Lord of the Nutcracker Men (21 page)
Read Lord of the Nutcracker Men Online
Authors: Iain Lawrence
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.
UTHOR'S
N
OTE
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.
Cliffe is real. It's a charming little village beside the marshes of the Thames. On Christmas Day in 1914, a
German airman really did drop a bomb near Cliffe's railway station. The raid wasn't quite as dramatic as Johnny tells it, as the aeroplanes didn't come so close to the ground. But visitors are still taken to see the place where the bomb came down.
There were men like Johnny's father who volunteered in October and were in the field by Christmas. But there weren't very many. In the first feverish weeks of the war, most of the volunteers joined the “new army” being raised by Lord Kitchener, a hero of the Boer War and— in 1914—Britain's secretary of state for war. While the generals thought the war would end quickly, Kitchener believed it would last three years and planned his recruitment for that. His thousands of volunteers spent months parading through streets and parks, while the “old army,” desperate for men, sent its few new recruits into battle as quickly as possible.
When Johnny's father arrived in France, the war was settling into its stalemate. The armies were only then beginning to build the elaborate trenches that would be their homes for four years. The strip of Europe that would be reduced to a wasteland was still dotted with farms and trees. But sectors of the front were just as described by Johnny's father. I have tried not to be influenced by the horrors that were yet to come, by the poison gas and flamethrowers and corpse-choked ground that were all unimagined in 1914.
Through it all, the mail went back and forth. The letters from Johnny's father may seem to come with unlikely regularity and impossible speed, but the truth is that they don't. Mail from the front was delivered in
England within two or three days. The battlefield, for many British soldiers, was so close to home that it was heartbreaking.
An officer going on leave could have breakfast in the trenches and supper in a London hotel. The soldier at the front could read a newspaper just one day old. During the biggest barrages, the sound of guns was heard in England.
I imagine that my grandfather could hear them for the rest of his life.
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book started as a Christmas story, as a simple tale of a boy and his wooden soldiers. It grew into what it is through the help of many people.
Bruce Wishart introduced me to nutcracker men. He shaped the figures, then helped shape the story through many conversations.
My parents provided answers to many questions about day-to-day life in Britain. When they didn't have the answer, my father found it. He provided books and research material, then corrected many mistakes that I'd made.
As with every book I've written, I owe thanks to my companion, Kristin Miller, and my agent, Jane Jordan Browne, and to the people at Random House, especially Françoise Bui. All of them provided much support and encouragement, as they always do.
But this story could not have been written without the help of Kathleen Larkin, a research librarian at the Prince Rupert Library. She spent countless hours immersed in the Great War, finding just the right book to answer the most obscure question, or the particular
person who knew what even the books didn't tell. She even went to Cliffe and sent me pictures of a village that was far more lovely and picturesque than the one I'd imagined for myself.
These are just some of the people who answered her queries, who helped me portray a period that is, sadly, being quickly forgotten:
Mrs. Peggy Wise and Mr. David Wright, proprietors of Martins News in Cliffe, Kent.
Pat Leviston of Cliffe, Kent.
Michele Losse, research assistant at Post Office Heritage Services in London.
Major Vince Larocque, museum curator for the Canadian Military Engineers, in Vancouver.
Marion Webster of the Guildhall Museum in Rochester, Kent.
Angela Woollacott, professor, historian, and author, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Miss Eileen N. Hawkins, of the YWCA in London.
John A. Henshall, librarian, at the University of Warwick library in Coventry.
Barbara Ludlow of Hawkinge, Kent.
The staff of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Derek Reid of British Telecom Archives, London.
Sergeant Pilkington of the Philatelic Bureau of the British Forces Post Office in London.
Liliane Reid Lafleur and Ray White of the library of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
Penny McLaughlin, commemoration and public relations, Veterans Affairs Canada.
Jim Streckfuss, president of the League of World War I Aviation Historians.
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
Iain Lawrence studied journalism in Vancouver, British Columbia, and worked for small newspapers in the northern part of the province. He settled on the coast, living first in the port city of Prince Rupert and now on the Gulf Islands. An avid sailor, he wrote two nonfiction books about his travels on the coast before turning to children's novels.
Lord of the Nutcracker Men
was inspired, in part, by family stories of his grandfather, who served as a Lewis gunner on the Western Front during World War I.
Lawrence is the author of four other novels for young readers, including the acclaimed High Seas Trilogy:
The Wreckers
(an Edgar Allan Poe Award Nominee),
The Smugglers,
and
The Buccaneers. Ghost Boy,
set in postwar America, was named a
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of the Year, a
School Library Journal
Best Book of the Year, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and an ALA Notable Book.
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New York
Copyright © 2001 by Iain Lawrence
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eISBN: 978-0-307-53789-8
v3.0