Paris: The Novel (97 page)

“You look pretty robust.”

“That may be. But all the same …”

“James could do it. He’s a lawyer, and far more competent than I.”

“Your sister and brother-in-law are in England. They can’t come over.”

“You’ve already asked them?”

“Of course. I knew you wouldn’t want this. You have your own life—though that may be somewhat curtailed while this war lasts, I imagine.”

Marc’s career had been moderately successful. Every year he got a commission or two for a portrait. When a gallery put on a show of his work, a large and fashionable crowd turned up and the paintings would sell. He had talent, but not genius. Had he wanted to, he could have become the director of a museum or an art school, or he could have run a gallery, but he disliked administration. Instead, while carrying on his own work, he became a critic and promoter of the work of others, a respected fixture on the art scene and a man with many friends. Now that the war had started, he had wondered whether to offer himself to the government as a war artist.

And now his brother wanted him to come and help run the family business.

“I could be called up,” Marc objected. “I’m probably just young enough.”

“I already have an exemption for you,” Gérard told him. “The wholesale business is part of the war effort, you know. We’re already supplying food to the troops.” He paused. “I need you to understand the wholesale business, but your main task would be to keep the store going—if we can.”

“Joséphine? You’d close Joséphine?”

“I know you like the store. It would break Father’s heart if we had to close it. But if the war drags on, fashion goods are going to be tough to sell. It may be hard to keep Joséphine going. I know I wouldn’t be able to do it. I haven’t got the talent. But perhaps you could succeed.” He glanced at his brother with mild amusement. “Funnily enough, if you put your mind to it, I think you’d run Joséphine rather well.”

Marc gave his brother a long look.

“But I’d have to work for you.”

“We’d work together. But yes, I’d make the final investment decisions.” Gérard gazed at him calmly. “People are going to sacrifice their lives, Marc. This would be your sacrifice. You may dislike the idea, but it wouldn’t kill you. And I want to preserve the business for the next generation.”

“I’ll give you my answer tomorrow,” Marc told him.

He was at his aunt Éloïse’s apartment within the hour. She wasn’t surprised to see him.

“I assume that Gérard has spoken to you,” she remarked.

“You’ll support me when I refuse, won’t you?” he said.

“Not at all,” she answered firmly. She smiled. “I love you, Marc, but you are selfish. And we’re at war. You must accept at once.”

•  1917  •

Father Xavier had been buried in Rome a month ago, in May, and Roland was glad that they’d never meet again. For he had no wish to tell the priest he thought that God was dead.

He’d seen too much in the last three years.

As for the terrible mission he must undertake now, Roland de Cygne felt only disgust and shame. But he would do his duty. What else was he to do?

Swiftness and secrecy were paramount. People in Paris had no idea what had happened. The British were largely in the dark. As for the Germans in the opposite trenches, not a hint of it must ever reach them.

Not the faintest whisper on the wind.

When they paused to rest the horses, he took out a cigarette and lit it. Before putting the lighter back in his pocket, he gazed at it thoughtfully.

It was nearly three years since he’d been given that lighter. On the eve of the battle of the Marne.

How proud of themselves his regiment of cuirassiers had been. They’d made one concession to the modern world. Realizing that their shining metal breastplates might attract enemy fire, they had covered them with cloth. And there they were, entering Europe’s first mechanized war as if it were still the age of Napoléon.

He’d come upon one of his troopers fashioning the lighter out of the shell casing of a rifle bullet. Duras was the trooper’s name, a genial young
fellow, good with his hands. The lighter fuel went in the shell casing, then the wick and a small flint striker were fitted on the top. A simple mechanism, but sturdy and reliable.

“Do you often make these, Duras?” he’d asked.

“Oui, mon colonel.”

He’d just been promoted to lieutenant-colonel the week before, he remembered, and he’d still been getting used to the appellation.

“Would you make one for me?”

“I will give you this one,
mon colonel
,” Duras had replied, “as soon as it is finished.” And a short time later he had brought it to him and shown him, neatly incised on the side of the casing, his initials: R de C.

“What shall I pay you?” he’d asked.

“A bottle of champagne when the war is over?” the young fellow suggested.

“Agreed.” Roland had laughed.

And he’d kept the lighter with him ever since, perhaps as a talisman of those last days, when war had still seemed to belong to a world he’d thought he knew.

A week later, on the orders of a well-meaning captain, Duras and a troop of more than 150 other cuirassiers had ridden over a low ridge and charged down upon a German force they hoped to clear from the area. There had been a sustained rattle of machine-gun fire, followed by silence. Half a dozen of the horses had returned, without their riders. The rest of the horses and all the men were dead, every one.

His cuirassiers had ceased to be a regiment in anything but name, soon after that. Sometimes they operated as mounted infantry, using their horses to cross terrain before they dismounted to fight with carbines on foot. They helped bring supplies. They escorted prisoners. No one even thought of a cavalry charge nowadays.

If only it had been the cavalry alone who were ill-prepared. What of all the infantrymen in their blue coats and bright red trousers—a uniform hardly changed in a hundred years? A uniform that guaranteed they were instantly visible to an enemy whose dull combat dress blended with the landscape. Madness. A quarter million brightly dressed soldiers killed or wounded in a single week upon the Marne. It had been months before the French army learned the simple art of camouflage.

Even their arms were inadequate. The Saint-Étienne, the Hotchkiss and the Chauchat light machine guns were hopelessly unreliable. It was
the second year of the war before the troops had the more reliable Berthier, and there still weren’t enough of them.

Almost a million Frenchmen had been killed in the first three years of the war—five percent of the entire male population of France, from cradle to grave. And that was before the recent catastrophe.

Why did my country fail to learn from the conflicts of recent decades? he asked himself. The British had changed their uniforms, learned camouflage and flexible cavalry tactics from the Boer War in Africa. The Germans had studied these lessons too. And they had better arms.

If he’d been on the staff himself, Roland thought, wouldn’t he have been wiser? Or would he have succumbed to the terrible French habit of arrogance, just as everyone else had? France was the best, the most cultivated, the most intelligent nation in the world, so went the refrain. Therefore she had nothing to learn from the boorish Germans and the crude Anglo-Saxons, or anybody else.

But alas it was not so, and now she had a million dead to prove it. Brave troops, who’d fought like lions. The finest attacking troops in the world, in Roland’s opinion. The British soldiers said so too.

It is we who let them down, he thought. We who prepared our army so poorly. We who misjudged the German plan, so obvious in retrospect. We who arranged a European world that could not avoid this war. We the rulers, with the power to destroy all that we love, and the stupidity to do it.

And now, it seemed, the army command had finally gone too far.

General Nivelle’s offensive that spring had been bold, yet strangely unimaginative.

“We’ll smash through the German line on the River Aisne, and win the war,” Nivelle declared.

To Roland the plan seemed little different from the strategy that had cost countless lives already.

“We’re going to break through at the section known as Chemin des Dames,” his commanding general told him, “and roll up the German line. And here’s the clever thing,” his general continued. “We’re going to use a tactic that we tried out at Verdun, but on a huge scale.”

“What is that,
mon général
?”

“A creeping barrage. The artillery will fire just ahead of our troops as
they advance. We lay down a stupendous shelling on the enemy trenches. What’s left of the men there will be entirely disoriented. And then our men will be able to race in behind the barrage and overwhelm the trenches before the enemy can even see them coming.”

“Won’t a good many of the shells fall short and hit our own troops?”

“Yes, but not too much, we hope. And it’s a lesser price to pay, if our men can sweep into the trenches almost unopposed.”

Roland had his doubts, but he knew it was pointless for him to say anything.

“What about tanks?” he asked. Personally, he thought of the new metal chariots as mechanical knights in armor. Partly for that reason, he believed they were important.

“Lots of them,” the general said. “We know what we’re doing.”

Nivelle’s offensive had succeeded in taking some points on the German lines, despite appalling weather, and the incompetent failure of the tank attack. But the German front did not collapse. And the losses of Frenchmen had been terrible.

“It wasn’t our fault. It was poor intelligence, my dear de Cygne,” his general had told him. “Who could have guessed the Germans were making their trenches like that?”

As the French troops advanced, taking huge casualties from their own artillery, and finally reached the German trenches, they did not find the Germans smashed and disoriented at all.

For the German trenches were not like the French ones in the least. To the French soldier, a trench was just a temporary, makeshift cover, from which to attack. To the Germans, a trench was a system.

Many of the German trenches had the advantage of high ground, but above all, their construction was entirely superior. The Germans dug far deeper. They fortified. They even had shelters underground. When the French laid down their huge bombardment, the Germans waited it out in the relative safety of their deep redoubts, and when the French troops finally raced toward the line, they found the Germans waiting for them, freshly supplied with first-rate new machine guns, with which they mowed the Frenchmen down.

The Nivelle offensive did not smash the German front. It hardly made a dent.

Its profound effect was not on the German army at all, but on the French. That was the tragedy.

And it was the reason for Roland de Cygne’s secret mission that day. A terrible mission he had never dreamed in his life that he would ever have to perform.

For unbeknownst to her allies and her enemies, right across the Western Front, the brave army of France had mutinied.