She had just sat with her hands folded on her lap, lost in thought.

‘If I were you, my children,’ she said, ‘I’d wait … That’s no kind of marriage; the husband off in some hell, his wife in Paris! After the wedding, just a week together …’

‘A week? Even a day together would be wonderful, Madame Pain!’

‘Well, you see? One day and then you’ll be separated. Perhaps for six months, who knows? You’ve said yourself that it will be a long war! No, no, my dears, let things work themselves out: when everyone’s had enough of fighting, life will get back to normal. For now, it’s as if everyone’s gone mad, but that can’t last.’

‘I’ll do whatever Thérèse wants,’ Martial said quickly. ‘If she doesn’t want to be married to a soldier … The wife of a soldier … I know that I’m offering her a difficult future, one that is very different from what I had dreamt of for her …’

‘But Martial,’ said Thérèse, ‘we’re already committed to each other.’

‘It’s not the same thing,’ Madame Pain grumbled, ‘not the same thing at all. You’re a child, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

But Thérèse just shook her head and said nothing, tight-lipped, with a look of determination that Madame Pain knew very well.

‘She’ll do just what she wants,’ she said softly. ‘And besides, it’s not as if Martial will be in any great danger: he’s a doctor …’

‘That’s true,’ said Bernard, scornfully. ‘And besides – mark my words – by the time he and his well-equipped, fancy train get to Berlin, we’ll already be there.’

He turned bright red and pushed his unruly hair off his forehead with his ink-stained hand.

‘Papa, Mama, don’t try to stop me. I’ve made my decision and there’s no turning back. I’m not waiting to be conscripted. I’m joining up.’

‘Imbecile! Not another word!’ his father shouted angrily.

‘Papa, Mama, I’m telling you: I’ve made my decision and there’s no turning back.’

‘But you’re only seventeen,’ groaned Blanche.

‘I’ll be eighteen in three days.’

‘But you’re only a child!’

‘That’s what the enemy will think,’ replied Bernard, and he thought: ‘That was a good thing to say!’

Then Adolphe Brun intervened. He banged his fist on the table with one hand while furiously twirling his left moustache with the other.

‘You all make me laugh, the lot of you! You know nothing about politics. You’d think you were a bunch of village idiots! I’m an old Parisian; I can’t be fooled. Your war will fizzle out! I’m telling you, I am. Much Ado About Nothing. All that pointless sabre rattling, and in the end, the diplomats will come to an agreement and everyone will go back home. And why? Because that’s the way it’s always been! Yes, I know, there was the Hundred Years War and Napoleon, but all that is history! These days, everything gets worked out in the end. Songs will be written about it, a satirical revue at the end of the year and that will be that! You know that they can’t pull the wool over my eyes,’ he said again, trying to put a crafty expression on his honest face he believed was befitting a true Parisian born and bred. He winked at everyone several times:

‘Exactly one year from now, we’ll talk about your war again,’ he concluded, ‘and we’ll have a good laugh.’

Everyone was silent.

‘And we’ll have a good laugh,’ he said again.

At that very moment, they heard the sound of trains passing by. Sharp, shrill whistles rang out as the carriages seemed to surge out of the station, rumbling, thundering, with the hurried, raucous roar of a herd of furious charging beasts. Everyone listened; they had never heard so many trains going so fast.

‘Those are the military convoys, of course, aren’t they?’

‘Already?’

‘Yes, absolutely! They must have started moving the troops yesterday.’

‘We’ve heard them roaring by for the past three nights,’ said Thérèse.

Blanche Jacquelain burst into tears while Adolphe Brun turned very pale and simply kept saying:

‘I’m telling you we’ll soon be having a good laugh about it, believe you me.’

4

Bernard managed to witness one more event with the innocent eyes of a non-combatant: the wedding of Martial and Thérèse.

The marriage was held at the beginning of 1915. ‘The groom is returning from the front,’ Adolphe Brun had told his friends when he invited them to the wedding reception. ‘He’ll be in Paris for twenty-four hours; he’ll tell us what’s happening.’

For at the time, soldiers were greeted like ambassadors of a foreign country who carried fearful secrets, secrets that were only kept from their nearest and dearest by the demands of discipline. Every single one of them, from the most humble foot soldier to a battalion’s medical doctor, like Martial, ‘knew things’, or so the civilians thought. They had knowledge of what the great military leaders were plotting, the date of the next offensive and the mysterious plans of the enemy.

‘Well, when is it going to happen? When?’ Madame Humbert eagerly asked Doctor Brun as soon as she saw him. What she meant was ‘The Victory. When will we claim Victory?’ And when Martial did not reply, she cheerfully wagged her finger at him. ‘He’s so secretive; he doesn’t want to tell us a thing,’ she said, simpering, then becoming serious again:

‘Well, can you explain what they’re doing, why we aren’t advancing?’

Martial had not remained behind in his fine hospital train for long, a train that could hold up to eight beds per carriage and one hundred and twenty-eight wounded men in total, or so the newspapers proudly reported. Those trains were used for show, to comfort the civilian population and for the edification of the neutral nations. The wounded soldiers were transported in freight trains and cattle wagons, bleeding, in terrible pain, dying all along the small regional branch lines. After the first days, the really awful days, Martial had been allowed to transfer to a first-aid post on the front line.