Private Peaceful. Michael Morpurgo
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With my thanks to Piet Chielens of In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2003
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016
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Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2003
Photographs in end material © Shutterstock
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover images © Pirmin Föllmi/EyeEm/Getty Images (poppy field); Shutterstock.com (all other images)
Michael Morpurgo asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
Although the title was inspired by the name on a gravestone in Ypres, this novel is a work of fiction. Any reference to real people (living or dead), actual locales and historical events are used solely to lend the fiction an appropriate cultural and historical setting. All other names, characters, places and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007486441
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007477838
Version: 2018-07-31
Contents
Twenty-four minutes past twelve
Discover more unforgettable books from the nation’s favourite storyteller
Other titles by Michael Morpurgo include
Of course both Private Peaceful and War Horse take place in the First World War.
War Horse came first, way back in 1982, a story inspired by a chance meeting in my local pub all those years ago with an old veteran who lived in our village. From my talks with him and with two other old men of that generation, I found out so much about that war, about life at home and in the trenches. One of these old soldiers had been to war, ‘with horses’, as he put it. Those meetings and the surprise discovery in the attic of four contemporary drawings of cavalry fighting in the First World War, provided the seed corn for War Horse.
Sadly, the book did not do that well when it came out, sold very few copies, failed to win a prize, received mixed reviews, but the few who did read it seemed to like it. Because of this I was invited to a conference of children’s writers and illustrators from all over the world who had tackled the difficult subject of war. It took place in Ypres in Belgium, the town that had been fought over fiercely in the First World War. There, battles had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides, and the town became synonymous with the endurance and suffering of that terrible war.