The Boy Who Went to War by Giles Milton

Author:Giles Milton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429990585
Publisher: Macmillan

As they boarded the train at Münsingen station, Wolfram and his comrades still had no idea where they might be sent. Some thought they were heading for the Ukraine. Others said they were off to Italy. All the speculation proved in vain; their destination remained so secret that even their commanders did not know.

The journey seemed to last a lifetime. The lads would sleep, then be jostled awake, then fall asleep again, and still they were on the move. At one point, one of Wolfram’s friends peered out through the window and thought he recognised the Paris skyline. However, the train rattled on through the night and it was only when it finally came to a halt in Bayeux that they realised they had been posted to Normandy.

The men were told to walk to Caen, some twenty miles to the south-west. On their arrival, weary and footsore, Wolfram and his comrades were told to continue on towards Audrieu, a little village that lay a few miles from Caen.

They blinked in disbelief when they finally arrived there. Chateau Audrieu, their billet, was an elegant manor built in the formal classicism of pre-revolutionary France. The Livry-Levels, hereditary chatelaines since the early eighteenth century, had made few changes to its unstudied grace.

In the dim light of its oak-panelled salons, there were enough antiques to have kept Wolfram occupied for days, but the house was so dark that he could snatch only brief glimpses of the ancient trunks and settles, and portraits of the family’s Louis Quatorze armigers – chevaliers of impeccable pedigree – remained as incorporeal as ghosts.

The German officers got to stay in the chateau while Wolfram and his fellow funkers were lodged in the outhouses, surrounded by acres of formal gardens, parterres, fountains, topiary, orchards, meadows and woodland.

As winter gave way to an early spring, they were sent on training exercises into the nearby woods and coppices, with constant reminders of the need to be absolute masters of their machines. Men’s lives would depend on the speed with which they could transmit messages on the battlefield.

They were woken at three in the morning in order to prepare their horses. The animals had to be harnessed to a cart that carried their Morse machine – a clunking great piece of equipment that was far too heavy to be transported by hand. The men themselves packed everything else they needed into rucksacks: weaponry, cooking equipment and a zeltbahn – cleverly designed triangular structures that could be put together and made into a tent.

The Morse excursions took them through many picturesque farming communities. As the dawn sun broke through the woodland, and they sent and received messages, they were hotly trailed by infantry. These foot soldiers would fire blanks at them so that they could experience what it was like to be operating the machine in the heat of battle.

Once the exercise was finally over, the men made their way back to the chateau in their own time, often stopping at the farmhouses to try to buy eggs, milk and butter.

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