November 1918
The first days are the most dangerous.
Not because the fighting is heavier - it is lighter, day by day, the German resistance crumbling like a sand wall in the rain. But because the end is visible, tangible, within reach, and men who can see the end begin to think about afterwards, and a man thinking about afterwards is a man who hesitates a second too long before getting down, who raises his head a centimetre too high above the parapet, who slows a step too many crossing a crossroads. Death in the last days is the most obscene, because it is the most avoidable, and yet it is not.
Henri knows it. He tells his men so, in the schoolmaster's voice that repeats an instruction for the hundredth time: 'We carry on as before. Rifles clean, heads down, eyes open. We let nothing slip. Nothing. Not now.'
The shepherd nods. Lacombe has never let anything slip in his life. Not with the ewes, not with the cat, not with the letters of the alphabet. The shepherd is a man of constancy, and constancy is the virtue that saves when all the others waver.
Pélissié nods too. Pélissié will let nothing slip because Pélissié does not know how. He is a man of one speed, his own, and that speed does not change with circumstances. Pélissié will do the same thing on the last day as on the first - he will march, he will fire if he is fired on, he will write his letter in the evening, and he will sleep with the slate beside him, the slate he no longer needs but keeps like a talisman, as Henri keeps the wooden dog and the cigar box.
On 3 November, Austria-Hungary signs the armistice. The Habsburg Empire, six hundred years of history, collapses in a week. The peoples go their separate ways - the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Yugoslavs, the Poles. The map of Europe is being redrawn at the speed of an earthquake, and frontiers that have held for centuries burst like seams under the strain.
The same day, the German sailors at Kiel mutiny. They refuse to put to sea for a last naval battle the admiralty has ordered - a useless, suicidal battle, designed to save the honour of the fleet. The sailors have no wish to die for the honour of the admiralty. They form soldiers' councils, take control of the town, and within a few days the revolt spreads to Hamburg, to Bremen, to Munich, to Berlin. Germany is in revolution.
Henri hears the news from the communiqués, from newspapers that arrive a day late, from the rumours going round the billets. The news is so enormous, so fast, so unbelievable, that the men do not know what to do with it. An empire falling. Sailors in revolt. Kings abdicating. The world of 1914, the one that started the war, that world of crowns and thrones and dynastic alliances, is dying, and it is dying faster than the men in the trenches.
Marcel would have known what to make of it. Henri thinks of Marcel, in Toulouse, at his press, who must be setting the biggest headlines of his life as a compositor. He imagines the lead type lined up in the composing stick - A-R-M-I-S-T-I-C-E - and he smiles, because Marcel has been waiting four years for that word, and that word Marcel will set with love.
On 7 November, the advance speeds up. The Germans hardly resist any more. Units surrender by whole battalions, grey men, exhausted, starving, who raise their hands without being asked and walk to the rear with the relief of men for whom the war is over, over at last, whatever shape the end takes.
Henri advances into Belgium, towards Mons - Mons, the town where the British fought for the first time in August 1914, and where the British will fight for the last time in November 1918. The circle. Always the circle.
On 8 November, Germany sends its plenipotentiaries. A train crosses the lines, in the forest of Compiègne, and men in civilian clothes get down onto a makeshift platform, in a clearing, and sit down facing Foch in a dining car, and the negotiations begin. The armistice. The terms. The end.
Henri does not know the negotiations are taking place. He knows something is happening because the orders are changing - they are still advancing, but cautiously, keeping risks down, avoiding needless engagements. The high command knows. The high command is protecting what is left. Every death, now, is one death too many.
On 9 November, the Kaiser abdicates. Wilhelm II, the German emperor, whose portrait hung in German classrooms as Marianne's hung in French ones, Wilhelm II goes into exile in the Netherlands, and Germany becomes a republic, as Russia has become a republic, as Austria has become a republic. The world of kings is collapsing.
Henri hears of the abdication on the 10th, from a communiqué read aloud at battalion headquarters. The men listen. Nobody reacts. It is too big, too far away, too abstract. The Kaiser is a name, a face in the newspaper cartoons, not a real man. What is real is the November cold, the Belgian mud, the noise of the guns growing fainter but not stopping. Not yet.
10 November. The last day but one.
The fighting goes on. That is the cruellest part of the end - the fighting goes on while everyone knows the armistice is being signed, while the plenipotentiaries are in the carriage at Compiègne, while the terms are almost settled. The fighting goes on because the armistice is not signed, and as long as it is not signed, war is war, and orders are orders, and shells make no distinction between the last day and the first.
Henri advances. The platoon passes through a Belgian village, the last village before the front line, and behind the village there is a wood, and in the wood there are Germans, a rearguard, a machine gun, men who have not been ordered to surrender and are still firing because the order is to fire.
Henri stops. He looks at the wood. The machine gun is three hundred metres away, in a hole, behind a barricade of felled trees. The fire is sporadic, badly aimed - the gunners are tired or inexperienced or both. Henri could attack. He has the men, the grenades, the experience. He could take that position in an hour, perhaps less.
Or he could wait.
Wait. The word that war does not know, the word that is the enemy of the offensive, the word Joffre and Nivelle and all the generals of élan cursed for four years. Wait. Do not attack. Do not take risks. Do not lose one more man for a wood that will be French tomorrow, or the day after, without a single drop of blood being shed.
Henri looks at the shepherd. The shepherd looks at the wood. The shepherd says: 'We wait.'
Henri does not answer at once. He is an officer. An officer does not take his orders from a private soldier, even if that soldier is Antoine Lacombe, even if that soldier is the shepherd of Rocamadour. But an officer listens, and what Henri hears in the shepherd's voice is not cowardice - it is wisdom. The wisdom of a man who has survived four years and refuses to die for a wood on the last day.
Henri sends a runner to the battalion commander. The message: 'Enemy position identified. Propose to bypass and wait. Request instructions.' The runner comes back an hour later with the answer: 'Bypass. Do not engage. Hold your position.'
Hold your position. Do not engage. Pétain's words, not Nivelle's. The words of prudence, not of élan. The words that save.
Henri goes round the wood. The platoon settles on both flanks, at a distance, out of range of the machine gun. And they wait. The wood is there, with its Germans, and the platoon is there, with its Frenchmen, and nobody fires, and night falls, and the cold rises, and the shepherd takes the cat out of his haversack and puts it on his knees, and the cat purrs.
Nobody sleeps that night. Not because of the danger - there is hardly any danger left. Because of the waiting. The waiting for something nobody dares name, for fear of making it vanish.
11 November 1918.
At five in the morning, in the carriage at Compiègne, the German plenipotentiaries sign the armistice. The ceasefire will take effect at eleven o'clock. Six more hours of war. Six hours in which men will die, because the news takes time to come down, because some commanders want one last blow, because the machine does not know how to stop all at once.
Henri hears the news at half past six, from a runner who comes running up, out of breath, red in the face, shouting before he even reaches battalion headquarters: 'The armistice! The armistice is signed! At eleven it's over!'
The men hear. They hear the word. Armistice. They hear it and do not move. Not a shout, not a gesture, not a movement. They stay still, standing or sitting, where they are, and the word floats in the cold November air like a bubble that might burst if anyone touches it.
Henri looks at his men. Twenty faces. The shepherd, sitting against a tree, the cat in his arms. Pélissié, standing, rifle on his shoulder, eyes on the wood where the Germans still are. The reinforcements, the new men, who have only a few months of war behind them and do not know what the word means to those who have four years.
Henri says: 'We wait for eleven o'clock. Nobody moves. Nobody fires. We wait.'
They wait.
The hours are the longest of the war. Longer than the nights at Verdun, longer than the days on the Somme, longer than the waiting before the Chemin des Dames. Because these hours are the last, and the last hours are eternal.
The shepherd strokes the cat. A mechanical movement, regular, like the pendulum of a clock. The cat purrs. The black mongrel lies beside him, head on its paws, eyes half closed.
Pélissié sits down. It is the first time Henri has seen Pélissié sit down on duty. Pélissié, who never sits, who is always on his feet, on sentry, rifle ready. Pélissié sits down against the wall of a Belgian house, puts his rifle beside him - not on his shoulder, beside him - and takes his slate out of his haversack. The slate. The one from the beginning, from the evening school, the one bearing the traces of a hundred lessons. He lays it on his knees and looks at it.
Henri watches Pélissié looking at his slate, and he understands that the slate is not a tool - it is a piece of the road, a piece of the journey between the man who could not write and the man who writes thirty-line letters and reads Montaigne. The slate is the proof that the road exists.
At ten o'clock, the shepherd says: 'One hour.'
At half past ten, the guns fall silent. Not all of them - there is still firing, far off, to the north, commanders who want their last salvo, their last shell, their last mark in history. But in Henri's sector the guns fall silent, one by one, like candles being blown out.
At a quarter to eleven, the silence is almost complete. A silence Henri has not heard since August 1914. Not the silence of the pause between two bombardments. Silence. Real silence. The kind that waits for nothing. The kind that simply is.
At five to eleven, Henri stands up. He looks at his watch. The hands are going round. Every second is a step. Every step is a man who will not die.
At one minute to eleven, the shepherd stands up too. Pélissié stands up. The men stand up. Twenty men on their feet, in line, facing east, towards the wood where the Germans still are, and the silence is total, and the world holds its breath.
Eleven o'clock.
The sound of bells.
Somewhere, in a Belgian village, a bell rings. Then another, in another village. Then another. The bells of Belgium ring for the armistice as they rang the tocsin in August 1914, but the sound is different - not the knell, not the alarm. A clear, pure sound that rises into the cold November air and says a single word in every language in the world.
Over.
Henri stays standing, the watch in his hand, his eyes on the hands passing eleven and going on round, and the hands go round in a world that is no longer at war, and that world is the same world as before but it is another world, and Henri knows it, and he does not know what to do with it.
The shepherd is beside him. Lacombe has put the cat down and the cat walks through the wet November grass with the dignity of an animal that has never understood why humans make so much noise. The black mongrel raises its head towards the bells and pricks up its ears.
Pélissié is motionless, the rifle beside him, the slate in his hands. He looks at the slate and he looks at the sky and he looks at Henri, and across his peasant's face passes something that might be a smile, if Pélissié's muscles still knew how to smile.
Nobody shouts. Nobody sings. Nobody cries. Not yet. The shouts, the songs, the tears will come later, in the hours and days that follow, when the news has had time to sink in, to work its way into the bones and the muscles and the brain, to undo the knots that four years of war have pulled tight. For now there is only the silence, and the bells, and the men standing there not knowing what to do with their hands.
Henri puts his watch away. He looks at the shepherd. The shepherd looks at him. And between them passes something that is not a word, not a gesture, not a look - something older than all that, something that is the recognition of two men who have been through hell together and are out on the other side, standing, alive, with a cat and a slate and a blue exercise book and a wooden dog and a cigar box and a wedding ring weighing three grams.
Henri says: 'Lacombe.'
The shepherd says: 'Lieutenant.'
Then the shepherd does something he has never done. He holds out his hand to Henri. Not a salute - a handshake. A shepherd's hand, thick, calloused, which has held lambs and rifles and a pencil and the wooden letters of the alphabet. Henri takes it. The schoolmaster's hand, thin, ink-stained, which has held exercise books and grenades and a cigar box and the forehead of a dying man.
They shake hands, once, hard, and let go.
In the wood, the Germans come out. One by one, hands raised, faces grey, eyes full of something like the relief of condemned men who have been reprieved. There are seven of them. Seven men with a machine gun, who held that wood through the last hours of the war, and who put down their weapon and raise their hands and walk towards the French.
Henri watches them come. He says nothing. He gives no order. The seven Germans come up to the French platoon, and nobody raises a rifle, and nobody shouts, and the bells are still ringing.
One of the Germans - a corporal, about thirty, with broken spectacles mended with wire, like Henri's - stops in front of Henri and looks at him. They look at each other. Two men in uniform, two enemies, two schoolmasters perhaps - the mended spectacles, the inky hands, who knows. The corporal says a word in German that Henri does not understand, and Henri says a word in French that the corporal does not understand, and the two words are probably the same word.
The shepherd produces the cat from nowhere - nobody saw it get back into the haversack - and puts it down on the ground, between the two groups, the French and the Germans, and the cat looks at one lot, looks at the other, and sits down exactly in the middle, and begins to lick its paw, with that perfect indifference that is the only wisdom the war has not destroyed.
One of the Germans laughs. A Frenchman laughs. Then another. And the laughter rises, slowly, not a laugh of joy, not a laugh of triumph, a laugh of release, the laugh of men who have carried too heavy a load for too long and put it down, at last, and find that their shoulders are still there under the weight.
In Lyon, the bells are ringing too.
Jeanne is at home, in the kitchen at Vaise, her five-month belly under her dress, when the bells begin. She is sitting at the table, a bowl of soup in front of her, and she hears the bells, and she does not understand at once, because bells ring for many reasons - masses, funerals, weddings, the hours. Then the neighbour upstairs knocks on the ceiling - three knocks, the signal - and Jeanne gets up and opens the window.
The rue de la Claire is full of people. Out from everywhere, from the houses, the workshops, the shops. Women mostly - the men are at the front, or in hospital, or at the union, and it is the women who fill the street, in overalls, in aprons, their hands still dirty from the workshop or the kitchen, and they look at one another, and they say nothing, and then someone says the word, the word everyone is waiting for, and the word passes from mouth to mouth like a flame.
'The armistice.'
Jeanne stays at the window. She puts her hands on her belly. The child is there, in her belly, the January child, Paul's child, the child of afterwards. And the war is over. The war that took Paul and gave him back broken, the war that took Henri and has not yet given him back, the war that took Rose's husband and will never give him back, the war is over.
Paul arrives forty minutes later, out of breath, the arm in its sling jolting as he runs. He has run all the way from the Bourse du Travail, his right hand holding his cap, his left hand holding nothing because it can no longer hold anything. He comes into the flat, sees Jeanne at the window, her belly round, her hands on her belly, and he stops.
'It's over,' he says.
'It's over,' she says.
They look at each other. No embrace, no shout. They look at each other like two survivors of a shipwreck finding each other on the beach, soaked, exhausted, unable to believe that the ground under their feet is ground and not water. Then Paul crosses the kitchen and takes Jeanne in his arm - his right arm, the only one - and holds her, and she holds him, and the belly between them is hard and round and alive, and the bells are ringing.
Rose arrives an hour later, little Jeanne on her hip, the two older ones by the hand, her face wet with tears she does not recognise as her own. Rose who never cries, Rose who buried her husband without a tear, Rose who gave birth alone and worked alone and lived alone - Rose is crying on the stairs at Vaise, and Jeanne opens the door and takes her in her arms, and the two women stand there, in the doorway, with the children between their legs and Jeanne's belly between them, and they cry together, without a sound, without a word, the way you cry when it is over and only now begin to measure what 'over' means.
What 'over' means is that Rose's husband will not come back. Never. Peace does not give back the dead. Peace gives back the living, and the living will have to live with the dead, and the dead will not go away because the bells are ringing.
Henri does not write in his notebook on 11 November. Not that evening, not the next day. He will not write for a week. The notebook stays shut, in the haversack, beside the cigar box and the Montaigne and the Goethe, and Henri does not open it, because the words are not there yet, because silence is the only language that fits what has just happened.
What he does, on the evening of 11 November, is write to Louise. A letter. The last letter of the war. On paper found in the Belgian house, with the civilian pen, by the light of a lamp that is not a candle but a real lamp, with a shade, in a room that has a ceiling and walls and a window with curtains.
'Dear Louise. It's over.
I don't know what else to write. It's over. The bells rang at eleven and the world stopped and started again at the same time. The men are standing. The shepherd is standing. Pélissié is standing. The cat is fat and alive. And I'm standing, with your ring on my finger and the photograph of our daughter in my pocket and the sound of the bells in my head.
I don't know when I'll be home. Soon. Days, weeks - I don't know. But I'll be home. This time, when I say I'll be home, it isn't a promise any more. It's a fact. I'll be home because the war is over and nothing can stop me coming home now.
Get the garden ready. Buy some bean seeds. And tell little Jeanne her father is coming home, for real, not on leave, not for four days - for ever.
For ever. It's the first time I've written those words in four years. For ever.
I love you. I'm coming home.
Henri.'