Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo (Harper Collins, 2003)

187 pgs; told in 13 sections over the course of one night.

Subjects: World War One, England, Belgium, Flanders, Ypres, deserters, junior fiction/junior YA (Year 7-10)

Also made into a film (2012) and a one-man stage show (although from what I've read, this has a different ending).  The film has a study resource which includes interviews with Michael Morpurgo and screen writer Simon Reade, as well as a trailer.

Synopsis
The story is told in a series of flashbacks by Private Tommo Peaceful, aged nearly 18, who spends one long night waiting for the dawn and remembering back over his life so far. The reason for his night-long vigil is hinted at but contains an unexpected twist at the end.   

Tommo grew up in a small village in Devon with his two older brothers, Charlie (whom he idolises) and Big Joe, who is mentally handicapped. The first half of the book deals with his childhood: schooling, his father’s death, his mother’s desperate efforts to keep the family together and the girl – Molly – whom both he and Charlie fall in love with, although it’s Charlie who wins and marries her. The pressure put on young men and boys to sign up for war is clearly shown when the sergeant major comes to town with his band of soldiers, “splendid in their scarlet uniforms.”

Both Charlie and Tommo (aged nearly 16) sign up and are sent to the trenches near Ypres, where they soon realise there is nothing splendid about war at all. The bullying behaviour of one of the army sergeants, and Charlie’s refusal to kowtow to him, is a constant theme, as is the fierce loyalty between the two brothers. At the end these two themes coincide, with fateful results.   

Questions:

Do you think Charlie did the right thing when he refused to leave Tommo? What would have happened to him if he had left Tommo? What would have happened to Tommo?

The motto on the cover says “Innocence and love, courage and cowardice.” How are each of these qualities dealt with in the book?

Reviews:
Here is a review of the book from the Booksellers New Zealand blog. This review on the Independent website talks about "Why children should see Michael Morpurgo’s ‘Private Peaceful" (the movie). 

Author’s website:

Michael Morpurgo's website includes worksheets, posters and book covers to download.

He has written a number of other war-related books, notably The war horse (also made into a film.)

Here he is talking about writing on BBC Authors Live.

Other books you might like:

The silver donkey by Sonya Hartnett also deals with the topic of army deserters and how they were treated.  
So does My brother's war by David Hill (NZ author). 
My review of The silver donkey includes some information on  the Shot at Dawn Memorial in Britain which is a memorial to some of these young men from Britain and the Commonwealth. 

New Zealand connections:

Desertion was treated as a crime by the army and could be punished by  court-martial and execution.  On pg 47 of Anzac Day: the New Zealand story is a section called “Pardoned at last”. This tells the story of the men who were court-martialled for mutiny or desertion, often because they were suffering from undiagnosed shell shock. Many of these men had fought bravely in other parts of the war but had just reached the limit of what they could endure. Their deaths were seen as terribly shameful for their families and often they were not talked about for years.

In 2000, the Pardon for Soldiers of the Great War Act was passed to pardon the five NZ soldiers who were subsequently shot. You can read more about the Act here.

The medals and certificate of pardon for one of the soldiers, Victor Spencer, were later gifted to the Bluff Maritime Museum. 

The story of two of the five soldiers, both born in Australia, is told further in this transcript: "ANZAC tragedies revealed after 80 years: the stories of Private John Sweeney and Frank Needs / John King , both Australians who signed up in NZ, and served bravely in Gallipoli but were charged with desertion in France and shot."

(It’s interesting to note that Australian never allowed its own soldiers to be shot, perhaps because the AIF was only ever made up of volunteers  - conscription was voted against twice by the Australian public during WW1 – and the public outcry would have been huge. But these two men had signed up for the NZ army.) 

    

The silver donkey by Sonya Hartnett

The silver donkey by Sonya Hartnett (Viking, 2004)

ISBN 0 670 04240 4

18 chapters; 192 pages with about 10 full page black and white illustrations

Subjects: World War One, France, deserters, animals, fable, junior fiction (Year 5-8)

This story is set in northern France, near the coast, sometime during the battles fought along the Western Front during World War One. 

Two sisters, Coco and Marcelle, find a soldier hiding in the woods, desperate to get back to his sick brother in England. The trauma of war has left him temporarily blind. Together with their older brother Pascal and a friend, Fabrice, the girls concoct a plan to help him. The two of them are delightful, especially Coco who is entranced by the soldier’s tiny silver donkey (there is a lovely passage where she imagines riding away on it.) Pascal, on the other hand, would prefer to hear gruesome first-hand accounts of the war, “a tale about machine-guns and bayonets.”

Interspersed with the main narrative are four stand-alone stories, told by the soldier, three of them with a donkey theme: Mary and Joseph travelling to Bethlehem, a legend about why storm clouds are grey and the tale of the “donkey man” at Gallipoli (although again the place is not mentioned.)  

The story is beautifully told in almost poetic language. One plot detail that bothered me was that the soldier would still be treated as a deserter when he reached England, so he was not really escaping to safety.  But this is partly because details are often left vague, and the story has an almost dreamlike quality of “fable”. The book is asking questions about the nature of bravery and courage and the sort of qualities that really matter, like the donkey’s qualities of loyalty, humility, gentleness, trustworthiness and steadfastness.

The silver donkey was made into a musical by the Australian team of Dean Bryant and Matthew Frank, and the production toured Australia and  the USA in 2006. You can see a clip from it here on Youtube. 

Reviews: 

Charm under fire: Sonya Hartnett's The Silver Donkey shows that life in wartime offers surprising opportunities. Another review is here: The silver donkey by Sonya Hartnett. 

You can also find teacher's notes for the book here. 

Questions:

• What do you think is the answer to Fabrice’s question (in the chapter called Heroes): “Do you really have a brother… Or is he a ghost made of wishes and fear, someone you invented to disguise your shame in fleeing a war which other men… have stayed behind to fight?"
• Do you think the Lieutenant did the right thing when he lay beside the dying Ernie Whittaker? What else could he have done? How do you think he felt afterwards?
• What does the silver donkey represent?
• Why don’t we ever learn the Lieutenant’s real name?
• Who is a “hero” in this book? What is heroism?

Author’s website:

Sonya Hartnett is an Australian writer. 

Her other war-related children’s books include Children of the King (2012),  a time-overlap adventure about three children sent to the countryside to escape the war in London, and The midnight zoo (2010) (“Under cover of darkness, two brothers cross a war-ravaged countryside carrying a secret bundle. One night they stumble across a deserted town reduced to smouldering ruins. But at the end of a blackened street they find a small green miracle: a zoo filled with animals in need of hope.”)

Other books you might like:

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo also deals with the topic of army deserters and how they were treated.

New Zealand connections:

Desertion was treated as a crime by the army and could be punished by  court-martial and execution.  On pg 47 of Anzac Day: the New Zealand story is a section called “Pardoned at last”. This tells the story of the men who were court-martialled for mutiny or desertion, often because they were suffering from undiagnosed shell shock. Many of these men had fought bravely in other parts of the war but had just reached the limit of what they could endure. Their deaths were seen as terribly shameful for their families and often they were not talked about for years.

In England, there is a memorial  to some of these young men from Britain and the Commonwealth at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.

Called the Shot At Dawn Memorial, it contains a statue of a young man ­blindfolded and strapped to a post, surrounded by 306 other posts, each with the name, age and ­regiment of a man who was executed.

In 2000, the Pardon for Soldiers of the Great War Act was passed to pardon the five NZ soldiers who were subsequently shot. You can read more about the Act here and here. The medals and certificate of pardon for one of the soldiers, Victor Spencer, were later gifted to the Bluff Maritime Museum. 

Of the five soldiers listed, two were born in Australia and their story is told further here:

ANZAC tragedies revealed after 80 years: the stories of Private John Sweeney and Frank Needs / John King , both Australians who signed up in NZ, and served bravely in Gallipoli but were charged with desertion in France and shot. (It’s interesting to note that Australian never allowed its own soldiers to be shot, perhaps because the AIF was made up of volunteers  - conscription was voted against twice by the Australian public during World War One - and the public outcry would have been huge. But these two men had signed up for the NZ army.)