The Pigeon Spy Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Doves and dollars

  Chapter 2: Trains and targets

  Chapter 3: Hawks and hunger

  Chapter 4: France and friends

  Chapter 5: Bandages and bullets

  Chapter 6: Puddles and prayers

  Chapter 7: Splinters and stones

  Chapter 8: Darkness and deer

  Chapter 9: Pigeon and peg

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Doves and dollars

  I never left the state of Kansas until I joined the army. In fact, I’d hardly ever left our farm.

  ‘That Great War is nothing to do with us,’ Ma used to say. ‘You stay out of it, Joe.’

  Our farm was a patch of dirt. Dad did the ploughing and sowing – I never liked horses, and they didn’t like me. Ma kept the old tractor running and the pick-up truck that got us to Great Bend – every time I touched a machine, it broke. I minded the pigs and chickens, and the pigeons. Maybe you wouldn’t think of farming pigeons. But Ma sold them to Mr Lamarr at his White Dove restaurant in Great Bend to be made into pigeon pie. We needed the money, but I felt bad about the pigeons.

  I liked to train my birds to fly back home. Some days I’d run ten miles across the range, then tie a message to the bird’s leg and set it free. Those little messages got back to our farm long before I did.

  From time to time Ma came back from Great Bend with a newspaper. After dark we’d sit round the oil lamp and read about the Great War over in Europe.

  ‘Looks like America’s going to send men across to fight,’ Pa said one night in the lamplight.

  ‘Well, they ain’t taking my little Joe,’ Ma said.

  ‘He has to be eighteen to fight. Joe’s only sixteen.’

  ‘He looks eighteen,’ Ma argued. ‘If the army send men out to look for soldiers you hide in the barn, you hear, Joe?’

  Then one day in the spring of 1917 Ma came home wild as a mountain lion. ‘Some low-down crook of a farmer over in Dry Walnut Creek is selling Mr Lamarr pigeons for half what we charge. I had to take even less. We’ll hardly afford to eat this month,’ she sobbed, and tears ran down her thin, sun-stained cheeks. ‘All because of this farmer Muller.’

  ‘Muller?’ Pa said. ‘Sounds German to me.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Ma shouted. ‘And we’re at war with the Germans!’

  I tried to remind her: ‘You said the Great War is nothing to do with us.’

  She wasn’t listening. ‘It’d serve them right if I sent our Joe to fight them. They’d be beaten inside a week.’

  I tried again. ‘You said I was too young.’

  ‘I’ll drive you in to Great Bend tomorrow. You can sign up for the US Army there.’

  ‘But you said…’

  Ma wasn’t listening.

  We drove into the town the next day and saw a line of men outside the door of the Town Hall. Ma pushed me out of the pickup truck. I joined the line and shuffled along with the rest till I got to the desk.

  ‘Name?’ the man in a khaki uniform asked.

  ‘Joe. Joe Clay.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  The man rubbed his tired eyes. ‘We don’t take men as young as sixteen. You reckon you mean eighteen?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said. It was a lie. We both knew it.

  ‘I’ll put down eighteen,’ he said. ‘Now put your mark here.’

  ‘I can write my name,’ I said proudly.

  ‘That’ll come in useful when you’re digging trenches,’ he muttered. ‘Here is a rail pass. Report to Kansas City troop depot a week today and they’ll train you up.’ He reached out to shake my hand quickly. ‘Welcome to the army, son,’ he said, then shouted, ‘Next!’

  And that was how I came to fight in the Great War. All because Ma got in a temper over a few pigeons.

  I can’t complain. Pigeons got me into the war, but it was a pigeon that got me out of it alive.

  Chapter 2

  Trains and targets

  I went off to Camp Lewis in Washington for training.

  First we learned to march. The sergeant said I was the worst marcher he’d ever seen.

  Then we tried shooting. My shooting was worse than my marching. When they gave me a rifle everybody hid.

  They tried me in the cook house but my porridge was so lumpy the sergeant said it could kill more men than a German machine gun, and my bacon was harder than a bullet.

  By the spring of 1918 the army reckoned we were ready to go across the seas to fight the German army. The colonel sent for me. ‘Trooper Clay,’ he said with a sad shake of his white-haired head. ‘What am I going to do with you?’

  ‘Send me to France to fight, sir?’

  ‘You can’t shoot straight, you can’t march straight, and you can’t look after the horses or the trucks.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘We could sent you over to France and tie you to a post. The riflemen could use you for target practice.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I muttered. My boots were too big and the wool uniform itched and made me sweat. I felt as miserable as a whipped puppy.

  ‘Tell me, Trooper Clay, is there anything you are good at? Any single thing?’

  ‘I can run ten miles in an hour,’ I said.

  The colonel looked happier. ‘That’s good. The men in battle need to send messages quickly. Telephone wires get cut or snapped so then they use runners.’

  ‘I could do that,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a dangerous job,’ he said.

  My mouth went dry. ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘The men in the battle may want supplies. Or they may want to tell our heavy gunners where the enemy troops are, so they can drop shells on them. Now, Trooper Clay, what do the Germans think of that?’

  ‘They don’t want the big guns dropping shells on them, sir?’

  ‘Exactly,’ the colonel said. ‘So your enemy will do all they can to stop the messengers getting through. They send snipers to pick them off. Know what a sniper is?’

  ‘A lone sharp-shooter with a rifle,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be trying to run five miles with a message and the sniper will be trying to shoot you. Or they may call up the German Air Force to attack you with planes carrying machine guns. A dangerous job.’ The colonel rubbed his hands together. ‘Trooper Clay, I’ll have you posted to a troop of messengers in France.’

  ‘Thank you sir,’ I said. But I don’t know why I said that.

  Chapter 3

  Hawks and hunger

  It took eight days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. We landed in a place so green and peaceful I couldn’t believe there was a war going on. I was used to the endless flat and dusty plains of Kansas. This was a land of fresh rain, rolling green hills and little fields with sheep and cows.

  I said, ‘France sure is a great place.’

  The sergeant sneered at me. ‘We’re in England, you dummy.’

  The men heard him and laughed. After that no one called me Joe any more – they all called me Dummy.

  We spent a couple of weeks in England doing more training. No one was faster than me down the lanes and over the green fields. ‘It’ll be harder when you get to France,’ the sergeant warned me. ‘Running in trenches and ditches to stay out of sight, running in darkness or wearing a gas mask.’

  I got stronger and my feet got used to the heavy boots. At dinner the other men moaned about how much they hated the army food. I ate everything they put in front of me.

  After dinner, some of the men went into the towns on the lorries to drink English beer. But I went down to the other part of the messenger troop: the pigeons.

  The soldier in charge of the pigeons was Corporal Bobby Mason – a man nearly as old as Pa, with hair going grey at the sides.
He didn’t call me Dummy and he listened when I told him about how I trained my birds back home. Now he taught me the way the army did it.

  ‘We get our birds from the pigeon men of Britain,’ Corporal Mason told me. ‘They’re tough little fellers and don’t seem to mind the gunfire. Some fly all the way from France to England. They reckon nineteen out of twenty get through safely.’

  ‘What happens to the others?’ I asked.

  ‘The Germans shoot them down, or send up hawks to hunt them. And of course some get eaten by our soldiers.’

  ‘What?’ I gasped.

  ‘Every troop takes two or three pigeons into battle. If the men get stuck and their food is cut off, they eat the pigeons. Makes sense,’ Bobby told me.

  I remembered Mr Lamarr and his White Dove restaurant. I wasn’t sure I could eat a pigeon myself, not one that I’d looked after. But, like Bobby said, it made sense if you were hungry.

  When I’d been in England a week the corporal said, ‘The pigeon trainers they sent me aren’t much good. They’ve never cared for birds before.’ He looked away from me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘I did something I shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘I went to the sergeant and asked if he could give you a transfer to be a pigeon trainer. He said yes. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Mind?’ I almost screamed. ‘Mind? It’s the best job in the army!’ I could have kissed the guy.

  Of course I didn’t know how close the pigeons would come to getting me killed.

  Chapter 4

  France and friends

  I sailed across the English Channel to France and into the Great War. It wasn’t all about soldiers stuck in the same trench for years. This was Autumn 1918 and the enemy were being pushed all the way back to Germany.

  The British, the French and the Americans were marching forward every day. The Germans kept stopping and turning their machine guns on them. But every day the enemy were driven back.

  I had to follow them with the pigeons.

  The British called nesting boxes ‘pigeon lofts’. I trained the birds to fly back to the lofts. The armies were moving forward, and the lofts were moving with them, every day closer to Germany. And still the birds found their way back.

  Every day an army messenger would arrive and pick up a basket of three or four birds. Then he’d head back into the battle, ten to thirty miles away.

  Most days the birds came home to the lofts and I was waiting. There was a little can wrapped around each pigeon’s leg and I’d unfasten it as soon as the bird had its corn and water. Then I raced with the message to the signal trooper. Most of the messages told the men on the big guns where our foot-soldiers were. They told the gunners where to drop their shells to clear the enemy out of the way and not kill our own men.

  The men in my troop said we’d be in Germany by November. ‘There’s nothing going to stop us now,’ the messengers told us when they came to collect the birds.

  But Pa always had this saying: ‘If anything can go wrong then it will go wrong.’ And Pa was right.

  It started when a soldier from the 77th Battalion limped into our camp. He was a big man for a runner – most of them were little fellers. But this one looked like a boxer, battered face, fists like tins of plum-and-apple jam, and broken teeth.

  ‘Birds,’ he said to me.

  ‘How many, sir?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not a sir. I’m Private Owens of the 77th. Friends call me Wolfie because I eat like a wolf.’

  ‘I’m Private Clay,’ I said. ‘Friends call me Dummy because I’m stupid.’

  ‘I’m not your friend. Get me three messenger birds.’

  ‘Yes, sir – I mean, Wolfie.’

  He grabbed me by the front of my uniform and lifted me off my feet. His nose was an inch from mine. ‘You’re not my friend. It’s Private Owens to you.’

  I glanced at his shoulder. ‘You’re bleeding, Private Owens,’ I said.

  ‘A machine-gun bullet caught me on my way here. The enemy are closing in to cut off the 77th. That’s why I need to hurry.’

  ‘But the doctor can look at that, can’t he, while I find three birds?’

  He grunted, and lowered me to the ground. Wolfie was a rough, hard man but I liked him, so I found my three best birds. Of course you just want to know about the best and bravest of them all, the black one the Brits called Cher Ami. They told me that was French for ‘Dear Friend’.

  I didn’t want to send Cher Ami into the fighting. Some birds didn’t come back alive. But I put him carefully into the basket with the other two.

  I lived to be glad I did that.

  Chapter 5

  Bandages and bullets

  Wolfie Owens came back from the hospital tent with his arm in a sling, raging and ranting at the sergeant.

  ‘How can I fight with my arm bandaged up like that?’ Wolfie asked.

  ‘You were told to stay in the hospital for a couple of days to let the wound heal,’ my sergeant said.

  ‘My company is under attack and low on food,’ the big man said. ‘You want me to lie on a bed in a hospital while my friends starve and get shot at?’

  ‘Yes. You can’t help them if you can’t fire a rifle.’

  The big fists were tight. ‘But they need to get messages out. I have to take the pigeons back to them,’ he argued.

  ‘You can’t carry a rifle and a box of pigeons.’

  ‘I can try.’

  I stood watching the argument with the basket in my hands and the three birds making a soft ‘coo-coo’ sound.

  The sergeant caught sight of me. ‘Trooper Clay here can carry the pigeons to the 77th. He’s a runner.’

  Wolfie took a deep breath to hold in his temper and looked at me. ‘Trooper Clay?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Have you ever been close to the battle front?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Do you know the way?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Wolfie turned back to the sergeant. ‘See, sarge? Hopeless.’

  The sergeant gave a grim smile. ‘In that case you can both go. The Dummy can carry his birds and you can show him the way.’

  Wolfie looked at me and spread his huge hands. I shrugged. ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

  I packed some food, put the pigeon basket on my back and climbed into a lorry. We clattered over broken roads for twenty painful miles then the driver stopped. ‘This is as far as it goes.’

  Wolfie stepped down and looked into the distant, dark-green hills. ‘See that forest over there?’

  ‘Around five miles off?’ I said.

  ‘We walk.’

  The autumn fields were soft with rain and shattered by shells. Slimy green water gathered in the shell holes and the smell was sour as one of Pa’s pig pens.

  We reached the top of a hill and looked down into a valley. Wolfie pointed. ‘The 77th were down there when I left them. There are Germans to the right and Germans to the left as well as straight ahead.’

  I nodded, and felt a sharp blow to the top of my head as a bullet struck my helmet. If I hadn’t dipped my head just then, it would have emptied my brains onto the muddy grass.

  I stood there like the dummy they called me. Wolfie grabbed my arm and threw me to the ground. I felt the pigeons flap and squawk as their basket tumbled. But the strangest sound was Wolfie Owens laughing.

  ‘I was shot,’ I groaned. ‘What’s so funny?’

  He wiped a tear of laughter away. ‘I said there were Germans either side and straight ahead. Well, I was wrong. There are Germans behind us as well. We’re cut off, Trooper Clay. Welcome to the 77th, because they’re our only hope. If you know how to run then get down this hill and into the trees as fast as you can.’

  I picked myself up, strapped on the pigeons and ran for my life.

  Chapter 6

  Puddles and prayers

  Gunfire crackled like a dry log on our kitchen stove back in Kansas as I ran to
wards the shelter of the trees.

  Behind me, Wolfie was walking backwards, firing his rifle from the hip, to make the enemy keep their heads down till I reached safety. He was risking his life to save the pigeons.

  The enemy were keeping their heads so low they couldn’t see where they were firing but the machine guns were rattling like woodpeckers.

  I got a shock when a pale face appeared from behind a bullet-beaten tree. ‘This way, soldier,’ an American trooper cried. He had a tattered uniform and a scarred helmet.

  I sprinted towards him, jumping over tree roots and skidding in muddy puddles, till at last I had the massive tree between me and the machine guns.

  Wolfie wandered in after me. ‘Hi, Crow,’ Wolfie said to the soldier. ‘This is Dummy.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Dummy… and really pleased to meet your feathered passengers. This way.’ The man led us through bushes into the strange stillness of the wood.

  Wolfie crunched through fallen branches. ‘They call him Crow because he’s ragged as any scarecrow you ever met.’

  ‘We’re in a bad way, Wolfie. The Germans are all around us. We have no food, not a lot of bullets, and no way of getting help… till now.’

  ‘We’ll get a message out this afternoon,’ Wolfie promised.

  ‘If help doesn’t arrive in two days we’re finished. Every day the Germans creep closer and more of the men get shot. The only water is in a stream in a little valley. The Germans have a sniper watching it every minute. We send a man down to get water and we never see him again.’

  We followed a path like a thread through the trees. At last we came to a clearing with a few dozen torn tents and some soldiers sitting around looking as miserable as turkeys on Christmas Eve.

  An officer strutted across the clearing. He was a small man with thin hair and round spectacles with wire frames. ‘Who have we here?’ he said, looking at me.