Eleven Eleven

CHAPTER 4

3.00 a.m.

Despite his exhaustion, Will was not going to sleep again that night. He felt restless and couldn’t help dwelling on how he had ended up here at the Front, when he could easily have spent another two years at home.

It had been one of those warm spring days in early April and Alice’s father, Dr Hayworth, had invited Will out on a family picnic. Dr Hayworth knew he and Alice were sweethearts, but Will was forbidden to visit their house. Maybe, he thought, this invite was a sign that they were coming round to the idea.

They had driven out to the Lune Valley with another car containing Alice’s uncle and her cousins, along with their pet parrot. Will had never been in a car before and he felt light-headed with excitement. It seemed against the laws of nature to be able to drive along that fast, without a team of horses. Dr Hayworth took bends at alarming speed, and when he ground the gears and cursed under his breath Will and Alice caught each other’s eye and had a fit of the giggles.

After they’d eaten a lunch of cold roast chicken and potato salad, the women and girls of the party sat around on deckchairs chatting. Will was surprised to see they even let Pru the parrot perch on top of her cage. ‘Why doesn’t she fly away?’ he asked Alice.

‘She’s had her wings clipped, silly!’ she said.

Will had hoped he and Alice would be able to go for a riverside walk. Instead, he was approached by Dr Hayworth. ‘We need to have a talk, my lad,’ he said, and guided him away from the others.

Hayworth came straight to the point. The German spring offensive was making great inroads into the Allied front line. All the gains of the previous three years had been lost, and now even Paris was threatened. ‘If you’re man enough to court my daughter,’ he said, pointedly repeating the words of a recruitment poster Will had seen around town, ‘then you’re man enough to fight for her honour against the Hun.’

Will protested he was not old enough to join up. But Hayworth told him that that hadn’t stopped those two valiant boys Boothby and Solomons. Both had honoured the school with their warrior spirit. Now the war with Russia was over and the Hun had only the Western Front to fight on, the British army would need every soldier they could get.

So Will went along to the recruiting office in Lancaster Town Hall and spent half an hour being measured and filling in forms. He told them he was eighteen. ‘Course you are, son,’ said the recruiting sergeant with a wink.

Alice’s face fell when Will told her. He’d thought she’d be proud of him. She pleaded with him not to do it, but it was too late, he’d already signed the papers. That was when she told him her parents had always chided her for taking a shine to him, a boy whose own father worked in a textile warehouse. Will realised then that Dr Hayworth’s real motive was to get him away from Alice.

His father congratulated him for being a brave lad, but his mother said nothing at all, before disappearing into the kitchen to prepare the tea. After he had gone to bed, he heard them arguing. Will wasn’t sure what had stopped them going down to the recruiting station and telling them he was too young. He half wished now that they had.

Will’s other brother, Stanley, had gone missing at Passchendaele. Will’s mum had said not knowing what had happened to him was worse than finding out. So when one of Stanley’s mates came home on leave, Will’s dad got him drunk down at the Weaver’s Arms. The lad told him that Stan had drowned. ‘He’s not a bloody sailor!’ spluttered Will’s dad. ‘How can you drown in the army?’

It had rained like cats and dogs for weeks before the battle began. Passchendaele was a vast sea of sucking mud. They had gone on a raid in the middle of the night. Stanley had been sucked into the mud and sank. By the time they got to him, he’d gone under. It wasn’t the heroic end gallant soldiers dreamed of.

When Will went out, they got Jim to have a word with the commander of his company, to make sure Will would serve alongside his brother. Lillie Franklin was convinced that if he had Jim to look after him he would be safe.



Will was sent to Grantham in Lincolnshire for his basic training. The weeks he spent there passed in a blur, but the answer to a question one of the recruits asked about taking prisoners had stuck in his head: ‘Well, lads, every prisoner is another mouth to feed. It’s another day’s rations. Think about that when you’ve got some Hun yelling “Kamerad” at you.’ ‘Friend’, that meant. That’s what they said when they wanted to surrender.

He never resented the constant cleaning and polishing and the bone-weary exhaustion of his training. The whole point of it, he told himself, was to enable him to survive. The thought of gas terrified him – especially when they had to put on their clumsy ‘gaspirators’, as the men jokingly called them, and pass through a hut full of the stuff. Will found he could breathe all right, but the mask was hellishly uncomfortable and made his face sweat and itch. And his clothes stank for the next three days.

He paid close attention to the ins and outs of the Lee-Enfield rifle and its firing mechanism, the workings of the Lewis machine gun, the correct use of the Mills hand grenade and, somewhat queasily, ‘the offensive spirit of the bayonet’. Fighting at close quarters was what worried him most. The prospect of having to shove a bayonet into another soldier’s gut made him feel sick. Bombs, rifles and machine guns all did their work at a distance. With a bayonet you had to get right up close. His instructors were quite plain about where the best places to strike were: the throat, the chest and the groin. The bayonet, they declared, was the best possible weapon for close-quarter combat. If you fired your rifle when fighting hand to hand, you stood every chance of the shot passing straight through your opponent’s body and hitting your comrade. Bayonets were the ideal weapon. It didn’t take long for Will to realise that his German adversaries were almost certainly being told the same thing.



In early June they were ready. Until he’d joined the army, Alice and the teachers at his school were the poshest people he’d known. Now, on his last day in Grantham, they were herded into a large hall and given a pep talk by a portly colonel with a bristly moustache who was even posher. He said ‘hice’ and ‘rhum’ instead of ‘house’ and ‘room’, and Will had some difficulty understanding him. The colonel warned them of the penalties of breaching the ‘Army Act’. This would lead to ‘trouble’, as he put it, and even ‘shooting at the hands of your own comrades’. He told them that fear was not a crime, but an inability to control that fear was a contagious disease that needed to be isolated and cured with the utmost severity. Will left the hall feeling terrified, and unwilling to catch the eye of any of his fellow recruits.

Next morning, on a breezy sunny day, they took the ferry across the Channel to Calais and then a short train journey to the huge training camp at Étaples. Here, the new arrivals were billeted right next to a Casualty Clearing Station while they awaited their first taste of the front line. This temporary hospital was a vast camp – taking up maybe half a square mile of tents and wooden huts.

They were immediately put to work stretchering the wounded off the trains that came in twice a day. The gas casualties were the worst. Gasping for breath, coughing up bloody lumps, their uniforms still stinking of the gas that had got them. Carrying the shell-blast victims was a nightmare too. They screamed every time they were moved, as shattered bones grated together. Right next door to the Casualty Clearing Station was a vast cemetery – thousands and thousands of graves. It might have been practical, but it was hardly a reassuring sight.

When he got to the Front and told Jim about the Clearing Station cemetery, his brother waved him away in scorn. ‘Toughen up, sunshine,’ he had said. ‘That’s nothing. When we came up through the reserve trenches for the big push at the Somme, they marched us past two open graves, great big ones, dug that morning for what was to come. I yelled out “Eyes left” to stop the men seeing them, but I don’t think I fooled anyone.’

Now, as Will lay on the same cold, dark earth, he tried not to think about those burial pits, and all the men whose bodies had been placed in them. He had been three months now at the Front. Every minute, every hour, was a battle against the bullet, shell or bayonet that fate had written his name on.