The Silver Hand Read online

  All the quotes at the beginning of chapters are by the Roman writer and orator, Cicero, who lived between 106 BC and 43 BC.

  Contents

  Chapter One: ‘The enemy is within the gates’

  Chapter Two: ‘A traitor does not look like a traitor’

  Chapter Three: ‘The life given us, by nature is short’

  Chapter Four: ‘While there’s life, there’s hope’

  Chapter Five: ‘Life is nothing without friendship’

  Chapter Six: ‘The dead live on in the memory of the living’

  Chapter Seven: ‘Laws are silent in times of war’

  Chapter Eight: ‘Friendship is tested when bad luck strikes’

  Chapter Nine: ‘The name of peace is sweet’

  Chapter Ten: ‘Friendship increases happiness, and reduces misery’

  Notes

  Chapter One

  ‘The enemy is within the gates’

  21 March 1918: Bray, Northern France

  Aimee sped down the lane, her pigtail streaming out behind her. Dust clouds swirled up as her boots flew over the stony cart track and the cows near the hedges shied away. A mist hung over the fields and crept through the streets and wrapped itself around the chimneys like a scarf. The distant drumming of the thousands of guns to the east sounded louder and closer this morning.

  Aimee skidded as she turned into the school gates and she tumbled through the door into the cool, dark hallway. The school cat, the colour of rust and ashes, jumped up from its seat outside the school office.

  She threw open the classroom door and stood gasping to get her breath back. Master DuPont glared at her, his hand that held the chalk frozen in the air and his face as sour as green plums. ‘Aimee Fletcher, you are late.’

  Aimee nodded and panted. ‘Yes, but...’

  ‘Again. What is it this time? Did your hen get its head stuck in the wire of the chicken shed? Or was it the cow today, kicking over the milk bucket? You have a different excuse every day. Maybe you found a mermaid in the horse trough and stopped for a chat?’

  ‘No, sir, but...’

  ‘You have been late three times this week and you must be punished.’ The teacher picked up a small book covered in green leather. ‘You will take this book by Cicero, the great Roman writer. You will stay behind after school and turn his wise Latin words into French.’

  Aimee’s nut-brown face turned bright red. ‘Oh, I’ll like that.’

  The teacher closed his tired eyes and sighed softly. ‘You will, too,’ he murmured.

  ‘I love Latin,’ Aimee went on. ‘I lie in bed at night and tell myself the old folk tales but I change the words into Latin for fun. The big bad wolf is lupus maximus malam...’

  ‘I know that,’ the teacher snapped. ‘Now sit at your desk. We have just started an English lesson.’

  ‘That’s not as much fun as Latin,’ Aimee argued.

  Master DuPont gripped the chalk so hard it cracked and the white dust floated through a morning sunbeam. ‘The British soldiers are our friends. They are fighting against the Germans who invaded our land, our own big bad wolves. We must be polite to the British and, when we see them marching through our village, we must speak to them in English.’

  Aimee spread her hands. ‘My dad is English... though he’s joined the French army... I can speak it very well already.’

  The teacher put the broken chalk down on his desk and rubbed his weary eyes. ‘I am sure you can, Aimee Fletcher. You are the best pupil in Latin and English in the class.’

  ‘And history,’ Aimee put in.

  ‘And history.’ The teacher nodded. ‘But you must learn to be on time. You will stay behind after school today and translate some Cicero.’

  Aimee shuffled from one foot to the other. ‘But, sir, that’s what I was trying to tell you... there won’t be any more school.’

  Some of the children giggled. Aimee was mad. No more school? What next? No more sun in the sky? No more River Somme at the end of the road?

  Master DuPont glared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can’t say. The younger children would panic.’

  ‘Aimee Fletcher, if you are making up some story to escape punishment then I can tell you...’

  ‘Intus est hostis,’ she hissed.

  The teacher blinked. ‘Cicero?’

  Aimee nodded. ‘Yes... so the young ones aren’t scared. Intus est hostis.’

  But then the teacher did just what Aimee hoped he wouldn’t do. He said the Latin words in French. ‘The enemy is within the gates? You mean the Germans are coming?’

  Aimee groaned. The younger children gasped and whimpered and panicked. A shiver from the trembling pupils seemed to chill the room. Little Marie Picard screamed and pointed at the glass in the classroom door. Everyone’s eyes followed her finger.

  A soldier was standing outside.

  21 March 1918: Saint Quentin, Northern France

  Marius Furst stepped out of the trench and looked to the west. A mild breeze blew in the boy’s face and carried the smell of stale death into his nostrils. But it didn’t disturb the fog of the spring morning or the thunder of the heavy guns in the battles ahead of him. ‘So this is no man’s land?’ he asked.

  The soldier with a face of flint gave a laugh as sharp as a dog’s bark. ‘Never seen it before, lad?’

  ‘I’ve never been near the trenches before. I just left Germany to help us win the war.’

  The soldier had a stripe on his arm that showed he was a corporal. ‘You look too young to fight.’

  ‘Yes. No,’ Marius mumbled. ‘My grandmother taught me about herbs and healing. I thought I could work in the hospitals.’

  ‘But they let you join the army?’ the corporal asked. ‘They gave you a uniform.’

  ‘No. I met a soldier on the road. He was running away... a deserter. He swapped clothes with me.’

  The soldier nodded his head and a dark fringe of hair flopped over his eyes; pale eyes that glowed bright. He had a tiny moustache like a small paintbrush. ‘We need more brave lads like you... and fewer of the cowards that run from the fight. If they were all like you – and me – we’d have won this war years ago.’ He patted Marius on the shoulder. ‘Brave lad.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill anyone – just help our injured countrymen. I’ve seen a few that came home wounded.’

  ‘Just a few? Then you’re lucky,’ the soldier said. ‘I’ve been in and out of these trenches for four years and seen things that will haunt me for the rest of my life.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ Marius asked, wide-eyed and pale.

  The man just shook his head. ‘It’s over now. This trench war is over. We’re moving west. We’re moving fast. We’ll drive the British into the sea and send them back to their puny little island. Four years of mud and blood and we’re on the move at last. They’re running away like trench rats,’ he snorted.

  Marius stepped forward. ‘I’d better get after them. The hospital is packed and ready to follow our great army.’

  The soldier just nodded. ‘They say we drove the British back fifteen kilometres yesterday. Get your running boots on, lad.’ He hefted a pack on to his bony shoulder, gripped his rifle and headed to the road where lorries full of soldiers trundled westwards.

  ‘See you,’ Marius called after him.

  The man turned and scowled. ‘I hope not. If I see you then it means I’ll be wounded in hospital. I’ve been there once and don’t want to see you nurses again.’

  Marius grinned. ‘I suppose so, Corporal.’

  The soldier stared towards the sinking sun in the west. His pale eyes glowed icicle-blue. ‘When we have beaten the British we’ll take their empire, then crush the French and rule the world.’

  Marius blinke
d. ‘You think so?’

  The soldier sniffed the rank, dank air. ‘I know so... or my name isn’t Hitler. Adolf Hitler.’ He turned on his heel and marched off.

  Marius picked up his own pack of bandages, potions and pills and set off over no man’s land. For four years this ground between the British trenches and the German trenches had been gashed and gouged, shaped, scraped and scored by shells from the big guns. The boy knew the sour smell of the killing ground from the bodies and the clothes of the soldiers he’d patched up, back in the Saint Quentin hospital.

  He stepped carefully on to the softened soil. In the watery shell-holes there was a green metal-sheen of slime made by the poison gases the armies had fired at one another.

  New grass was already beginning to grow over the ruined earth and, high above him, a skylark sang. It seemed to sing what the soldier had said: ‘It’s over now, it’s over now.’ Marius walked another hundred metres and reached the trenches that had just been deserted by the British. This was where men had crouched below their sandbags and had burrowed shelters into the sides of the trenches.

  The boy stepped down on to the damp boards of the trench and peered into one of the dugouts. The mud walls were lined with old waterproof capes and pieces of boxwood. A crate made a table and the enemy had found a shabby old horsehair chair to sit on.

  A soot-black kettle sat on a rusting paraffin stove, its water cold as Christmas now. Marius shook his head at the misery the British had suffered here. No wonder they had fled down the road home. The German trenches – the ones he’d seen a hundred metres away – were dug deep and snug.

  He felt brighter after what that little corporal had said. He stepped back into the evening air and turned west to catch up with his troops who were striding forward and driving the British like cattle before them. Marius whistled a tune of a song from an earlier war...

  ‘Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine, dear Fatherland, no fear be thine,

  Firm and true stands the Watch, the Watch at the Rhine.’

  He hurried through the evening air and his heavy pack now felt light as a butterfly. ‘Firm and true, that’s me. Firm and true.’

  21 March 1918: Bray

  There was a clatter and a rattle of tumbling chairs as a dozen children fled to the corner of the room. Aimee sighed. The number of children in Bray school had fallen since the war started – now there were only enough to make a single class – and she was the oldest. Sometimes she felt like a mother hen to the little chicks.

  The soldier tapped on the glass and opened the door. Master DuPont swallowed so hard his stiff collar creaked.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ the soldier asked, tugging off his cap and tucking it under his arm.

  The teacher stared and his mouth opened but no sound came out. The whimpering children fell silent.

  ‘I speak English,’ Aimee said quietly. Then she turned to her classmates. ‘It’s all right. He’s British. He’s a friend. Go back to your seats.’ The children slipped back shy as smoke and watched wide-eyed.

  For four years they had lived with the distant trembling of the mighty war guns to the east. Most of the younger ones still had nightmare memories of the days, back in 1914, when the Germans had arrived and taken over their homes. They remembered the hard-faced, stone-faced, grey-faced men with bayonets glinting in the sun.

  They remembered hiding in their cellars as the British army swept in from the west and drove the invaders back. And back. And further back. And then the armies stopped. They faced one another in trenches dug into the soft soils near the River Somme.

  The children heard stories of how the armies put up barbed wire between themselves and their enemies then tried to smash the trenches opposite with the great guns that made the Bray school walls shiver.

  Sometimes the guns fell silent but the village was never free of the motor-lorries and wagons drawn by sweating horses. They were like a circus passing through the town as they pulled supplies to their tired army and their hungry horses. It was a carnival train of shells and bullets, cannon and tanks, wood and wire and gas masks and grenades. A daily carnival of death.

  The traffic snarled and snaggled in the narrow village streets, where it met with traffic going the other way: the marching men and the wounded, bandaged soldiers that were being carried to Amiens or back home to Britain.

  Master DuPont found his voice. ‘How can I help, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Good morning, I am Captain Ellis.’ The young soldier had a kindly face under the dust from the roads. The children watched, agape, though they didn’t understand much of what he said. He went on, ‘The British army needs to take over your school. We want a command base for General Bruce.’

  Master DuPont blew out his cheeks. ‘The general can’t command the army from here,’ he argued. ‘The trenches are twenty or thirty kilometres away.’

  The soldier sighed. ‘Not any longer. The enemy has broken through our lines. They smashed us with thousands of shells then marched over no man’s land under cover of the fog. The Germans are coming.’

  Aimee smiled and spread her hands wide. ‘I told you,’ she said to the teacher.

  Master DuPont’s face turned cloud-grey. ‘The children will have to leave. They’ll have to go to Amiens. There are homes waiting for them there. We never thought we’d see this day.’

  Aimee whispered the news to the children and they gathered their pencils and books and got ready to exit the classroom. The teacher watched them and despair ran through the wrinkles of his old face. ‘What will I do?’ he groaned.

  ‘Give me the keys to the school,’ Captain Ellis said.

  Master DuPont reached into the desk and passed a tarnished set of clanking keys to the captain. He looked at the children and tried to smile. ‘Wherever you go, my young ones, remember you are French and our spirit shall never be defeated. Let us sing our anthem one last time before you leave.’

  Captain Ellis stood to attention. Aimee stepped across to the piano in the corner of the room and struck the notes firmly. The quavering voices of the children filled the room.

  ‘Arise, children of the Fatherland,

  The day of glory has arrived!

  Against us tyranny’s

  bloody banner is raised.

  Let’s march, let’s march!

  Let an impure blood

  soak our fields!’

  Aimee finished with a crashing chord that shook the windows. Master DuPont sniffed and blew his nose loudly. ‘God speed and prosper you in all you do,’ he said.

  The teacher lowered his head and walked out of the door into the misty air without looking back, and Aimee suddenly saw the fearsome old man was frail as dead leaves.

  21 March 1918: Amiens, Northern France

  Brass buttons shone and medal ribbons were a rainbow of colour on the drab uniforms of the officers who sat and stared at the map on the wall. There were enough moustaches in the room to make a yard brush and the lips underneath them were tightly turned down when they heard the grim news.

  General Bruce stood in front of the map with a pointer. ‘We knew the German army was going to launch Operation Michael against us but I didn’t think they’d get so far so quickly.’ He turned to a small man with a uniform as neat as a needle. ‘What went wrong, Colonel Wright?’

  Wright stepped forward and took a pencil to point at the map. ‘The morning was foggy. The Germans hit us with thirty divisions in the first wave. When the fog lifted, no man’s land was swarming with horses and men. They had rifles and “potato-masher” stick grenades. Their shells hit our trenches, which were soon filled with dead or wounded. The British men left alive were ready to surrender.’

  General Bruce shook his head. ‘A dark day. The enemy drove through our trenches and on for eight miles. We have to stand and fight somewhere.’

  A sergeant was standing by the door and there was a murmur of talk as someone passed him a sheet of paper. The sergeant had cropped dark hair and the eyes of a hawk, over a thin nose and a
cruel mouth. But the strangest thing that caught your eye was his shining left hand. It was silver. A false hand taking the place of one he’d lost.

  The man with the silver hand held up the paper in his right hand. ‘Excuse me, General Bruce. It’s a message from General Haig.’

  ‘Not now, Sergeant Grimm,’ Colonel Wright snapped.

  ‘Sorry, sir. It’s important,’ the sergeant said. He marched over to General Bruce as stiff as a puppet and handed him the paper.

  Bruce looked up and said to his officers, ‘Go back to your men and read them a copy of this message.’

  ‘What does it say, sir?’ Colonel Wright asked.

  General Bruce read it quietly. ‘Today the enemy began his terrific attacks against us. Many amongst us are now tired. To those I would say that Victory will belong to the side which holds out the longest. The French army is moving quickly and in great numbers to help us. We have no choice, we must fight it out. Every yard must be held to the last man: there must be no retreat. With our backs to the wall we must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind are in our hands right now.’

  Colonel Wright nodded. ‘With our backs to the wall.’

  One of the officers asked, ‘Where is our wall? Where do we stop them?’

  The general pointed to the map. ‘Here,’ he said and drew a line on the map. It passed through the village of Bray. ‘Sergeant Grimm will take the orders to our troops,’ he said, nodding towards the man with the silver hand.

  ‘Can we stop them?’ a young captain asked.

  ‘We can stop them. Then we will drive them all the way back to Germany,’ the general said with a sly smile. ‘You see, we have a new weapon that will win the war. It is so secret hardly anyone outside this room knows about it.’

  A shiver of excitement ran through the officers. ‘Are you going to tell us about this new weapon?’ the captain asked. ‘Is it a new tank? A new plane?’

  General Bruce gave a wide smile under his moustache. ‘A new sort of gas. DM gas. When it is fired at the enemy it will turn them into statues. I have the formula here,’ he said and waved a brown envelope at the men in the room. He turned and handed it to the sergeant. ‘Grimm?’