August 1918
On 8 August, the British army attacks at Amiens.
It is Foch's blow - the real one, the great one, the one that changes everything. Four hundred and fifty tanks, two thousand aircraft, British, Australian and Canadian divisions, thrown forward in the morning fog on a twenty-kilometre front, without an artillery preparation, with total surprise. The Germans are crushed. In a few hours the front is broken to a depth of twelve kilometres. Whole divisions are captured. Fifteen thousand prisoners on the first day. Four hundred guns taken.
Ludendorff will call 8 August 'the black day of the German army'. Not because of the losses - Germany has had worse losses. Because of what the losses mean. Units surrendering en masse. Soldiers refusing to go up the line. Reinforcements greeted with shouts of 'blacklegs' and 'war-prolongers' by their own comrades. The German army is cracking from within, as the French army cracked in May 1917, and that crack is the true sign of the end.
Verdier reads the reports of 8 August with a calm that surprises his colleagues. No excitement, no triumph. The calm of a man who has watched the solution take shape for years and sees it applied at last. Massed tanks. Surprise. Coordination. It is all there. Everything he wrote.
He notes in his notebook on 8 August: 'Amiens. Four hundred and fifty tanks. A breakthrough twelve kilometres deep. Ludendorff will say it is a black day. He is right. But for us it is the first white day in four years.'
Henri goes into action on the 10th.
Not at Amiens - further south, in Picardy, in a French offensive supporting the British blow. Foch gives no respite. He strikes everywhere, one sector after another, switching sectors, preventing the Germans from concentrating their reserves. Every blow tells, every blow drives them back, and together they make a general withdrawal the Germans can no longer stop.
Henri advances. The word, after four years of 'hold', 'dig', 'resist' - the word 'advance' has a taste the men are discovering with an awed astonishment. We are advancing. We are marching east, not west. The villages we pass through are not villages we are abandoning - they are villages we are liberating. And in the liberated villages, there are people.
Henri enters a small Picardy town on 12 August with his platoon. The Germans left it in the night, in a hurry, leaving behind crates of ammunition, field kitchens still warm, German newspapers from that morning. And on the doorsteps, the civilians. Women, old people, children. People who have lived four years under occupation, four years of requisitions, forced labour, curfew, hunger. People who watch the French soldiers come into their village with eyes Henri cannot describe - not joy, not yet, something before joy, an amazement, a disbelief, as if freedom were a wild animal you dare not approach for fear it will run away.
An old woman comes out of her house, goes up to Henri, and touches his sleeve. The second lieutenant's star, the horizon-blue cloth. She touches it the way you touch a relic, to make sure it is real. Then she says, in a voice rusty with silence: 'Is it over?'
Henri looks at her. He would like to say yes. He cannot. 'Not yet, madame. But soon.'
The old woman nods. She does not cry. She is past the age of tears, or perhaps she has shed them all in four years. She goes back into her house and shuts the door, and Henri stays in the street with that question - 'Is it over?' - ringing like the first word of a new world.
The shepherd comes into the village behind Henri. He looks at the houses, the people, the street. And he says, with the wonder of a shepherd finding a lost pasture again: 'There's hens.' There are hens. In a farmyard, hens pecking, indifferent to the liberation, to the war, to everything. Hens. The shepherd looks at them as he would look at his ewes, with a peasant's tenderness for farmyard animals that survive everything. Verdun the cat, in the haversack, puts its head out and looks at the hens with professional interest, which Lacombe tempers with a 'You stay put.'
The advance goes on. Not at the speed of March - the French army is tired, the men are thin, the ranks thinned out. But the advance goes on, slow, methodical, irresistible. Village after village, wood after wood, river after river. The Germans fight their way back with the energy of despair - dogged rearguards, machine guns in every bell tower, traps at every crossroads. Every kilometre costs men. Henri knows it. Every kilometre of freedom is paid for at the same price as every kilometre of mud, and the notebook grows longer.
On 15 August, the Assumption, Henri loses a man.
Not a reinforcement. Not a new face. Fayolle.
It is a mortar splinter, at the entrance to a village, as the platoon advances along a road lined with poplars. The mortar bomb lands ten metres from Fayolle, and the splinter takes him in the chest, on the left side, where the lungs are already damaged by four years of coughing, by the bronchitis of 1914, by the dysentery of 1916, by everything this twenty-three-year-old body has endured since it left the Lot in September 1914.
Fayolle falls. Henri is on him in five seconds. There is blood everywhere - black, thick, pumped out by the heart that is still beating. Fayolle's face is white, his eyes are open, and he looks at Henri with an expression Henri recognises, because he has seen it a hundred times - the expression of a man who knows.
'Sergeant,' says Fayolle. Not Lieutenant. Sergeant. Henri's rank when Fayolle arrived, the rank of their first meeting, the rank of the beginning.
Henri presses the dressing onto his chest. The blood soaks through the cloth, through his fingers, runs into the dust of the road. The stretcher-bearers arrive. They take Fayolle, lift him, lay him on the stretcher. Fayolle grabs Henri's hand - like the carpenter from Cahors in August 1914, as all the wounded grab the nearest hand, because a hand is the last link with the world.
Henri holds Fayolle's hand. The shepherd is behind him, motionless. Pélissié is behind him, motionless. The cat is somewhere, invisible. The stretcher-bearers carry Fayolle away, and Henri lets go of the hand, and the hand falls back onto the stretcher, and the stretcher moves off along the road, between the poplars, and Henri stands in the dust with Fayolle's blood on his fingers.
The shepherd puts his hand on Henri's shoulder. The same hand Henri put on Lacombe's shoulder when Flòc died. The same gesture, reversed. The shepherd says nothing. There is nothing to say.
Henri will not know for five days. Five days of advancing, of fighting, of liberated villages, of old women touching his sleeve, five days with Fayolle's blood dried under his nails, in the creases of his hands, which he does not wash because washing means wiping away. And on the fifth day the runner arrives with the message. Fayolle is alive. Evacuated. The splinter pierced the left lung, the one that was already not working very well, and the surgeon has operated, and Fayolle is alive.
Alive. With one lung gone. At twenty-three.
Henri sits down against a wall and closes his eyes. The shepherd is beside him. The cat is on the shepherd's knees. Pélissié is standing a little way off, rifle on his shoulder, on sentry, because Pélissié keeps watch when the others no longer can.
'He's pulling through,' says Henri.
The shepherd says: 'I know.' As if he had always known. As if Fayolle's death were an impossibility the shepherd had refused in advance, by the strength of a shepherd's will that does not lose its beasts.
In Lyon, August brings heat and hope.
The communiqués have changed their tone. No more 'our troops are resisting doggedly' - now it is 'our troops are advancing', 'our troops have liberated', 'our troops have captured'. The words of victory, cautious still, measured, but the words of victory all the same. Jeanne reads the communiqués at the factory, during the break, and the women read with her, and for the first time in four years their faces are not shut as they read. Something opens. Not a smile - not yet. An easing. A loosening of the jaws. The end is in the air.
Paul reads the communiqués at the union, with a soldier's eye. He says to Jeanne one evening: 'They're falling back. For real. It's not a tactical withdrawal like in '17. They're falling back because they can't hold any more.' And in Paul's voice Jeanne hears something she has not heard since August 1914 - not joy, not yet, but the possibility of joy. The idea that joy might come back. One day. Soon.
Jeanne is three months pregnant. Her belly does not show yet, but her body knows - the morning sickness, the tiredness in the evening, the breasts that ache. Paul still does the cooking, with his right hand, with a skill that improves week by week. His soup has become edible. His omelettes are almost good. Jeanne does not tell him, because Paul does not need compliments - he needs to know his wife is eating, and she eats.
Rose, when she sees Jeanne at the factory, says: 'You're getting bigger.' Jeanne says: 'Does it show?' Rose says: 'To me, yes. To the others, not yet. But it will.' It will. And when it does, Jeanne will have to choose - go on working or stop, keep her place or lose it, the wage or the belly. The choice all the women of 1918 make without anyone making it easier for them.
At the end of August, Henri writes to Louise. Not from a dugout - there are no more dugouts, no more trenches. From a billet, in a liberated house, sitting at a real table, on a real chair, with a real roof over his head. He writes with a pen found in a drawer of the house's study - a civilian pen, a peacetime pen, not a trench pencil.
'Dear Louise. Fayolle is wounded. Alive, but wounded. The lung. He won't be coming back. He's the last of the first - the last man who arrived in September 1914 and was still with me. There's the shepherd and Pélissié left. Three, out of the thirty who went up in August '14. Three.
I can't think about it. If I think about it, I stop, and I can't stop, because the men need me to keep walking and to walk in front.
But I can tell you something else. We're advancing. We're liberating villages. And in the villages there are people who look at us as if they'd forgotten we existed, and who touch us to make sure we're real. And the hens peck in the yards. And the shepherd looks at the hens with a shepherd's eyes, which means with love.
Little Jeanne is eleven months old. In a month it'll be her first birthday. I'll try to be there. I'll try. It's the only word left - try. Not promise. Try.
Give her a kiss. Tell her the cat is fat and ungrateful and the hens are alive and the figs will soon be ripe on the yard wall. Tell her her father is coming home.'
31 August, evening. A billet in Picardy. A house with a roof. The shepherd is sitting in the kitchen, the cat on the table, and he is writing. In his blue exercise book. Henri sits opposite him, notebook open, the civilian pen in his hand.
They write at the same time, in silence, the shepherd and the schoolmaster, each in his own book, each with his own words. Two men writing in a Picardy kitchen, in August 1918, while the war draws back. Pélissié is asleep in the next room, the slate propped against the wall, a finished letter in its envelope, ready for the vaguemestre.
The shepherd looks up from his exercise book and says: 'Lieutenant.'
Henri looks up.
'When are we going home?'
It is the first time in four years the shepherd has asked the question. Not 'are we going home' - 'when'. The question holds its own answer. We are going home. That is certain. The only unknown is the when.
Henri says: 'Soon.'
The shepherd nods. He lowers his eyes to his exercise book and goes back to his writing. Henri lowers his eyes to his. And in that kitchen, in that house, under that roof that does not leak, at that table that does not shake, two men are writing towards the same thing - the end, home, the return.
The cat purrs on the table, between the two books. Outside, the August night is warm and silent, and the front is ten kilometres to the east, and it is moving away.
Moving away.