July 1918
Ludendorff strikes one last time.
On 15 July, at midnight, the German artillery opens fire in Champagne and on the Marne. It is the fifth offensive, the last, the one Ludendorff calls the Friedensturm - the peace offensive, because he still believes one last blow will be enough. Fifty-two German divisions attack on an eighty-kilometre front, from Château-Thierry to the Argonne.
But this time the Allies know.
Not by intuition - by intelligence. German prisoners taken on the 14th have talked. The hour of the attack, the sector, the method. Pétain has had time to prepare a defence in depth - the front lines are almost emptied, the troops pulled back to the second and third positions, and when the German bombardment falls on the forward trenches, it falls on trenches that are almost empty. The Germans fire a million shells at ghosts.
Henri is not in Champagne. He is still in Picardy, in reserve. But he hears it - all France hears it, on this 15 July, the rumbling coming from the east. The shepherd opens his eyes in the dark of the dugout and says: 'Again.' Henri says: 'The last.' He does not know why he says it. He feels it, with the certainty of the body that four years of war have honed to a cutting edge. The last. Because the Germans have nothing left after this. Because the sand has almost run out.
East of Reims, the Germans are stopped dead. The defence in depth works. The German infantry advances into emptiness and runs into the second position, intact, manned, murderous. The German losses are appalling. The assault divisions, the last of them, the survivors of March and April and May, are crushed against a wall they did not expect.
West of Reims, on the Marne, the Germans manage to cross the river. They establish bridgeheads on the south bank. But the resistance is ferocious - French divisions, American divisions, even Italian divisions fight side by side in the vineyards of Champagne, and the Germans cannot widen their bridgeheads. In three days the offensive is stopped. Everywhere. Along the whole front.
Ludendorff has played his last card. It was not enough.
And on 18 July, the answer.
Foch strikes. Without warning. Without an artillery preparation. At dawn, in the fog, on the western flank of the Marne salient, between Soissons and Château-Thierry. Two hundred and fifty-five Renault FT tanks, a hundred and twenty-three Schneider tanks and a hundred or so Saint-Chamond tanks come out of the woods and advance in swarms on the German lines. Behind the tanks, the infantry - French divisions, American divisions, Moroccan divisions. Aircraft fly over the battlefield, machine-gunning the roads, bombing the reserves. It is the war Verdier dreamt of in his reports - tanks, aircraft, artillery, infantry, all together, coordinated, synchronised. Twentieth-century war being born in the wheatfields of Picardy.
The Germans are taken by surprise. For the first time in the war, it is they who are surprised. No bombardment beforehand to warn them. No visible concentration of troops. Just the tanks, appearing from nowhere, crushing the wire and the machine guns and advancing, and behind them the men advancing, and the German front cracking.
The advance is eight kilometres on the first day. The Marne salient begins to shrink. The Germans fall back. For the first time since March, it is the Germans who fall back.
Verdier is at headquarters when the reports come in. Eight kilometres. Four hundred and fifty tanks. Total surprise. He reads the figures and something happens that he had stopped expecting - a feeling. Not joy, not triumph. Relief. The relief of a man who has waited four years for the machine to work, and sees the machine working at last. The tanks have broken through. The infantry has followed. The aircraft have covered them. The creeping barrage has kept pace. Everything has worked. Everything he wrote, noted, proposed, calculated - everything has worked.
He sits at his desk and stays motionless for three minutes. Then he opens his notebook and writes a single line: '18 July 1918. It worked.'
Henri goes into action on 20 July.
His regiment is sent in as reinforcements into the salient, to widen the breach opened on the 18th. It is the war of movement again, but a war of movement that goes forward instead of back. Henri leads his platoon across a landscape that is no longer a trench landscape - open fields, villages, roads. And everywhere the signs of the German withdrawal - abandoned positions, burnt-out dumps, spiked guns, columns of prisoners walking to the rear, hands on their heads, faces grey.
Henri looks at the prisoners. Lads, most of them. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Germany has sent its last children, and its last children have the eyes of men who know it is over. Not over today, not over tomorrow. But over. The certainty is in their eyes as it is in Henri's, but the other way round - they see defeat, he sees victory.
The platoon advances five kilometres on the 20th, three on the 21st, two on the 22nd. The German resistance stiffens - the rearguards fight doggedly, with machine guns and artillery, to cover the withdrawal of the main body. Every village is a battle, every wood an ambush, every crossroads a trap. Henri loses two men on the 21st - reinforcements, new faces he has not had time to know. The notebook grows longer.
The shepherd advances with his stick and his cat and his throbbing thigh. He limps more than before, the fatigue of the march waking the old wound, but he advances, because Lacombe always advances, because the flock is ahead and the shepherd follows the flock. Fayolle marches without coughing - the dry Picardy summer is good for his lungs, and the adrenaline does the rest. Pélissié marches the way he does everything, in silence, rifle on his shoulder, eyes on the ground.
On 23 July, they enter a village the Germans have just left. The houses are standing, the shutters closed, the streets empty. No civilians - they have gone or are hiding. Henri pushes open the door of a house and goes in. A kitchen. A table. Plates. A pot of jam, open, half eaten - the Germans ate the French jam before they left. It is a tiny, absurd detail, and Henri notes it in his notebook because the half-eaten jam says more about the war than all the communiqués in the world.
The shepherd comes in behind him. He looks at the kitchen, the table, the plates. And he says something he has never said in four years of war: 'It looks like home.'
At the end of July, the Marne salient is gone. The Germans are driven back beyond the Vesle, then the Aisne. Soissons is liberated. Château-Thierry is liberated. The Marne is French again. And the movement does not stop - Foch pushes, everywhere, all along the front, with attack after attack that leaves the Germans no time to regroup.
The Second Battle of the Marne is the decisive victory of the war. Not the last battle - there will be others, for four more months. But the battle that breaks the German mainspring, that turns the momentum, that turns defence into attack and attack into retreat. After July 1918, the Germans do nothing but fall back. Slowly, fighting, inflicting losses. But falling back.
In Lyon, July brings heat and nausea.
Jeanne is two months pregnant and the factory is an oven. Forty degrees in the shop, metal dust sticking to the skin, the smell of grease turning the stomach. Jeanne grits her teeth and works, because that is what she does, because she does not know how to do otherwise, because stopping means losing her place and her place is all she has.
Rose keeps an eye on her. Rose has the eye - the eye of women who have carried children and recognise the signs. The pallor, the more frequent pauses, the hand that rests on the belly without thinking. Rose says nothing to the others - it is Jeanne's secret, and women's secrets are kept between women. But on Sunday, when Jeanne comes to eat at Rose's with little Jeanne, who is twenty-one months old now and runs everywhere, Rose says: 'You've got to slow down.'
Jeanne says: 'I can't.'
Rose says: 'You can. You've got to. You're not twenty-five any more, Jeanne. And the factory doesn't give a damn about your belly.'
Jeanne does not slow down. Not yet. But she adjusts - her movements, her postures, her pauses. She drinks more water. She eats at midday, which she did not always do. She sits on her stool - the stool she won in 1916, the stool of the tiny victory - and lets the stool carry what her legs no longer can.
Paul, in the evenings, watches her with a worry he does not show but she can guess at. Paul, who has seen men die, who has seen bodies come apart, looks at Jeanne's belly with the same fear Henri feels before the shells - the fear of losing the one thing that matters.
He says nothing. He cooks. It is new - Paul cooking, with his right hand, clumsily, simple dishes, soups, omelettes. He cooks because Jeanne comes home worn out and cooking is the only useful thing a man with a broken arm can do for a pregnant woman working ten hours a day. It is a domestic revolution, silent, without speeches, without theory. A man makes the soup. The world changes.
On 31 July, Henri writes to Louise from a billet behind the lines, somewhere between Soissons and Compiègne. The platoon is at rest, after ten days of fighting. Seven men lost in July. Seven more for the notebook. But the old hands are there. All of them. Always.
'Dear Louise. It's turning. I can't tell you more, but it's turning. For the first time in four years, we're going forward. Not a few metres - several kilometres. The Germans are falling back. I see their abandoned positions, their guns left behind, their prisoners walking to the rear. And in their eyes I see something I've never seen before - defeat. Not ours. Theirs.
I don't know when it will end. But it will end. The end is in the air the way spring is in the air in March - you can't see it yet, but you can feel it.
Little Jeanne is ten months old. My sister Jeanne is expecting a child in January. Lucien is preparing for the training college. Lucienne draws. Pélissié reads Montaigne. The shepherd can read. Marcel has a paper. Fayolle has had a poem printed. The cat is fat and ungrateful.
Do you see? Do you see what has grown while the world was burning? That's what we'll bring home. Not medals, not stripes. Seeds. Seeds that have grown in the mud and will grow again, afterwards, in peacetime, in our school garden, in your pupils' beans, in Lucienne's drawings, in Pélissié's letters, in the shepherd's exercise book.
I love you. I'm coming back. And this time, when I say it, I believe it.'
Louise receives the letter on 8 August, under the fig tree at the haberdashery, little Jeanne on her knee. The figs are almost ripe. The sky is blue. And somewhere, on the other side of France, the war is turning.