I’ll never forgive myself, sighed Monteil; I’ll never get over this. The family had indeed hoped, thanks to the doctor’s connections, that by dodging the front Charles would be less exposed to enemy fire in the air than on the ground. The connections had worked, of course; everything had gone welclass="underline" he’d been exempted from ground combat and reassigned to the newborn aviation corps—which no civilian could have imagined then would ever play an active role in combat—as if it were a cushy berth. Whereas that turned out to be a miscalculation: Juliette’s putative father disappeared even more swiftly from the sky than he might perhaps have done from the mud. I’ll always blame myself for this, Monteil continued. Maybe he would have been better off in the infantry, after all. We had no way of knowing. Blanche replied briefly that regrets were useless, no point in going on and on about it, and it mightn’t be such a bad idea if he would instead take a look at Juliette.
Who was three months old, it was the beginning of spring, and Blanche could see things budding in the trees—trees still bereft, however, of even the tiniest bird—through the window next to which she had parked the baby carriage. Forgive me, said Monteil, heaving himself heavily out of his armchair to remove the child from her carriage and examine her— respiration, temperature, alertness—and then declare that my word, she seems to be doing very nicely. Good, Blanche said to him in thanks as she rewrapped the infant. And your parents, Monteil inquired. They’re holding up well, said Blanche; it was hard after Charles died, but the child provides a distraction for them. Yes, Monteil began to ramble on again, I’ll be angry with myself forever for what I did but it was for his own good, wasn’t it. Couldn’t be helped, said Blanche firmly. And his brother, aside from that, asked Monteil. Excuse me, said Blanche, whose brother? Charles’s brother, Monteil prompted her, have you any news? Postcards, replied Blanche, he sends them regularly. And even a letter, from time to time. At the moment, I think they’re in the Somme, he’s not complaining very much. That’s fine, then, observed Monteil. Anyway, Blanche reminded him, he’s never been one for complaints, Anthime. You know how he is: he always adapts.
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AS A MATTER OF FACT, Anthime had adapted. What’s more, even if he hadn’t, if he’d obviously been having trouble dealing with things and tried to tell anyone, postal censorship wasn’t a big help to anyone trying to carp. Yes, Anthime got used fairly quickly to the daily chores of cleaning, digging and earthwork maintenance, the loading and transportation of materials, as well as the periods in the trenches, the shifts of guard duty at night, the days off. These last existed in name only, moreover, consisting of drilling, instruction, maneuvers, typhoid vaccinations, showers when all was going well, march pasts, parades under arms, ceremonies such as the awarding of the Croix de Guerre, invented six months earlier, or, for example, the recent presentation to a sergeant major in the platoon of a citation for devotion to duty at the front in spite of his rheumatism. Anthime had also grown used to the relocations, the changes in the uniforms, and above all, the others.
The others were mostly but not simply peasants, agricultural laborers, craftsmen, and homeworkers, a basically proletarian population in which those who knew how to read, write, and count, like Anthime Sèze, were both in the minority and in a position to help their comrades compose letters or read those they received. The news in this mail was then passed on to anyone interested, although Anthime had kept mum upon learning of Charles’s death, sharing this only with Bossis, Arcenel, and Padioleau. Somehow, the four of them always managed in spite of all the troop movements to wind up not too far from one another.
As for changes in the uniforms, it was in the spring that new greatcoats were issued in a light blue that proved quite becoming in the newly returned sunshine. The overly garish red pants had almost disappeared, either covered by blue overalls or replaced by velvet trousers. In the defensive accessories department, the men first received cervelières, close-fitting steel skullcaps, to be worn under the kepi, while a few weeks later, in May, appeared the first sign of a not-so-jolly technological innovation: gags and goggles with mica lenses were distributed to every soldier for protection against combat gases.
Uncomfortable, always sliding off, the migraineprovoking cervelière was not a huge success; more and more of the men stopped wearing them and soon used them only for culinary ends, for cooking up an egg or as an extra soup bowl. It was in the early days of September, after the Ardennes and the Somme,[9] when Anthime’s company had moved back toward the northeastern province of Champagne, that this skullcap was replaced by a helmet meant to provide more serious protection, yet initially painted bright blue. Putting them on, the men found it funny not to recognize one another, for the helmets obscured much of their faces. When everyone stopped laughing and realized that sunlight reflecting off this fetching blue made them all attractive targets, they slathered the helmets with mud the way they’d done with the mess tins the year before. Anyway, whatever their color, the men were not half pleased to have them during the fall offensive. Especially on one difficult day at the end of October, when wearing a helmet was no laughing matter.
That day, brutal shelling had begun in the early morning: at first the enemy had sent over only large-caliber shells, well-aimed 170s and 245s that pummeled the earth deep into the lines, shaking loose landslides that buried the wounded and able-bodied alike, quickly stifling them in avalanches of dirt. Anthime almost didn’t make it out of a hole that suddenly fell in on him after a bomb landed. Escaping hundreds of bullets whizzing by barely a few feet from him and dozens of shells within a fifty-yard radius, jumping this way and that in the hail of debris, he thought at one point he was done for when a percussion-fuse shell fell quite close to him, landing in a breach of his trench they’d plugged with bags of earth, one of which, sliced open and hurled through the air by the shell’s impact, almost knocked him senseless but—luckily—shielded him from the shrapnel. Taking advantage of the general fear and chaos thus sown throughout the network, the enemy infantry chose that moment to attack en masse, terrifying the entire troop into fleeing panic-stricken toward the rear lines screaming that the Huns were coming.
Dragging themselves on their bellies to the nearest hiding place, Anthime and Bossis managed to hide inside a sap—a narrow tunnel leading out from the main trench—running a few yards below the ground, and that’s when the bullets and shells were joined by gases, all sorts of them: blinding, asphyxiating, blistering, sneezing, and tear gases liberally diffused by the enemy with special shells or gas bottles in successive waves and in the direction of the wind. The instant he smelled chlorine, Anthime put on his protective mask and then signaled Bossis to leave the sap and get into the open air where, although they were exposed to projectiles, they could at least escape those even more insidious killers, the particularly heavy vapors that gathered to linger in the bottom of holes, trenches, and tunnels long after their clouds had passed on.
As if all that were not enough, hardly had they clambered from their hiding place when a Nieuport biplane fighter, one of their own, picked that moment to crash and explode near the shelter,[10] hurling wreckage all over the trench and intensifying a cataclysm of dust and smoke—through which Anthime and Bossis could see the incineration of two airmen killed on impact and still strapped in, transformed into sizzling skeletons hanging by their seat straps. Meanwhile, although unnoticed amid this turmoil, daylight was failing, and when the sun actually went down a relative calm seemed to return for a moment. But it seemed as well that the desired conclusion to the day would be a last display, a final burst of fireworks, for a gigantic bombardment began again, leaving Anthime and Bossis once more covered in dirt from a fresh explosion when a shell landed on the tunnel they’d only just left, which caved in as they watched.
9
The Battle of the Somme (July 1–November 18, 1916), one of the biggest and bloodiest battles of the war, was also one of the most deadly confrontations in history, with a butcher’s bill of more than a million casualties. The French and British armies, supported by troops from British imperial territories, mounted a joint offensive against the German army, which had by then taken considerable French territory at great cost to both sides and was pressing France hard in its siege of Verdun. Specifically developed to break the deadlock of trench warfare on the Western Front, tanks were first used in combat by the British in the Battle of the Somme, but by the time the Germans withdrew to their fortified Hindenburg Line, the French and British forces had managed to penetrate only a few miles into German-occupied territory.
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