April 1919 - December 1920

Henri takes off the uniform the day after he gets home.

He folds it and puts it away in a trunk that Louise's mother has brought up from the cellar, and he closes the lid. The horizon-blue greatcoat, the trousers, the boots, the second lieutenant's star. He keeps the mended spectacles, because he has no others. He keeps the ring, because it is not something you put away. And he keeps the haversack, because the haversack holds Marcel's cigar box, the shepherd's blue exercise book, Pélissié's slate, Lacombe's wooden dog, the Montaigne, the Goethe, Pélissié's letter for Jeanne, the photograph, the notebook. The haversack is a museum. The museum of a war, carried on one man's shoulder.

The cat takes possession of the haberdashery within twenty-four hours. It is a cat that has lived for four years in holes and haversacks, and a haberdashery with a counter, shelves, a stove and a fig tree in the yard is a palace beyond its wildest ambitions. It settles on the counter, between the reels of thread and the boxes of buttons, with the sovereignty that is its nature, and Louise's mother watches it settle and says nothing, which is her way of accepting.

It takes little Jeanne three days to tame her father. Three days of wary looks, of hands held out and drawn back, of suspicious silences. On the first day she cries when Henri picks her up. On the second day she accepts his arms but turns her head towards Louise, towards the face she knows. On the third day she touches his spectacles, takes them off, puts them back, and laughs. The spectacles are the bridge. The spectacles mended with wire, the ones that came through the war, the ones that saw Verdun and the Somme and the Chemin des Dames - the spectacles make a little girl of eighteen months laugh, and the laughter is the door, and the door is open.

April. Henri reports to the schools inspectorate in Cahors.

He goes into the inspector's office - not the same inspector as in 1914, that one died at Verdun - and he puts on the desk his demobilisation papers, his schoolmaster's file, and his application for a transfer to Figeac.

The new inspector is a man of fifty, invalided out with a knee wound, still in mourning for his son, killed in Champagne in 1915. He looks at Henri's file - the service record, the citations, the ranks. Schoolmaster in 1914, second lieutenant in 1918. The school at Labastide-Murat, then the trench, then Verdun, then the Somme.

The inspector says: 'You want Figeac.'

'My wife teaches there. My daughter lives there.'

The inspector nods. He signs the transfer. It is the simplest and the most immense thing anyone has ever signed for Henri - a paper saying that Henri Castayrol is schoolmaster at Figeac, boys' school, with effect from 1 May 1919.

Henri comes out of the office with the paper in his hand, and he walks through the streets of Cahors, and he passes the Pont Valentré, and he thinks of Fayolle, who can see that bridge from his hospital window, and he tells himself he will go and see him, that evening, on the place Gambetta, with a drink.

He goes.

Fayolle is sitting outside the café, thin, pale, hollow-chested, but sitting, alive, a glass of white wine in front of him. He sees Henri coming and gets up - slowly, with a grimace, because getting up is an effort when you have only one lung. They look at each other. Eight months since 15 August 1918, since the mortar splinter on the road in Picardy.

Fayolle says: 'Lieutenant.'

Henri says: 'It's over, Fayolle. Henri.'

Fayolle smiles. Fayolle's smile is the same as in 1914 - the smile of the lad from Puy-l'Évêque, the one who killed a man at twenty and had a poem printed at twenty-three. The smile has survived everything.

They drink. White Cahors wine, dry, cool, tasting of stone and sun. They do not talk about the war. They talk about what is coming. Fayolle does not know what he will do - he cannot work the vines, not with one lung, and he knows nothing else. Henri says: 'You know how to make people laugh.' Fayolle says: 'That's no trade.' Henri says: 'We'll see.'

On his way out of the café, Henri passes the school in Cahors, the one where Lucien Combes is preparing for the training college. He does not stop. Not yet. He will come back. But through the open ground-floor window he sees a blackboard and desks, and he thinks of the school in October 1918, the overturned desks he set upright, and he knows the desks are standing here, and the desks are standing everywhere, and that that is victory - not the flags, not the parades, not the speeches. The desks standing.

May 1919. Henri walks into his classroom.

The boys' school in Figeac, rue Émile Zola. Two classrooms, a yard, a covered playground, a garden behind. Louise's garden - the bean garden, the one where Marthe Bouyssou saw the first leaf come up. The garden is on the other side of the wall, in the girls' school, and Henri can see it from the window of his own classroom, and the view of his wife's garden from the window of his classroom is the exact geography of his life afterwards.

Thirty-two pupils. Boys from six to thirteen, sons of peasants, shopkeepers, craftsmen, factory hands. Boys whose fathers have come back - not all of them. Some fathers will never come back, and the sons of those fathers have a look Henri recognises, the look of children who know something children should not know.

Henri stands in front of the blackboard, chalk in hand, and he looks at his pupils, and his pupils look at him, and the silence of that first minute is the most important silence of his life - more important than the silence of 11 November, more important than the silence of the end. Because this silence is a beginning. The silence before the first sentence, before the first lesson, before everything that is to come.

He raises the chalk. He writes on the board. Not a grammar lesson, not a dictation, not a date in history. Three words.

'Reading, writing, arithmetic.'

Then he turns to his pupils and says: 'That's what we're going to do. The rest is detail.'

A boy in the third row puts up his hand. 'Sir, were you a soldier?'

Henri looks at the boy. Seven years old, freckles, a look that gives nothing away. The son of a dead man, probably, or of a wounded one, or of one who came back. 'Yes.'

'What was it like?'

Henri thinks. Not for long - four years of thinking have prepared him for the question.

'It was the reason you have to learn to read.'

The boy does not understand. He will understand later. A schoolmaster's answers are made for later.

The summer of 1919 passes in the light of the Lot.

Henri teaches. Louise teaches. Little Jeanne goes to the crèche in the mornings and to her grandmother in the afternoons, and the cat sleeps on the haberdashery counter, and the figs ripen on the yard wall, and the beans grow in the school garden.

On Sundays, Henri and Louise go up onto the causse. They walk along the dry-stone paths, between the junipers and the holm oaks, with little Jeanne on Henri's shoulders - the shoulders that carried the thirty-kilo pack and the Lebel rifle and the weight of thirty men. The little one weighs ten kilos. It is the gentlest weight Henri has ever carried.

One Sunday in June they go to Labastide-Murat. Henri shows Louise the school. His first school, the one with the frozen inkwells and the narcissi on the desk. The temporary master has gone, and a new schoolmaster has been appointed to the post, a young man of twenty-two, invalided out with the after-effects of polio, who had not had time to take his certificate before the war ended. Henri watches him teach through the open window, the way Verdier watched battlefields through the windows of his command posts, and he thinks: that's good. The baton has been passed. The school goes on.

They go to the Delpechs'. Old Delpech is dead - not from the war, from age. The Delpech boy is nineteen and runs the farm with his mother and his sisters. Delpech the father has come back, one arm gone, and works as best he can. Henri eats the Delpechs' soup, the Delpechs' cheese, the Delpechs' bread, and the earth of the causse is under his feet, and the sky of the causse is over his head, and the world is where it belongs.

In July, Henri goes to Rocamadour.

Not for the pilgrimage - for the shepherd. He takes the train to Gramat, then walks. Eight kilometres across the causse, in the July heat, the haversack on his shoulder and little Jeanne in the arms of Louise, walking beside him. The cat has stayed in Figeac - the cat does not walk on the causse, the cat is a haberdashery animal.

Lacombe's farm is at the end of a dirt track, between two dry-stone walls, with a roof of stone slabs and a wooden gate. The ewes are in the pasture, two hundred white ewes on the short grass of the causse, and among them a white dog, big, massive, with bright eyes - Nòu. The dog sees Henri coming and barks, a deep patou bark, and the shepherd comes out of the house.

Lacombe has changed. Not for better, not for worse - into something different. The shepherd of the trench has become the shepherd of the causse, which is the same thing and not the same thing. His face is smoother, his shoulders lower, his limp the same. But his eyes are different - more open, more present, rid of the wall that closed them for months in 1916.

The shepherd looks at Henri. He looks at Louise. He looks at little Jeanne. Then he says: 'Come in.'

Lacombe's wife is in the kitchen - a small, dark, silent woman, like her husband in her silence and unlike him in her hands, which are not a soldier's hands but a shepherd's wife's hands, just as hard, just as calloused, but differently. And Madelou is there. Eleven years old, black plaits, her father's eyes but with her mother's light in them. Madelou, who received her father's first letter, the one with the twenty-three words, the one that made her mother cry.

Henri smiles at the girl. 'You're Madelou.'

The girl looks at him with the wariness of children of the causse, who do not give their trust to the first comer. 'You're the second lieutenant.'

Henri smiles. 'No. I'm the schoolmaster.'

Madelou looks at her father. The shepherd nods. 'He's the one who taught me.'

Madelou looks at Henri again, and this time her eyes change - not trust, not yet, but curiosity. The man who taught her father to read. The man who turned a mute shepherd into a man who writes in a blue exercise book. The man of the wooden letters.

They eat together. Confit, cheese, bread, walnut wine. Lacombe's kitchen is small, dark, warm, and it smells of wool-grease and wood smoke and curds. Henri recognises the smells - not the same as the trench's, and yet related, because country life and war life are cousins in their hardness and their simplicity.

The shepherd does not say much. He never has, and peace has not made him talkative. But he shows. He shows the flock, the dog, the farm. He shows the blue exercise book - a second one, bought in Gramat, in which he goes on writing, in the evenings, by the lamp, a shepherd's thoughts that need no reader to exist.

When it is time to go, Lacombe walks Henri to the gate. They walk side by side, as in the communication trench, the shepherd a little behind, out of habit. At the gate, Lacombe stops and says: 'Lieutenant.'

'Henri.'

The shepherd does not correct himself. For Lacombe, Henri will always be the second lieutenant, as for Henri Lacombe will always be the shepherd, and those war names are their true names, truer than their Christian names, because they were earned in the mud.

'Thank you,' says the shepherd.

It is the third time Lacombe has thanked Henri. The first for Madelou's letter, the second for the exercise book. The third is the last, and it holds the first two, and everything else.

Henri sets off for home. The causse is white under the July sun, the crickets are singing, the junipers smell strong. Little Jeanne is asleep in Louise's arms, and Henri walks beside his wife, and the world is a dry-stone path between two walls, and the path goes somewhere, and somewhere is good.

The autumn of 1919 brings the first elections after the war. The 'horizon-blue' Chamber - ex-servicemen deputies, men in uniform or in mourning, voting the laws of reconstruction. Women do not vote. Jeanne does not vote. Rose does not vote. The women who kept the country standing for four years do not vote, and the injustice is so enormous it becomes invisible, like things too big to be seen.

Jeanne says nothing. Jeanne picks up little Henri - eight months old, chubby, noisy, Paul's image with Jeanne's eyes - and she goes to the union, and she carries on. The stamp has gone, the title has gone, the factory has replaced her with a man who does the job less well and is paid more. But Jeanne is at the union, with Paul, and together they do what Paul said they would do - they fight. For pay. For conditions. For crèches. For the vote.

The vote will come. Not straight away - in 1944, twenty-five years later, a quarter of a century of waiting, another war to get there. But it will come. And when it does, Jeanne will remember the stamp and the stools and the crèche at Vaise, and she will know that seeds take time to grow, but that they grow.

Rose is still working in a factory - not Berliet, which has let most of the women go. Another factory, smaller, making machine parts. Worse paid. Less respected. Rose does not care. Rose has three children, one wage, and an anger that is intact, and Rose's anger is an engine that never stops.

Fayolle dies on 3 October 1919.

The flu. The third wave, the one that has been sweeping France since the winter, the one that kills the weak and the damaged, the one that finishes the work the war began. Fayolle, with his one lung, has nothing to fight it with. The good lung, the one that was doing the work of two, becomes inflamed, fills up, stops. Three days of fever, in the hospital in Cahors, the same hospital where he was treated for the splinter from the Somme. Three days, and it is over.

Henri learns of it by telegram, on 4 October, at the school in Figeac. He is marking dictations when the postman comes into the yard. Henri takes the telegram, reads it, reads it again. Then he puts his pencil down on the desk, gets up, and goes out into the yard. He stands under the covered playground, arms by his sides, and he looks at the wall of the girls' school, Louise's wall, and he does not see the wall. He sees a lad of nineteen coming up as a reinforcement in September 1914, already coughing, who had killed a man and came to tell his corporal with white eyes. He sees the lad who told the shepherd jokes, one a night, thirty-one in October, to get him out from behind the wall. He sees the man running along the road in Picardy in August 1918, his mouth open to breathe, one lung and running all the same.

Louise finds him in the yard ten minutes later. She sees his face and does not ask. She takes the telegram he is still holding, reads it, and says: 'Fayolle.' Henri nods. Louise says nothing more. She puts her hand on Henri's arm and stays there, standing beside him, under the covered playground, while the children play in the next yard and the world goes on.

Henri writes to the shepherd that same evening. Three lines. 'Lacombe. Fayolle is dead. The flu. The funeral is on the 6th at Puy-l'Évêque. Come if you can.'

The funeral takes place on a Monday, in the rain.

The cemetery at Puy-l'Évêque is on the hill, above the Lot, with the vines all round and the river below. A village cemetery, small, crowded, where the dead know one another as the living do, by name and by land. Fayolle's parents are there - the father a vine-grower, the mother in black, people of the Lot, taciturn, upright, burying their son who came back from the war to die at home.

Henri is there, in civilian clothes, without braid, without star. Louise has stayed in Figeac with the little one.

And the shepherd is there. Lacombe has come from Rocamadour, on foot probably, with his ash stick and his limp and a black suit that does not fit him because suits never fit shepherds. He stands at the edge of the grave, his face shut, his hands on his stick, and he says nothing, and he does not cry, because the shepherd does not cry, except for a dog, once, in a trench.

And Pélissié is there. Come from Saint-Céré, in a suit as well, a peasant's Sunday suit, clean and stiff. Pélissié who does not speak, who has never spoken, who has always let others speak for him. Pélissié stands on the other side of the grave, facing the shepherd, and between them is the hole, and in the hole the coffin, and in the coffin a man of twenty-four who made people laugh who no longer laughed.

The curé says the words. The earth falls on the wood. Fayolle's mother makes a sound Henri knows - the sound of the Pradel mother at Capdenac-Gare, in 1915, the one Louise heard and that made her step back in fear. The sound of mothers. The one sound the war cannot drown.

After the service, Henri, the shepherd and Pélissié stay. The others have gone, the family, the curé, the neighbours. The three of them stay in front of the fresh grave, in the rain that does not stop, and the silence between them is the silence of the section, the silence of the trench, the silence of men who have no need to speak because they have shared something words cannot carry.

The shepherd says: 'He told such bad jokes.'

Pélissié says: 'Yes.'

Henri says: 'The worst.'

And that is Fayolle's funeral oration - three sentences, eight words, spoken by three men standing in the rain of the Lot, above a green river, in a vine-growers' cemetery, for a lad of twenty-four who survived Verdun and the Somme and the Chemin des Dames and Picardy and a mortar splinter in the lung, and did not survive the flu. Because the war does not end when the bells ring. The war ends when the last wounded man dies of his wounds, and Fayolle had been wounded since 1914, since the first cough, since the first winter, and the flu only finished what the mud began.

They go down the hill together, the three of them, without speaking. At the foot of the hill the road divides - Henri towards the station, Lacombe towards the causse, Pélissié towards Saint-Céré. They shake hands. Once. Hard. And they go their separate ways, and the rain falls on the Lot, and the Lot flows towards the Garonne, and Fayolle stays on the hill, above the vines, for ever.

In December 1919, Henri receives a letter from Verdier.

He does not know Verdier. He has never heard the name. The letter arrives at the school in Figeac, addressed to 'Second Lieutenant Castayrol, Henri, formerly of the 7th Infantry Regiment', and it comes from Paris.

'Sir. You do not know me. I am Major Verdier, formerly a staff officer. I have read, in the primary teachers' review, a piece signed with your name, on teaching in the trenches. It moved me more than I can say.

I spent four years writing reports that nobody read. You spent four years teaching in conditions nobody could imagine. We fought the same war, you and I, each at our post, each with our tools - mine were figures, yours were letters. The letters were of more use.

I am writing to thank you. Not in the name of the army, not in the name of France - in my own name. Thank you for teaching men to read in the mud. It is the most useful thing that was done in this war, and I say so knowing whereof I speak.

Major Étienne Verdier.'

Henri reads the letter in the school yard, under the covered playground, during break. The children play around him, shout, run, jostle one another. Henri reads the letter of a man he does not know, a man who spent four years making calculations nobody listened to, and who is thanking him, and the thanks cross distance and time and ranks and hierarchies and arrive in the yard of a school in Figeac where a schoolmaster is holding a letter and watching children play.

He does not reply at once. He replies in January 1920, a short, courteous letter that says what matters: 'Major. Thank you for your words. The figures were of use too. Without your calculations, more of us would have died. Letters and figures are not enemies. They are the two legs of the same march. Yours sincerely, Henri Castayrol, schoolmaster.'

1920 unfolds like a first year of true peace.

Not the peace of the treaties - the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919, and its clauses are already contested, and the seeds of future wars are already planted in its articles, but nobody sees that yet, or those who see it are not listened to. The peace of 1920 is the peace of every day, the peace of gestures found again, the peace of ordinary things becoming ordinary again after being impossible.

Henri teaches. That is the word that sums up 1920 - teaches. He teaches in Figeac, in his classroom, with his thirty-two boys, and he teaches as he has always taught, with rigour and tenderness, with the exacting standards of a man who knows what ignorance costs. But he teaches differently too. The war has changed the way he sees. The object lessons are not the same - when Henri talks about the geography of France, he sees the trenches under the hills and the cemeteries under the fields. When he talks about history, he knows that history is not a book but an abyss, and that dates are scars. When he gives dictation, he thinks of Pélissié tracing his first letters on a slate, and of Lacombe writing 'Madelou' with a shepherd's fingers, and the dictation becomes something else - not an exercise, an act of faith.

Louise teaches on the other side of the wall. The bean garden lies between them, and sometimes, through the window, Henri sees Louise in her yard, among her girls, and Louise sees him in his yard, among his boys, and they smile at each other over the wall and the beans, and that smile is the sum of their life.

Little Jeanne turns two in September 1920. She walks, she runs, she talks - not much, but well. She says 'Papa', she says 'Maman', she says 'cat', she says 'mamé' for her grandmother, and she says 'kool' for school, because school is the place where her parents disappear in the morning and reappear in the evening, and a place as magical as that deserves a word.

The cat is growing old. Verdun the cat, war hero, survivor of four fronts, is now a fat grey tom who sleeps on the haberdashery counter and no longer chases rats. Louise's mother feeds him chicken livers and scraps of confit, and the cat accepts these tributes with the dignity of a veteran.

Lucien Combes passes out of the training college in June 1920. First of his year. Henri learns the news from a letter from Lucien, the last of a long series, which says simply: 'Lieutenant. It's done. Schoolmaster. Like you.' Henri shows the letter to Louise, and Louise smiles, and Henri pins the letter to the wall of his classroom, beside Lucienne Marty's drawing, the one of the cat, and beside Pélissié's slate, which he has set on the shelf like a trophy, like a proof.

Lucien is appointed to Gourdon, his home town. He will teach where he was born, where he grew up unable to read, where he lied about his age to go to war, where he came back with a leg that no longer bends and a bloodstained Montaigne in his haversack. He will teach the children of Gourdon what a sergeant taught him in a barn in Picardy - that reading is freedom, and that to write is to exist.

Lucienne Marty is still drawing. She has finished at the art school in Cahors and gone on to the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse - the door Henri swore to open in 1914, the one Louise set ajar in 1916, which has now swung wide open. Lucienne draws faces, landscapes, animals. She draws the causse with a precision that hurts, because the causse under her pencil is so true you can hear the crickets and smell the thyme. One day her drawings will hang in galleries. Not straight away - later. Seeds take time.

Marcel publishes La Voix du Midi. The paper has grown - eight pages now, a print run of two thousand, a readership of factory hands and schoolmasters and trade unionists across the south-west. Marcel writes, sets, prints, distributes, with his back throbbing on rainy days and his hands that have never forgotten the lead. The subtitle has not changed: 'Founded in a trench.'

Fayolle lies on the hill at Puy-l'Évêque, above the vines, and his laughter is missed. It is missed at the café where he would have told his jokes, at the post office where he would have worked, at the bar where he would have had his drink. He is missed the way only people are missed who filled a room just by walking into it. The flu did what the shells did not, and Henri carries that injustice the way you carry a splinter that cannot be taken out - lodged too deep, too close to the heart.

Pélissié has gone back to his causse. He ploughs, he sows, he harvests. He has bought the second cow, mended the byre roof, rebuilt the garden wall, pruned the almond trees - every line of his 1918 list, ticked off, done, one by one, with the patience of a man for whom lists are promises and promises are acts. He still writes to his wife - pointless letters, since she is beside him, but letters all the same, left on the kitchen table in the morning, because writing has become his language of love, and Pélissié's love goes by written words as much as by spoken ones.

And the shepherd writes. Nobody knows except Madelou, who finds the blue exercise books in her father's cupboard, and reads them in secret, and discovers that her father - her silent father, her father of stone and wind - has an inner world made of words, of sentences, of thoughts that belong to him alone. One day Madelou will bring the exercise books to Henri, and Henri will read them, and Henri will understand that the most important thing he did in the war was not holding a trench or taking a blockhouse or leading an assault. It was putting a pencil in a shepherd's hand.

In March 1920, Henri receives a letter from Fayolle's mother. Not the mother at the cemetery, not the woman in black making the sound of mothers - another woman, a woman of paper, a woman writing official words because someone has told her official words must be written. Fayolle's mother is asking Henri for a certificate. A statement that her son was wounded in action, that the mortar splinter of 15 August 1918 destroyed his left lung, that the flu that killed him a year later killed a man already broken by the war. Fayolle's mother wants her son's name on the memorial.

The war memorial at Puy-l'Évêque is being built. Every commune in France is building its own, at this very moment, everywhere, in every village, on every square, in front of every town hall. Memorials of stone and marble, with names carved in them, and every name is an administrative battle as much as a bereavement - because 'Mort pour la France' is an official designation, a stamp, a form, and forms know nothing of destroyed lungs or flu that finishes the work of shells.

Henri writes the certificate that same evening, at the kitchen table in the haberdashery, while little Jeanne sleeps and Louise marks exercise books on the other side of the table. He writes as he knows how to write - with precision, with rigour, with the cold anger of a schoolmaster filling in a form on which a man's memory depends.

'I, the undersigned, Castayrol, Henri, second lieutenant in the 7th Infantry Regiment, certify that Private Fayolle, André, under my command from September 1914, was seriously wounded on 15 August 1918 by a mortar splinter which perforated the left lung, requiring surgery and resulting in the permanent loss of the use of the said lung. Private Fayolle served with courage and devotion through four years of campaigning, taking part in the battles of the Marne, Verdun, the Somme, the Chemin des Dames and Picardy. His death, which occurred on 3 October 1919 as a result of influenzal pneumonia, is the direct consequence of the weakening caused by his war wound.'

He signs. He seals. He sends.

The designation 'Mort pour la France' is granted in June 1920, after three months of files, of papers passed back and forth, of forms and stamps. André Fayolle's name is carved on the war memorial at Puy-l'Évêque, between a Dumas and a Garrigues, on the white stone, facing the vines, above the Lot.

Henri does not go to see the memorial. Not straight away. He will go one Sunday in the autumn, alone, without Louise, without the little one. He will stand before the stone and read the names, one by one, and he will find Fayolle's, and he will stay there a while, his hands in his pockets, the wooden dog against his thigh, and he will think of a lad of nineteen who was coughing when he came into a trench on the Aisne in September 1914, and who told bad jokes, and who laughed with one lung, and whose name is now in the stone, which is the only immortality the Republic offers its dead.

December 1920. The last month of the sixth year.

Henri is in the yard of the school in Figeac, on a December afternoon, cold and clear, the sky blue over the roofs. Break is over, the children have gone back in, and Henri is alone in the yard, standing by the wall between the boys' school and the girls' school. On the other side of the wall he can hear Louise's voice giving the lesson, a clear, steady voice, the voice of a schoolmistress telling her pupils that five threes are fifteen, and the girls' voices repeating it, and the sound of shoes on the floorboards, and the scrape of a chair.

Henri leans against the wall. The stone is cold under his hand. The wall is solid, old, built to last. On the other side, Louise. On this side, his pupils. And between the two, the garden, where the bare bean poles are waiting for spring.

He thinks of all those who are not here. Of the names in the notebook, that litany of the dead that does not fade and never will. Of the carpenter from Cahors, the first, the one from August 1914, who talked about his fiancée and died in four minutes. Of Lieutenant Marsal, who read Stendhal. Of the law student from Montauban. Of the barber's assistant from Brive. Of the charcoal-burner from Souillac, who saw letters for the first time through his owl spectacles. Of Brousse, the farmhand who pretended he could not read. Of all the reinforcements of all the autumns and all the winters, the faces that came and went, the names he entered in his notebook with the date and the place, and which are now names on memorials, in villages, all over France.

He thinks of Fayolle, at the post office, with his laughter and his one lung.

He thinks of those who are here. Of the shepherd, on his causse, with his ewes and his exercise books. Of Pélissié, on his farm, with his letters and his Montaigne. Of Marcel, in Toulouse, with his press and his back. Of Lucien, in Gourdon, in front of his blackboard. Of Lucienne, in Toulouse, at her easel. Of Jeanne, in Lyon, with Paul and little Henri and Rose and the crèche and the union and the anger that does not go out. Of little Jeanne, inside the haberdashery, with the cat and her grandmother and the reels of thread.

He takes the wooden dog out of his pocket. The patou the shepherd carved in October 1916, in a dugout on the Somme, with a knife and a piece of ash. The dog is worn by four years in a pocket, polished by Henri's fingers, smooth as a pebble. Henri turns it in his hand. The paws, the muzzle, the tail. Flòc. The dead dog. The dog that kept the shepherd alive, whose death nearly lost him, and whose wooden memory travelled from the Somme to Belgium, from Belgium to the Lot, from war to peace.

Henri puts the dog back in his pocket. He looks at the sky. The December sky over Figeac, blue and cold, immense above the roofs, the same sky as in 1914, the same as in 1918, the same as in 1920. The sky does not change. People change. Children grow up. Shepherds learn to read. Schoolmasters learn to live. Women learn that they are standing. Cats learn to grow old. And the beans wait for spring, because beans always wait for spring, and spring always comes.

Henri goes back into his classroom. Thirty-two faces raised towards him, thirty-two pairs of eyes, thirty-two futures. He picks up the chalk. He turns to the blackboard.

And he does what he has always done, what he will always do, what he was born for and what he survived for.

He teaches.

Share this text