Stoop to Battle

By Tim Shaw

1914, as Europe teeters on the edge of a war that will decimate a generation, Gustav Steinhauer of the German Secret Service hatches a plot to destroy the British economy. Deciding that only one man can pull-off his daring plan, he sends Wilhelm Jaeger back to England.
With the bitter resentment of his previous failure to assassinate Churchill still burning deep in his gut, Jaeger is eager to prove himself, and revenge his sisters shooting. Meanwhile Jaegers nemesis, former farm boy, Stoop Pearson, returns to the Royal flying Corps after a winter recovering from injuries sustained thwarting the assassination attempt. There he finds a Military force training hard for a war in which the aeroplane will receive a baptism of fire and lead.
Stoop to Battle takes us from deep in the stinking black bowels of the London sewer system, to high in the azure blue of the shrapnel filled skies above a rapidly advancing German army as it closes on Paris.
From the vicious brutality and depravity of humanity to the supreme bravery and sacrifice of young men, Stoop to Battle sees old friends and bitter adversaries reunited as they pit their wits and talents against each other in a Europe descending into war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468583175

Tim Shaw

Tim Shaw has a MA in Medieval Studies, and is ABD (All But Dissertation) for a PhD in Medieval Studies. He blogs on the Middle Ages at http://dailymedieval.blogspot.com. He has a website for more background information on the history in his novels: http://www.chaucermysteries.com.

Book preview

Stoop

to

Battle

TIM SHAW

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AuthorHouse™ UK Ltd.

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© 2012 Tim Shaw. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 8/9/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-8316-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-8317-5 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Background

Preface

Cast Of Players (Fictional)

Cast Of Players (Historical)

Part One Preface To War

Chapter One Convalescence

Chapter Two On The Mend

Chapter Three Guilt

Chapter Four Back To Work

Chapter Five Travelling

Chapter Six Foreign Soil

Chapter Seven Re-Union

Chapter Eight To Ground

Chapter Nine Working Together

Chapter Ten Underground

Chapter Eleven Fuses Lit

Chapter Twelve Bombs Away!

Chapter Thirteen Running

Part Two

Chapter Fourteen The Lights Go Out Across Europe

Chapter Fifteen True Colours

Chapter Sixteen Round Up

Chapter Seventeen To Belgium

Chapter Eighteen First Blood

Chapter Nineteen Retreat

Chapter Twenty The View From Above

Chapter Twenty-One Old Adversaries Entrenched

Chapter Twenty-Two Re-Match

Chapter Twenty-Three The Tables Turn

Chapter Twenty-Four Digging In

Chapter Twenty-Five The Race For The Coast

Chapter Twenty-Six Old Acquaintances

Chapter Twenty-Seven Düsseldorf

Chapter Twenty-Eight Stalking

Chapter Twenty-Nine Finale

Chapter Thirty Epilogue

History

BACKGROUND

By the start of the Great War, in August 1914, although aeroplane development was still in its infancy, experiments had already taken place in the use of aircraft for bombing; artillery spotting, observations of troop movements and some trials had even taken place mounting them with guns. The aeroplane however, was not considered as a serious weapon of war, more as a rich man ’ s plaything, or a piece of sporting equipment.

After five hundred years being the most powerful seafaring nation on the planet, Britain’s leading military thinkers of the period, could see little beyond their own glorious history. They had no concept of the aeroplane’s potential as a weapon, and the leaders of both the Army and the Navy barely tolerated the newly formed Royal Flying Corps.

Luckily, there were a few forward thinking officers and politicians who did see the true potential of aviation, in particular the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who pushed hard for its military acceptance.

With this in mind, at the end of May through to early June 1914, at Netheravon, there took place the greatest gathering of aircraft and men that Britain had ever seen. This, somewhat regrettably named, ‘Concentration Camp’, brought together the country’s finest pilots and best aviation minds.

They were assembled, to teach new techniques and to pass on the latest ideas in the training of pilots, observers and mechanics.

They were Training for war.

This was the first coming together of a cohesive, British military aerial fighting force. A force, which would very soon have a ‘baptism of fire’, in the skies high above the carnage of the Great War trenches.

The brave men flying these primitive machines had no computers, no navigation aids, heavy radio sets, unreliable engines that were constantly stopping and later, weapons which were forever jamming. They were learning not just about flying, but also about survival and, in a few short months, would be dueling to the death, high in the skies over Belgium and France.

In the early months of the war, the aeroplane was used simply for spotting troop movements, and for calling the shell-fall for the immense artillery barrages that tried to grind the enemy troops into the mud. It soon became clear to each side, that the information that these aircraft carried was of vital importance to the enemy, and that an advantage would be gained if they could stop each other from returning with it.

In a very short time, the waves and gestures between opposing crews, friendly or rude, became grappling hooks and gunshots, as they tried to stop each other returning. This aggression escalated through late 1914 and early 1915, though the fundamental problem of being able to accurately fire a gun from an aircraft remained.

The problem was that no one had discovered a way to fire a gun through the propeller arc without shooting the blades off. Many early aeroplanes were pusher types (propeller at the rear) which negated the problem, but these tended to be slow and cumbersome.

That was until Roland Garros; a French pilot mounted a forward firing machinegun on his aircraft and attached metal deflector plates to his propeller, thus enabling him to aim the aircraft at his opponent and fire through the arc of the propeller. Garros had immediate success and quickly became a national hero (the French National Tennis stadium is still named after him). However, after an engine failure on the German side of the lines, his aircraft was captured and the Germans were able to learn just why he had been so effective in destroying their aircraft.

Anthony Fokker was shown the system, though had already created a far better solution to the problem and fitted the first ‘interrupter gear’ to his new ‘Eindecker’. Thus, in spring 1915 started the Fokker Scourge.

The pilots on both sides had started the war fighting as gentlemen, with a code of conduct and an almost chivalric attitude towards each other. However, as the war dragged on, and the carnage of the trenches continued, this attitude also died. Aggression and a desire to survive prevailed, as it became a ‘dog eat dog’ fight for survival.

They flew, cramped in small exposed cockpits, cocooned in bulky clothing to prevent them freezing at high altitude and surrounded by highly flammable ammunition and fuel. Being shot at, not just by other pilots, but also by high explosive shells and small arms fired from the ground, these pilots had little in the way of protection from the elements or bullets, in their open cockpits.

To add ‘insult to injury’, British pilots were not issued with parachutes because; the Allied military hierarchy believed that men would be quote; ‘Prone to abandon Government property, and leave their aircraft rather than fight should they be given the opportunity’!

Meanwhile in the trenches below, soldiers were dying in their hundreds of thousands, suffering disease and the truly awful conditions in the mud of the trenches. Being sent ‘over the top’ into withering machine gun fire in fruitless charges, which massacred whole streets and villages worth of young men in the ‘Pals’ regiments.

As the Great War continued, the public at home, unable to comprehend the sheer scale of the destruction of a whole generation of young men, saw the pilots of the R.F.C as being above the slaughter, both metaphorically and physically, and endowed them with heroic status. Their exploits and deeds provided the Press with many column inches of glamorous daring-do, even though, initially, the British papers were not allowed to print the names of these heroic pilots, they would be reported simply as Captain X or Lieutenant Y.

The Germans and the French however, embraced the successes of their heroic pilots and revelled in their accomplishments. They were the celebrities of the day, portrayed as perfect examples of valiant manhood. It was indeed the French that created the concept of the ‘Ace’, a title given to a pilot who had shot down five enemy aeroplanes.

The German pilots approached the war from a different perspective to the British. They saw combat as a hunting exercise, using precise and practiced methods. They learned quickly what worked and what did not, and, with typical Teutonic efficiency, taught their pilots the art of fighting. ‘Boelke’s Dicta’ became the fighter pilots bible, laying down the basics of air combat; basics that are still relevant to today’s fighter pilots.

They were ruthless hunters, stalking their prey, positioning themselves to their best advantage and then executing the kill.

Baron Manfred Albrecht Freiherr Von Richthofen, the most famous pilot of the Great War, ‘The Red Baron’, would say, ‘Bring them down burning! Get close behind the plane you are after, and make it burn’, hardly the most chivalrous of attitudes.

The British pilots on the other hand, in the words of the famous ‘Max Immelmann’; appeared to treat the war as something of a sporting adventure, preferring ‘dash and verve’ to the cool, calculating and relentless German methods. They preferred colour, good humour and grand dramatic gestures, to the German’s careful shrewdness.

They British pilots were no less brave and no less successful; their attitude to combat just highlighted an inherent difference in the natures of the two sides.

As with all wars, there was also huge technical innovation. Necessity being the mother of invention. Better and more efficient methods of killing were for ever being sought, none more so than in the field of aviation.

At the start of the Great War, aircraft were flimsy, unarmed, inefficient and unreliable. By the end, engines were many times more powerful, making the aircraft much faster with greater range and ceiling.

They could carry vast loads of bombs to rain down on the enemy and they were armed with powerful machine guns for attack and defence. Faster, stronger, much more manoeuvrable, by 1918 the aeroplane had come of age. The Fokker DVII was deemed so effective as a weapon of war that the compulsory destruction of all examples was written into the Treaty of Versailles.

In the hands of experienced, trained and aggressive pilots, the aeroplane had truly evolved into a potent weapon of war.

PREFACE

By summer of 1914, Europe had not been involved in a major conflict for almost a hundred years. The last one ended when Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo.

In the intervening years, many treaties and pacts had been signed between nations in the interest of mutual security. These pacts however also ensured that, should a small conflict arise, then many nations would be dragged into the affray.

By the spring of 1914, many in power knew that war was coming.

In the early months, just before the outbreak of the Great War, the German Secret Service, under the auspices of spymaster Gustav Steinhauer, had infiltrated a number of agents into Great Britain.

The network of German spies across the United Kingdom, were co-ordinated through a small Barbershop in the Caledonian Road, London. It was run and owned by Karl Ernst, a German national, who used it as a mailing centre and information exchange point, a link between agents and Steinhauer’s office.

Gustav Steinhauer, as well as handling a series of undercover agents, had also been devising an audacious and daring plan to destroy the British economy.

A plan, which when put into operation in the spring of 1914, if successful, would have initially rendered Great Britain virtually incapable of fighting an effective war.

The first months of the Great War, far from being the static carnage that we associate with the period, were a fluid and mobile series of engagements, in which the German forces swept across Belgium.

The last major conflict in Europe had been the Napoleonic wars one hundred years earlier. A time of musket and ball, of brightly adorned battle ranks and, of the Cavalry charge. This method of warfare was clearly still in the minds of the military planners of the period, who fully failed to appreciate the improvements in weapon technology and the unbelievable killing power of the modern machinegun, howitzer and mortar.

The Belgians having a relatively small military, had built a ring of modern, garrisoned fortresses, with rising gun cupolas, to defend their eastern borders, but they were quickly overrun by the vast, well-armed and well-trained German forces.

Though they fought incredibly bravely against greatly outnumbering forces, and held up the advancing armies for far longer than the Germans had anticipated, they too failed to take into account the huge technical advances the Germans had made, particularly with weapons like the huge siege gun, ‘Big Bertha’.

Cast Of Players (Fictional)

SAM ‘STOOP’ PEARSON…The Farm boy… Gifted and resourceful, a natural flyer.

HENRY ‘SKID’ STEWART…The Friend…Loyal and supportive, despite the class difference.

GEORGE ALEXANDER MCTAVISH ‘Mac’…The Father figure…solid and dependable

JULIUS HORATIO CHRISTIAN…The Snob…Resentful, envious and vicious.

WILHELM JAEGER (JAGGER)…The Hunter…Charming, handsome, talented and driven.

ANTOINETTE JAEGER (JAGGER)…The Sister…Beautiful, ruthless, amoral and deadly.

JACOB SMITH…Secret Service…ex-military, intelligent, and intuitive with the First Lord’s ear

POLLY STEVENS…The lover…Brave, intelligent and desirable, niece of Jacob Smith.

TOMISLAV ‘TOMI’ JOVANOVIC…The Idealist…..Friend of Gavrilo Princip the murderer of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

ALBERT RAMSBOTTOM…The Lowlife…Cruel and vindictive, a callous thief.

Cast Of Players (Historical)

STANLEY CLARKE…Secret Service operative responsible for the breaking of the German spy ring in Britain.

MAJOR J.M SALMOND…Commanding Officer of 3 Squadron R.F.C

COMMANDER CHARLES SAMSON….Commanding Officer 3 Squadron R.N.A.S, instructor at Upavon, aviation pioneer

CAPTAIN EDWARD KINDER BRADBURY… Posthumously awarded Victoria Cross for the incident at Néry.

BATTERY SERGEANT-MAJOR GEORGE DORRELL…..Awarded V.C for the incident at Néry.

SERGEANT DAVID NELSON………….Awarded V.C for the incident at Néry.

BEN CLOUTING…………Present at the firing of the first British shots of the Great War.

REGINALD MARIX…Flew on the very first strategic bombing missions, launched by the R.N.A.S to destroy the Zeppelin Sheds of Cologne and Düsseldorf.

PART ONE

PREFACE TO WAR

CHAPTER ONE

CONVALESCENCE

An uncertain sun had hardly blinked above the distant horizon yet, though the day had barely started, it was already beautifully clear. The damp March air held billions of minute water particles, each one a prism that magnified his vision, giving him a seemingly endless view of the Lincolnshire coastline. Sam ‘Stoop’ Pearson laid back at his ease, resting on the damp spring-grass of the Wolds, overlooking the English east coast.

Sitting upright, he trained his binoculars onto the Grimsby dock tower, slowly adjusting the wheel between the lenses. As the tall edifice swam into focus, he lowered his gaze, following the sun-lit red brickwork down from the wide parapet below the gleaming three hundred foot high ‘birdcage’ apex, past the slotted windows and down to its base. He then scanned smoothly across to the two huge pairs of dock gates, for which it had been built. It was after all a hydraulic pump, using water pressure to open and close the large watertight gates that allowed tidal access for the vast inshore fishing fleet based there.

From his position facing east on the gentle, agricultural slope of the Lincolnshire Wolds, he could make out the smoky urban stain of Hull, sprawling along the north bank of the muddy river. From there, he scanned across the wide chocolate brown flow of the Humber estuary and the thin silted spit of Spurn Point’s long crooked finger, which lazily pointed the way to the sandy beaches of Cleethorpes.

Jutting eagerly from the Pier Gardens, across the promenade and out into the wide estuary stood the ornate iron pier, its 1200-foot length tipped with arcades and cafés.

The recently erected Pavilion, a third of the way along its length, glowed with a cold, whitewashed newness in the morning sun. It replaced, the old Concert Hall, which had originally occupied the very tip of the pier, and had burned down in the dramatic fire of 1903. Memories of that night flooded through his brain as he took in the view.

His mother, dragging the small sleeping boy from the secure warmth of his bed to watch the drama unfold from the place at which he now sat, high on the hills above. Wrapped against the night’s chill in a thick blanket, he had watched as the flames seared the heavens, bathing the Humber in a hellish red and orange glow. A sight that would be forever branded into his memory.

The pier stood empty now, patiently waiting.

When summer arrived, it would become alive, jam-packed, with teaming hoards of mill workers from Yorkshire and Lancashire, wedged shoulder to shoulder along its length. They would promenade it’s oak boarded decking in their holiday finery, laughing and flirting, eating ice-cream and making the most of the freedoms afforded by the annual factory shut down’s.

From the Pier, he scanned his lenses along the Samphire encrusted silt of the estuary. He could clearly see past the, now empty, seal breeding grounds, to the horizon where he knew Skegness lay.

Like Cleethorpes, it too would soon awake from its winter slumbers. Though it lay further south, its attractions vied for the same customers as Cleethorpes, creating a small rivalry between the two resorts. Unlike Cleethorpes on the mouth of the Humber, Skegness had the advantage of a more scenic position, near the edge of the wide gouge, which some ancient god appeared to have clawed from England’s fertile coastline. This inlet was known as The Wash.

As a child, Sam had heard a story of an ancient English King who, fleeing the capital with all the treasure he could carry, had taken a shortcut across the tidal silt of the Wash. Unfortunately his treasure wagon had become stuck in the deep mud and the incoming tide had swallowed all of that treasure. It may still be there, thought Sam as he scanned the horizon.

He did not need the glasses to see most of this, the cool clear air aided his 20/20 vision, but the true beauty was in the detail. Detail, which leaped out at him through the fine quality lenses of the military binoculars, a gift from Colonel Alexander McTavish.

Swinging the glasses back across the wide Humber, and re-adjusting the focus wheel, Sam watched, through the light blanket of pale ochre smokehouse haze that hung vaporously over the fish docks, as a flotilla of Drifters queued at the lock gates of the Dock.

This was Grimsby, the busiest fishing port in the country with some twelve hundred vessels plying their trade from its sheltered haven. How they managed to pack them all in the dock, beggared belief, he thought.

A deckhand had once told him that a man could walk from one side of the dock to the other on their decks, without getting his feet wet; seeing the sheer size of the fleet that plundered the coastal seas, he could now see how that would be possible.

Following the line of small fishing boats out into the Humber, he focused on the small maroon sails rising from the foredeck and stern of the more distant vessels as they slowly drifted their nets along the teaming coastal waters of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Each boat’s sail carrying the, just visible, white smudge of a registration number. ‘A hard existence being a fisherman’, he muttered to himself as he dropped the glasses to his chest and lay idly back. His hands slipped behind his head and his eyes slowly closed as he felt the gentle breeze and the weak sun softly warm on his smooth cheek.

When a moderate wind blew from the North East, the less-than delicate aroma of fish and smoke houses, busily preserving Haddock, Cod and Herring Bloaters for the cities, would gradually creep up the gentle slopes of the Wolds in an adiabatic invasion of the clean country air. It filtered down into the small stream eroded valleys that meandered through the chalky soil, where it would hang, sometimes for days, corrupting the sheltered dells.

As he lay back on the spring grass, a small smile flitted across Sam’s bright eyes, highlighted by the clear sun, as another distant memory slipped to the fore of his consciousness.

Once as a small child, out collecting Brambles with his mother, his baby sister strapped tightly to her back, he recalled asking her with twitching nose, what the strange alien smell was. ‘That, is the smell of money young Sam’, had been her reply, ‘there’s precious little of it to be made off the land in these parts for the likes of us’, she had added reflectively.

The child Sam had enjoyed brambling, an entertaining and fulfilling diversion, a small treat in a harsh existence. His short arms would carefully reach through the spiky thorns of the bramble bushes to collect his shiny black prize, and he would fill his belly with the sweet fruit, cramming them greedily into his mouth until he was almost sick. He would return home with his face and clothes stained purple from their sticky juice.

It was many years later, as the little family weathered a particularly harsh and hungry winter, that the realisation struck. They collected brambles in the autumn, along with gleaning pea fields and picking potatoes to bottle or store them, so that they would have food in their stomachs over the hard winter months.

Without a father bringing in a labourers wage, he had been taken by Influenza when Sam’s mother was pregnant with his sister Molly, times had been even tougher on the three of them.

Mother had done everything that she could to rear two young children alone, everything from taking in washing to scrubbing floors, all to subsidise the meagre income from the fickle labour on the land.

The young man that lay on the damp grass in the still air and watery March sunlight, was a very different being from the one who had lain there little more than a year ago. Sam Pearson had grown up an awful lot in a few short months.

Still dressed in simple farm workers clothing, a thick jumper above a well-worn pair of coarse cotton trousers. On his feet, he wore the same pair of scuffed, heavily soiled brown boots; outwardly he looked little changed. However, the steel of lost innocence in his eye reflected a life that, in the last year, had taken a very different path from the one he imagined he would wander.

Sam lay on a thick oilskin jacket to keep the dampness of the Lincolnshire earth from his work clothes. Beside him on the lush grass lay his antique rifle, its stock worn and distressed, though the barrel was clean and well oiled. An historic relic from the Napoleonic wars.

He still carried it, even though the Major, when he had gratefully bestowed them on Sam, had hoped the gift of the binoculars would replace the gun as a way of fulfilling his stalking and hunting needs.

However, once a hunter, always a hunter.

The young man, still just nineteen years old, looked fit and healthy once more. Beneath the bulky work clothing, was a strong sinewy working man’s body, honed with the hard toil of a farm labourer’s life. Though the tan was faded, due to a winter spent as much indoors as out, resting, recovering from his leg injury, the physique was now as sturdy as ever. The wavy, somewhat wayward brown hair was once more a little longer, the strong chin a little darker with close shaved stubble, and the brown eyes as bright and intelligent as ever, though now tinged with that harder edge to their ever assessing stare.

Enjoying the peace of the morning for a further fifteen minutes, Sam raised himself up onto his elbow. A frown scudded across his unlined brow and, lightly and silently, with a feline grace he rose to his feet, picked up the old gun and deftly flicked back the lock.

Crouching low, he crept to the lee of the sparse spring hedge that ran along the brow of the hill, five yards above where he had lain. His gait displayed a very slight limp, but that neither bothered him nor slowed him down.

As he reached the hedge, he dropped without a sound to one knee and very slowly, he pushed the rifle softly through the budding hedge branches.

Though, moments earlier he had outwardly appeared asleep his senses, as always fully alert, had picked up a small sliver of sound, a sound that had sighed into his ear from the distant wood. A slight whisper slithering through the quiet of the morning, a sound to which all but a few prey animals would have taken little heed.

Peering through the hedge, the hunter in him awakened, he spotted the source of the slight sound. A fine Red Deer out in the open, head down, munching slowly at the short new shoots of spring grass in the meadow at the edge of the woodland. He slowly eased the old rifle’s barrel further through the hedge, pushing it with great care, inch at a time through the tangle of naked branches. Pulling his eye down to the barrel, he rested his cheek against the cold of the steel and sighted along its length. Cautiously he drew a bead on the chest of the fine animal.

The deer, suddenly alert, instantly raised its head and sniffed the air, sensing danger but seeing none. The fine beast stood stiffly still, with head high and haunches flexed, flanks twitching ready for flight.

Sam slowed his breathing and very gently squeezed on the trigger of the old gun as he pulled it tightly into his shoulder, anticipating the strong recoil.

At that moment, another movement caught his eye. Just on the edge of the copse, hidden in the shade of the yet to burst bud trees, his sharp vision caught the shape of another young deer and next to that another, hardly more than fawns.

They must have been last years late offspring thought Sam as they timidly ventured into the morning light. He could imagine them almost blinking at their nervous transition from the safe gloom of the woodland to the brightness of the open field. He very slowly eased the finger pressure from the trigger and, lowering the rifle and quietly closing the frizzen, he slowly and silently, pulled it back onto the grass at his side. Very cautiously, he reached down for the binoculars around his neck, and gently spun the focus wheel until the young deer leaped into the lenses frame.

Every detail of them was acutely visible.

Their large watery brown eyes and damp noses, forever twitching, tasting the scent of the air around them, constantly checking for danger. The fine caramel and cream colouring of their flanks, infant spots now faded, glowed in the pale sunlight, and the sight brought a smile to Sam’s lips. ‘I don’t think I’ll be eating Venison this week’, Sam said beneath his breath and he watched the small family group as it cautiously fed.

Getting more enjoyment from the view than he ever would have from the meat, Sam watched the three deer graze. Suddenly, startled by a clatter of Woodpigeons from the wood behind, they swiftly, with an agile elegance disappeared into its diffuse safety, their glowing hides somehow fading in the shade as they melted into the background, perfectly camouflaged.

Sam too had heard the sound that scared the Woodpigeons, not loud, but not a natural sound of the wild and, annoyed that his enjoyment of the deer family had been curtailed, he retraced his footsteps.

Keeping low, he quickly yet silently covered the ground between himself and the woodland, using the sparse hedge for cover. Entering the woods through the hedge, he also melted into the background just as the deer had done.

A true hunter learned from his prey.

Treading carefully, not making a sound, he circled around to the spot from which the noise had emanated. Stopping as he spotted the female deer staring at him through the tangled undergrowth, her ears spread wide as a ravens wings, she watched his passage, assessing the danger he posed. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not after you now, but I think someone else is’.

Slowing his progress, cautiously Sam closed in on his new prey; he had spotted their movement at the same moment the she-deer had. Alertly, she turned her attention back towards the sound source, before leading her offspring quickly away to the safety of the deep wood.

Skirting around to the rear of his target, he slowly crept up behind them and raising the old rifle, pointing it directly to the canopy above, he pulled the trigger. The explosion from the gun was accompanied by copious amounts of acrid smoke from the homemade gunpowder. The two boys who had been stalking the deer, nearly leaped out of their skins in shock at the gun’s loud report. So intent on their prey had they been that they had not noticed that they in turn, were being stalked.

The pair, not yet in their teens were carrying an air rifle, a poachers favourite as it made very little noise, though they were still learning about hunting. Their clumsy attempts at stalking, reminded Sam of his early endeavours, not so very long ago. ‘Morning lads’, he said matter-of-factly as he slowly stood up. He rose from the undergrowth like a magician from a stage’s trapdoor, the gunshot’s explosion still dissipating through the trees; he continued ‘shot anything yet?’

‘WH…what do you mean stammered the taller of the two startled boys, trying to conceal the airgun behind his back’.

‘Oh I just wondered if you had managed to shoot any game yet’, Sam replied keeping his voice calm, not wanting to worry the lads unduly.

‘You the Game keep mister?’ asked the other, a smaller lad, thin to the point of emaciation, his face smudged with mud and grime, which hid his malnourished pallor.

‘Shush Tommy’, said the older boy, who then blushed slightly realising he had given his brother’s name away.

‘No Tommy I’m not the Gamekeeper, just a man out enjoying the wildlife’,

‘That why you carrying a gun then mister?’ said the older boy gaining confidence.

‘So why are you carrying a gun then boy?’ Sam challenged back, the boy clamped his mouth shut and looked down at his feet while focusing on his too large booted foot as it commenced to dig into the loose undergrowth as if of its own accord. ‘What were you trying for Tommy?’

‘We was after that deer but she got away,’

‘Did you see the two little-uns with her?’

‘No, we didn’t see