Eleven Eleven (18 page)

A few minutes later an orderly approaches the two lifeless bodies. ‘Have you done their tags?' he asks a man with Red Cross armbands.

‘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.

Pick up the next Incredible thriller from Paul Dowswell . . .

‘DOWSWELL SHOWS US A SIDE OF

NAZI GERMANY RARELY SEEN . . .

A HEART-STOPPING READ’

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Turn over to read Chapter 1

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.

The ache in his bladder gone, Piotr felt light-headed with relief. They had not sent him to the room on the right and the covered wagon. He was here with the nurses. There was a table with biscuits, and tumblers and a jug of water. He found a spot over by the window and hurriedly dressed. He had arrived at the orphanage with only the clothes he stood up in and these were a second set they had given him. He sometimes wondered who his grubby pullover had belonged to and hoped its previous owner had grown out of it rather than died.

Piotr looked around at the other boys here with him. He recognised several faces but there was no one here he would call a friend.

Outside in the corridor he heard the scrape of wood on polished floor. The table was being folded away. The selection was over. The last few boys quickly dressed as the older nurse clapped her hands to call everyone to attention.

‘Children,’ she said in a rasping German accent, stumbling clumsily round the Polish words. ‘Very important gentleman here to talk. Who speak German?’