Eleven Eleven - By Paul Dowswell Page 0,56

sodding war is over now. They can think what they bloody well like.

Far in the distance, Will hears a strange wailing sound. His ears are still ringing, and he has a terrible pain in his head. There is a stifling, musty smell in his nose and an itchy, scratchy feeling on his face. He wonders if he is dead, but his rational mind dismisses the idea. He remembers a great flash and then nothing. He seems to be far, far underwater, but he is slowly coming to the surface.

Jim pulls back the blanket from his brother’s face just as his eyes flicker open.

FACT AND FICTION

Eleven Eleven is structured around the final day of the Great War. Altogether, close to three thousand soldiers on both sides died on that final morning. Most fatalities occurred along the American sections of the front line as many American soldiers were ordered to fight to the last minute. An unlucky few on both sides were killed after eleven o’clock, in misunderstandings, and from stray artillery fire and unexploded shells.

In Chapter 6 the signing of the Armistice on Marshal Foch’s private train in Compiègne Forest is based on eyewitness accounts, although the narrator of this chapter, Captain Atherley, is fictitious.

All other characters, and what happens to them in the novel, are fictitious, although their age reflects the youth of many participants in the war. The Belgian town of St Libert, close to Mons and the French border, does not exist. Aulnois and Prouvy do, but were not affected by the events in the book.

William Franklin, Axel Meyer and Eddie Hertz are based on no real individuals, and the fighting units they belong to are either fictitious or took part in other actions on that day.

Because the story is set at the very end of the Great War, Eleven Eleven does not depict the suffering of soldiers on all sides caught up in the interminable trench warfare of 1914–1918. Have a look at L’enfer by Georges Leroux on Google Images to get a glimpse into why this conflict still haunts us a hundred years later.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A big thank you to Ele Fountain and Isabel Ford, my two invaluable editors at Bloomsbury, Dilys Dowswell, who read and commented on all my first drafts, and Neil Offley who helped me fulfil a long-held ambition to visit some of the battlefields and memorials of the Western Front. Christian Staufenbiel kindly gave his time to advise on the German words I’ve used.

And thanks, as ever, to my agent, Charlie Viney, for his tireless support, and Jenny and Josie Dowswell for looking after me.

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SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Turn over to read Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Warsaw August 2, 1941

Piotr Bruck shivered in the cold as he waited with twenty or so other naked boys in the long draughty corridor. He carried his clothes in an untidy bundle and hugged them close to his chest to try to keep warm. The late summer day was overcast and the rain had not let up since daybreak. He could see the goose pimples on the scrawny shoulder of the boy in front. That boy was shivering too, maybe from cold, maybe from fear. Two men in starched white coats sat at a table at the front of the line. They were giving each boy a cursory examination with strange-looking instruments. Some boys were sent to the room at the left of the table. Others were curtly dismissed to the room at the right.

Piotr and the other boys had been ordered to be silent and not look around. He willed his eyes to stay firmly fixed forward. So strong was Piotr’s fear, he felt almost detached from his body. Every movement he made seemed unnatural, forced. The only thing keeping him in the here and now was a desperate ache in his bladder. Piotr knew there was no point asking for permission to use the lavatory. When the soldiers had descended on the orphanage to hustle the boys from their beds and into a waiting van, he had asked to go. But he got a sharp cuff round the ear for talking out of turn.

The soldiers had first come to the orphanage two weeks ago. They had been back several times since. Sometimes they took boys, sometimes girls. Some of the boys in Piotr’s overcrowded dormitory had been glad to see them go: ‘More food for us, more