Paris: The Novel

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 youngfellow, 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 wasthe 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