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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
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Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2015
Illustrations © Michael Foreman 2015
Photographs in Afterword © Shutterstock.com
Cover photographs © The Catcher Photography/Getty Images (boy); DDP/Camera Press (SS soldiers); Juniors Bildarchiv GmbH/Alamy (German Shepherd); Zoonar GmbH/Alamy (background); Shutterstock.com (eagle); BPK/Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/Heinrich Hoffman (back cover)
Jacket Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Michael Morpurgo and Michael Foreman assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008134150
Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780008134181
Version: 2015-09-15
Contents
Part Three: If Ever a Look Could Kill
This book is dedicated to Private Henry Tandey VC.
And this is why. Many of my stories have come from the lives of others, from truths, written or remembered, this one perhaps more than any other. Certainly had I not discovered, through Michael Foreman, the extraordinary story of the life and death of Walter Tull, the first black officer to serve in the British Army, I should never have written A Medal for Leroy. Had I not met an old soldier from the First World War who had been to that war with horses, in the cavalry, I should not have written War Horse. Had I not come across, in a museum in Ypres, an official letter from the army to the mother of a soldier at the front in that same war, informing her that her son had been shot at dawn for cowardice, I should never have told my story of Private Peaceful. It was a medal commemorating the sinking of the Lusitania by torpedo in 1915 with terrible loss of life, over a thousand souls, that compelled me to think of writing the story of a survivor, which I did in Listen to the Moon.
I write fiction, but fiction with roots in history, in the people who made our history, who fought and often died in our wars. They were real people who lived and had their being in another time, often living and suffering through great and terrible dangers, facing these with unimaginable courage. My challenge as a story maker has been to imagine that courage, to live out in my mind’s eye, so far as I can, how it must have been for them.
So
