Eleven Eleven - By Paul Dowswell Page 0,55

her drinks and trying to talk to her. All that joie de vivre snuffed out like a candle. What a terrible waste. He had such an appetite for life. What was his name? Eddie. She had seen him just last night. It had been a wild evening, with too much wine, and everyone singing songs around the piano. When he’d asked for her scarf as a good-luck charm, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. After all, it had only cost her fifty centimes in a little junk shop in Paris.

She touches his face with her hand and leans closer to talk to him. ‘Hello, Eddie. It’s me, Céline. Can you hear me?’

The sound seeps through to Eddie’s fading consciousness, and something in his dying mind stirs. They are sitting on the grass at the Tuileries Garden, close to the Louvre. She is resting her head on his shoulder and caressing his face. The sunlight is brighter than he could ever imagine and he is so happy he feels like he is floating in the air.

Two other men from the ambulance crew come over carrying a stretcher apiece. They place them on the ground and lift Will Franklin and Eddie Hertz on to them. One of the stretcher men goes over to the ambulance to fetch a couple of blankets.

‘I’ll stay with this one for a moment, if you don’t mind,’ says Céline, still crouching by the airman. And she stays with him until she is sure his breathing has ceased. She pulls the blanket over his head. The young British soldier lying close by with blood all over his face hasn’t moved a jot. She shakes her head and looks around for other injured men who might need her attention.

A few minutes later an orderly approaches the two lifeless bodies. ‘Have you done their tags?’ he asks a man with Red Cross armbands.

‘Not yet,’ he replies.

The soldier pulls back the blankets and briskly snaps off one of the two identity tags Will and Eddie both wear around their neck. He looks at Will’s. ‘Thought so,’ he says to himself. ‘That’s Sergeant Franklin’s brother. I wouldn’t like to be the one to tell him.’

He turns to his companion and says, ‘We’ll come back for these two later,’ and walks away.

On the far side of the town square Sergeant Jim Franklin has caught up with his platoon. When the shooting in the forest started again, all of them, even he, just snapped and fled like frightened starlings. They had scattered out of pure terror, each one expecting that bullet in the brain, each one operating on pure survival instinct.

By the time Sergeant Franklin came to his senses, only Ogden was still there with him. Hosking soon caught up with them. Will had vanished.

‘Not a word,’ Franklin had warned them. ‘Not a word of this to a soul.’

They walked back to their previous position and some artillery men told them their unit had gone into Saint-Libert. And had they heard the news? The war was over. Jim Franklin was too tired to be happy and too upset about the men he had just lost. And he was too worried about his brother.

Now an anxious man runs up to speak to him and points. Jim walks towards the two stretchers he can see placed on the cobbled ground at the far end of the square. The railway station is still billowing smoke, but he barely notices. Everything seems to be taking place in a dream. His feet move forward on the solid ground but Franklin feels like he is wading through a morass of deep, sucking mud. His throat is tight, his chest heavy; he curses himself for having lost Will in the woods.

Jim approaches his brother’s shroud, wondering how on earth he is going to explain all this to his mother. He can picture her on the doorstep, getting that black-bordered telegram.

Choking back the tears that rise like floodwater, he pushes away the blanket. The blank eyes of Eddie Hertz stare back at him. Jim sees at once this man is a pilot and pulls the blanket back over his face.

His eyes alight on the other covered stretcher, but he is too overcome to look. He thinks of Will’s face – the lad had barely started shaving – and he begins to cry great gasping sobs. He sits on the cobble square and it all comes flooding out. For the first time ever he doesn’t care if the men see him. The