul sits down behind a desk, with a file and a pencil, and he does what Jeanne did at the factory - he learns. The files, the texts, the negotiations, the procedures. Labour policy, agreements, settlements. It is a world he knew from outside - the world of trade unionism, of assemblies, of meetings. Now he knows it from inside, with its papers and its compromises and its slowness, and he discovers that changing the world is desk work as much as platform work.
Jeanne sees him change. Not physically - Paul is still thin, still marked, his arm still stiff. But something in his eyes has lit up again, something that went out in the trench and that the union office is rekindling. Paul has a reason to get up in the morning. Not the war - work. Not survival - meaning.
In the evenings they have supper together. For the first time in four years, Paul and Jeanne have supper together every evening, at the same table, in the same kitchen, and the frictions of April are easing, slowly, replaced by a new routine, clumsy, groping, but a routine. Paul talks about the union. Jeanne talks about the factory. They trade figures, names, situations. They are not the same couple as in 1914 - they are a couple of 1918, formed by the war, deformed by absence, re-formed by return.
One evening, Paul says to Jeanne: 'When the men come back, they'll want the women's jobs back. The union will have to choose.'
'Choose what?'
'Whether it stands up for all the workers or only the men.'
Jeanne looks at him. Paul holds her gaze. It is the Paul of 1918, the one who listened to the women at the union, the one who said 'I understand now'. And it is also the Paul of before, the militant, the trade unionist, but a trade unionist who has widened his field of vision to take in the half of humanity he did not see before.
'And what will you choose?' Jeanne asks.
Paul does not answer at once. Then he says: 'All.'
It is a word. A single one. Like Louise's 'yes', like Louise's 'always', like the shepherd's 'Papa'. The words that matter are always short.
The end of May. The German offensive on the Aisne has broken through, the Germans are on the Marne, Paris is threatened, and the world seems to be at the edge of the abyss. But Henri is in Picardy, out of the way of the blow, and he uses the respite to do what he always does - hold on, prepare, teach.
The shepherd now reads the communiqué on his own every morning. It has become his ritual - he gets up, goes to battalion headquarters, makes out the communiqué pinned to the wall, and comes back to the dugout with his reading of the world. His reading is a shepherd's - direct, without nuance, without illusion. 'They've taken Soissons.' 'The Americans are at Château-Thierry.' 'It's holding.' Three sentences. The most honest summary of the situation Henri hears all day, because the shepherd does not know how to lie and the communiqués know how to do nothing else.
On 31 May, in the evening, Henri writes in his notebook.
'31 May 1918. The Aisne has fallen. The Marne is threatened. Paris is threatened. And yet I am calm. Not the calm of resignation - the calm of calculation. The Germans strike hard but they do not break through. They advance but they do not win. And every day the Americans arrive. Ten thousand a day. The sand is running. It is running the right way.
The shepherd read the communiqué this morning. He said: "They're on the Marne. That's where we stopped them the first time." He is right. That is where we stopped them in September 1914. And that is where we shall stop them again.
I do not know when. I do not know how. But I know. The shepherd knows. Fayolle knows. Pélissié knows. The cat knows, but the cat does not care.
Summer is coming. Summer will be decisive. And we shall be there.'