December 1918
Henri does not go home straight away.
That is the cruelty of the end - the war is over but the soldiers do not go home. The French army is occupying the Rhineland, controlling the liberated territories, handling the prisoners, dismantling the positions, clearing the roads, clearing the fields of mines. And above all, the army cannot demobilise four million men in a week. There has to be an order, trains, depots, papers. The machine that mobilised France in a fortnight in August 1914 will take months to demobilise it, because the machine works better for war than for peace, because war is a mechanism and peace is chaos.
Henri is in Belgium, in a billet near Mons, and he waits. Waiting for peace is different from waiting in war - it has none of the tension of danger, none of the urgency of survival. It has something else, more insidious: emptiness. The emptiness of days without shells, without watches, without fatigues that matter. The emptiness of men who look at one another and no longer know what to do with their hands, their eyes, their time. Four years of life compressed, concentrated, reduced to essentials - survive, eat, sleep, hold on - and suddenly space opens up, and the space is dizzying.
Henri organises. That is what he does - it is what he has always done. He organises the billet, the fatigues, the watches - yes, the watches, because discipline does not die with the war, and men with nothing left to do are men who fall apart. And he starts the evening school again.
Not out of necessity - out of instinct. The men need to learn, not because they need to know, but because learning is the opposite of destroying, and after four years of destruction men need the opposite. Henri teaches in the billet's mess hall, with a real blackboard, real chalk, and pupils who are no longer soldiers on borrowed time but soldiers waiting to become men again.
The shepherd comes every evening. Lacombe finished the alphabet long ago, he reads fluently now - not fast, not easily, but fluently, which means he can read a letter from Madelou without help, which was the aim, which was the whole aim. And yet he comes. He comes because the evening school has become his place, his ritual, his hour of peace in a life of war, and the end of the war does not change the need for the ritual. He sits at the back of the room, the cat on his knees, the blue exercise book open, and he writes while Henri teaches. He no longer writes letters, he no longer writes lists. He writes something nobody reads but himself, something that has no name and is part diary, part confession, part song.
Pélissié comes too. He is reading the Montaigne now, all of it, slowly, chapter by chapter, and in the evenings he asks Henri questions, a peasant's questions about a philosopher's texts, and the questions are better than the answers, and Henri knows it, and Pélissié knows it too.
On 10 December, Henri receives a letter from Fayolle.
Fayolle is in hospital in Cahors, transferred from the north. One lung gone, a scar running from his collarbone to his side, and a cough - still the cough, his companion for four years, but a one-lung cough now, drier, shorter, more final.
'Lieutenant. I'm in Cahors. It's the first time I've been this close to home since '14. From my window I can see the Pont Valentré and the Lot. The Lot is green, it's winter, and the walnut trees have lost their leaves. It's exactly the way I remembered it. I thought I'd forgotten, and I've forgotten nothing.
The doctor says I'll live. Not long perhaps - one lung is one lung, and it's doing the work of two. But I'll live long enough to have a drink with you on the place Gambetta, if you come through Cahors.
I don't know what I'll do. I can't be a vine-grower with one lung - the work's too hard, the slopes too steep. I don't know how to do anything else. But I know how to tell jokes, and jokes don't need lungs.
Your man. Fayolle.'
Henri reads the letter and puts it in his pocket, the pocket that is a country, an archipelago, a world. Fayolle is alive. Fayolle can see the Lot from his window. Fayolle is telling jokes. The world holds.
He replies that same evening: 'Dear Fayolle. The drink on the place Gambetta - consider it booked. I've owed you one since September '14 - four years late, the service is slow. As for a trade, we'll see. A man who can make other men laugh in a trench can make anyone laugh anywhere. It's a rare gift. Don't lose it.'
On 20 December, the demobilisation order comes through for the oldest classes.
Henri is not in the oldest class - he is in the class of 1910, twenty-eight years old. The oldest go first - the territorials, the reservists, the men of forty with farms, shops, workshops waiting for them. The shepherd is in the class of 1901. He is thirty-seven. He is going.
Henri learns of it on 21 December. Lacombe's demobilisation order, signed, stamped, dated. 'Private Lacombe, Antoine, class of 1901, is demobilised with effect from 23 December 1918. Discharge depot: Cahors.'
Two days. Two days and the shepherd will be gone. Two days and the man who slept against Henri in the trenches of the Aisne, who crawled beside him under the machine guns of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, who held at Verdun and on the Somme and on the Chemin des Dames, who learnt to read in a dugout by candlelight, who wrote twenty-three words to his daughter, who wept for a dog and purred for a cat - that man will be gone.
On the evening of the 21st, in the mess hall of the billet, Henri and the shepherd sit facing each other, for the last time. The cat is between them, on the table, asleep. The black mongrel is lying under the table. Pélissié is in a corner, the slate on his knees out of habit.
Henri does not know what to say. He has spent four years finding the right words - words for his pupils, words for his soldiers, words for Louise, words for Jeanne. And now, facing the shepherd, the words will not come.
It is Lacombe who speaks.
'Lieutenant.'
'Yes.'
'I wanted...' The shepherd stops. He searches, with the slowness that is his nature, for the exact word, the right word, the word that wastes nothing. 'You taught me to read.'
'Yes.'
'That's not nothing.'
'No.'
'I'll read Madelou's letters. I'll write to her. Every week. She'll have her father's letters.'
'Yes.'
'And the book...' The shepherd hesitates. He takes the blue exercise book out of his haversack. The book he has carried for months, the book in which he writes his shepherd's thoughts, his fragments, his words of silence. He puts it on the table, in front of Henri.
'Keep it,' says Lacombe.
Henri looks at the book. He does not touch it. 'It's yours.'
'It's thanks to you. Keep it. Show it to your daughter. Show her what a shepherd can write when a schoolmaster teaches him.'
Henri picks up the book. He opens it. The pages are covered in Lacombe's handwriting - that navvy's handwriting, enormous, lopsided, alive. Sentences. Thoughts. Words that have no form but have force, the raw force of a man who has found language after thirty-seven years of silence.
Henri closes the book. He puts it in his haversack, beside the cigar box, the Montaigne, the Goethe. His haversack is a library. The most unlikely library in the world - a French philosopher, a German poet, lead type, and a shepherd's exercise book.
'Thank you, Lacombe.'
The shepherd nods. Then he does something he has done only once before, on 11 November. He holds out his hand. Henri takes it. They shake hands, once, hard, for a long time.
The cat opens one eye, looks at the two men, and closes it again.
On 23 December, the shepherd leaves.
He leaves in the morning, with his pack, his ash stick, and the black mongrel following him. Not the cat. Verdun the cat stays with Henri. The shepherd decided it - he did not say so, he did it, putting the cat down on Henri's bunk on the morning he left, with a final gesture that admits no argument. The cat is the shepherd's gift to the schoolmaster, the last, the most precious. The cat that came through the war, the cat that did Verdun and the Somme and the Chemin des Dames, the cat that purrs when the shells fall and sleeps when the bells ring.
Henri walks the shepherd to the lorry that will take him to the station. The lorry is full of demobilised men, tired faces, packs between their knees, men going home. The shepherd climbs in, settles himself, puts down his pack. The black mongrel jumps in after him. The driver starts up.
Henri is standing in the road, and the lorry pulls away, and the shepherd does not look back - not out of indifference, out of nature. The shepherd does not look back because the shepherd always goes forward, and what is behind is behind, and what is ahead is the causse, and the ewes, and Madelou, and Nòu the dog, and the wife who cried when she got his letter.
Henri stays in the road until the lorry has gone. Then he goes back to the billet, and the cat is on his bunk, and the cat looks at him with the expression of one who has changed masters and knows it, and accepts it, because cats are the only creatures who know how to change worlds without losing their dignity.
Christmas 1918. The fifth. The first of the peace.
Henri spends it in the billet, with Pélissié and the others, without the shepherd. It is a strange Christmas - not a war Christmas, not yet a peace Christmas. A Christmas in between, suspended between two worlds, with plonk and bully beef and no prune cake because Louise's mother is not there to make it.
Pélissié takes a cheese out of his haversack. Ewe's-milk cheese from Saint-Céré, sent by his wife in a parcel. The same cheese Pélissié gave Henri for his wedding, two years before. Henri cuts it with his knife and hands it round, and the men eat ewe's-milk cheese on Christmas Eve, and the cheese tastes of the causse, of stone and thyme and wind, and Henri thinks of Lacombe, who may be home at this very moment, at Rocamadour, with Madelou and his wife and Nòu and the ewes, and that thought is the loveliest thing of this Christmas.
In Lyon, the first Christmas of the peace is the Christmas of rebuilding.
Paul is there. His arm in a sling, but there. Jeanne is there, seven months pregnant, sitting on the stool - a stool, always a stool, the furniture of her war. Rose is there, with the three children, little Jeanne, who is two now and says 'Mama', 'no', 'cat' and 'more', which is vocabulary enough to lead a life.
The chicken is on the table. The wine is on the table. The candles are on the table. And the chairs are occupied by women and a man and children, and Jeanne looks at the table and thinks of the first time, in 1915, when she had Christmas Eve supper alone, and then with Rose, and then with Marie and Germaine, and the table has grown every year, and now the table is full.
Paul gives a toast. With his right hand, glass raised, his voice a little hoarse - the trench voice, the one that will never quite go away. 'To those who aren't here.'
Silence. Glasses raised. Rose's husband, who is not here. The men from the factory who are not here. The nameless faces of the communiqués, the 'killed in action', the 'missing in action', the 'died of wounds'. All those who are not at this table and will be at no table. Never again.
Then Paul says: 'And to those who are.'
The glasses touch. The glasses ring. And the sound of the glasses is the sound of peace - small, clear, fragile, final.
31 December 1918. The last day of the year of victory.
Henri is in the Belgian billet, the cat on his knees, the notebook open. For the first time since 11 November, he writes.
'31 December 1918. The war has been over for fifty days. Fifty days of silence. Fifty days without shells, without watches, without the noise. The silence is the greatest change. Greater than peace, greater than victory. The silence.
The shepherd has gone. He is at home, at Rocamadour, with his ewes and his daughter. He can read. He can write. He has a blue exercise book he gave me and a dog called Nòu and a daughter called Madelou and a wife who cried when she saw his handwriting.
Pélissié is still here. He is waiting for his demobilisation. He reads Montaigne in the evenings and writes to his wife and whittles bits of wood with his knife. He will soon be back on his causse, and he will find his ewes and his farm again, and he will be the same man as before but not the same, because a man who can read Montaigne is no longer the same man, even if he makes the same movements and ploughs the same fields.
Fayolle is in Cahors. He is waiting for me on the place Gambetta with a drink. Marcel is in Toulouse, with his paper. Lucien is at the training college. Lucienne draws. Little Jeanne is a year and three months old. Big Jeanne is expecting a child in January. Paul is home.
And I am in a billet in Belgium with a cat and a cigar box and a shepherd's exercise book and a Montaigne and a Goethe and a ring weighing three grams and a photograph of my wife and my daughter and a wooden dog in my pocket.
I am going home soon. I do not know when. Soon. And when I get home, I shall put down my pack, take off the uniform, and go to the school. My wife will be beside me. My daughter will be in the playground. And I shall pick up the chalk, and write on the blackboard, and the children will read, and life will begin again.
That is all. It is enough. That is all.'