Eleven Eleven

CHAPTER 10

8.45 a.m.

‘No talking,’ whispered Sergeant Franklin, ‘and watch where you step. I don’t want any falling over and giving us away to a sniper. You never know who might be in here. Hosking, you stay on point for now; I’ll be right behind you.’

Will watched the others respond. With some of the other sergeants and corporals the men would exchange glances, even look askance at their orders. Jim’s commands were met only by stern nods and brief murmurs of agreement. He noticed how the men would often bunch around Jim, as if being close to their sergeant offered them extra protection.

Jim checked in his pocket and brought out a small compass. ‘Any of you got one of these?’ he asked. ‘No? Then make sure you keep with me. It’s very easy to lose your direction in a wood, especially where it’s dense.’

Hosking took the lead without a word and the nine of them began to advance into the great green-and-brown shelter of the forest. The evergreens and deciduous trees made for a beautiful mixture. Some of the deciduous ones had shed now, with only a few tattered leaves remaining. But the evergreens offered dense cover for anyone who might be watching.

One by one they were swallowed by the forest, and Will immediately felt a chill as he moved into its shadow. How strange, he thought, that such a place of natural beauty should suddenly become so sinister. Will loved the woods back home in the Lune Valley – he’d spent half his childhood playing in them. He and his mates had built dens in the dense vegetation or hollowed-out tree trunks, and even camped out for the night. Being here, in such similar terrain, filled him with a sadness he could not immediately understand.

The early-morning mist had turned to a dank fog, which hung around the lower branches. There was a strange smell too, which Will recognised as gas. Not the intense, choking smell that came from a recently fallen shell, but the faint remains of an earlier attack. Will hated that mixture – fog and gas. From a distance it was difficult to tell, but the closer you got, the more you could make out the green tendrils in the grey fog.

Now the cold was getting to him. He began to fantasise about a proper breakfast. Bacon, eggs, sausages, two lovely crisp fried eggs done in butter. He was never going to eat porridge again in his life. His stomach gave a gurgle, so loud Ogden looked around and winked at him. But as he did so he tripped and fell to the ground with a clatter of belt buckles, rifle strap and rustling brown leaves.

Sergeant Franklin looked round with cold disapproval. Ogden would be on latrine duty as soon as they got back.

As they ventured further into the dark depths, an enormous shape loomed out of the trees, making Will shudder. A German warplane had crashed, and hung nose down in the bare branches of a great oak. It had been there for a few months now, by the look of it. The canvas fuselage was starting to decay, and green moss was growing along the bare wooden struts where the fabric had been torn away. Will looked at the cockpit and was relieved to see it was empty. He’d seen pilots leap from burning machines, preferring a crushing fall to a fiery death. This machine was burned up, with black soot and charred fabric around the engine and along the side of the cockpit. Maybe that’s what had happened here.

Even in its derelict state the machine still had a fascinating beauty. The propeller hub, with the splintered stubs of its blades, was painted with a bright red spiral, which matched the colour of the fuselage. Great black crosses adorned the wings and tail. British warplanes were never so gaudy. But now it looked like an immense bird of prey that had been hung upside down as a trophy.

The men all stared at this extraordinary sight. In the middle distance a bombardment started – shells falling in the far end of the forest at regular intervals, blue flashes filtering through the dense vegetation. The explosions seemed muffled, but they were still close enough to feel through the ground.

‘If they’re ours, someone needs a right bollocking,’ said Jim under his breath. ‘If they’re Fritz’s, then it means there’s none of their men in the forest. If they start falling any closer, we’ll move out.’

As they left the great carcass of the warplane, another sound disturbed them. Will looked up to see a plane flying overhead, so close he could clearly make out the white discs on the wheels of the undercarriage. It was a Yank. Will suppressed an urge to wave; he would never see him under the thick canopy of the wood.

Flying seemed such an extraordinary thing to him – to be able to take to the fresh blue sky and leave the squalor and the soggy cold behind, the trudging through mud, and the sleeping in barns or out in the open. What he would give to be able to go back to a base every night to sleep in a proper bed. Pilots seemed like mythical figures to Will. Earlier in the war, when he was still young enough to be taken in by those stories, he had read about the French ace Guynemer, who had flown so high he had been taken by the angels, or the English hero Albert Ball, who was said to have flown into a cloud and vanished. But Will had seen the burned-out skeletons of flying machines scattered around the battlefield, and occasionally the charred bodies of luckless pilots, and he remembered another story he’d been told at school, of Icarus the ancient Greek, flying too close to the sun, and he decided he might be safer down on the ground after all.

As the engine note faded and they began to delve further into the forest, Weale held up his hand for them to stop and listen. ‘Where are Binney and Moorhouse?’ he whispered.

‘I were just thinking that,’ said Jim. ‘Don’t tell me they’ve scarpered.’

The patrol retraced their steps. The two missing soldiers, who had been at the end of their line, were close by the plane, where they had all stopped to look. Binney lay on his side on the ground, as if asleep. Will noticed how smooth his face was. It was all too easy to imagine him as a young boy, waiting for his mother to come and kiss him goodnight.

Moorhouse was lying on his back. His eyes were open. He looked surprised.

They had both been shot through the head. Moorhouse was obviously dead, but Jim went over to Binney to check for a pulse. He shook his head. Weale knelt over Moorhouse’s body and closed his eyes. ‘Poor sod. Four years of this,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Four years.’

All at once Will felt a knot tighten in his gut. ‘We never even heard anything.’

‘He must have timed his shots with the artillery barrage,’ whispered Jim. ‘Clever bastard. Well, he’s stirred up some trouble for himself.’

He gathered his patrol together. Will could see the others felt as shaken as he was. ‘There’s a sniper here who’s firing whenever the shells drop. When you hear a shell, dive for cover – that’s when he’s going to fire. And when he cocks it up – he’s bound to mistime one, then that’s when we’ll get him.’

Jim went over to the bodies again to collect the men’s identity tags. Then he said, ‘I’ll take point. Franklin, you take second.’ Will always took a moment to register when Jim called him by his surname. But he liked the idea of being behind Jim, peering through the forest, looking out for signs, protecting his older brother.

Sergeant Franklin’s courage had given the men heart. A single sniper and a patrol. The odds were in their favour. He was probably up a tree somewhere. Once they heard him they’d hunt him down.