Eleven Eleven - By Paul Dowswell Page 0,11

the column. They started marching again.

‘What happened?’ asked Erich under his breath.

‘I heard them doing it on the train,’ whispered Axel. ‘Some of the soldiers bleat like sheep to slaughter, to mock the officers. They heard the French soldiers did it, earlier in the war. I reckon he was trying to start it off.’

The column took a sharp turn to the left and Axel prayed they would be resting soon. As they marched to the west he noticed a succession of bright lights floating down in the sky. These must be parachute flares. Both sides regularly launched them to deter night attacks.

Soon afterwards Axel heard the distinctive rattle of a machine gun. He had been exposed to that sound plenty of times in his training camp, but now, for the first time, that rat-tat-tat-tat was live ammunition being fired at another human being, caught in the glow of the flare. All at once he realised with a rising dread what it would mean to be hit by a machine gun. They had told him in training that these weapons fired six hundred rounds a minute. Ten bullets a second. He and the other cadets all cooed in wonder – what a fantastic device! But here, so close to the Front, ten bullets a second took on a more sinister meaning when it was your body they were aiming at.

In the light from the flares they could make out a church spire ahead, and the roofs and chimneys of a small town. In a couple of minutes they had marched into the central square, where they could see groups of other German soldiers sitting or lying on the ground. They looked exhausted, and many of them were asleep. The stench of unwashed muddy clothes rose off them. It reminded Axel of his dog, Falken, after he’d been for a dip in a particularly fetid pool of water. When he was doing his training, he’d heard all sorts of nicknames for a front-line soldier: Dreckfresser – mud eater, Frontschweine – front swine. He’d liked the more humorous nicknames better, like Hans Wurst – Hans Sausage. But these men were definitely Frontschweine. Just as surely as he would be if he survived his first taste of combat.

Over on the far side of the square, there were a few field guns and piles of munitions. The town was barely more than a big village and, as far as Axel could tell in the dark, it seemed almost undamaged by the war.

‘Stand easy!’ shouted the Feldwebel, and the soldiers took off their heavy packs and laid down their rifles. They sat on the cobbled square, leaning on their packs or against one another’s backs.

Axel was exhausted. He wondered what he could throw away to lighten his pack. His father had given him a pamphlet Kraftsprüche aus der Heiligen Schrift für die Kriegszeit – ‘Helpful passages from the Holy Scriptures in Wartime’ – that seemed to be a good candidate. Since his earnest prayers to keep his family safe had fallen on deaf ears he had not felt the same about God. But Axel hesitated. He rifled through the pages and put the pamphlet back in his pocket. Where he was going he needed all the help he could get.

There was a field kitchen set up close by and Axel could smell something cooking – soup probably. An older soldier came round and told them to queue for their ration.

The Gulaschkanone – stew gun – sat smoking away in the corner. They called it that because its tall stove chimney could be lowered flat when the kitchen had to be moved. That made it look a bit like a cannon. Axel thought it had been misnamed. He’d give anything for some real stew – a nice thick beef-and-dumpling with peas and carrots and potatoes. What they usually got from the Gulaschkanone was some sort of thin vegetable soup – and you needed to be pretty clever to tell what sort of vegetables were in it. They had their soup with black Kriegsbrot – war bread – which was bulked out with wood shavings. That wasn’t a rumour. You could see them in the slices.

When he got to the front of the queue and was given a hunk of black bread and a ladle full of grey-green soup, he asked, ‘Where are we? Do you know what’s happening?’

The cook leaned closer and whispered, ‘This place is called Saint-Libert. I think they’re sending that lot back east –’