Eleven Eleven - By Paul Dowswell Page 0,4

instructions to the night watch. Since coming out to France Jim had grown a carapace of steel along with a great bristly moustache. Will understood well why his brother had had to change. How else did you keep a soldier out in no-man’s-land in a forward observation post in the middle of the night, with his head and shoulders above the parapet, where he could catch a stray bullet or be snatched by an enemy patrol at any moment? The men in Jim’s squad had to be more frightened of their sergeant than they were of the enemy.

Shortly after Will had arrived in C Company, someone had raided the hamper in the Regimental Aid Post. All the comforts for wounded men – the brandy, the cocoa, the Oxo, even the biscuits – had been taken. Jim had called his platoon to order and told them that unless the goods were returned in the next hour, the whole lot of them would be on night patrol, every night, until they were. It worked.

Another time Will had seen Jim screaming in the face of a young lad who had completely lost his bottle. He was cowering in a trench and crying hysterically, just before they were meant to go over the top. Jim had got him out with the rest of them when the whistle blew. The boy was caught by a machine gun a couple of minutes later.

‘He had to go with us. Redcaps would have done for him if he’d stayed in the trench,’ Jim told Will afterwards, when they were alone. During an attack, the Military Police combed the start lines just after Z-Hour. And all the troops had been made aware that any man who stayed behind would be shot on the spot.

Now Will’s stomach was rumbling and he began to wish he smoked. The others said it stopped you feeling hungry, but whenever he tried a cigarette he coughed his lungs out and the others would laugh and thump him on the back a bit too enthusiastically.

Will liked to stick with the older soldiers when he could. He felt safer with them and enjoyed their banter. He picked their slang up quick enough. ‘Cushy’ for easy, ‘char’ for tea – words they had brought back from colonial service in India. There was the newly minted slang from France too, like ‘boko’ for a lot, a comic pronunciation of beaucoup, and ‘San Fairy Anne’ – it doesn’t matter – from Ça ne fait rien. But he liked the English slang words the best – like ‘gasper’ for cigarette, and ‘bung’ for the tasteless cheese they had in their iron rations, because it was said to ‘bung you up’.

But he could sense their sneers when he used those words – he was trying too hard. And he was Sergeant Franklin’s brother. They were all right with Will, but he was never really going to be one of them.

He tried to sleep, but he could only doze. He knew they were somewhere near the town of Mons – the place where the British had fought with the German army in the first days of the war. It had taken them over four years to get back here. Four whole years.

In the four months he had been on the Western Front Will had advanced far enough through France and into Belgium to notice how the buildings had changed. Even in the shattered villages he could tell that the houses were more like pictures he had seen at school of Amsterdam or other Dutch places. He wondered what the buildings in Germany would look like.

The thought of entering Germany gave Will a glimmer of confidence but it didn’t take his mind off the fact that they were due to attack the town of Saint-Libert in the morning. First light didn’t feel too far away, and Will always felt a sickening pit-of-the-stomach fear when he knew he was going to have to fight. Some of the others said he was ‘windy’ and that it was stupid to worry about it.

‘Yer could get killed sitting at the side of the road having a cuppa,’ they said, ‘if a shell’s got yer name on it.’

Jim had taken him to one side and told him men like that were just bragging. ‘Everyone gets frightened before a battle, Will, even me,’ he whispered. ‘If yer not frightened, yer get careless. Being frightened is good. You make sure you’re frightened when we have to fight. You’ll stay alive