June 1918
The German offensive on the Aisne is running out of breath.
As in March, as in April, the same pattern - the lightning advance of the first days turns into slow progress, then into stagnation. The Germans are on the Marne, at Château-Thierry, but they do not cross the river. The salient they have made is deep, dangerous, impressive on the map - and vulnerable. A salient is a pocket whose flanks are exposed, and Foch looks at the flanks with the eyes of a man who has waited all his life for this moment.
But Ludendorff has not finished. On 9 June he launches a fourth offensive - between Montdidier and Noyon, in Picardy, to try to join the March salient to the May salient, to make a continuous front that would take in Paris. This time the attack falls on the French sector - fresh divisions, well prepared, the same hurricane bombardment, the same storm troops.
Henri is in Picardy. His regiment is in reserve, twenty kilometres behind the point of impact. On the morning of 9 June the rumbling starts again - the rumbling he now recognises the way you recognise the voice of a familiar enemy. The shepherd opens his eyes. The cat flattens itself at the bottom of the haversack. Fayolle coughs and gets up. Pélissié picks up his rifle.
The regiment goes up the line on the 10th, urgently, in lorries driving through the night in the dust and the noise. Henri settles his platoon in a half-ruined village, facing the German advance, and prepares the defence. It is the war of movement again, the one he learnt in March - no trenches, no communication trenches, houses, walls, ditches, anything that can stop a bullet and shelter a man.
But this time something is different. The Germans are tired. Henri sees it in the rhythm of the attack - slower than in March, less coordinated, with pauses the storm troops of March never took. The Sturmtruppen are worn out. Four offensives in three months have devoured Germany's best troops, the ones that cannot be replaced, the veterans, the specialists, the men who knew how to infiltrate and outflank. Their replacements are younger, less trained, less willing. Henri sees it in their eyes when he takes them prisoner - the same eyes as the French reinforcements of 1916, the eyes of men who did not choose.
The Noyon offensive is stopped in three days. On 12 June the French counter-attack with tanks - Renault FTs, the new French light tanks, fast, nimble, nothing like the British monsters of Cambrai. The tanks burst out of the woods at dawn, in swarms, and the Germans fall back. It is the first time Henri has seen tanks in action, and the sight astounds him - these little steel boxes moving across the fields, crushing the wire, crossing the ditches, and behind them the infantry advancing upright, shielded, alive.
The shepherd looks at the tanks with a peasant's distrust of machines. 'Do they break down?' he asks. Henri says: 'Often.' The shepherd nods. 'But when they work, they work.' It is the most favourable criticism Antoine Lacombe has ever passed on a mechanical object.
The fourth German offensive has failed. In four days. It is the shortest of the four, the weakest, the least dangerous. The Germans no longer have the strength to break through. The momentum is broken. The elite divisions are decimated. The replacements are not a match for the originals. And the Americans are arriving, ten thousand a day, twenty thousand some days, a steady flood that changes the equation with the regularity of a rising river.
Verdier reads the reports on the Noyon offensive and writes in his notebook on 13 June: 'Fourth attempt. Fourth failure. The Germans no longer have the means to break through. Each offensive weakens them further. The window is closing. If they did not win in March, they will not win. The question is no longer whether we shall hold. It is when we shall counter-attack.'
When. Not if. The same word Henri wrote in March. Two men who do not know each other think the same thing, in the same words, from different trenches and different offices. The war makes minds converge the way it makes suffering converge.
Henri spends the rest of June in a stabilised sector between Montdidier and Noyon. The platoon lost three men in the fighting of the 10th to the 12th - one killed, two wounded. The dead man is a March reinforcement, a lad of nineteen whose mother's first name Henri did not know. He writes it in his notebook with the others, in the list that grows longer, the litany of names that is his reckoning of the war.
The old hands are alive. All of them. The shepherd, Fayolle, Pélissié. The cat. The core holds. The core has held for four years, and the core will hold to the end, because the core is harder than the war, because the bonds that tie these men to one another are forged in an alloy nothing can break - not shells, not tiredness, not fear, not time.
Fayolle is coughing less. The spring has done him good, as every spring does, and Henri clings to this seasonal improvement in the hope that the summer will stretch the respite. Fayolle is twenty-three. Twenty-three years old and four years of war. More war than peace in his adult life. Henri looks at him and wonders what Fayolle will become afterwards - if there is an afterwards, if Fayolle will know how to live in a world without trenches, without the section, without the shepherd and the cat and the constant noise that has become his silence.
Pélissié writes. Always. In the evening, the slate, the pencil, the letter. But Pélissié writes something else now, besides the letters to his wife. He writes lists of the things he will do when he gets home. Practical, concrete lists - mend the byre roof, buy a second cow, rebuild the garden wall, prune the almond trees. A peasant's lists, lists of life. Henri sees them on the slate in the morning, before Pélissié wipes them off, and he reads them the way you read a poem - with the feeling that every line is an act of faith.
On 18 June, Henri receives a letter from Marcel.
'Dear Lieutenant. La Voix du Midi exists. Six numbers, a modest print run, a microscopic readership. But it exists. A workers' paper in Toulouse, founded by a compositor who took a splinter in the back on the Chemin des Dames. The subtitle really is "Founded in a trench". I wasn't joking.
The first article in the first number was about women in the factories. I interviewed women workers at the Toulouse powder works. They told me things the papers don't tell - the pay, the conditions, the accidents. The accidents above all. Powder works blow up. Not often, but when they do, it's women who die. Women making the shells the men fire. The circle is complete.
Your sister Jeanne - you've told me about her. The Berliet works, the union, the stools. If she ever wants to write - an account, a story, anything - La Voix du Midi will print it. Tell her.
Your compositor. Marcel.
P.S. The second number carried a poem by Fayolle. The one he published in the first Poilu du Causse, in June 1915. I've kept it all this time. It's still just as bad. I printed it anyway. Soldiers' bad poems are worth more than civilians' good ones.'
Henri reads the letter and laughs at the postscript. Fayolle, when Henri tells him that his 1915 poem has been printed in a newspaper in Toulouse, blushes. A man of twenty-three who has been through Verdun and the Somme and the Chemin des Dames, blushing because his poem has been printed. Henri finds it magnificent.
In Lyon, June brings news Jeanne and Paul were not expecting.
Jeanne is pregnant.
It is the local doctor who confirms it, one morning in the second week of June. Jeanne comes home from the surgery and sits down in the kitchen and stays there a moment, her hands on her belly, her eyes on the window. Five years. Five years since the miscarriage of 1913, five years of silence, five years of an empty belly. And now, in this kitchen in Vaise, in this war that will not end, in this world that is burning, life.
She does not tell Paul straight away. She waits for the evening, for supper, for the moment when they are sitting face to face, in the routine they have rebuilt. Paul eats with his right hand - he will always eat with his right hand now, the left arm is no more than an accompaniment, a counterweight, a memory of what it was. Jeanne puts down her spoon and says: 'Paul.'
He looks up.
'I'm pregnant.'
The silence lasts three seconds. Paul's spoon stays in the air, halfway between the plate and his mouth. Then he puts it down. Slowly. He looks at Jeanne. His eyes - the soldier's eyes, the wounded man's eyes, the eyes of the man who cries out in the night - his eyes change. Something old lights up in them again, something from before the war, before the trenches, before everything.
'True?' he says.
'True.'
Paul gets up. He comes round the table. He kneels beside Jeanne, takes her left hand in his right, and rests his forehead against Jeanne's belly, and stays there, his forehead against her belly, and Jeanne lays her hand on Paul's head, and they stay like that, in the kitchen at Vaise, in June 1918, for a minute that holds everything - the miscarriage, the absence, the war, the return, and now this, this impossible thing, this necessary thing, this thing that comes exactly when it must come, that is to say when nobody was expecting it any more.
Rose, when she hears, says: 'Bloody hell, Jeanne.' It is the tenderest expression in Rose Vigier's vocabulary.
Henri, when he learns of it from a letter of Jeanne's dated 20 June, reads the sentence three times. 'I'm pregnant. Paul and me. For January.' Then he shows the letter to the shepherd. The shepherd reads the sentence - slowly, with his finger, but he reads it alone. And he says: 'That's good.' Then he adds: 'January. It's cold, to be born in.' Henri says: 'Jeanne has always liked the cold.' It is not true - Jeanne hates the cold. But the sentence makes the shepherd laugh, and the shepherd's laugh is so rare that Henri would say it a hundred times over.
On 30 June, Verdier writes a report that is not like the others.
It is not an analysis, not a forecast. It is a proposal. Verdier proposes a plan for a counter-offensive.
Not a limited counter-offensive, not a raid - a general counter-offensive, coordinated, using everything the Allied armies have learnt in four years. Massed tanks - hundreds of Renault FTs, in swarms, without an artillery preparation so as to keep surprise. Aircraft overhead - reconnaissance and bomber squadrons blinding the enemy and shielding the advance. Artillery behind - the creeping barrage perfected, keeping pace with the infantry metre by metre. And the infantry itself, trained in the new tactics, advancing in groups, outflanking, infiltrating - the same tactics as the German Sturmtruppen, but turned against their inventors.
The report runs to thirty pages. It is the work of Verdier's whole war - four years of notes, calculations, ignored reports, lessons learnt in blood, condensed into thirty pages that say: this is how we win. Not when - how.
Verdier passes the report on. He does not know whether anyone will read it. He does not know that Foch is thinking the same thing at the same moment, that the plans taking shape at supreme headquarters match his report line for line, that this is the convergence of minds that have seen the same things and drawn the same conclusions. He does not know. He does his job.
On the evening of 30 June, Henri is in the dugout. The candle is burning. The cat is asleep. The shepherd is writing in his blue exercise book. Fayolle is asleep and not coughing. Pélissié is writing to his wife.
Henri touches the ring. The photograph. The cigar box. The wooden dog. His pocket is a world. His notebook is open.
'30 June 1918. Four years of war tomorrow. Four years. How do you say four years? I do not know. It is longer than training college, longer than military service, longer than anything I have lived through. And shorter, in a way, because the days are all alike and memory squeezes them together.
Jeanne is pregnant. My sister. A child for January. A war child, like my daughter. The children of the war will be a generation apart - born in the noise, carried in fear, brought into the world by women who kept the country standing. Those children will be different. I do not know how. But different.
The summer will be decisive. Everyone says so. Everyone feels it. Germany has struck four times and has not broken through. The Americans are coming. The tanks are coming. Foch is preparing something. I can feel it in the orders, in the movements, in the air. Something is coming. Something different.
Four years. The shepherd can read. Pélissié writes lists of things to do when he gets home. Fayolle has a poem printed in a newspaper. Marcel has his paper. Lucien will be a schoolmaster. Lucienne draws. Marthe Bouyssou wants to be a schoolmistress. The cat is fat.
Four years, and life has grown in every crack of the destruction. Like the poppies in no man's land. Like the beans in Louise's garden. Like the child in Jeanne's belly.
Life is more stubborn than death. It is the only lesson of this war. The only one worth having.'