Eleven Eleven - By Paul Dowswell Page 0,12

he nodded to the exhausted men on the other side of the square – ‘and you are going forward.’

So, they were going straight to the Front. Axel nodded. His mouth was too dry to speak. He didn’t feel ready to face men who had been fighting for months already, maybe years.

He sat down with Erich and they both devoured their soup, wiping their mess tins clean with the bread. It tasted of nothing they could recognise – in fact it was more of a texture than an actual flavour – like wallpaper paste. But it was hot and it filled a hole. When they had finished, Axel whispered, ‘We’re going into action. I thought we’d have a rest first. I didn’t think we’d be sent straight to the Front.’

‘Form up,’ shouted the Feldwebel.

Axel and Erich placed themselves at the very rear of the column this time – as far away as possible from the Feldwebel. It felt safer, being at the back.

As they marched past the railway station at the far end of the square, Axel could see silhouettes of men on the roof. They were holding wires and small packages. ‘What are they doing?’ he whispered to Erich.

An older man in front of them leaned round and said, ‘It looks like they’re wiring up the railway station. Ready to blow it up. They’ve probably put explosives on the rails too. When we go, they will destroy the town. Leave them nothing that’s useful.’

Axel wondered if he would pass this way again. He looked at the eastern sky. It was still dark, with no glimmer of the approaching dawn. While it was dark, he felt safe.

But, as if to prove him wrong, he heard a distant whistle. ‘Incoming shell,’ whispered the man in front. There was a dull explosion further to the north.

‘Not here at least,’ said Erich.

But there were more, coming in at steady intervals, getting closer. Axel heard a whistling sound growing louder by the second. He wanted to quicken his pace, or start to run, but he was too frightened of the Feldwebel to break rank.

There was a crack and a shattering sound in the square behind him, like someone hitting bricks and mortar with a large lump hammer. Axel expected a crushing explosion, but there was nothing more. He glanced behind, but it was too dark to see.

The parachute flares still lit up the sky, and as they grew closer to the Front, Axel began to imagine their distant glow was reflecting on his jacket buttons. One old soldier had told him to rub mud on them, but he hadn’t dared besmirch his uniform like that.

The intermittent rattle of machine guns was growing louder.

As the column marched out of the town, resentful eyes observed their departure from an attic room of Café Remy, on the edge of the town. Georges de Winne, the owner of the establishment, peered down the barrel of his stolen Mauser rifle and drew a bead on the last head in the column. It was too dark to see properly but it made no difference. He pulled the trigger and the firing pin clicked in an empty chamber. He didn’t really know why he did it, but it made him feel better.

De Winne scratched his great black moustache and sat down with a sigh. One of these days, he told himself, he would have the courage to kill some of these Boche. Right now, he had no ammunition for his gun, and he was too frightened to ask for some from the few people he knew in Saint-Libert who formed part of the town’s shady resistance. He hoped they had forgotten he had offered to keep the gun for them. Its presence in his house, tucked out of sight in a pile of old newspapers and carpets in the attic, caused him constant anxiety. When the Boche had arrived, midway through their triumphant march through Belgium in the far-off summer of 1914, they had been ruthless with any Belgian civilians caught with firearms. There had been summary executions. Sometimes women and children were shot too. The executions provoked a great deal of impotent rage, but they had ensured minimum resistance and even a measure of surly cooperation.

When de Winne thought about all the things he had had to do for the Germans, who had made frequent use of his bar, resentment simmered in his gut like sour wine. This was the fifth autumn the Boche had been there in Saint-Libert, but, he