War Stories

by Michael Morpurgo

Miss Dalley tapped her desk with her pointer. ‘Silence!’ she said. ‘Sit up straight!’ And the class fell silent and shuffled themselves, sitting up straight. Miss Dalley’s eyes wandered around the room. Her gaze stopped at Toby’s empty desk.

  ‘Toby isn’t in class today,’ she said. ‘His family had bad news last night. His father has been killed – one of the brave men killed defending us in this terrible war. Toby’ll probably be back with us tomorrow – or the day after – and we’ll all have to be very kind … very understanding to him, because this is a very sad thing for his family.’

  Elizabeth felt a sudden strange shift in the world around her. It was almost like an earthquake, except that the pens did not rattle and the desks did not slide. She wasn’t sure if the change was in the world around her or somewhere deep in her own head. Perhaps it was partly the way voices and expressions in the outside world had altered. Perhaps her ideas about the world were struggling to fit themselves into a different pattern. Suddenly, the game seemed nothing but horrible. Suddenly she found she was deeply glad that her father was too old to go to war. Suddenly she understood why, when her mother was so excited and so sure of the good and bad of things, her father sat back, smiling his question-mark smile. And it wasn’t just a secret joke, that question. There was something sad about it too.

  At playtime only a few boys played the Spitfire game, and even they did not play it for long. Elizabeth thought that when Toby did come back to school that Spitfire game would be hard to play, even if, in the game at least, you were always shooting down the enemy.

  She went home after school. The news of Toby’s father’s death was like a scent in the air. She was breathing it in all the time, even in her own tin-hut home.

  ‘He was a gallant man,’ her mother said, not just once, but over and over again. ‘He was a true warrior.’

  ‘Warrior’ was a heroic storybook word, but for some reason it was still hard to believe in that heroic story in quite the way she had believed in it yesterday.

  When her mother went out of the hut and over to the caravan to look for some missing darning wool, Elizabeth turned to look seriously at her father.

  ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Dad, do you think Toby’s father really was a gallant warrior?’

  Her father looked sideways at her, then twisted in his chair to look at her directly, as if they were going to have a serious conversation.

  ‘I think he probably was,’ he replied, speaking in a quiet voice, ‘but to tell you the truth, I think a lot of the German pilots are probably gallant too. And the ones that Toby’s father shot down – they’ll have mothers and children and friends being sad for them. I think war’s a great mess.’

  ‘But the Japs are baddies,’ said Elizabeth. She wanted her father to help her feel certain about that.

  ‘I know there are Japanese children who will be crying right now because their fathers have been killed,’ her father replied. ‘I’m much more mixed-up about things than your mum.’

  ‘Toby played it as if it were a game – spitfires and Messerschmitts and …’ Elizabeth hesitated and shrugged.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a game,’ said her father, ‘not unless being alive’s a game. Games and stories have shapes, and of course people put story-shapes on wars. But me … I think if you look at war really closely it loses its shape. I mean, for your mum, we are the goodies and they are the baddies – no doubt about it. But over in Germany – in Japan – there are thousands of people absolutely sure that they are the goodies and we are the baddies.

  ‘Look, when I was away in my particular war, I lost friends. My best friend was shot down beside me. If the bullet had been a little bit to the left I would have been the one who was bowled over and he would have been the one running on towards the enemy. Anyhow, a few minutes later, there I was, firing my own gun and seeing this young man, round about my own age, stagger and fall. I don’t know who he was, but he probably had a family who loved him. He would have been someone’s best friend. Well, I’m not saying I’m sorry, even now. I was over there to shoot him and others like him. He was there to shoot me if he could. But by now it’s gone all shapeless. And, like I said, games have a shape to them. These wars – they aren’t games.’

  ‘But you do want us to win,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Oh, you bet I do,’ said her father. ‘And, by the way, it sounds as if the Japs have come to a bit of a standstill, which I’m absolutely delighted to hear. So God bless the Yankees, even if they don’t speak as nicely as the British.’

  He and Elizabeth looked at each other. Her father smiled his crooked smile and, after a moment Elizabeth smiled back at him. And as she did this she felt that strange alteration inside her head coming out in her smile, so that her smile was a crooked one too – partly a smile and partly a question mark. The game had turned into a great question and, looking at her father, Elizabeth felt she might be asking that question over and over again for the rest of her life.

  Joanna Davidson

  I wanted to write about a tragedy that is still unfolding, in Iraq, as I write this. The story centres on two brothers, Abbas and Hassen, whose lives are irrevocably changed by events far beyond their control. I also wanted to show the wider consequences of war.

  After the Gulf War ended in 1991, Saddam Hussein ordered that the marshland – an area of some 7,700 square miles, to the south of Iraq – be drained. He wanted to punish the Marsh Arabs for rebelling against his forces and for giving sanctuary to those who fled into the marshes. Whole villages were torched to the ground and many people were killed. The Marsh Arabs – a civilization spanning five thousand years – bravely defied Saddam, only to be deserted by the Allies in their hour of need. They were effectively forgotten by the rest of the world.

  As a consequence of this, they faced catastrophe. The marshes, home to thousands of different species of birds, were deliberately poisoned by pollution from the blazing oilfields. Their water was stopped by the damming of the Euphrates River. It took just a few years to wipe out the wetlands of Mesopotamia – an ecosystem that took millennia to be formed – a place many believe to be the setting for the Bible’s Garden of Eden.

  But there are now small seeds of hope. The Marsh Arabs really have begun to return, smashing down the gates of the dam that deprived the wetlands of water. But the marshes and the people can never be the same again; such is the enormity of the task of recultivating a land laid to waste by a war without end.

  WHERE THERE IS WATER, THERE IS LIFE

  The first shot cracked open the air, reverberating across the water, carried in a million ripples from the mighty Euphrates. Hassen plunged after his father into the reeds, wishing he, too, had a rifle instead of the ungainly spear he had been forced to carry.

  He knew they were close now. High-pitched squeals rose from the yellowed sedge just ahead of them. Hassen pushed onwards, feet sinking into the clammy clay. The boy seemed oblivious to the trail of blood he left in his wake, where reeds, as sharp as razors, had slashed at his bare arms.

  The wild pig was wounded, judging by the wild snapping of reeds as it floundered hopelessly in the mud. Then there was silence. Hassen knew this was when the danger was at its greatest. Many hunters had been gored at such a moment as this, falsely believing victory was already theirs.

  Although now a fine hunter, Hassen still recoiled from the killing part. It was the thrill of the chase he loved. Unfit to eat, these brutes were considered vermin by the tribesmen of Zayad, demolishing the crops and attacking anyone who dared to disturb their endless feasting. In the flickering light of the campfires, villagers would tell tales of their close encounters, embellishing details (although no one ever seemed to mind), proudly raising their tunics to display livid scars, the result of an angry tusk.

  Whereas Hassen found his life in the marshes a constant adventure, paddling to and fro between the islands in his little canoe, Abbas had felt trapped within a world that never changed.

  It hadn’t always been so. He had once
risen, worked and slept to the ancient rhythm of his forefathers, happy in his ignorance. Until he had lingered, one day, chatting to the driver who came to collect the fish to transport to Baghdad. He described to Abbas his life in the city, where night and day no longer mattered, thanks to electricity, and clean water appeared at the twist of a tap. He displayed the gold watch strapped around a plump wrist.

  ‘Your ways are dying, mark my words. Your family will depend on you in the future …’ Abbas, lost in thought, missed the driver’s oily smirk as he drove away.

  ‘Why do you have to go?’ Hassen pleaded with his brother.

  ‘Haven’t you ever wondered what lies beyond the reed beds?’ Abbas asked, impatiently.

  ‘Father says there is still fighting further north.’

  ‘Pah!’ responded Abbas. ‘The war is almost over. I’ve heard that people live like kings in Baghdad,’ he continued, looking suddenly dreamy. ‘Men have Mercedes cars, not water buffalo.’

  Hassen was unmoved. ‘You will never come back. You will be killed – or forget all about us.’

  He had never seen Abbas so angry as he was at that moment. ‘Never speak that way again,’ he warned him, his eyes black with fury. ‘As God is my witness, I will come back.’

  Abbas did not say goodbye. He left on a night when the moon chose to hide her face behind the clouds. Hassen was sad for months after his brother left them.

  ‘I never want to hear his name spoken in our house again,’ said their father. But the women wailed and tore at their clothes, as if for one already dead.

  Hassen tried to compensate for Abbas’s absence – to please his father, now lost in his private grief for a favourite son. How he longed to be like Abbas – impulsive and fearless, loved instantly by all those who encountered him. By comparison, Hassen felt as the moon to the sun. A pale imitation.

  But now that Abbas had gone, it was Hassen who was left to fill the void. The days seemed longer now he was alone, herding the water buffalo out to pasture at dawn, returning them to the shallows in the violet dusk to give up their warm supply of milk. Nothing was wasted. Even the dung was moulded into small pats of fuel that filled the hut with acrid smoke.

  Months passed, and there was no word from Abbas. It fell to Hassen, now he was thirteen, to accompany his father when he went hunting on the vast lake.

  ‘You’re my man now,’ he told him, ruffling the boy’s dark head with a callused hand – the lines in his face etched deeper too since Abbas had gone.

  Hassen watched his father halt just ahead of him, a small figure against the towering reeds. Wordlessly, he motioned for his son to stop as he pointed with the butt of his rifle towards a bank in the distance, shimmering in the wind.

  Hassen was wading, waist-deep in golden water buttercups, when suddenly a roar so great, unlike any he had ever heard before, forced the reeds around him to bow down and touch the water.

  He stood, transfixed, watching as his father raised his gun towards the sky and pointed it at the giant bird that loomed overhead. Silver and black, unlike any bird he had ever seen before, its vast wings caught them both in its shadow, blotting out the sun for an instant. And then it wheeled away as something fell, glinting against the blue sky, towards them.

  He remembered afterwards how his father shouted, ‘Down!’, before everything went black. Hassen lay still, with nothing but the ringing inside his skull and the empty sky above him. Rolling slowly on to his side, he could see his father, floating on his back, a look of surprise on his face. Hassen knew then – he was dead.

  Much later, as the light bled into the darkness, Hassen was found by passing fishermen, thrown like a rag doll, by the force of the explosion, against the forgiving mudflats.

  The mourning lasted for many days after the funeral, with Hassen, now sole provider for his mother and two small sisters, Sadiya and Sabiha, forced to sit for hours on the tattered rug at the entrance to their hut, receiving all those who came to pay their respects, as was the custom.

  During this time, Sheik Amara, the tribal head, came to pay his respects. This was looked upon as a great honour bestowed on only a few. Hassen’s mother made sweet pancakes for the occasion, as the frail old man, accompanied by a small entourage, slowly lowered himself on to the frayed rug. The coffee was too bitter for Hassen and scalded the roof of his mouth. But he swallowed it all the same. He noticed the splendid dagger that hung from Sheik Amara’s belt, the jewel-encrusted sheath flaming red and green as it caught the light. Hassen, in turn, proudly showed him his father’s rifle.

  Sheik Amara gazed from beneath his hooded eyes at the boy, pale olive against the white of his tunic. Seeing how heavily the burdens of grief and responsibility lay on those narrow shoulders, he reminded Hassen how, many centuries earlier, the king of Babylon had been forced to flee, like a bird to the marshes.

  ‘But what have we done to deserve this war?’ asked the boy.

  ‘We chose to defy the tyrant Saddam,’ the Sheik said with a sigh. ‘We have risen up against him, giving sanctuary to those who flee his evil tyranny. So now we are like a thorn in his side. He punishes us because of the Marsh Arabs’ refusal to give up their ways and their land and bow in abeyance, like a reed in the wind. We are a proud people and will not easily be crushed.’

  Sheik Amara rose slowly to leave. Gazing out across the glittering waves caught by the morning breeze, he smiled. ‘Where there is life, there is water,’ he said. ‘Until the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers run dry, there will be life in the marshes, and here we will stay.’

  The boy took comfort from Sheik Amara’s words. But he missed Abbas more than ever.

  After his father’s death, Hassen found he could not sleep. He would sit for hours into the night, fists clenched, as if made of stone, unable to close his eyes. When he did, he would see his father, pale and lifeless, floating away from him. The stars still shone hard and bright and the frogs still sang their midnight serenade and Hassen could only marvel at how the world continued, when his had stopped.

  Hassen had started avoiding the evening fires where boys danced and sang until they dropped. Now the breadwinner, he had no time for such frivolity. He sensed his father’s death was a bad omen for them all, since it had marked the beginning of many deaths in the marshes. There were to be many attacks on the Marsh Arabs after this – with stories of villages being torched, their inhabitants killed. The peace of centuries had been shattered forever.

  A month after Sheik Amara’s visit, Hassen was out tending the water buffalo with his friend Medhi. They had known each other since the cradle, born a few hours apart. Whilst Medhi was the joker, a skinny monkey of a boy who made everyone laugh, Hassen was tall and graceful, his seeming aloofness making him the reluctant object of every girl’s attention.

  Huge clouds bruised the horizon for days, and yet no storm came. No one could understand this freak of Nature. It was Medhi who provided the answer. While delivering fish to Basra, he had learned how many oil wells were now deliberately being set on fire.

  ‘Saddam wants them to burn forever, like hell itself,’ Medhi told Hassen, his monkey face looking suddenly wrinkled and old. ‘If he can’t flush us out, he will try to smoke us out.’

  Birds, now airborne in their thousands, blotted out the light as they fled a storm that showed no signs of abating. Many dropped, like stones, their feathers congealed with oil.

  For a while, the air was alive with the beating of wings – and then it was empty. And the world fell silent.

  Hassen paused, spear in hand, and gazed beyond the waterline, black against the burnished sky. He had promised his dead father he would provide for his mother and two sisters. What if he failed? He felt truly afraid for the first time.

  At first he thought he must be imagining it. The water level had begun to drop at the most alarming rate. No one had an explanation. Months passed, and the waters seeped away, revealing hideous lumps of slime, like the backbone of some monstrous beast, glistening beneath the sun.


  The water buffalo, bewildered, stumbled further into the stagnant ponds. The powerful stench from the rotting reed beds grew as the arteries from the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers slowly ran dry.

  Reeds cracked and turned to chaff beneath the baking sun as the marsh became jaundiced and withered in the heat. Fish gasped and grew bloated, rising to the filmy surface of pools which now resembled huge milky cataracts. A death rattle echoed through the dying bamboo.

  There was panic among the villagers. Sheik Amara was forced to call another meeting.

  ‘Our land has turned to desert – how can we live in a desert?’ they clamoured.

  Hassen noticed how he appeared to have shrunk inside his splendid robes. ‘We have no choice,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper, chaff in the wind. ‘We will have to move from the marshes. There is no life without water.’

  When Hassen told his mother about the planned exodus, she cried pitifully. ‘While there is breath in my body, I will not leave this place. Besides, how will Abbas ever find us now?’ Weeping, she hugged Sadiya and Sabiha to her.

  Hassen felt the anger rise up in him. Anger for the senseless death of his father, anger at Abbas for deserting them. Anger for having to be the strong one.

  Hassen watched as many departed on foot, possessions piled high upon their heads. Medhi walked, looking straight ahead of him. He did not turn to say goodbye. Hassen understood. To look back would have made it impossible to leave.

  ‘Five thousand years in a handful of dust!’ Hassen thought to himself, watching the figures until they dissolved into the landscape. How were they going to live now? No fish, no birds, no water buffalo. No water.

  In a matter of days, the little provision they had was running perilously low. The last of the water buffalo had died, knee-deep in the dried mud, now oblivious to the humming flies. Now there was no milk.

  Sadiya, who was only ten, surveyed her brother with large brown eyes. ‘My tummy hurts all the time now,’ she told him. To distract her, Hassen fashioned a doll out of dried reeds.