Private Peaceful. Michael Morpurgo
called because of John Macrae’s iconic poem.
I went with my friend, Michael Foreman, who had already written and illustrated two remarkable books set in war, War Game and War Boy. We went off together one morning to spend some time in the museum, and arranged to meet outside in the square afterwards. No war museum is more deeply engaging or informative or heart-breaking. But I found myself unable to stay long. It was simply too upsetting, as indeed a war museum should be. As I was leaving, I saw up on the wall, in a frame, a typed letter with its envelope. Intrigued, I went closer. It was from a captain in the army to the mother of a soldier, informing her in just few short lines that her son had been shot at dawn for cowardice. I read the address and name on the envelope, saw the jagged tear she had made opening it, knew at once that this letter destroyed her life, and the lives of her family. I could see her in my mind’s eye, standing there on her doorstep, letter in hand. I could feel her grief and her pain.
I knew then that I had to know more about the soldiers who had been executed in that war. I was able to see documents of their court martial trials – some lasting less than an hour, for a man’s life. I found out how there were over 3,000 soldiers condemned to death for cowardice in the face of the enemy, for desertion. Two were shot for falling asleep on sentry duty. Of these about 300 had their sentences confirmed and were shot. Many had clearly been suffering from shell shock – post traumatic stress disorder we call it these days. Some had already been hospitalised for it. It was evident to me that there was little justice here, more retribution. Very often the men had no one to represent them. It was capital punishment imposed quite deliberately to encourage other soldiers to obey orders.
I read in my research at the museum how these executions were carried out. At dawn, in a farm yard, or prison yard, out in a field, up against a hedge, the prisoner was tied to a post, blindfolded and then shot by a firing squad, sometimes composed of his comrades from his own company. I visited some of the places this had happened, stood where they had stood. I visited their graves. And I knew I had to write the story of one of these unfortunate men, ‘worthless men’ as one had been called as he was sentenced at his trial.
On my return home I discovered that all these years later, despite all the campaigning of the families of the executed to persuade governments to pardon those men shot at dawn, still there was a refusal to acknowledge that terrible injustices had been done. So I determined then to tell the story of one of these men, the life story from childhood home to the trenches to the firing squad.
I set the story in my village, in the farms and fields around me, in my cottage at home, the place where the soldier was born and grew up, where he went to school, where he fished in the rivers, scrimped apples – actually the same village where the story of War Horse takes place, where Joey is born and grew up. Much that I had learnt when I visited Ypres, and from those old men in the village all those years before when I was writing War Horse, I incorporated into this new story. It was, after all, the same war, the same horror, the same suffering.
I decided to become my soldier, tell it in the first person, speak it down onto the page, my thoughts and memories during the last long night before the execution at dawn. I had to live as close to the story as possible. I would have no numbered chapters, but instead simply the time as I look at my watch, as the hours pass, as 6 o’clock comes ever closer. I trace my life, to make the night as long as my life, to postpone the fatal hour.
Unlike War Horse, this book was an instant success. It did receive great reviews, mostly, did win a prize or two, did sell well. Within a year it was on the stage, adapted into a powerful one-man show by Simon Reade. It travelled the country, received rave reviews wherever it went. It travelled the world. Then Tom Morris at the National Theatre approached me with the idea of making a play of War Horse, a book which had been ignored for twenty-five years or more, though never out of print, thanks to my publishers who kept the faith!
War Horse turned out to be the greatest hit the National Theatre has ever had. It has also travelled the world from Germany, to the US, to Japan and China. Next year it will tour the UK again. And there have been films and radio plays of both War Horse and Private Peaceful.
But both books, although set in amongst the suffering of war at home and on the battlefield, are essentially about our longing for peace.
Both are my anthems for peace.
Michael Morpurgo, 2016
They’ve gone now, and I’m alone at last. I have the whole night ahead of me, and I won’t waste a single moment of it. I shan’t sleep it away. I won’t dream it away either. I mustn’t, because every moment of it will be far too precious.
I want to try to remember everything, just as it was, just as it happened. I’ve had nearly eighteen years of yesterdays and tomorrows, and tonight I must remember as many of them as I can. I want tonight to be long, as long as my life, not filled with fleeting dreams that rush me on towards dawn.
Tonight, more than any other night of my life, I want to feel alive.
Charlie is taking me by the hand, leading me because he knows I don’t want to go. I’ve never worn a collar before and it’s choking me. My boots are strange and heavy on my feet. My heart is heavy too, because I dread what I am going to. Charlie has told me often how terrible this school-place is: about Mr Munnings and his raging tempers and the long whipping cane he hangs on the wall above his desk.
Big Joe doesn’t have to go to school and I don’t think that’s fair at all. He’s much older than me. He’s even older than Charlie and he’s never been to school. He stays at home with Mother, and sits up in his tree singing Oranges and Lemons, and laughing. Big Joe is always happy, always laughing. I wish I could be happy like him. I wish I could be at home like him. I don’t want to go with Charlie. I don’t want to go to school.
I look back, over my shoulder, hoping for a reprieve, hoping that Mother will come running after me and take me home. But she doesn’t come and she doesn’t come, and school and Mr Munnings and his cane are getting closer with every step.
“Piggyback?” says Charlie. He sees my eyes full of tears and knows how it is. Charlie always knows how it is. He’s three years older than me, so he’s done everything and knows everything. He’s strong, too, and very good at piggybacks. So I hop up and cling on tight, crying behind my closed eyes, trying not to whimper out loud. But I cannot hold back my sobbing for long because I know that this morning is not the beginning of anything – not new and exciting as Mother says it is – but rather the end of my beginning. Clinging on round Charlie’s neck I know that I am living the last moments of my carefree time, that I will not be the same person when I come home this afternoon.
I open my eyes and see a dead crow hanging from the fence, his beak open. Was he shot, shot in mid-scream, as he began to sing, his raucous tune scarcely begun? He sways, his feathers still catching the wind even in death, his family and friends cawing in their grief and anger from the high elm trees above us. I am not sorry for him. It could be him that drove away my robin and emptied her nest of her eggs. My eggs. Five of them there had been, live and warm under my fingers. I remember I took them out one by one and laid them in the palm of my hand. I wanted them for my tin, to blow them like Charlie did and lay them in cotton wool with my blackbird’s eggs and my pigeon’s eggs. I would have taken them. But something made me draw back, made me hesitate. The robin was watching me from Father’s rose bush, her black and beady eyes unblinking, begging me.
Father was in that bird’s eyes. Under the rose bush, deep down, buried in the damp and wormy earth were all his precious things. Mother had put his pipe in first. Then Charlie laid his hobnail boots side by side, curled into each other, sleeping. Big Joe knelt down and covered the boots in Father’s old scarf.
“Your turn, Tommo,” Mother said. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was holding the gloves he’d worn the morning he died. I remembered picking one of them up.