Verdun by Jankowski Paul;

Author:Jankowski, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2013-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

you above all, be very good, my little wife, think of nothing, think of me, of what I am enduring; that way you’ll be strong in the face of temptation.… Above all do not receive any soldiers at home, not for any reason, not for anything.

A longing to return expressed itself temporally as well, as nostalgia emerged from separation and the distant home came to embody the receding years of peace. In July censors noticed a spreading longing for the prewar among farmers from the Sarthe and the Mayenne trapped, as they saw it, in the “hellhole” of Verdun: “We were so happy before.”16

Ultimately, obviously, such sentiments could only end with the war itself. But in the meantime the civilian and military authorities could relieve some hardship and mitigate some resentment. By late June, when the Direction de l’arrière had made a determined effort to improve the quantities and varieties of food and drink, the men complained less and enthused more over the meals they were eating and the wine they were drinking. They wrote of enough bread, and sardines, and cheese, and jam, and three-quarters of a bottle of wine a day; and a month later of four courses with every meal and a liter of wine a day. They were twice as well fed as before, one of them wrote, and when the weather turned and the cold came back the culinary complaints did not.

The powers in place could do little about the weather. The theorem needed no demonstration: “morale,” one of the censors noted, “tends to rise and fall with the barometer.” Nonetheless, they strove to supplement their men’s natural defenses against the elements by sending more clothes and more blankets. These improved, too, along with the cuisine. When new galoshes—galoches—arrived, and gloves lined with rabbit fur, and woolen sweaters, and sheepskin for their overcoats, the men acknowledged the manna, and in the rare moments when all their creature comforts seemed assured they could wax almost dithyrambic: “nothing wants, we’re like princes.” Still, lined up in a trench with no roof between them and the elements, it was not long before their thoughts turned cold again.17

The authorities could deploy only two remedies for the psychological pains of separation: letters and leaves. The will to carry on might flag in the absence of any word, any sign, any parcel from home. Even when the news was bad, when the mail brought word of grief or melancholy in the family, it filled the silence with dialogue of a kind—“the letter, sole consolation.” Writing letters mattered as much as receiving them; among ten men at rest, an artillery lieutenant noticed, one would be reading and three writing letters; and mostly, the censors observed again and again, the men wrote not about the war but about the personal and mundane preoccupations that had traveled with them to the front and still pervaded their thoughts. The farmers among them worried constantly about the women in the fields. “Have you harvested the hay? Is the wheat good?”

More than letters, leaves bridged the gap.

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