Alone In The Trenches Read Free

rude goodbye over
his shoulder as he went.
    “Oh good,” said the soldier to himself. “So what am I supposed to do with you?” He called across the yard in which we were standing. “Oi, Perkins! You seem to have
time on your hands. I need you here. Now, private soldier. Not tomorrow morning.”
    “What’s your name?” Private Perkins asked me gently. I told him it was Annette, and he said his was Charlie. “And how old are you?” I answered that I was nine.
    Charlie was very young – too young to shave – and slimly built. A mop of unruly dark hair poked out from inside his soldier’s cap. He was the first person who’d smiled at
me all day.

    “What about brothers and sisters?”
    Thinking about Michel, I began to cry. And to my surprise his eyes filled up with tears too.
    He took a handkerchief from his pocket. It was none too clean but he wiped my cheeks and then his own.
    “Don’t let the corporal see,” he said with another smile. “That would never do. He’d have me cleaning the latrines for not behaving like a proper soldier. I know
all about missing family. I’ve got a wheelbarrow full of brothers and sisters. I write letters, but God knows whether they ever reach home. Leastways, they never write back, even those as
can.”
    I looked around me. We were in the stable yard of what was probably a fine house. There were low buildings on all sides of the yard’s cobbled floor, some of them open at the front. We were
sitting on two low canvas chairs in one of the barns beside a stove which pumped heat out into the chilly morning. On the corners of the buildings rose bushes climbed the walls. Charlie saw me
looking.
    “The house is called
Les Roses
,” he said, “Because of the flowers, I suppose. We call it ‘
Rosie
’.”
    “Do the owners still live here?” I asked.
    “Long gone,” he answered. “Took what they could carry, and fled to England. You speak very good English for such a little girl! How’s that then?”
    I explained about my dad.
    “So where are your family now?” he asked.
    What I did next seems dreadful to me now. Without a moment’s hesitation I told the biggest fib of my life.
    “They’re all dead,” I answered. “My dad, my brother, my mum. All of them. Our farmhouse was blown up by a German gun.”
    Charlie looked stunned. “How did you escape?”
    I thought quickly. “I was down the garden in the privy. And then I ran away.”
    What a whopping, terrible lie! But can you see why I might have told it? Since the Great War ended, people know that soldiers sometimes become ‘shell-shocked’. Their minds get
scrambled by the awful things they’ve seen in battle and they go to pieces. Maybe that’s what happened to me in Ypres. Even as I was sitting there with Charlie I’d become more and
more cross with Mum every minute. Surely she’d known the city was too dangerous? The driver of the wagon had just made it perfectly clear. Ypres had been bombed before. And if Mum had known
that, what possessed her to send me in to buy bread? Even Madame P. had been surprised. I could have been killed. So now, if Michel and Dad were never coming back, what did it matter if I pretended
to have lost Mum and Grandma too? Hadn’t Dad run away from home when he wasn’t much older than me?
    Charlie could see I was shivering. “I think we could both do with a mug of something hot,” he said. “Just hang on a mo’.”
    He fetched a tin billy-can and some water, and used a stand made from twisted wire to heat up the billy over the stove. From his pocket he produced some paper wraps containing a sticky dark
brown substance, which went into the water.
    “Oxo…” he smiled, “…beef tea. You’ll like it. Makes everything seem better.”
    He was right. It was comforting to hold a hot drink and inhale the meaty aroma. However, when I took a sip it tasted vaguely of petrol. I must have wrinkled my nose. Charlie noticed and
laughed.

    “I know,” he said. “I’m