Eleven Eleven - By Paul Dowswell Page 0,3

he was still a schoolboy. Will knew his sort from the Officers’ Training Corps parades back at home. Will liked him though.

The smell of burning tobacco wafted down the road and caught in his nose. The driver must have a snout on the go. The others in Will’s platoon had been disturbed too and some of them were sitting up and instinctively reaching for their Players or Woodbines. Lighter flames and the brief flare of matches lit up faces etched with dirt and exhaustion.

‘Settle yourselves, men,’ said Richardson. ‘We just have to let this half-track past. Then you can get back to sleep.’

The platoon shuffled up the side of the road. Will hated to move. Even in the coldest, dampest spots, if you stayed still, your body heat lent a grudging warmth to the earth and your damp clothes. But if you stirred, the cold bit like shards of broken glass.

The half-track edged forward, close enough now for Will to taste the exhaust in the back of his throat. As it passed, he felt the warmth from the engine on his nose and cheeks. The meagre heat stirred a mad impulse in him. As the caterpillar tracks clanked past, mere inches from his feet, he realised how easy it would be to stretch out a foot and give himself a ‘Blighty injury’. That’s what the men called the wounds that got you sent back to Blighty – Britain. He stretched his foot out, right to the rim of the metal track.

It was worth it, surely. Will’s mind was racing now. Just do it. A crushed foot would have him stretchered to the rear and on a boat back to England. He’d be home within a week. A warm hospital ward. Three hot meals a day. He could sleep as much as he liked. And he would live to see the end of the war. The tractor passed and now the howitzer lumbered after it, its broad armour-plated wheels churning up the muddy road.

Will looked at those wheels with trepidation. It would hurt like hell, and he’d walk with a crutch for the rest of his life. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Watch that foot there, lad,’ whispered Weale, one of the older men in the platoon.

The huge gun slipped in the mud, and the wheel lurched closer to the resting men. Weale pulled Will back just as he hurriedly drew his legs up. The metal plates left deep imprints in the ground right next to him. The driver gunned his engine, trying to gain traction in the soft ground, and then the steady chug of the tractor faded into the distance.

‘Lucky escape there, lad,’ whispered Weale in his ear. ‘Double lucky. If you had caught your leg, they might have thought it deliberate. Boys have been shot fer less.

‘Not that I thought that’s what you were doing of course,’ Weale said with a wink. He patted Will on the back and went back to join his friend Moorhouse. Will’s heart was racing, but he knew Weale wouldn’t say anything. He liked those two. They’d both been out in France since 1914. If they could survive four years of it, maybe he could too.

Jim Franklin was looking for a man to relieve Richardson for the next hour. Will turned his back on his brother and prayed he wouldn’t pick him. Cold and wet as he was, Will was wretchedly weary and desperately needed to rest. The platoon sergeant was careful not to give any of his men the slightest reason to suspect his younger brother had an easier time than the rest of them. Will was also keenly aware that Jim was still angry with him for coming out here in the first place. His mother and father had already lost a son to this war, and Will was only sixteen.

‘Battersby, you first, then Uttley,’ said Jim. ‘Uttley, you can come and get me at oh five hundred.’

Will was safe. At least for the next three hours. He wrapped his trench coat tight around his body and tried to settle. The rain was holding off for now and he began to drift in and out of sleep. Far above he could hear a persistent hum. It sounded like an insect – but it could only be a distant aeroplane. He wondered how the pilots ever managed to find their way back to base on a dark night.

He glanced over to see his brother a few feet away giving