Eleven Eleven

CHAPTER 2

2.00 a.m. Close to the British front line

William Franklin could sense the earth tremble beneath his feet. It wasn’t the irregular tremors of an artillery bombardment, or the solid rhythmic stomp of a long column of marching men. This was a deep, heavy rumble – the sort that only a large armoured vehicle would make.

Will felt himself surfacing, like a diver coming up from dark depths. He was so tired he just wanted to stay down in his underwater world for ever. The nearer he came to consciousness, the more he became aware of the soggy cold of that November early morning. It had been raining all of the previous day and his thick trench coat and woollen tunic had soaked up the moisture from the soil.

The men had searched for three hours for a barn or farmhouse to rest in, but every one they had come to had been bursting with other British soldiers. After four years stuck in the trenches, Will’s ‘King’s Own’ Royal Lancaster Regiment was on the move.

His platoon had been marching all day and were close to exhaustion. Sometime after midnight their commander, Lieutenant Richardson, decided the roadside would have to do. There was a raised parapet of earth either side, which offered slightly better protection than sleeping out in the open. Will had fallen asleep almost as soon as he unbuckled his pack and laid down his rifle. Now his brief rest was being disturbed.

Will could hear a grinding, clanking sound – so loud he could feel its vibration in his chest. He saw the lieutenant running down the road towards the vehicle, shouting and waving his arms. Will was sorry to see it was him. Richardson had taken the first watch, as he usually did, so that meant they had been asleep for less than an hour.

In the gloom he could make out the silhouette of a single British armoured tractor with caterpillar tracks, pulling a large artillery piece – a heavy howitzer, by what little he could see of it. Will and two of the other boys in his platoon had watched one of them in action the other day – until the artillery commander told them to clear off.

The engine cut abruptly and Lieutenant Richardson’s angry voice carried clearly through the night air.

‘There’s a platoon of men by the side of the road. What made you think it was safe to drive this vehicle down here without checking what was in front of you?’

‘Sorry, sir,’ said a gruff voice. ‘Been ordered to take this up the line, sir, under cover of darkness, sir.’

Will recognised the insolence in the driver’s voice. Richardson was barely eighteen – the age Will himself was pretending to be – and had barely started shaving. Richardson was making a good job of being a lieutenant, but beneath the uniform and the officer’s bearing and authority, he was still a schoolboy. Will knew his sort from the Officers’ Training Corps parades back at home. Will liked him though.

The smell of burning tobacco wafted down the road and caught in his nose. The driver must have a snout on the go. The others in Will’s platoon had been disturbed too and some of them were sitting up and instinctively reaching for their Players or Woodbines. Lighter flames and the brief flare of matches lit up faces etched with dirt and exhaustion.

‘Settle yourselves, men,’ said Richardson. ‘We just have to let this half-track past. Then you can get back to sleep.’

The platoon shuffled up the side of the road. Will hated to move. Even in the coldest, dampest spots, if you stayed still, your body heat lent a grudging warmth to the earth and your damp clothes. But if you stirred, the cold bit like shards of broken glass.

The half-track edged forward, close enough now for Will to taste the exhaust in the back of his throat. As it passed, he felt the warmth from the engine on his nose and cheeks. The meagre heat stirred a mad impulse in him. As the caterpillar tracks clanked past, mere inches from his feet, he realised how easy it would be to stretch out a foot and give himself a ‘Blighty injury’. That’s what the men called the wounds that got you sent back to Blighty – Britain. He stretched his foot out, right to the rim of the metal track.

It was worth it, surely. Will’s mind was racing now. Just do it. A crushed foot would have him stretchered to the rear and on a boat back to England. He’d be home within a week. A warm hospital ward. Three hot meals a day. He could sleep as much as he liked. And he would live to see the end of the war. The tractor passed and now the howitzer lumbered after it, its broad armour-plated wheels churning up the muddy road.

Will looked at those wheels with trepidation. It would hurt like hell, and he’d walk with a crutch for the rest of his life. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Watch that foot there, lad,’ whispered Weale, one of the older men in the platoon.

The huge gun slipped in the mud, and the wheel lurched closer to the resting men. Weale pulled Will back just as he hurriedly drew his legs up. The metal plates left deep imprints in the ground right next to him. The driver gunned his engine, trying to gain traction in the soft ground, and then the steady chug of the tractor faded into the distance.

‘Lucky escape there, lad,’ whispered Weale in his ear. ‘Double lucky. If you had caught your leg, they might have thought it deliberate. Boys have been shot fer less.

‘Not that I thought that’s what you were doing of course,’ Weale said with a wink. He patted Will on the back and went back to join his friend Moorhouse. Will’s heart was racing, but he knew Weale wouldn’t say anything. He liked those two. They’d both been out in France since 1914. If they could survive four years of it, maybe he could too.

Jim Franklin was looking for a man to relieve Richardson for the next hour. Will turned his back on his brother and prayed he wouldn’t pick him. Cold and wet as he was, Will was wretchedly weary and desperately needed to rest. The platoon sergeant was careful not to give any of his men the slightest reason to suspect his younger brother had an easier time than the rest of them. Will was also keenly aware that Jim was still angry with him for coming out here in the first place. His mother and father had already lost a son to this war, and Will was only sixteen.

‘Battersby, you first, then Uttley,’ said Jim. ‘Uttley, you can come and get me at oh five hundred.’

Will was safe. At least for the next three hours. He wrapped his trench coat tight around his body and tried to settle. The rain was holding off for now and he began to drift in and out of sleep. Far above he could hear a persistent hum. It sounded like an insect – but it could only be a distant aeroplane. He wondered how the pilots ever managed to find their way back to base on a dark night.

He glanced over to see his brother a few feet away giving instructions to the night watch. Since coming out to France Jim had grown a carapace of steel along with a great bristly moustache. Will understood well why his brother had had to change. How else did you keep a soldier out in no-man’s-land in a forward observation post in the middle of the night, with his head and shoulders above the parapet, where he could catch a stray bullet or be snatched by an enemy patrol at any moment? The men in Jim’s squad had to be more frightened of their sergeant than they were of the enemy.

Shortly after Will had arrived in C Company, someone had raided the hamper in the Regimental Aid Post. All the comforts for wounded men – the brandy, the cocoa, the Oxo, even the biscuits – had been taken. Jim had called his platoon to order and told them that unless the goods were returned in the next hour, the whole lot of them would be on night patrol, every night, until they were. It worked.

Another time Will had seen Jim screaming in the face of a young lad who had completely lost his bottle. He was cowering in a trench and crying hysterically, just before they were meant to go over the top. Jim had got him out with the rest of them when the whistle blew. The boy was caught by a machine gun a couple of minutes later.

‘He had to go with us. Redcaps would have done for him if he’d stayed in the trench,’ Jim told Will afterwards, when they were alone. During an attack, the Military Police combed the start lines just after Z-Hour. And all the troops had been made aware that any man who stayed behind would be shot on the spot.

Now Will’s stomach was rumbling and he began to wish he smoked. The others said it stopped you feeling hungry, but whenever he tried a cigarette he coughed his lungs out and the others would laugh and thump him on the back a bit too enthusiastically.

Will liked to stick with the older soldiers when he could. He felt safer with them and enjoyed their banter. He picked their slang up quick enough. ‘Cushy’ for easy, ‘char’ for tea – words they had brought back from colonial service in India. There was the newly minted slang from France too, like ‘boko’ for a lot, a comic pronunciation of beaucoup, and ‘San Fairy Anne’ – it doesn’t matter – from Ça ne fait rien. But he liked the English slang words the best – like ‘gasper’ for cigarette, and ‘bung’ for the tasteless cheese they had in their iron rations, because it was said to ‘bung you up’.

But he could sense their sneers when he used those words – he was trying too hard. And he was Sergeant Franklin’s brother. They were all right with Will, but he was never really going to be one of them.

He tried to sleep, but he could only doze. He knew they were somewhere near the town of Mons – the place where the British had fought with the German army in the first days of the war. It had taken them over four years to get back here. Four whole years.

In the four months he had been on the Western Front Will had advanced far enough through France and into Belgium to notice how the buildings had changed. Even in the shattered villages he could tell that the houses were more like pictures he had seen at school of Amsterdam or other Dutch places. He wondered what the buildings in Germany would look like.

The thought of entering Germany gave Will a glimmer of confidence but it didn’t take his mind off the fact that they were due to attack the town of Saint-Libert in the morning. First light didn’t feel too far away, and Will always felt a sickening pit-of-the-stomach fear when he knew he was going to have to fight. Some of the others said he was ‘windy’ and that it was stupid to worry about it.

‘Yer could get killed sitting at the side of the road having a cuppa,’ they said, ‘if a shell’s got yer name on it.’

Jim had taken him to one side and told him men like that were just bragging. ‘Everyone gets frightened before a battle, Will, even me,’ he whispered. ‘If yer not frightened, yer get careless. Being frightened is good. You make sure you’re frightened when we have to fight. You’ll stay alive that way.’

After another few minutes the cold overtook Will’s tiredness and he sat up. In the sky a parachute flare floated slowly down. It was too far away to cast any light over their own position but close enough to make him realise they could be in the thick of the fighting in less than an hour.

Another kind of noise reached him now. Far to the east he heard the metallic grind of wheels on tracks. He guessed they were troop trains – German reinforcements for their front line. Hearing the distant shunting and creaking brought back sudden memories of home. Sounds of trains in the night while he was tucked up snug in bed. He thought of his room back in Lancaster, in his family’s terraced house with its fine Minton tiles. He could almost taste the bread his mother baked every morning, and the comforting smell of the coal-fired range in the kitchen. What he’d give for a slice of that bread with butter and his mum’s home-made raspberry jam. His stomach lurched and gurgled.

He tried hard to steer his mind away from food, and thought instead of Alice. He carried a tatty photograph of her in his tunic pocket – wrapped in greaseproof paper to protect it from the damp. He was so familiar with it he did not often get it out to look at. She was staring stiffly into the camera, her face an enigma – neither smiling nor scowling. Will often wondered what she was thinking when that shot was taken.

He could picture her in Lancaster Royal Grammar School’s assembly hall, playing at the great black grand piano they had, after most of the boys had gone home. Will had been a pupil there, before all this. He often stayed late to work in the library. Alice was the headmaster’s daughter. He would listen to her play, lingering at the hall entrance so she wouldn’t notice him. She always stopped the minute she knew he was there.

A great thunderous explosion rent the night air – and a billowing flash lit up the sky. All of the men sat up at once. They reached for their rifles and anxiously scanned the surrounding area. ‘What’s Fritz up to?’ said Battersby.

A series of smaller explosions followed. Like lightning and thunder, they saw the flashes first; then the sound rolled over a few moments later.

Sergeant Franklin loomed out of the dark and told them all to stand down. ‘Nothing to worry about. Sounds like an ammunition dump or a supply train,’ he said. ‘Maybe Fritz got careless with a shell. Or maybe one of our pilot boys dropped a bomb on them.’ He gave a little chuckle. ‘That’ll keep ’em occupied for a while.’

After a while, Will heard the creaking and clanking of trains from the German lines start up again. There were men and boys over there, disembarking on to platforms or sidings. Maybe they were as frightened as he was. He hoped so.