October 1918
Germany is cracking.
Not only the army - the country. The news that filters through the lines, from prisoners, from captured newspapers, from wireless intercepts, paints the picture of an empire falling apart. Hunger. The Allied naval blockade, four years of blockade, has emptied the granaries, the market stalls, the bellies. German civilians eat sawdust bread and swedes and nothing else, and German children are dying of malnutrition, and German women queue in grey streets outside empty bakeries. Influenza. A monstrous pandemic, the Spanish flu, which has been sweeping the whole world since the spring, kills soldiers and civilians by the million, and strikes Germany harder than the Allies, because starving bodies resist less than fed ones. And politics. The Kaiser is tottering. The German socialists are demanding peace. The sailors at Kiel will soon refuse to put to sea. Soldiers' and workers' councils are forming in the industrial towns.
Henri knows almost nothing of this. Henri knows that the Germans are falling back, that the prisoners are younger and thinner every day, and that in the abandoned positions there is less and less equipment and more and more letters. Letters from mothers, wives, sisters, which all say the same thing in German - come home, we're hungry, it's over. Henri cannot read German, but he recognises the words. The words of the end are the same in every language.
The Goethe is still in his haversack. The book picked up in 1915 in a dugout on the Aisne, which has come through Verdun, the Somme, the Chemin des Dames, Picardy. Henri takes it out sometimes and looks at the Gothic letters, and he thinks of the man who owned the book, a German soldier who read Goethe in a trench, and he wonders whether the man is alive, and whether he has a wife, and whether he has a child, and whether his child is a year old like little Jeanne.
The advance goes on, but it has changed its nature. It is no longer the fluid war of movement of August - it is a methodical progress, village by village, river by river, against a German rearguard fighting with the doggedness of men who have nothing left to lose but time. Every day the rearguards win is a day's respite for Germany, a day of negotiation, one more day before the collapse. The Germans are no longer fighting for victory. They are fighting for the negotiating table.
Henri advances. His platoon, down to twenty men with the August and September reinforcements, moves through a changing landscape - devastated Picardy gives way to land less touched, villages less destroyed, fields still farmed. And civilians, more and more civilians, liberated every day, coming out of their houses like moles from their runs, blinking at the light, at the blue uniforms, at a freedom they do not yet dare believe in.
On 8 October, Henri enters a village with a school.
A school. With its walls, its roof, its yard, its covered playground. The shutters are closed, the windows broken, the yard overgrown with weeds. But the walls are standing, and the door opens when Henri pushes it, and he goes into a classroom he recognises at once, because all the classrooms of the Republic look alike - the blackboard, the rows of desks, the dais, the map of France on the wall. The map is torn. The desks are overturned. Someone - the Germans, probably - has used the room as a store, and there are empty crates left, bits of telephone wire, a boot with a hole in it.
Henri stands in the middle of the room and looks. It is the first classroom he has seen since Labastide-Murat, since August 1914. Four years. Four years without a blackboard, without desks, without chalk, without children. Four years in which he has taught all the same - in barns, in dugouts, on slates, with wooden letters, to shepherds and peasants and lads of sixteen. But not in a classroom. Not here. Not like this.
The shepherd comes in behind him. He looks at the room and says nothing. But he sees Henri's face, and what he sees on Henri's face is something he has never seen there - not sadness, not joy. Longing. The schoolmaster's longing for his class, the shepherd's longing for his flock, a man's longing for what he is when the war is not bending him out of shape.
Pélissié comes in next. He looks at the overturned desks, the blackboard, the torn map. And he says, in his peasant's voice that wastes no words: 'It'll need putting right.'
Henri looks at him. Pélissié is not talking about the school. Pélissié is talking about everything - the school, the village, the country, the world. It'll need putting right. The programme for after the war in four words, spoken by a man who could not read two years ago.
Henri sets a desk upright. Then a second. Then a third. The shepherd understands and helps him - a shepherd's hands setting desks upright the way they set fallen lambs back on their feet. Pélissié picks up the torn map of France and lays it on the schoolmaster's desk. In five minutes the room is in order. The desks are in rows. The blackboard is blank but standing. The map is crumpled but there.
Henri sits down on the schoolmaster's chair, behind the desk. He looks at the empty room. The desks are waiting for children. The blackboard is waiting for chalk. The map is waiting for lessons.
He gets up and goes out. There is a war to finish.
On 10 October, Henri writes Louise a letter that is perhaps the most important of all.
'Dear Louise. I saw a school today. An empty school, damaged, in a liberated village. I went in and I put the desks back in place. It's a foolish thing to do, a useless thing - the children won't be back tomorrow, the village has barely been liberated, the war goes on. But I put the desks back in place, and the shepherd helped me, and Pélissié picked up the map of France.
That's what I'll do, afterwards. Put the desks back in place. Not the same desks, not the same school - but the same act. Put right what has been destroyed. Stand up again what has been knocked down.
I won't be the same schoolmaster as before. The man who taught at Labastide in 1914 no longer exists. In his place there's a man who has seen what I've seen, who knows what I know, who carries what I carry. That man will teach differently. I don't know how yet. But he'll teach, because that's what he is, and the war hasn't changed that. The war has changed everything else - the body, sleep, the hands, the eyes. Not that. Not what matters.
Ask for my transfer to Figeac. Do the papers. Get the class ready. Get the garden ready. Get the beans ready. I'm coming home.'
In Lyon, October brings the round belly and the flu.
The Spanish flu strikes France as it strikes the world - in waves, blindly, massively. The factories slow down, the shops empty, the women workers fall ill by the dozen. At Berliet, Shop C loses a third of its hands in two weeks. The women who are left do the work of those who have gone, and Jeanne, five months pregnant, works twelve hours a day to make up for the absent.
Rose falls ill on 12 October. Fever, cough, aches. The flu. Jeanne finds her in the evening in her flat, in bed, burning, unable to get up, the three children round her - the eldest boy of eight, the second, a girl of five, and little Jeanne of twenty-two months. Jeanne takes the children. She takes them home, puts them in her own bed, and goes back to Rose's with water, broth, damp cloths. Paul, at home, looks after the children with his right hand, with the clumsy skill he has acquired cooking - children are not so very different from omelettes, they need gentleness and patience and not too much heat.
Rose gets better. Not at once - two weeks of fever, sweating, coughing, two weeks in which Jeanne goes back and forth between the factory, her flat, Rose's flat, the crèche, the market, the shopping. Two weeks that wear her out more than anything she has done since the war began, because the tiredness of the pregnancy is added to the tiredness of the work, which is added to the tiredness of nursing, and the sum is beyond what a human body can carry.
On 20 October, Jeanne collapses. Not dramatically - she sits down on a chair in the shop and cannot get up again. Her legs do not answer. Her eyes blur. Rose, just back at work, pale but on her feet, sees her and says to the foreman: 'She's going home.' The foreman does not argue. Rose takes Jeanne home by tram, gets her up the stairs at Vaise, puts her to bed, and stays beside her until Paul gets back from the union.
Paul looks at Jeanne lying there, her round belly under the blanket, her face grey, her eyes closed. He sits on the edge of the bed and takes her hand. Paul's right hand, the only one that works, round Jeanne's left hand, the one that held the calipers, the one that signed the dispatch notes, the one that held the stamp.
'Stop,' says Paul. Not a question. An order. The first order Paul has given Jeanne since the war began.
Jeanne opens her eyes. 'If I stop, I lose my place.'
'If you carry on, you'll lose the little one.'
The little one. The child in her belly. The January child. Paul is right and Jeanne knows it, and knowing it is a defeat, because stopping means giving in, falling back, handing over ground that was won. But the ground won is worth nothing if the child does not come.
Jeanne stops. On 25 October she informs the management that she is taking her leave. The deputy manager does not protest. He has the Shop C figures, he has Jeanne's belly, he has the flu cutting down his workforce. He says: 'Come back when you can.' It is more than Jeanne hoped for. It is less than she deserves.
Rose says: 'You did what had to be done.' Jeanne does not answer. What had to be done - it is the phrase the women of 1918 use when they have no choice and act as if they had.
At the end of October, the news from the front comes thick and fast.
Austria-Hungary asks for an armistice. The Ottoman Empire asks for an armistice. Bulgaria signed in September. Germany's allies fall one after another, like dominoes, and Germany is left alone, surrounded, starving, sick with influenza and defeat.
On 26 October, Ludendorff is dismissed. The Kaiser sacrifices him, too late, as Joffre was sacrificed in 1916, as Nivelle was in 1917. Generals pay for the wars they have lost, and soldiers pay for the wars they have been made to fight.
Verdier learns of Ludendorff's fall from a telegram and notes in his notebook: 'Ludendorff dismissed. The end is near. The German political structures will not hold. The armistice is a matter of days or weeks.'
Then he adds, underneath, in a slower hand: 'Four years. Four years to come to this. Millions dead for a map that will look like the map of 1914, with a few lines moved. All that for this. No - not all that for this. All that so that it never happens again. That is what we shall say. That is what we shall hope. That is what we shall have to believe, because the alternative is unbearable.'
Henri is still in the line, in the north of Picardy, on the edge of Belgium. The advance is continuous now, three, four, five kilometres a day, because the Germans no longer resist as they did - the rearguards are thinner, the counter-attacks rarer, the surrenders more frequent. The front is dissolving slowly, like a crust of ice in the sun.
On 30 October, Henri enters a Belgian village. Belgium. Four years after the invasion, French soldiers are entering Belgium, and the Belgians are at the roadside, and they are crying, and they are laughing, and they are holding out flowers and bread and bottles, and the French soldiers take the flowers and the bread and the bottles, and Henri looks at these people welcoming them like saviours and thinks of August 1914, of the columns of Belgian refugees fleeing the other way, and the circle closes.
The shepherd comes into the village with the cat and the black mongrel and his ash stick, and a little Belgian girl of four or five comes up to him and touches the cat in the haversack, and the shepherd bends down and takes the cat out and puts it in the little girl's arms, and the little girl laughs, and the cat does not scratch.
Pélissié watches the scene without a word. But in the evening, in the billet, he writes his wife a letter that begins: 'Dear Marie. Today I saw the end.'
31 October 1918. The last month of the war but one. Henri is sitting in a Belgian house, at a table that is not his, with a white tablecloth an old woman has laid for the French soldiers, and coffee that is not coffee but is hot. The shepherd is opposite him, the blue exercise book open. Pélissié is in the corner, the slate put down and not used - he no longer needs the slate, Pélissié, he writes on paper now, like everyone else.
Henri opens his notebook. The list of names. The dead, the wounded, the missing. Four years of names. He does not count them - counting them would reduce them to a figure, and every name is a face, a story, a world.
He turns the page. A blank page. He writes:
'31 October 1918. The end is near. I can feel it in the air, in the eyes of the German prisoners, in the Belgians' flowers, in the shepherd's step, which limps less when he walks east. The end is near and I dare not believe in it, because believing in the end means lowering your guard, and lowering your guard means dying at the last moment, and dying at the last moment is the cruellest thing in this war.
So I do not believe. I march. I check the rifles, the grenades, the dressings. I do my job. To the end. To the last day. Until they tell me it is over, and the silence comes back, and the silence is a real silence, not the absence of noise between two shells, but the silence of peace.'
The shepherd closes his exercise book. The cat is asleep. The black mongrel is asleep. Outside, the Belgian night is cold and starry, and the front is a few kilometres away, and it is moving away still, and it will move away again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
November tomorrow.