of planes. Occasionally the fuses fail and these shells can fall on us too. The problem is that these bullets and shells have a tendency to fall from the sky about ten or twenty miles out from where they were fired. So they have a tendency to fall on us. The last thing you want is to be caught without your tin hat firmly strapped onto your skull when it is literally raining bullets or shells.
My head bowed low and I looked into Thompson's face. His eyes seemed dead, although a solitary tear was dragging a lonely path down his childish pale chin. He barely has enough whiskers to shave yet, and looks both impossibly young and impossibly old and tired at the same time. I tried to whisper to him; reassure him that we would be alright but he could barely acknowledge my presence. I am not sure he could even hear me.
He still has hardly spoken since his comrades were cut down. It is weeks now. I did speak to the Sergeant-Major about him. I tried to suggest we should send him to the M. O. but the Sergeant-Major was having none of it. I am sorry to say that I think I did more harm than good, and I am afraid that he now thinks that Thompson, and by association all four of us in our bivuoac, are shirkers. Of course this is by no means the case, but I wish I had kept my mouth shut. It feels like all the N.C.O.s have their beady eyes on us now. Oh well, I suppose it will pass if we keep our heads down. I hope so anyway.
When the last straggling bombers were flying overhead and their growl was at last seeming distant I chanced a peek at the sky. There was one lone bomber left, one of its engines sputtering and coughing like an old man choking on his pipe. It had been hit. Black oily smoke balls puttered from the back of its wing and a cheer slowly rippled round the camp as man after man realised it was going down.
It looked to be moving ever so slowly; creeping a smoke trail across the blue. So slow it seemed impossible to me that it could ever stay in the air at that pace; as if it were crawling gradually to its knees, gasping its last breaths with panting blackened smoke, as it headed into a sedate sloping spiral. A dying moth grasping at the air.
The cheers quickly turned to shouts of panic and men running, holding their tin hats and looking desperately skywards to try and work out the trajectory of its decent. It hit the ground about half a mile away, skimming the tops of tents first with lop-sided-wings, before one wing was ripped off by a sturdy flag pole in a burst of dripping flames.
We stood high on the lip of our fox-hole; fascinated eyes thankful it was moving away from us. As soon as I saw the wobbling hazy shapes of burning men running from their flaming tents I grabbed Thompson's shoulders and moved him back into the foxhole, turning his eyes away from the sight. Their screams pierced even from this distance. I stood again and watched, unable to tear my own eyes away. One burning man was waving his arms in the air as he ran; as if he were trying to bat the flames away and somehow outrun them. The flames gave his body the unreal appearance of a flailing mannequin with streaks of orange tissue paper flying out from behind him. Impossible tissue paper that he could not remove. Wild flying tissue paper that was consuming him. It was horrific.
Later Jones, Hendricks and I took a stroll over to the smouldering carcass of the Fokker. We stood on a slight ridge near enough to see, but far enough to not get in the way of the fire teams that were still damping down the smoking wreck. The glass nose of the bomber, below the cockpit, was still intact, its twin machine guns poking up to the sky. You could see the bloodied face of the dead gunner pressed against the glass, his gloved hand still reaching out in death as if to try and escape through the spider-web cracks in the glass.
There was a German word painted in high black gothic script on the side of the fuselage. "Hexerei" it said. I called out to one of the Tommies nearby, and asked if he knew what it meant; "witchcraft," he shouted back with a cockney burr, "it’s bloody witchcraft!"
To think that the Hun would paint the word 'witchcraft' on the side of one of their bombers. The whole thing, this whole bloody war and the machines we use to wage it is like witchcraft. Or perhaps sorcery. I wondered if that's what those pilots and flight crew meant when they painted that on their beloved flying machine.
The real sorcery is that fact that we put up with it. Put up with this war and the death and pain and miserable short lives. Put up with defenceless women being trampled to death at a concert for no reason. Put up with children like Archie Groves, Billy and all of poor Thompson's mates being senselessly killed. And they were no more than children.
In that moment, as I stood there looking at the letters on the side of that useless burned out aeroplane, it became clear to me as if for the first time. Clear as day; like my eyes were open for the first time; as if I have spent all of my short life bent double; stooped over like I was still in those damn tunnels, eyes fixed on the ground and never able to see the clear blue sky. They fit us soldiers with blinkers like horses.
Yes I know that war is misery and war is horrific, we all do. But it was as if it was the very first time that the thought that we don't actually have to do this came to mind. We have been bewitched somehow into to thinking that there is no choice. Witchcraft has cast a spell on us. I have been bewitched, so have you my dear Esme and so has every other man, women and child from these two opposing nations for many long years. Such evil sorcery. "Hexerei".
I must say that such thoughts have put my mind in a bit of a turmoil. It seems so obvious and clear but at the same time so confusing Esme. I am not the bravest of men, far from it, but I can truly say that I am not scared of the fight. Although I increasingly fear death; the older I get the closer it seems. Please forgive me if this is sounds so horribly morbid.
Do not misunderstand me; I have a hatred of the Germans, as we all do. I wish for revenge for the loss of my father. It is like they always taught us in school; the purpose of a boy is to grow to be a soldier, to avenge the deaths of our fathers.
One of my earliest memories was my teacher; when I must have been about five and just learning to read. She was a sternly robust spinster of a woman, like they so often seem to be. I loved books but was struggling to read the 'Janet and John' books; you know, those school books that have the different coloured covers depending on what stage of reading you are at. My teacher, Miss Ormondroyd, she was explaining the book to me in her faint northern accent, her stubby fingers tracing beneath each word; "Janet helps her mother," she would read as I stared at the picture of the girl helping her mother wash up at the sink, "John likes to march," and there he was, in the book in his cleanly-pressed school army uniform; I so wanted to be like him. "Janet likes to cook," she continued, "John likes to shoot,"; John in the picture with his practice air rifle. "Janet hates Germans,", "John hates Germans," is how those books would always finish. You must remember them Esme. Miss Ormondroyd would always finish the reading lesson by asking us why we all hate the Germans and we would chant back parrot fashion; "because the Germans started the war!"
And the truth is that fact doesn't go away, for any of us. They started all this back in 1914, they are responsible and this is why we must defeat them.
At the same time I find it increasingly difficult to hate them. Despite all the talk between the Tommies about how they are 'disgusting hateful sausage eaters' or worse, I can't but help see the face of yet another dead young man when I see a dead German. A face much like my own. That gunner in the bomber, his face twisted hard against the glass. That parachutist stripped naked, his face peaceful. These are simply fragile sacks of impermanent flesh, bags of bones; just like Hendricks and Jones and Thompson and me. Just like Archie Groves and Billy. And any of us. Those German boys had minds and souls full of thoughts, and longings and dreams of love and better lives. Just like we do. Can they all possibly hate us so? All of them? Are they all taught to hate us just like we are taught to hate them? I cannot begin to believe that they are so very much different to us.
A couple of years ago they sent a spotter plane, high above the Wall, and it dropped thousands of leaflets down on us. Paper rain swirling like spinning seeds; drifting slowly through the
smoke filled air. Messages to us about how we should surrender. Carefully printed English telling us about how we were being lied to by the Empire, about how we were being 'used as slaves' to fight this war, and that if we rose up against our officers and surrendered they would treat us well and we would finally be safe. 'The German soldier is your brother in arms' it said.
I was put on a duty to sweep them up, collect them and burn them on top of the Wall. Of course I didn't believe a word of their lies, especially the stuff about how the German army was superior and would soon crush the B.E.F. into the dirt if we didn't surrender. I know that was a lie because that was over two years ago and there is no sign of us being crushed as yet. So like everyone else I dismissed their pronouncements as lies. But the idea that their soldiers are our 'brothers in arms' has somehow stuck in the back of my mind.
Such things remain unspoken between us soldiers; it is unwise to utter them out loud even in jest. You never know who might be listening and misunderstand. I have heard whispers over the last five years of those who talk out of turn in unpatriotic ways. Such a thing may well get you sent to the most