Minutes later the boy stood wearily in the middle of the grass field that the pilots were using as an airfield today. Every few days they moved forward as their army advanced. A cool wind blew across the Somme and he shivered. He forced himself to stand as straight and tall as he could.

The red plane circled and droned then came low towards him, almost the height of Marius’s head. The boy’s eyes were filled with tears. He looked straight into the goggles of the Red Baron, raised an arm and saluted. Manfred Von Richthofen raised a quick hand in reply as the plane roared over Marius and almost blew him down.

The boy swallowed hard and walked slowly from the airfield towards the army hospital. The thin officer called, ‘Boy!’

Marius turned. ‘Well done,’ the man grinned.

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

Chapter Three

‘The life given us, by nature is short’

27 March 1918: Bray

Smoke hung grey over Bray like a shroud over a coffin. The British had given up and run west towards Amiens the evening before. They choked the roads with gun-carriages and men, with ambulances and lorries full of weapons, tools and barbed wire, food supplies and tanks.

They couldn’t carry everything to safety. They burned their mounds of horse food before they left the town so the weary German horses couldn’t eat it when they arrived. Anything that could be useful to the enemy was wrecked. Even the straw in the hospital beds at the Fletchers’ barn was scattered over the floor.

The last trains pulled out of Bray station heading for safety in Amiens and gangs of British and French took iron bars to wreck the signals and the points.

The German army crept into the smoky town next morning, afraid of a trap, but they found it empty of enemy soldiers.

When they were sure it was clear they roared in with their motor-lorries and carts. Their drums rumbled and growled. The French people who’d stayed in Bray watched them silently. The British had been their allies. The Germans were their invaders – for the second time in four years.

A shambling band played a marching tune that the Bray folk knew was called ‘The Glory of Germany’. It had been written in 1871 after the Germans defeated them in the last war between the two nations. It grated on the French ears and stabbed at the French hearts.

A German colonel with medal ribbons climbed on to the steps of the Town Hall and spoke to the people, who gathered round like sullen, sulking children. He spoke in good, clear French. ‘We do not wish to harm anyone in Bray. Our war is against your soldiers and the British.’

‘And the Americans,’ a greengrocer muttered. ‘Wait till they get here.’