“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 was the 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 intelligent nation in the world, so went the refrain. Therefore she had nothing to learn from the boorish Germans and the crude Anglo-Saxons, or anybody else.

But alas it was not so, and now she had a million dead to prove it. Brave troops, who’d fought like lions. The finest attacking troops in the world, in Roland’s opinion. The British soldiers said so too.

It is we who let them down, he thought. We who prepared our army so poorly. We who misjudged the German plan, so obvious in retrospect. We who arranged a European world that could not avoid this war. We the rulers, with the power to destroy all that we love, and the stupidity to do it.