Some men said the Germans were using the time to dig a wide tunnel right under the French positions at Verdun and attack them from the rear. For a while Jean-Baptiste found it hard to sleep in the burrow he’d cut into the trench side, thinking of Germans moving noiselessly below and behind him. Some said the British were coming to reinforce them. “Ah, perfidious Albion,” said the captain when Folz asked him if it was true.
On February 11, they were ordered to prepare for battle. For months, Jean-Baptiste had kept a small piece of paper and a stub of pencil. Not for the first time, he looked at it for an hour, intending to write to his mother, but, finding there was too much to say, decided it was easier to say nothing. Most of the men around him were veterans; most had been wounded and patched up in earlier battles. In their last hours of being under shelter, three older men played piquet, with sous changing hands back and forth accompanied by grunts and occasional snarls. Another was making a ring for his girl out of a fuse cap. He even had a proper vise in his pack. He’d chucked out his cooking pan to lighten the weight. But most, like Jean-Baptiste, were silenced by the cold, the boredom, and the suffocating blanket of fear.
Two German deserters had turned up a couple of days earlier. They were Alsatians and narrowly escaped being killed as they approached, their hands up, shouting “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Friends! Don’t shoot!” They looked frightened. “Brothers,” cried one. Which was a mistake. They insisted they had been forced to be Germans and wear German uniforms but, like all good men of Alsace, were French at heart. They both spoke good French, so Sergeant Folz had punched the one who’d called them brothers and broken his nose as some sort of compromise of justice.
“French, my arse,” he’d said.
The other man had blathered that they’d only come to warn them that the Germans were about to launch their push and had a thousand guns trained on this sector. He clearly didn’t want to be around, on either side, to see it and seemed relieved when the two of them were sent back to the rear for interrogation.
“They’ll shoot them after,” said Folz.
Jean-Baptiste imagined that tomorrow’s death would be hot: fire or explosive, searing metal or the burst of warm blood. But instead, sometime in the night when he must, finally, have been sleeping, the snow came out of nowhere and with it came life. He woke up because he was even colder and wetter than usual. Thick flakes were falling, blown by gusts into strange shapes. Crests of ice formed on greatcoats like raised white seams, and every so often a soldier in an animal pelt shook himself like a dog. Even with their heads bowed down, snow fell on their cold cheeks and, melting, ran down inside the back of their collars.
Guinard came back from sentry duty and reported the disappearance of earth and sky as well as Germans. Nothing could be seen a meter from the trenches. The mood changed as it became obvious that there was going to be no attack in the next few hours.
Slowly men found their voices, stirred, shook off the small drifts on their uniforms. Joubert was nowhere in sight, but Aspirant Collinette was standing forlornly by Sergeant Folz, looking out into the whiteness. The slender officer cadet had his eyes screwed up and kept wiping his binoculars with his sleeve as the snow fell. Folz stood, legs apart, impervious to the conditions. In his shaggy sheepskin he looked half man, half beast. Jean-Baptiste imagined that any flakes that had the temerity to fall on Folz simply fizzled away. Somebody passed around some brandy. A few meters away, a soldier laughed. This tiny sliver of hope, the likelihood that it wasn’t today that was marked for their death, had reanimated these living corpses. He thought that they were like starving beggars being thrown a single crust and felt something like embarrassment: suddenly they were revealing to each other how much they all really wanted to live.
Death, though, had always played a long game. Death could outwait any living creature; while their brief euphoria subsided under the weight of cold and ignorance, death, quite at home in snow, stayed close at hand, waiting for them to starve if they wouldn’t fight.
Blizzards, fog, squalls, and gales attacked both sides for days. First one, then four, then twenty men got the runs; the latrines were running over, and only the cold saved the men from being made sick by the stink. The soldier in the hole next to him crawled out at all hours and sat outside, bent over, groaning and occasionally belching, his greatcoat open to reveal his filthy uniform, his fists thrust into his stomach. After a while, he’d stumble off and then, in another while, return to his place, holding his belly as if he’d been bayoneted and was trying to keep his innards from spilling out, his sparse wet whiskers creating black slashes in his white face.