Story

Private Peaceful details the gritty rural lives and loves of Tommo and Charlie – two young brothers – and their poor Devonshire family from 1909 until 1916, when the outbreak of war destroys their country idyll. Both join up (one under age) leaving behind the beautiful Molly who is the love of both their lives.

The young men survive gas attacks, shelling, German troops and the appalling deaths of their close friends. But one thing they cannot escape is summary military justice.

Finding Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo

I was born in 1943, near London. I played in bombsites, listened to the stories told around the kitchen table, stories of war that saddened all the faces around me. My Uncle Pieter lived only in the photo on the mantelpiece. He had been killed in the RAF in 1941. But for me he lived on, ever young in the photograph, as I grew up, as I grew old.

So I have been drawn instinctively, I think, in many of my stories, to the subject of war, the enduring of it, the pity of it, and above all the suffering of survivors. Some twenty years ago, after meeting an old soldier from my village who had been to the First World War in the Devon Yeomanry in the Cavalry, I wrote War Horse, a vision of that dreadful war seen through the eyes of a horse.

Then, just five years ago, on a visit to Ypres to talk about writing about war for young people at a conference, I visited the ‘In Flanders Field’ Museum.

Talking to Piet Chielens, its director, I was reminded that over 300 British soldiers had been executed during the First World War for cowardice or desertion, two of them for simply falling asleep at their posts.

I read their stories, their trials (some lasted less than twenty minutes – twenty minutes for a man’s life).They knew then about shell-shock – many officers were treated in psychiatric hospitals for it, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon amongst them. They knew even as they sentenced these men (they called them ‘worthless’ men), that most of them were traumatised by the terrors they had endured, by the prolonged and dreadful brutality of trench warfare.

In all, over 3,000 were condemned to death, and 300 of them were chosen to be shot. I visited the execution sites, the cells in Poperinghe, I read the telegram sent home to a mother informing her that her son had been shot at dawn for cowardice. I knew recent governments had considered and rejected the granting of pardons for these men, had refused to acknowledge the appalling injustice visited upon them.

Standing in a war cemetery in the rain five miles outside Ypres, I came upon the gravestone of Private Peaceful. I had found my name, my unknown soldier. I had found my story, a story I knew I had to tell and that should be told.

The question then was how it should be told. I decided to put myself at the centre of the story, to become the condemned man waiting only for dawn and death. A glance at my watch recently returned from the menders who had declared it was made in 1915, gave me the idea that the chapter breaks should happen only when the soldier glances down at his watch which he dreads to do, and tries not to do.

My soldier would reflect on his life, live it again through the night so that the night would be long, as long as his life. He does not want to sleep his last night away, nor waste it in dreams. Above all he wants to feel alive.

Each chapter begins in the barn in Belgium, but his thoughts soon take him back to Devon, to the fields and streams and lanes of Iddesleigh, his home and his village.

Memories of his childhood come back to him, of family. Of the first day at school, of the first stirrings of love, a father’s death, a night’s poaching, then of the first news of approaching war and the recruiting sergeant in the town square at Hatherleigh. So to the trenches and to the events that have led him to the last night of his life.

And all the while the watch he does not want to look at is ticking his life away.

The New Zealand government has recently pardoned the five executed New Zealand soldiers. The French have now pardoned theirs. It is surely the mark of a civilised people to acknowledge shame and wrong-doing, to set the record straight.

I hope the book of Private Peaceful and the play of Private Peaceful (written by screenplay writer and producer Simon Reade)will help bring this about for our soldiers too, for the sake of the three hundred or so unfortunate men and their families, and for our honour too.**

** This was originally written in 2004. After almost 90 years, in 2006 the British Government finally granted posthumous pardons to those shot at dawn for cowardice or desertion.