Private Peaceful

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

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Five Past Ten

Twenty to Eleven

Nearly Quarter Past Eleven

Ten to Midnight

Twenty-four minutes past twelve

Nearly five to one

Twenty-eight minutes past one

Fourteen minutes past two

A minute past three

Twenty-five past three

Nearly Four o’clock

Five to five

One minute to six

Discover more

Author’s note

About the Author

Discover more unforgettable books from the nation’s favourite storyteller

Other titles by Michael Morpurgo include

About the Publisher

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. They held this conference in one of the greatest of all war museums, In Flanders Fields, so 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.