September 1918
Little Jeanne is one year old.
On 9 September, in the yard behind the haberdashery in Figeac, under the fig tree heavy with ripe fruit, Louise puts a cake on the table - a prune cake, the same as at the wedding, made by Louise's mother with the flour they can find and the sugar they can no longer find. One candle. Just one. Little Jeanne sits on her grandmother's knee and looks at the flame with huge eyes, blue, serious, Henri's eyes behind Louise's features.
Henri is not there.
He is somewhere in Picardy, a hundred kilometres north of Paris, and he is advancing. The whole French army is advancing. The British are advancing. The Americans are advancing. All along the front, from the sea to the Vosges, the Allies are pushing, and the Germans are falling back, and the movement is that of a rising tide that nothing can turn.
Henri knows it is his daughter's birthday. He knows because he wrote the date in his notebook, ringed in pencil, with a word - 'Jeanne, 1 year'. And on 9 September, marching along a Picardy road between two liberated villages, he takes the photograph out of his pocket and looks at it. The photograph from December 1917, Louise and the little one in front of the haberdashery. The little one was three months old in the photograph. She is twelve months old now, and Henri does not know what she looks like at twelve months, because he has not seen her since September 1917, since the leave for the birth, since the room under the eaves and the fig tree and the 'ga' to the cat.
A year. His daughter is a year old and he does not know her one-year-old face. It is the wound he told Louise about in August - the one wound of this war he will never heal. Lost time. Stolen months. The first steps he did not see, the first words he did not hear, the first laughs he did not bring about. That time will not come back. You cannot make up a child's first year. It happens once, and if the father is not there, it happens without him.
Henri puts the photograph away and marches on. The shepherd is behind him, the cat in the haversack, the ash stick striking the ground at every step. Pélissié is beside him, silent as always. The reinforcements follow - new men, faces Henri has known for a few weeks, a few months, no more. The section of 1914 no longer exists. The shepherd and Pélissié are the last. Fayolle is in hospital, one lung gone. Marcel is in Toulouse, his back in pieces. The others are dead, or wounded, or scattered among the hospitals and depots behind the lines.
Three. Out of thirty. Three men still standing, after four years.
The September advance is different from August's. Slower, harder, costlier. The Germans have fallen back to the Hindenburg Line - the line Verdier studied in 1917, that masterpiece of fortification, the deep trenches, the reinforced concrete, the belts of wire fifty metres wide. The Hindenburg Line is the last rampart. If it falls, nothing is left standing behind it, and the Germans know it, and they defend it with the energy of a last stand.
Foch wants to break it. Not to go round it, not to besiege it - to break it, in one blow, along the whole front, with everything he has. French, British, Americans, Belgians, all together, at the same time, so that the Germans cannot shift their reserves from one sector to another. It is the final offensive. The last. The one that will end the war or will not.
Verdier works day and night. The plans for the offensive have been converging on his desk for weeks - the axes of attack, the artillery concentrations, the tank movements, the barrage timetables. It is the most important work of his career, the work of his whole war, and Verdier does it with the icy rigour that is his nature, knowing that every figure in his tables is a man, and every error in his calculations is a death.
He is forty-six. He was forty-two when the war began. Four years of his life - four years of notes, reports, notebooks, files that fill a whole shelf. Four years spent calculating the war, measuring it, weighing it. And now, perhaps, ending it.
On 12 September, the Americans attack on their own for the first time.
At Saint-Mihiel, south of Verdun, Pershing's First American Army launches an offensive against a German salient that has existed since 1914 - four years. Half a million Americans, fifteen hundred aircraft, two hundred and sixty-seven tanks. The attack succeeds in thirty-six hours. The salient is wiped out. Sixteen thousand prisoners. It is a modest victory beside the giant battles of the Somme or Verdun, but it is an American victory, the first, and it tells the world that the American army has arrived.
Henri takes no part in Saint-Mihiel. He is in Picardy, facing the Hindenburg Line, and he is preparing the assault. The assault that will come at the end of September, the beginning of October, the one that will break the line or will not.
He prepares as he has always prepared - the positions, the objectives, the orders. But the preparation of September 1918 is different from all the others, because for the first time Henri is preparing an assault believing it can succeed. Not hoping - believing. Belief has come back, slowly, village after village, kilometre after kilometre, carried by the advance, by the prisoners, by the eyes of the old women who touch his sleeve, by the German withdrawal that no longer stops.
The shepherd feels it. The shepherd feels everything. One evening, in the billet, he says to Henri: 'This is the last time we go up.' It is not a question. It is a shepherd's statement, founded on instinct and observation and that animal wisdom worth all Verdier's reports.
Henri says: 'I think so too.'
Pélissié, writing in his corner, looks up. He looks at Henri, he looks at the shepherd, and he says - Pélissié who never says anything, Pélissié who speaks with his hands and his rifle and his slate - he says: 'All the better.'
It is the longest thing Pélissié has said since the taking of the German trench in September 1914. Three words. Four years between them. And the three words say everything.
In Lyon, September brings the turning point Jeanne was dreading.
Her belly shows. Not much - four months, a discreet bump under her work overall, which her belt still hides. But Rose sees it, and what Rose sees, others will soon see. And when the others see, the questions will come. And after the questions, the decisions.
Jeanne has not told the management she is pregnant. Not out of concealment - out of calculation. She knows what will happen when she tells them: she will be redeployed, put in a 'suitable' post, her responsibilities cut, and perhaps, probably, eased out. Not brutally - with the words of solicitude. 'For your own good, Madame Castayrol.' 'In your condition, Madame Castayrol.' The words of kindness that hide the words of power: you are no longer useful, go home, your belly has no place here.
Paul says: 'Tell them. Before they see it.'
Jeanne says: 'If I tell them, they'll sack me.'
'They can't sack you. You're pregnant.'
'They can redeploy me. Put me on sweeping. Cut my pay.'
Paul looks at her. He knows factories. He knows bosses. He knows Jeanne is right. And he knows too that silence does not protect - it postpones. The belly will grow. The secret will come out. And when it comes out, the management will have one more argument: she lied to us.
Jeanne thinks about it for a week. Then she goes to see the deputy manager. The one with the figures, the one with the heating, the one with the two days' leave for Henri's wedding. She goes into his office and says: 'Sir, I'm four months pregnant. I'm carrying on working. My output hasn't dropped. Here are the figures for August.' She puts the figures on the desk. The figures are good. The figures are always good, because Jeanne is Jeanne and figures are her weapon.
The deputy manager looks at the figures. He looks at Jeanne. He says: 'Congratulations.' Then he says: 'How long will you be able to carry on?'
'Until I can't.'
'And when you can't?'
'I'll stop.'
'And afterwards?'
'I'll come back.'
The deputy manager looks at her. He knows that 'afterwards' is a complicated word in 1918. Afterwards, the men will come back. Afterwards, the women will leave. Afterwards, Jeanne may no longer have a post. But the deputy manager is a practical man, and an inspector who produces figures like these is not easily replaced.
'All right,' he says. 'We'll see.'
We'll see. The watchword of the war. Jeanne comes out of the office and does not crow. She has won time, not the battle. The time may be enough. It may not.
On 26 September, the general offensive begins.
It is Foch's final blow. All along the front, from north to south, the Allied armies attack at the same time. The Americans in the Argonne, the French in Champagne, the British in Artois and Picardy, the Belgians in Flanders. A million men on the move. Thousands of tanks. Thousands of aircraft. The creeping barrage across hundreds of kilometres. It is the greatest military operation in history, and it falls on a German army that no longer has the means to resist everywhere at once.
Henri attacks on 29 September, in the Saint-Quentin sector, facing the Hindenburg Line. The creeping barrage thunders ahead of him, the tanks advance, the infantry follows. It is the same ballet as in July, the same ballet as in August, but perfected, refined, run in. The French army of September 1918 is a war machine of a precision the French army of August 1914 could not have imagined - and that precision has been paid for with four years of blood.
The Hindenburg Line holds out. It holds out because it was built to hold out, because the concrete is thick and the machine guns many and the defenders desperate. But it gives way. In places, in pieces, one blockhouse after another, one fortified village after another. The tanks go where the infantry cannot. The artillery crushes what the tanks cannot. And the infantry goes into the holes the tanks and the artillery have opened, and it holds, and it advances.
Henri leads his platoon through a network of concrete-lined trenches that looks like what he has seen from the other side for four years - the deep dugouts, the bunks, the shelves. He goes into a German dugout and finds the same scene as in October 1915 - the abandoned book, the family photograph turned face down, the cracked mirror. The same objects, the same lives, the same waste. But this time Henri does not stay. He goes through and on.
The shepherd goes through behind him, the cat in the haversack, the ash stick beating on the concrete. Lacombe looks at the German dugouts and says: 'They had it better than us.' It is true. The Germans always had it better - deeper dugouts, thicker concrete, better-built trenches. And it was not enough. Better was not enough, because better does not count when the numbers change, when the Americans arrive by the million, when the tanks arrive by the hundred, when time is playing against you.
The Hindenburg Line is broken on 5 October. Not everywhere - in several sectors, enough for the line to be no longer a line but an archipelago of isolated positions the Allies go round and reduce one by one. Behind the Hindenburg Line there is nothing. No second line, no fall-back position. Open ground. The plain. And beyond the plain, Germany.
Verdier watches the Hindenburg Line fall on his map, sector by sector, like a crumbling wall. He takes out the red pins - the German positions - and puts in blue pins - the Allied positions. The blue ones advance. The red ones fall back. The map changes colour, day after day, and the movement cannot be reversed.
He writes in his notebook on 5 October: 'The Hindenburg Line is broken. There is no line behind it. Germany has no fortified position left between the front and the Rhine. It is over. Not today, not tomorrow. But it is over. The question is no longer military. It is political. When will the Germans ask for an armistice?'
When. The same word. The only word left.
On 30 September, Henri is at rest. Two days. Two days in a liberated village, with a roof, a table, hens in the yard. The shepherd is sitting outside, the cat on his knees, and the black Picardy mongrel - a stray that has followed the platoon since August, a thin, stubborn animal Lacombe has adopted without saying so - lying at his feet.
Henri sits down beside the shepherd. They look at the yard, the hens, the dog, the cat. The September sun is gentle, the light is golden, and the noise of the front is far away - so far away you could forget it, if you did not know it was there.
The shepherd opens his blue exercise book. He writes. Henri does not look - he has learnt not to look, to respect what is written in the shepherd's book. But Lacombe tears out the page and hands it to Henri.
Henri takes the page. He reads.
'The second lieutenant says reading is freedom. To write is to exist. But to go home is to live. Soon.'
Henri folds the page and puts it in his pocket. Against the ring. Against the photograph. Against Pélissié's letter. Against the wooden dog. Against everything.
The shepherd goes back to his exercise book and writes something else, which Henri will not see. Something for Madelou. Something for his wife. Something for the puppy Nòu, who is a dog now, a real patou, guarding the flock on the Causse de Gramat while his master guards the men in the mud of Picardy.
The cat purrs. The dog sleeps. The hens peck. And the front draws back, and the war is ending, and the shepherd writes.