Michael Morpurgo - Morpurgo War Stories

“Y’ain’t a coward, are you?”

No, old woman, I am not, I am not.

Then the whistle goes, and I am up with the others and after them. We pour through the gap in the wire. They lie here so thick on the ground it is hard not to step on them. I have no pity for them, but no hatred either. They came to kill us, and we killed them. I look up. They are running from us as we go forward. We fire at will now, picking them off. We are across no-man’s-land before we know it. We find a way through their wire and leap down into their frontline trenches. I am a hunter seeking out my quarry, a quarry I will kill, but my quarry has gone. The trench is deserted.

Lieutenant Buckland is up on the parapet above us, screaming at us to follow him, that we’ve got them on the run. I follow. We all follow. He is not so much of a pipsqueak as we all thought. Everywhere I look, to my right, to my left, as far as I can see, we are advancing and I am a part of it and I feel suddenly exhilarated. But in front of us the enemy seems to have vanished. I am unsure what to do now. I look all around for Charlie, and cannot see him anywhere. That’s when the first shell comes screaming over. I throw myself down, flatten myself into the mud, as it explodes close behind me, deafening me instantly. After a while I force myself to lift up my head and look. Ahead of me I see us advancing still, and everywhere in front of us the flash of rifle fire, the spitting flame of machine guns. For a moment I think I am dead already. All is soundless, all is unreal. A silent storm of shelling rages about me. Before my eyes we are scythed down, blown apart, obliterated. I see men crying out but I hear nothing. It is as if I am not there, as if this horror cannot touch me.

They are stumbling back towards me now. I can’t see Charlie among them. The lieutenant grabs me and hauls me to my feet. He’s shouting at me, then turning me and pushing me back towards our trenches. I am trying to run with the others, trying to keep with them. But my legs are leaden and will not let me run. The lieutenant stays with me, urging me on, urging us all on. He is a good man. He’s right there alongside me when he’s hit. He drops to his knees and dies looking up at me. I see the light fade in his eyes. I watch him fall forward on his face. I do not know how I manage to get back after that, but I do. I find myself curled up in the dugout, and the dugout is half-empty. Charlie is not there. He has not come back.

At least I can hear again now, even if it is mostly the ringing in my head. Pete has news of Charlie. He says he’s sure he saw him on the way back from the German trenches, hobbling, using his rifle as a stick, but all right. That gives me some fragile hope, but it is hope that ebbs away as the hours pass. As I lie there I relive each and every horror. I see the puzzled look on the lieutenant’s face as he kneels there, trying to speak to me. I see a thousand silent screams. To drive these visions away I tell myself all manner of reassuring tales about Charlie: how Charlie must be out there in some crater, only waiting for the clouds to cover the moon before he crawls back; how he’s got himself lost and has landed up somewhere down the line with another regiment and will find his way back to us in the morning — it happens all the time. My mind races and will not let me rest. There is no shelling to interrupt my thoughts. Outside the world has fallen silent. Both armies lie exhausted in their trenches and bleeding to death.

By stand-to the next morning I knew for sure that Charlie would not be coming back, that all my stories had been just that, stories. Pete and Nipper and the others had tried to convince me that he might still be alive. But I knew he was not. I was not grieving. I was numb inside, as void of all feeling as the hands that clutched my rifle. I looked out over no-man’s-land where Charlie had died. They lay as if they’d been heaped against the wire by the wind, and Charlie, I knew, was one of them. I wondered what I would write to Molly and Mother. I could hear Mother’s voice in my head, hear her telling Big Joe how Charlie would not be coming back, how he had gone to Heaven to be with Father and Bertha. Big Joe would be sad. He would rock. He would hum Oranges and Lemons mournfully up his tree. But after a few days his faith would comfort him. He would believe absolutely that Charlie was up there in the blue of Heaven, high above the church tower somewhere. I envied him that. I could no longer even pretend to myself that I believed in a merciful god, nor in a heaven, not any more, not after I had seen what men could do to one another. I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

That night, like a man sleepwalking, I got up to take my turn on sentry duty. The sky was filled with stars. Molly knew the stars well — the Plough, the Milky Way, the Pole Star — she’d often tried to teach me them all when we were out poaching. I tried to remember, tried to identify them in amongst the millions, and failed. As I was looking up in wonder at the immensity and beauty of it all, I found myself almost believing in Heaven again. I picked one bright star in the west to be Charlie and another next to him. That was Father. They were together looking down on me. I wished then I had told Charlie about how Father had died, for there would be no secrets between us now. I shouldn’t have kept it from him. So, unspeaking, I told him then, saw him glisten and wink at me, and knew he had understood and did not blame me. Then I heard Charlie’s voice in my head. “Don’t go all dreamy on lookout, Tommo,” he was saying. “You’ll fall asleep. You can get shot for that.” I widened my eyes, blinked them hard, and took in a deep gulp of cold air to wake me up.

Only moments later I saw something move out beyond the wire. I listened. There was still a ringing in my ears, so I couldn’t be sure of it, but I thought I could hear someone, a voice, and a voice that was not inside my head. It was a whisper. “Hey! Anyone there? It’s me, Charlie Peaceful. D Company. I’m coming in. Don’t shoot.” Perhaps I was already asleep and deep in a wonderful dream I wanted to be true. But the voice came again, louder this time. “What’s the matter with you lot? Are you all fast asleep or what? It’s Charlie, Charlie Peaceful.”

From under the wire a dark shape shifted and moved towards me. Not a dream, not one of my make-believe stories. It was Charlie. I could see his face now and he could see mine. “Tommo, you dozy beggar, you. Give us a hand, will you?” I grabbed him and tumbled him down into the trench. “Am I glad to see you!” he said. We hugged one another then. I don’t think we ever had before. I cried, and tried unsuccessfully to hide it, until I felt him crying too.

“What happened?” I asked.

“They shot me in the foot, can you believe it? Shot right through my boot. I bled like a pig. I was on my way back and I passed out in some shell hole. Then by the time I woke up all you lot had gone off and left me. I had to stay put till nightfall. Seems like I’ve been crawling all bloody night.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I can’t feel a thing,” Charlie said. “But then, I can’t feel the other foot either — I’m frozen stiff. Don’t you worry, Tommo. I’ll be right as rain.”

They stretchered him to hospital that night, and I did not see him again until they pulled us out of the line a few days later. Pete and I went to see him as soon as we could. He was sitting up in his bed and grinning all over his face. “It’s good in here,” he said. “You want to try it sometime. Three decent meals a day, nurses, no mud, and a nice long way from Mister Fritz.”

“How’s the foot?” I asked him.

“Foot? What foot?” He patted his leg. “That’s not a foot, Tommo. That’s my ticket home. Some nice, kind Mister Fritz gave me the best present he could, a ticket home to Blighty. They’re sending me to a hospital back home. It’s a bit infected. Lots of bones broken, they said. It’ll mend, but it’ll take an operation, and then I’ve got to rest it up. So they’re packing me off tomorrow.”