He imagined his sister’s face as he returned to the village. He could picture how pleased Gretl would be to see him. Now the war was over, maybe he could find work playing the piano in the halls and taverns in Berlin. And maybe, when Gretl was a little older, she could sing alongside him.
His pace picked up. He felt a vigour he had not felt for weeks – he was going home.
The sun poked out for a brief moment, and Axel felt its warmth on his face. He swallowed the smooth chocolate, thinking he had never tasted anything quite so delicious. He broke another piece and let it melt on his tongue, stopping to savour the moment. He decided then and there he was going to eat the whole bar. When he got back to the German lines, he certainly wasn’t going to share this with strangers!
On the top floor of his house on the edge of the town, Georges de Winne squinted through the sights of his rifle. When the Germans went last night, he had finally plucked up the courage to steal a few rounds of ammunition from a pack they had left in the square. The German boy was at the edge of his range, he reckoned, but the sudden burst of sunlight made it easier to draw a bead on him. And, for the moment, he was standing still. Perfect. He wasn’t going to let that Boche go; he didn’t care what age he was. Four years they’d lived in his house and eaten his food. He felt a mounting rage – one that he had nursed and nurtured over the long years of occupation. De Winne held his breath and his finger tightened around the trigger.
When Axel vanished from sight, Will turned his attention again to Eddie. He was asleep or unconscious. Where was the ambulance? Will tried to shake him awake. Failing to rouse him, he ran off to look for medical orderlies. It had been over half an hour since the first orderly had seen them.
Will couldn’t find anyone from the Medical Corps so he decided to look for an ambulance himself, searching each side street for a dirty brown vehicle with a red cross on the side. After three minutes, he saw one in the distance, close to the road that led past the railway station, and ran over to talk to the driver. There were orderlies inside, and he could even see the white headscarf of a nurse. ‘We have a pilot, badly injured, on the far side of the square,’ he said, trying not to sound too upset. ‘He needs attention. I can’t rouse him.’
The driver patted a hand on his and told him to return to the injured man. The road ahead was blocked with fallen debris, he explained. They would find another route and come to attend to this man as soon as possible. Will was to wave and identify his position as soon as the ambulance found a way into the square.
Will rushed back, desperately hoping he might find Jim on the way. Eddie was still unconscious but his breathing was regular. And his colour looked better than it had been. Maybe he was just exhausted. Will put a hand on his shoulder. ‘They’re coming, Eddie,’ he said. ‘You hold on a little longer.’
A minute or two later he heard the judder of an internal combustion engine and saw the nose of the ambulance peep from a nearby side street. Will cheered with relief and stood up to wave them over.
At that moment a loud blast ripped through the square close to where he was standing. In an instant Will felt the heat of the explosion burn his face, then a sharp stab – like the blade of a knife at the top of his forehead – then nothing.
Over on the far side of town, Georges de Winne is startled by the sudden blast. The bullet he releases merely grazes the side of Axel’s head.
Axel falls to the ground. There is a sharp pain just above his ear, but he quickly realises he has not been seriously injured. Gathering his thoughts, he runs as fast as he can. Bullets punch the ground around him, but de Winne has run out of ammunition by the time Axel finds shelter in a nearby copse. Blood is pouring down the side of his head. But it is only a flesh wound. In the distance he can see the smoking chimney of a Gulaschkanone. He runs forward, breathlessly calling out to the soldiers as he approaches.
Back in the square the ambulance crew tumble from their vehicle, thinking an artillery barrage is falling on the town. They crouch close to the wall, awaiting further destruction.
‘Which bloody idiot is still firing shells?’ asks the driver. ‘The war’s supposed to be over.’
‘Maybe it was one of ours with a delayed-action fuse?’ says a stretcher-bearer. ‘There was an assault planned here for this morning.’ He sighs. ‘Maybe they sent it over the night before.’
There are no more explosions so they peer around the corner. Close by, they see the facade of one of the buildings overlooking the square has fallen in on itself. The blast has overturned a hay cart and two bodies are lying lifeless on the ground.
The nurse quickly gathers her medical kit. Most of the time she works in the field hospitals, but sometimes she goes out behind the front line, acting as a translator for the British.
‘I’ll go,’ she volunteers. ‘You see who else might have been caught in the blast.’
She walks towards the two prone bodies with her usual detachment. She heard the morning’s news, of course, but like so many others she feels indifference, perhaps a mild relief that it is over. It is too late for her fiancé, Auguste, and her brother Julien. But as she approaches she feels a small stab of pity for these two before her. Caught on the last morning. The fortunes of war.
Both of them are still. There is blood, but nothing missing or torn open. Nothing too grotesque. One wears a leather flying helmet, the other is the British boy they spoke to a few minutes ago.
She goes to the airman first. As she kneels down, she can see he is breathing, just, but she instinctively knows he isn’t long for the world. He is ‘expectant’ – the field-hospital triage category for beyond help.
The British boy lies motionless and is covered with mud and dried blood. He is as limp as a rag doll and there is no pulse. There is a fresh wound on his forehead but otherwise he seems unmarked by the blast. She has seen it many times. Artillery shells and bombs have unpredictable effects on their victims. Some would be turned almost inside out with the force of an explosion. Others would seem asleep, with slight or no visible wounds – only the terrible stillness of the dead.
She turns again to look at the pale, bloodied face of the airman and recognition dawns. With a start she sees the edge of her scarf poking just above the neckline of his leather jacket. It is that pilot she often sees at the American airbase. She likes him, he is sweet, although he does remind her of a frisky puppy, always buying her drinks and trying to talk to her. All that joie de vivre snuffed out like a candle. What a terrible waste. He had such an appetite for life. What was his name? Eddie. She had seen him just last night. It had been a wild evening, with too much wine, and everyone singing songs around the piano. When he’d asked for her scarf as a good-luck charm, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. After all, it had only cost her fifty centimes in a little junk shop in Paris.
She touches his face with her hand and leans closer to talk to him. ‘Hello, Eddie. It’s me, Céline. Can you hear me?’
The sound seeps through to Eddie’s fading consciousness, and something in his dying mind stirs. They are sitting on the grass at the Tuileries Garden, close to the Louvre. She is resting her head on his shoulder and caressing his face. The sunlight is brighter than he could ever imagine and he is so happy he feels like he is floating in the air.
Two other men from the ambulance crew come over carrying a stretcher apiece. They place them on the ground and lift Will Franklin and Eddie Hertz on to them. One of the stretcher men goes over to the ambulance to fetch a couple of blankets.
‘I’ll stay with this one for a moment, if you don’t mind,’ says Céline, still crouching by the airman. And she stays with him until she is sure his breathing has ceased. She pulls the blanket over his head. The young British soldier lying close by with blood all over his face hasn’t moved a jot. She shakes her head and looks around for other injured men who might need her attention.
A few minutes later an orderly approaches the two lifeless bodies. ‘Have you done their tags?’ he asks a man with Red Cross armba
nds.
‘Not yet,’ he replies.
The soldier pulls back the blankets and briskly snaps off one of the two identity tags Will and Eddie both wear around their neck. He looks at Will’s. ‘Thought so,’ he says to himself. ‘That’s Sergeant Franklin’s brother. I wouldn’t like to be the one to tell him.’
He turns to his companion and says, ‘We’ll come back for these two later,’ and walks away.
On the far side of the town square Sergeant Jim Franklin has caught up with his platoon. When the shooting in the forest started again, all of them, even he, just snapped and fled like frightened starlings. They had scattered out of pure terror, each one expecting that bullet in the brain, each one operating on pure survival instinct.
By the time Sergeant Franklin came to his senses, only Ogden was still there with him. Hosking soon caught up with them. Will had vanished.
‘Not a word,’ Franklin had warned them. ‘Not a word of this to a soul.’
They walked back to their previous position and some artillery men told them their unit had gone into Saint-Libert. And had they heard the news? The war was over. Jim Franklin was too tired to be happy and too upset about the men he had just lost. And he was too worried about his brother.
Now an anxious man runs up to speak to him and points. Jim walks towards the two stretchers he can see placed on the cobbled ground at the far end of the square. The railway station is still billowing smoke, but he barely notices. Everything seems to be taking place in a dream. His feet move forward on the solid ground but Franklin feels like he is wading through a morass of deep, sucking mud. His throat is tight, his chest heavy; he curses himself for having lost Will in the woods.
Jim approaches his brother’s shroud, wondering how on earth he is going to explain all this to his mother. He can picture her on the doorstep, getting that black-bordered telegram.
Choking back the tears that rise like floodwater, he pushes away the blanket. The blank eyes of Eddie Hertz stare back at him. Jim sees at once this man is a pilot and pulls the blanket back over his face.
His eyes alight on the other covered stretcher, but he is too overcome to look. He thinks of Will’s face – the lad had barely started shaving – and he begins to cry great gasping sobs. He sits on the cobble square and it all comes flooding out. For the first time ever he doesn’t care if the men see him. The sodding war is over now. They can think what they bloody well like.
Far in the distance, Will hears a strange wailing sound. His ears are still ringing, and he has a terrible pain in his head. There is a stifling, musty smell in his nose and an itchy, scratchy feeling on his face. He wonders if he is dead, but his rational mind dismisses the idea. He remembers a great flash and then nothing. He seems to be far, far underwater, but he is slowly coming to the surface.
Jim pulls back the blanket from his brother’s face just as his eyes flicker open.
FACT AND FICTION
Eleven Eleven is structured around the final day of the Great War. Altogether, close to three thousand soldiers on both sides died on that final morning. Most fatalities occurred along the American sections of the front line as many American soldiers were ordered to fight to the last minute. An unlucky few on both sides were killed after eleven o’clock, in misunderstandings, and from stray artillery fire and unexploded shells.
In Chapter 6 the signing of the Armistice on Marshal Foch’s private train in Compiègne Forest is based on eyewitness accounts, although the narrator of this chapter, Captain Atherley, is fictitious.
All other characters, and what happens to them in the novel, are fictitious, although their age reflects the youth of many participants in the war. The Belgian town of St Libert, close to Mons and the French border, does not exist. Aulnois and Prouvy do, but were not affected by the events in the book.
William Franklin, Axel Meyer and Eddie Hertz are based on no real individuals, and the fighting units they belong to are either fictitious or took part in other actions on that day.
Because the story is set at the very end of the Great War, Eleven Eleven does not depict the suffering of soldiers on all sides caught up in the interminable trench warfare of 1914–1918. Have a look at L’enfer by Georges Leroux on Google Images to get a glimpse into why this conflict still haunts us a hundred years later.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A big thank you to Ele Fountain and Isabel Ford, my two invaluable editors at Bloomsbury, Dilys Dowswell, who read and commented on all my first drafts, and Neil Offley who helped me fulfil a long-held ambition to visit some of the battlefields and memorials of the Western Front. Christian Staufenbiel kindly gave his time to advise on the German words I’ve used.
And thanks, as ever, to my agent, Charlie Viney, for his tireless support, and Jenny and Josie Dowswell for looking after me.
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CHAPTER 1
Warsaw August 2, 1941
Piotr Bruck shivered in the cold as he waited with twenty or so other naked boys in the long draughty corridor. He carried his clothes in an untidy bundle and hugged them close to his chest to try to keep warm. The late summer day was overcast and the rain had not let up since daybreak. He could see the goose pimples on the scrawny shoulder of the boy in front. That boy was shivering too, maybe from cold, maybe from fear. Two men in starched white coats sat at a table at the front of the line. They were giving each boy a cursory examination with strange-looking instruments. Some boys were sent to the room at the left of the table. Others were curtly dismissed to the room at the right.
Piotr and the other boys had been ordered to be silent and not look around. He willed his eyes to stay firmly fixed forward. So strong was Piotr’s fear, he felt almost detached from his body. Every movement he made seemed unnatural, forced. The only thing keeping him in the here and now was a desperate ache in his bladder. Piotr knew there was no point asking for permission to use the lavatory. When the soldiers had descended on the orphanage to hustle the boys from their beds and into a waiting van, he had asked to go. But he got a sharp cuff round the ear for talking out of turn.
The soldiers had first come to the orphanage two weeks ago. They had been back several times since. Sometimes they took boys, sometimes girls. Some of the boys in Piotr’s overcrowded dormitory had been glad to see them go: ‘More food for us, more room too, what’s the problem?’ said one. Only a few of the children came back. Those willing to tell what had happened had muttered something about being photographed and measured.
Now, just ahead in the corridor, Piotr could see several soldiers in black uniforms. The sort with lightning insignia on the collars. Some had dogs – fierce Alsatians who strained restlessly at their chain leashes. He had seen men like this before. They had come to his village during the fighting. He had seen first-hand what they were capable of.
There was another man watching them. He wore the same lightning insignia as the soldiers, but his was bold and large on the breast pocket of his white coat. He stood close to Piotr, tall and commanding, arms held behind his back, overseeing this mysterious procedure. When he turned around, Piotr noticed he carried a short leather riding whip. The man’s dark hair flopped lankly over the top of his head, but it was shaved at the sides, in the German style, a good seven or eight centimetres above the ears.
Observing the boys through black-rimmed spectacles he would nod or shake his head as his eyes passed along the line. Most of the boys, Piotr noticed, were blond like him, although a few had darker hair.
The man had the self-assured air of a doctor, but what he reminded Piotr of most was a farmer, examining his pigs and wondering which would fetch the best price at the village market. He caught Piotr staring and tutted impatiently through tight, thin lips, signalling for him to look to the front with
a brisk, semicircular motion of his index finger.
Now Piotr was only three rows from the table, and could hear snippets of the conversation between the two men there. ‘Why was this one brought in?’ Then louder to the boy before him. ‘To the right, quick, before you feel my boot up your arse.’
Piotr edged forward. He could see the room to the right led directly to another corridor and an open door that led outside. No wonder there was such a draught. Beyond was a covered wagon where he glimpsed sullen young faces and guards with bayonets on their rifles. He felt another sharp slap to the back of his head. ‘Eyes forward!’ yelled a soldier. Piotr thought he was going to wet himself, he was so terrified.
On the table was a large box file. Stencilled on it in bold black letters were the words:
RACE AND SETTLEMENT MAIN OFFICE
Now Piotr was at the front of the queue praying hard not to be sent to the room on the right. One of the men in the starched white coats was looking directly at him. He smiled and turned to his companion who was reaching for a strange device that reminded Piotr of a pair of spindly pincers. There were several of these on the table. They looked like sinister medical instruments, but their purpose was not to extend or hold open human orifices or surgical incisions. These pincers had centimetre measurements indented along their polished steel edges.
‘We hardly need to bother,’ he said to his companion. ‘He looks just like that boy in the Hitler-Jugend poster.’
They set the pincers either side of his ears, taking swift measurements of his face. The man indicated he should go to the room on the left with a smile. Piotr scurried in. There, other boys were dressed and waiting. As his fear subsided, he felt foolish standing there naked, clutching his clothes. There were no soldiers here, just two nurses, one stout and maternal, the other young and petite. Piotr blushed crimson. He saw a door marked Herren and dashed inside.
Eleven Eleven Page 13
