August 1914

The dogs were lost without their masters. They couldn’t understand why the men were absent for so long. For fear of them wandering the streets and catching rabies, people tied their dogs up most of the time and did not let them stray far from their houses. No more long hikes for them, no more days spent outside following the men across the fields or into the woods hunting. In Orcières, dogs were never allowed inside houses; on the contrary, they usually kept well away. But now they crept timidly towards the door. It was obvious from the way they looked inside that they did not understand why the men never came out any more. They couldn’t even smell them now. And it was the same with the deserted stables when they looked there. With the oxen gone to the front and the sheep still up in the summer pasture because no one dared bring them down, the dogs felt as if part of their world had vanished without explanation or consolation. Instead of the words of their masters there was the howling of the big cats. Each time the lions and tigers growled up above, the dogs lowered their heads, afraid. They were so frightened by the noise that they no longer dared look up at the hill.

Since the lion tamer had moved up there, everything had felt wrong. It was he who had brought the storms. Before the arrival of the German and his big cats, the sky had never trembled under the weight of such terrifying clouds, there had never been such crazy storms of hailstones the size of ice cubes. And no one could remember such squalls of rain. From the middle of September onwards thick, heavy rain fell for hours at a time, then suddenly stopped. The clouds vanished to be replaced by sun and clear skies. But the next day the thermometer would go wild and the barometer plummet again. The beginning of summer had seen luminous, cloudless skies, but now they were unrecognisable, violent and roiling, flinging down treacherous hail, leading people to make dire predictions that the weather was broken, that winter would be freezing, that wolves would come out and that the war would never end.

‘It’s the bombs that are destroying everything. Apparently they’re bombing each other all day and all night long. Swarms of bombs, thousands of them, ripping through the sky and throwing the stars off course. Nothing will ever be the same again.’