The gas lamps at Le Coq Rouge threw everything in amber and shadow, the kind of light that made whatever you were doing feel like it mattered more than it did. I had my hands around a cold beer, the glass sweating onto my fingers, and Pierre was halfway through a story about a model he'd sketched the previous evening — the details getting more embellished with each telling, the way his stories always did — and Marcel was already laughing before the punchline arrived, that big barrel laugh of his that came from somewhere below his ribs, and Jacques was trying to look scandalised and failing, and for that particular moment everything was exactly as it should have been.
Montmartre in summer smelled of warm stone and cigarette smoke and someone always cooking something in the apartments above. The bar was full, the way it always was on a weeknight, workers and artists and clerks and the particular breed of Parisian who considers a bar stool a legitimate office. I'd been coming here since I was twenty, which meant six years of the same tables, the same barman, the same smell of spilled wine soaking into old wood. It felt permanent. The way things do before they aren't.
The door banged open and a newsboy tumbled through it, fourteen at most, face red and shining with the particular excitement of someone delivering news too large for their body to contain.
"Extra! Extra! Germano-Hungry invades Sarbiane! War declared — the Republic is mobilising! "
The bar went quiet. Not all at once — it happened in a wave, table by table, as heads turned and the silence spread. The boy was already holding up papers, people reaching for them, and for a moment the only sounds were the rustle of newsprint and the clink of someone setting down a glass very carefully.
Marcel snatched one. We huddled around him — Pierre leaning over his shoulder, Jacques pushing his glasses up his nose to read, me standing at the back trying to see over Pierre's arm. The headline was enormous, the ink still smelling fresh:
INVASION. THE GREAT EMPIRE CROSSES THE BORDER. RUSSIA MOBILISES. THE REPUBLIC AT WAR.
The boy was talking to anyone who'd listen, breathless and important: "Russia's joined the Front against the Empire, messieurs. And the Empire tried pushing across our border — failed, our boys held them back — but it's war proper now. Official. They're calling all men of fighting age."
Then the bar erupted.
Vive la République! Someone started it and others joined, and within thirty seconds half the room was on their feet, glasses raised, men who'd been strangers two minutes ago clapping each other on the back with the sudden brotherhood that catastrophe manufactures. Curses aimed at the Empire, at the Emperor personally, at the Germano-Hungry generals who apparently thought Europa was theirs to march across at will.
Pierre slammed his palm on the table, nearly upsetting my beer, his eyes lit with something that I recognised and slightly distrusted — the look he got when a painting was going well, that absolute certainty that he was doing exactly the right thing.
"This is it," he said. "We go together. A pals battalion — friends training together, fighting together. You don't leave your mates to do this without you."
Marcel was already nodding, rolling his shoulders the way he did before he got under a heavy engine. "For the Republic. For our homes." He looked at me. "Adolphine?"
I stared into my beer. The foam was settling, the way it does when you've been holding the glass too long without drinking from it.
I was twenty-six years old. I worked in a textile mill on the edge of the 18th arrondissement, feeding fabric through looms for ten hours a day so that people with money could wear things that were soft. I had a room above a bakery that was too hot in summer and too cold in winter. I had these three men around this table, who were the closest thing I had to family since my mother died three years ago, and my father before that. I had no wife. No children. Nothing waiting for me at home except the same tomorrow as today.
The papers said it was grim. The papers also said it would be swift.
"Hell," I said. "Why not. For the Republic."
We drained our glasses. Four mugs meeting in the middle of the table, foam sloshing over the rims, the decision made in the way that the worst decisions often are — quickly, with drinks in hand, surrounded by noise that makes everything feel more possible than it is.
---
The recruitment office on the Boulevard Haussmann had a queue stretching half a block by the time we arrived that afternoon. Bakers still in their whites, a banker in a good suit that was already going to be wrong for what came next, students, labourers, a priest who stood in line with his hands folded and his eyes elsewhere. The sergeant behind the desk had the face of a man who had been doing this since morning and expected to be doing it until midnight, stamping papers with a rhythm that had stopped being deliberate and become automatic.
He didn't look up when we reached the desk.
"Names. Ages. Fit?"
We gave them. He stamped. Four thuds of the stamp, four futures redirected.
"Pals battalion. Report tomorrow, oh-six-hundred. Basics for one week. Then you ship." He finally looked up, briefly, with eyes that had seen a hundred versions of us that day. "Don't be late."
We walked back through Paris in the long summer evening, the city golden and oblivious around us, café tables full, children on bicycles, a woman selling flowers outside the Métro who smiled at us as we passed. I looked at all of it and tried to memorise it without letting myself know that was what I was doing.
---
A week of training is not enough to make a soldier. A week of training is barely enough to make a man dangerous to himself, let alone useful against an enemy. We learned this quickly, under instructors who had the thankless job of compressing months of knowledge into days and knew it, their voices carrying an urgency that had nothing to do with enthusiasm.
We drilled in mud that the summer rain churned fresh every morning. Marching until the blisters burst and then marching on the burst blisters. Bayonet practice against straw dummies that didn't fight back, which we would later understand was the least realistic preparation possible. Lectures delivered at speed about gas masks — how to get one on in under ten seconds, how to check the seal, what happens if you don't — accompanied by photographs that the instructor held up briefly and then put away, as if too much exposure to them would be counterproductive.
One afternoon a veteran came to speak to us. He was not old — perhaps thirty-five — but he moved like an older man, carefully, as if certain parts of him required deliberate management. He talked about the Empire's mage divisions without drama or embellishment, which was somehow more frightening than if he'd tried to scare us.
"They enchant the ammunition," he said. "Some rounds detonate on impact — not the casing, the spell inside it. Hits a man and the round flowers open, tears a cavity the size of your fist. Others track. You break cover, the round corrects. You dive left, it follows. I've seen men shot from behind cover they'd reached safely, three seconds after they were behind it." He paused. "The flying constructs carry mages who can direct enchanted fire on a moving target from two hundred metres in the air. They don't look like aeroplanes. They're quieter. You often don't know they're overhead until someone near you is down."
He looked around the room at our faces.
"I'm not telling you this to frighten you," he said. "I'm telling you so that the first time you see it, you'll know what it is and you won't freeze."
Pierre, sitting beside me, said nothing. He had his sketchbook out and was drawing the veteran's face, which was his way of processing things he didn't know how to say out loud.
---
We boarded at Gare de l'Est on a Thursday morning. The platform was a sea of khaki and tears, mothers holding sons for slightly too long, sweethearts gripping hands through carriage windows as the locomotive exhaled great clouds of steam that drifted over everything and made it all look briefly soft and impermanent. A small boy was running alongside one of the carriages as it pulled out, waving, and whoever he was waving at was waving back, and then the platform ended and the boy stopped and the train didn't.
Inside our carriage it smelled of sweat and tobacco and someone's sausage. We played cards for the first two hours. Pierre drew. Marcel slept sitting up the way only large men can, deeply and immediately. Jacques read, or pretended to — I noticed he turned the same page three times.
I watched the country change through the window.
Farmland first, France doing what France does in summer — gold and green and unhurried, farmhouses drowsing in the heat, a river catching light in the distance. Then the farmland thinned. Then the villages grew quieter, emptier, the people we glimpsed at level crossings watching the train pass with expressions that were not quite what you'd expect — not waving, not hostile, just watching, with the careful stillness of people who have decided to wait and see.
Then the horizon began to flicker.
At first I genuinely thought it was a storm. The flashes had the quality of lightning — sudden, white-orange, gone before you were sure you'd seen them. Then the sound reached us, low and continuous, felt more than heard, a vibration in the floor of the carriage that had nothing to do with the tracks. The windows rattled in their frames.
"That's artillery," Jacques said quietly, his book closed in his lap now.
Nobody argued with him.
Pierre had stopped drawing. Marcel was awake, forearms on his knees, looking at the floor. The card game at the table behind us had dissolved without anyone formally ending it, the cards still scattered across the surface, a hand of seven showing face-up that nobody had played.
I pressed my forehead against the glass and watched the horizon flash and thought about the textile mill — the rhythm of the looms, the smell of the dye vats, the particular ache in your shoulders after ten hours of it, the way the light came through the high factory windows in the late afternoon and turned the threads of fabric briefly into something almost beautiful before the shift ended and the lights went on and it was just fabric again.
Outside, the flashes were closer. A column of smoke climbed from somewhere beyond a treeline, black and deliberate, the kind of smoke that means something substantial has stopped existing. Two men on horseback rode across a field we were passing, going fast in the opposite direction, which told you something about what was ahead.
Pierre looked at me. His face had the expression it got when a painting had gone wrong past saving — not panic, something quieter than that. Recognition.
"We did a stupid thing," he said.
"Yes," I said.
The train hurtled on. Nobody disagreed. The artillery shook the windows in their frames and we sat with it, four men who had made a decision over beer in a warm bar in Montmartre and were now sitting inside the consequences, watching the sky ahead light up in oranges and reds that had nothing to do with sunset.
I thought about what the veteran had said. You often don't know they're overhead until someone near you is down.
I thought about Pierre's laugh. Marcel's engine-sized hands. Jacques turning the same page three times.
The train didn't slow down.