We didn't go in the front, but around the back with Mr. Tuttle leading. I didn't understand why until I thought of his roses, and how he must have fretted about them all night and all day. He went straight to their corner, and when he touched them the ice shivered away from their branches.
I heard a sound of engines, and looked up to the north. Above the marshes, an aeroplane was flying west toward London. The sun glinted on its wings as it banked and straightened.
I knew the shape of those wings, the curve of the tail. “An FF twenty-nine,” I said. “A German.”
“Really?” said Auntie Ivy.
Mr. Tuttle turned away from his roses. We watched the aeroplane, and saw two others behind it, black specks coming from the east, from Grain. The German turned slightly north.
“He's going to bomb London,” I said.
The planes were so small, London so distant, that I felt only excited at the idea of it. I thought of the soldiers at their gun and how they would jump to their feet, spilling the tea from their metal cups.
The engines buzzed, barely louder than flies. The German rolled sideways, and straightened, and the other machines came into line behind it.
“A Vickers,” I said. “And the Albatros, look!” It seemed funny that a machine built in Germany would be sent up to knock a German down. And I doubted that it could. “The German's faster,” I said. “They might not catch him.”
They flitted past a line of trees, the German, then the British. And when they appeared again, the aeroplanes were closer together.
“No, I don't believe he's going all the way to London,” said Mr. Tuttle. “He'll be after the arsenal at Woolwich.”
My excitement vanished, and a sickly fear took its place.
“The arsenal's packed with powder,” said Mr. Tuttle. If he ever knew my mum was there he had forgotten it now. “We'll feel the blast from here.”
“My mother's in Woolwich!” I cried.
“Oh,” he said, in a tiny voice. His eyes were wide, and his mouth stayed open in a little circle.
The FF29 went down in a dive. It dropped below the hedges around us, and we could only hear the sound of its motor speeding into a whine. The British pilots dipped and followed it.
“This can't be real,” said Auntie Ivy. “It can't be true.”
A gun opened up somewhere by the river. Little black clouds dotted across the sky, along the top of the hedge beside us. And it was the worst feeling in the world to know there was nothing we could do.
Then the sounds of the engines changed again. They grew clearer, and louder, and the German machine appeared suddenly, far in the west. It came toward us, maybe a thousand feet up, growing larger, tilting left and then right in slashes of sunshine. The British were above it, still behind it, and another Vickers had appeared.
The German machine had clumsy floats instead of wheels. It carried a pair of bombs slung on a rack between them. It came roaring straight at us.
“Get to the house!” shouted Mr. Tuttle. “Go on.” He shoved Auntie Ivy, and she skidded on the frost. He pushed again; she fell to her knees. “Johnny, help her!”
I ran to take her elbow, thinking that Mr. Tuttle would take the other. But he only pressed us together, gave us another push forward, then turned away himself.
He crossed the garden in his clumsy run, shattering the frost with his shoes. His coat flapped around him, tangling at his legs, and he thrashed at it as he stumbled along.
I looked up at the FF29. It skittered on the air like a boat on the sea, flung up and tossed down, tipped to its right, then its left. But it still came toward us.
“Hubert!” shouted Auntie Ivy. She was looking back at Mr. Tuttle.
I couldn't believe what he was doing. In the corner of the garden he wrestled with his big pile of boards.
“Hubert!”
He didn't look up. “My roses,” he said. “I have to shield Glory.”
“Oh, please,” she wailed.
He pulled at the boards, but the frost stuck them together. He kicked at the pile, and a white shower of sparkles rose from his foot. And the German tilted down in a dive.
Its wings stretched as wide as the house. Its propeller spun in a blur. And it swooped from the sky, no longer a machine flown by a man, but a thing with eyes, with a mind.
“Hubert, please!”
The door to the house flew open, and old Storey Sims came lumbering out. “Are you mad?” he shouted. “Don't you see that machine?”
“Help my auntie,” I said.
He dashed to her side and plucked her clear from the ground. He carried her as though she weighed nothing at all. And I ran to help Mr. Tuttle.
“Get inside,” he said.
“No, sir,” I told him.
He had a board lifted half from the pile. I got my shoulder underneath and levered it up, and it sprang loose from the others with a loud rip, like a scream. We heaved it up, one end on the wall, and there it lay, slanted in front of the roses, a tiny shield just six inches wide.
“Another,” I said.
Mr. Tuttle was panting. “No time,” he said.
The German was crossing the field beyond the road, rushing on at a hundred miles an hour. I heard the black horse whinny with fright; I heard its harness jangle.
“Get down!” shouted Mr. Tuttle.
He dropped to his belly, onto the frost. His hand groped out to find me, to pull me down. But I stepped away and went back to the wood. I had destroyed his roses, and I would do what I could to save them.
The board wouldn't lift, and the seaplane hurtled over the road. I saw the pilot, helmeted and goggled. I saw the British coming after him. And we stared at each other, through the blurred propeller, as I clawed at the wood with my fingers.
I saw him move, and I thought now the bombs would fall. I watched to see them drop.
It might have been that the pilot never meant to drop his bombs. He might only have been weaving away from the Vickers. Possibly, he saw a better target to the south. But the thought that came to me was that he just couldn't drop a bomb on a child, that he couldn't kill a boy on Christmas Day. And the pilot snapped his machine onto its side, and the tail flaps hinged as he banked away to the south.
He flew over my head with a deafening clatter, and the Vickers, then the Albatros, passed behind him.
Mr. Tuttle looked up. There was a bead of frost on the tip of his nose. “You could have been killed, Johnny. What were you thinking?”
“I had to help you,” I said. “I was the one who damaged your roses.”
“You?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“For my Guy Fawkes guy.”
“My beautiful roses?” he said.
“I'm sorry, sir,” I said.
“Why couldn't you tell me?” asked Mr. Tuttle.
“I was scared to at first,” I said. “And then I was ashamed.”
“Even after this morning?” He looked puzzled more than sad. “Even after our talk you couldn't come to me with this?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“But why on earth not?”
We heard the bombs explode then. Two geysers of mud appeared in the south, toward the railway tracks and the station. They grew higher, roiling with dust and smoke, and the British machines went tearing through them in pursuit of the vanishing German. Then the mud fell down in a rain.
Between us and the raining mud a flock of rooks went whirling up, like bits of shrapnel flung about. And the air sort of crumpled around us, and we heard the bangs, and they scared me badly. The windows rattled in Mr. Tuttle's house, and the blast echoed like far-off thunder. The aeroplanes flew off to the east, the German weaving ahead of the British.
The sound brought Storey Sims out from the house. It brought Auntie Ivy and Murdoch, too. The young soldier leaned on his father. He looked ill and ridden with pain, but I could see he would live after all. The three of them stared up at the sky, warily, as though the bombs had fallen from now
here, and another could follow at any moment.
Then Murdoch asked me, “Do you see what I meant?”
“Yes,” I said. It would drive me mad to hear bombs burst all around me, all day and all night, to feel the air thicken and warp, and to wonder if someone I knew had been blown into smithereens.
“Thank you for bringing me home,” said Murdoch.
Old Storey held his son, and Mr. Tuttle looked at them, and then at me. He cocked his head in a quizzical way. “Ahh,” he said. Then he came to my side, and his coat—flapping out—wrapped around me. I knew that he understood why I hadn't told him about the roses; and I knew that I could, whenever I wanted, tell him my darkest secrets with no fear that he would think any less of me.
We went up to the door. He hugged Auntie Ivy, and she ran her hands all over his back, as though to make sure the bomb hadn't knocked him to pieces. And then we all went inside, as the church bells rang for Christmas Day.
CHAPTER 21
December 26, 1914
My dearest Johnny,
I woke in the trenches on Christmas morning and could hardly believe my eyes. The sun was just rising, and it shone across a land so white that I was sure all of Flanders was covered with snow. But you probably saw that too, as you're really so very close to where I am.
I heard shouting from the men at the parapets. The Huns were moving, they said. The Huns were coming.
I leapt up, my rifle ready. I laid it down on the sandbags and squinted through the sights. And right before me, just thirty yards away, there was a line of shapes that was dark against the sun. But they sparkled, those shapes. I couldn't make them out until the sun rose a little higher. And then I saw they were Christmas trees, and they were decorated with tinsel and garlands.
A German voice shouted out, “Tommies, don't shoot!” And a man came up from the trench, between the trees. He walked toward us across that frosty no-man's-land, slowly and calmly, like a fellow out for a stroll in the park. Then one of our lieutenants scrambled up, and he started across to meet him.
At the wire, they shook hands. They each stepped back a pace, and they saluted one another. And I tell you, it was the most amazing thing to see them standing all alone in that land of white, where no two men had ever stood, and likely will never stand again. The Christmas trees sparkled with their garlands and tinsel; the frost glittered with incredible brilliance.
And then the Germans came out from their trench, and we came out from ours. All of us spilled up onto that awful, beautiful ground.
We drank German beer and ate British chocolate. We took snaps of each other, the Germans in their gray, the British in our motley clothes of fur and wool, all standing arm in arm between the trenches. Everyone got out their wallets and showed each other pictures. Someone found a football, and a little game broke out.
Remember the doorman from around the corner? Willy Kempf 's his name. Well, he was there, and we talked about London and he asked about you. I tried to find Fatty Dienst but, sadly, he wasn't there. Just a few days earlier I would have met him, but by Christmas he was—Well, Johnny, he was gone.
All day we went back and forth, from the Germans' trench to ours. I gave a man the packet of matches that Princess Mary sent me. And in exchange he gave me a razor; a very fine razor, in fact. I thought I would hang on to it until you're old enough to shave, but I decided that I would send it now, as it's such a splendid keepsake from the most amazing Christmas I have ever seen.
You'll find it, enclosed.
Toward nightfall, the Germans lit the candles on their trees. Hundreds of little flames twinkled away, shining in the frost like so many stars. We sang “Silent Night” again, and “O Tannenbaum.”
Then the generals got wind of our truce. They were furious that we were talking to Fritz instead of trying to shoot him. They chased us to our trench, and the Germans' generals chased them to theirs. If it wasn't for the generals we might never have gone back to the war.
In the morning, two Germans stood up on their parapet. They opened a long banner that they'd made out of blankets. They'd painted across it: “Merry Christmas, Tommies.” They saluted us, and one of them pulled out a pistol and fired twice in the air. Then they carefully wound up their banner and dropped back in the trench.
And a little while later the shooting started, and the war was on again.
Merry Christmas, Johnny.
All my love,
Dad
The letter came three days after Christmas, and by then I already knew what had happened. Dad was telling the truth, word for word, just as it happened. There had been no billiards, no horseshoes, but that truce on Christmas Day was very, very real.
The trenches stretched from the Channel to Switzerland. Across all of Europe, over hills and down into valleys, through forests and fields, over rivers and streams, the Germans and the British had fought just yards apart. But here and there, on Christmas Day, the war stopped for a while, and the enemies became friends. British soldiers and German soldiers met in no-man's-land. They exchanged presents and photographs. In one or two places they even played football.
I would never see anything as close to a miracle as that Christmas of 1914. Maybe the peace would have spread along the whole front, across the whole world, if it hadn't been for the generals. They chased their men back to the trenches; they ordered them to start shooting again. But for a day, at least, the war stopped; it happened that once and never again.
I don't know if my wooden soldiers had anything to do with the Christmas truce. I really didn't want to know. The box where I'd put them on Christmas morning stayed under my bed for nearly four years, until my dad came home at last.
My mum was wearing long white gloves when she met him at the station. Underneath, her hands were yellow, stained by the sulphur from her shells. For the next five years she wore the gloves nearly night and day, and the ghastly color never left her. Though my dad escaped the war, my mum did not. She died in 1923, still young and beautiful.
Mr. Tuttle became my Uncle Hubert. He married Auntie in the big stone church where we'd gone on Christmas Eve. His best man was Murdoch, who stood beside him on crutches, because he had lost his leg to gangrene.
I got used to seeing the sergeant that way. Always cheery, always laughing, he hopped along like a three-legged bird, never tiring on the walks we took together. The orange cat became his pet and sometimes followed us as far as the gate, but never beyond it. Murdoch took a new name, and all of Cliffe kept his secret. Even Auntie Ivy never breathed a word about Murdoch's self-inflicted wound. He started writing poems; he had them published, too. Most were about Kent, about the fields and the sun and the rainbows. But sometimes he would go into a gloom and write about the war. And what he wrote then made people cry.
When Dad came home, looking thinner and older, I gave Murdoch my box of wooden soldiers. He was looking after his own father then, and it wouldn't be long until old Storey was laid down in the little cemetery with all the other Simses. I carried the box to his farmhouse, and Storey and Murdoch both helped me unpack it.
We stood the soldiers in rows on a bookshelf. And there they still stand, as far as I know. Or some of them, anyway.
Murdoch wrote a poem about them when he was quite an old man. He said how they made him think of the friends he'd made in the army, how the nutcracker men were aging like them, gathering dust on their wooden shoulders. Every once in a while, he said, often in the dead of night, one of those fierce-looking men would suddenly tip over. It would roll from the shelf and land on the floor with a little thunk. He said that by then there weren't many left.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
They called it the Great War.
It started in August 1914 and ended on November 11, 1918. Sixty million soldiers and sailors and airmen took part, representing sixteen nations. Of every three men sent to fight, one was wounded; of every eight, one was killed.
My mother's three uncles went off with Lovat's Scouts, in the Highland Regiment. All three were
taken prisoner. My father's father lied about his age to join the British Army when he was seventeen. He went to France with the Cambridshires, a battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. While serving in the trenches as a Lewis gunner, he was wounded by shrapnel. But he went back to the fighting and lost an arm. In May 1917 he was sent home to England. For the rest of his life he wore a contraption of leather and metal to take the place of his missing hand. He was troubled until the day that he died by the shrapnel that remained inside him.
I never met any of them. But as a child I saw other veterans of the Great War. Some had no legs. They sat on little wooden platforms fitted with wheels. They pushed themselves along the sidewalks and sold pencils on street corners. I remember my mother pulling me past one. “Don't stare,” she told me. “Don't stare.”
When I was older I read about the war, about Billy Bishop and the Red Baron, Lawrence of Arabia and Count Luckner the Sea Devil. I never connected them with the old men on the streets. They were preserved in my books, forever young. The war that killed millions, and crippled millions more, produced a few heroes. And it produced a few miracles, too.
The Christmas Truce of 1914 really did happen. Along whole sections of the Western Front, the fighting stopped for that first Christmas of the war. Soldiers came out of the trenches to meet in no-man's-land, exchanging presents and pictures. Just hours before, they had shot at each other. Now they shook hands and sang carols.
The Angel of Mons was true as well, or at least there were many who claimed to have seen that vision in the sky. It was only the first of many such stories. There was something about the Great War that inspired a belief in the supernatural. There were ghostly soldiers and phantom cavalry, and an airman who simply vanished. There were soldiers convinced that the ghosts of English archers appeared in the night to hold the same bit of ground against the Germans that they'd held against the French five hundred years before. In the morning, the story goes, German soldiers covered the ground, their bodies riddled with arrows.
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