Michael Morpurgo

Private Peaceful


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       With my thanks to Piet Chielens of In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres

       The Borough Press

The Borough Press

       Copyright

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2003

      This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016

      HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

      The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2003

      Photographs in end material © Shutterstock

      Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

      Cover images © Pirmin Föllmi/EyeEm/Getty Images (poppy field); Shutterstock.com (all other images)

      Michael Morpurgo asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

       Although the title was inspired by the name on a gravestone in Ypres, this novel is a work of fiction. Any reference to real people (living or dead), actual locales and historical events are used solely to lend the fiction an appropriate cultural and historical setting. All other names, characters, places and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007486441

      Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007477838

      Version: 2018-07-31

       Dedication

The Borough Press

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Twenty-four minutes past twelve

       Nearly five to one

       Twenty-eight minutes past one

       Fourteen minutes past two

       A minute past three

       Twenty-five past three

       Nearly Four o’clock

       Five to five

       One minute to six

       Discover more

       Author’s note

       About the Author

       Discover more unforgettable books from the nation’s favourite storyteller

       Other titles by Michael Morpurgo include

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD

      Of course both Private Peaceful and War Horse take place in the First World War.

      War Horse came first, way back in 1982, a story inspired by a chance meeting in my local pub all those years ago with an old veteran who lived in our village. From my talks with him and with two other old men of that generation, I found out so much about that war, about life at home and in the trenches. One of these old soldiers had been to war, ‘with horses’, as he put it. Those meetings and the surprise discovery in the attic of four contemporary drawings of cavalry fighting in the First World War, provided the seed corn for War Horse.

      Sadly, the book did not do that well when it came out, sold very few copies, failed to win a prize, received mixed reviews, but the few who did read it seemed to like it. Because of this I was invited to a conference of children’s writers and illustrators from all over the world who had tackled the difficult subject of war. It took place in Ypres in Belgium, the town that had been fought over fiercely in the First World War. There, battles had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides, and the town became synonymous with the endurance and suffering of that terrible war.