1914

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.