“This is more scary than being under fire” Frank muttered.

A cameraman and sound engineer are setting up their equipment in the living room of a very elderly man. He’s in his mid-90’s and smartly turned out with a couple of service medals on his dark blue blazer.

“Do I really have to wear these things?” he asks the director, indicating the awards.

“Yes, you do, Frank” she replies. “You did earn them.”

He shrugs. “Couple o’ gongs for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We all got these ones, y’know.”

The director half-smiles then turns to her team. “We good to roll?”

The camerman nods. The sound engineer gives a thumbs-up as he carefully places the boom mic nearer to Frank.

The director smiles at her subject. “Now, just be natural and tell your story. Don’t rush. Nice and calm.” She turns to her crew. “And…..three, two, one and go!”

Frank takes a deep breath, looks straight at the camera and begins.

“I weren’t there on D-Day. The Big One. Or the hard fight the Jerries made of it in Normandy. Just as well. The regiment took fifty-five percent casualties in just eight weeks. They say that’s the kind o’ thing that either makes you or breaks you. But I was still back in Blighty at the time so I didn’t get to find out.

I had my 19th birthday on Christmas Eve,1944. Got my call-up papers soon after and started training. I played football every weekend for the local club, just small time, y’know. And I was a brickie by trade so I was bloody fit in those days. The training didn’t bother me too much. It was harder on some of those office boys, huffing and puffing through it all. The sergeants were shockers; I never heard swearing like it till I joined the army. But they knew what they was doing. One of ‘em only had one arm. Lost it at Anzio the year before. They put him to work on us. Some of the lads whined about it but they was teaching us how to fight a war not come first prize in a dancing class. I heard a few complain the war would be over before we got there but the Jerries still had some fight left in ‘em. You don’t mess about with Hitler’s mob, the bastards knew how to give you a good scrap.

Training finished, we got shipped over in March. By this time, our division had crossed over the Rhine, the yanks were doing alright further south and the Russki’s were bashing the hell out of ‘em in east Germany. Looked like the war was running out of Germans. Some of the new lot were eager to get stuck in. Me? I didn’t have a clue. Part of me wanted to ‘do my bit’, the other part wanted to get the hell out of there.

Finally we joined the battalion and settled in. We weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms. They looked down on us as “sprogs”, young recruits, no use to anyone. One o’ my mates, a chirpy little bloke called Charlie Yates, told a tough looking corporal he wished he’d been there in Normandy. Big mistake. The corp told him about Spandau’s which can rip a man in two, tiger tanks rolling over our wounded blokes and turning ‘em into mush, SS shooting prisoners like they was rabid dogs, and the stink of dead men and dead cows and dead horses, the stink so bad you could smell it on your uniform days after.” Charlie shut up after that.

They told us there was some Jerry troops in a large village nearby and we had to go and push ‘em out. A couple o’ Sherman tanks were gonna come at them from the flank. “Engage the enemy” as the officer put it. There was some woods nearby and we made our way through the trees so they wouldn’t see us approach. We could see the village through the wood. Then suddenly all hell broke loose. A Spandau opened up and German rifle fire and bullets everywhere. I dived behind a tree but the bloke next to me was too late and caught a bullet in the throat. There was a small artillery piece firing HE into us, wood splinters flying all over the place. Our lot returned fire and the Bren opened up and they kept their heads down for a bit but then they got so bloody close they started lobbing their stick grenades. The sound was….well, it was like nothing I’d ever heard. There was rifle fire, machine guns, shells, grenades, men screaming, men shouting, men crying. Despite all that training, I-I just didn’t know what to do. I was so scared I nearly wet myself. I lay there on the ground pointing my Lee Enfield. One of the old lags shouted at me: “Fire your bloody rifle you useless piece o’ shit!”

The Jerries started to outflank us and one of ‘em got so close he threw a grenade at the Bren crew and….well, that was that. The Lieutenant who was new to the unit started to get a bit panicky then. We had no machine gun, the Shermans hadn’t turned up and as for the Jerries, nobody told ‘em they were supposed to be defeated. Just when it looked like they was about to overrun us, he called a retreat and a few of the veterans gave covering fire and we ran, we just ran for our lives. It was chaos. Bloody chaos.

I scarpered through the trees and one minute there were blokes running with me and the next….nothing. I could hear gunshots and shouting through the woods but I couldn’t see a soul. I stopped, sweating and exhausted and scared stiff and I tried to pull meself together, make sense of it all. I was in a clearing, a small grassy meadow. I relaxed for a moment, tried to put all the madness behind me.

Then he walked into the clearing. He was a German soldier. Well, when I say ‘soldier’ he looked about fifteen, same age as my kid brother. He was skinny and pale, the uniform hung on him like a blanket, the coal shuttle helmet was too big for his head. He didn’t look old enough to shave.

He was just as shocked as I was. It was pathetic. It was like we both accidentally walked into somebody else’s war. Just like the ambush in the trees, I was stunned. I didn’t know what to do. The boy looked at me for a moment, then he lowered his rifle, he sort of half-smiled and said “Bitte”.”

Frank looks down for a moment. “And then it happened. It just happened and I wish it didn’t but it did and there’s nothin’ I can do about it. I was nervous, I was so bloody nervous I went and accidentally pulled the trigger on my rifle. The shot rang out like a….like a crack o’ thunder and the soldier, the boy, he stared at me, he had this surprised look on his face like he was saying “What did you do that for?” and he just crumpled and fell backwards onto the grass. I stood there like an idiot. It was like my rifle had gone off all by itself.

There was still no-one else around. He’d been like me, maybe lost from his unit. Just wandering around in a fog. He groaned and I could see him moving. I ran over to him. He was on his back, clutching his abdomen, this dark patch of blood on his field grey tunic. His breathing was short like he, y’know, like he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs. He glanced up at me. His eyes looked hurt and scared. “Hilfen mir!” he said. I knelt down beside him. I took off the helmet. It was heavy, heavier than ours. I noticed his hair. It was dark which surprised me ‘cos I actually thought all Germans were blond. I took off my own tunic then I rolled it up and laid it underneath his head.

I was all mixed up. My hands were still shaking from the clash in the woods earlier. I was confused ‘cos I was lost and on my own and I couldn’t get the sound of gunfire outta my head. And even though they trained me to kill Germans, now I’d finally shot one, I was just stricken, I was just stricken with guilt. I couldn’t leave him there, could I? So…..so I stayed. Seemed like the right thing to do but if some Jerries came along and saw him there, covered in blood, they might just shoot me on the spot.

I carefully unbuttoned his tunic to see the damage. It weren’t good. It really weren’t good at all. I was the worst shot in my unit. The sergeant major said I couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces…..but I’d managed to shoot him in the middle of his body, dead centre. His right hand was getting bloody from clutching the wound. When he saw it, he started to sob and a tear rolled down his grubby face. “He looked at me and he said “Ich werde sterben”. I found out later it means, “I’m going to die”. But I think I knew that.

I took out the large field dressing from my medical kit and placed it over the wound. God knows why. It weren’t gonna save him. It just seemed right at the time. He cried out with the pain of it. I nearly cried with him I felt so bad. I gave him some water which he managed to sip. He said “Danke Schön” and then he said “Thank you”. I‘ll always remember that. “Thank you.” Maybe it was the only English he knew.

Before the war, the only time I saw someone die was Granny Beth when she quietly passed away in her bed.” Frank pauses. “This weren’t the same. It weren’t the same at all.

So then he reached out to me with his left hand, the one that weren’t covered in blood. I-I hesitated at first and then I took it. There wasn’t much strength in it. He just said “Kamerad”. I didn’t know what to say. What do you say? I’d just shot a teenager, this boy who knew he was gonna die and he’s calling me his comrade. I dunno, I s’pose he just wanted to hold on to someone, anyone really.

Then-then his body started to shudder and he coughed violently. Through it all, he somehow managed to point to the top of his tunic and say “photo.” I reached and pulled out a leather wallet. Inside was a photo of a woman with black hair, aged around late thirties, forty. He clutched it and held it up to his face and said over and over “Mutti, mutti, mutti……”

And then he just...” Frank slowly shakes his head. “He just went. One minute he was there, the next…the next he was… gone.”

Frank wells up and is embarrassed. There’s a pause. He clears his throat as he gathers himself.

“He was lying there on the grass and blood all over his chest and not moving. Course he wasn’t. He was never gonna move again. For the life of me, I can’t remember what was going through my mind. The whole day I was lost and confused and scared. I did feel empty though, so empty like it was me who was drained of blood, not him. I carefully took back my tunic and laid his head on the ground, gently, like he was still alive. Then I picked up my rifle and started to leave. God knows why I did this and I should’ve left it with him but….I took it. I took the photograph of his mother from his hand and then I put it in me wallet. I’ve had it ever since. It started to fall apart after a long while so I had a copy done.” He pulls out a black and white photo and looks at it sadly. Still gazing at the photo….“I don’t know the name of that lad. Or where he lived or anything. It’s just to remind me. To remind me that…well, y’know.” Frank looks up at everyone in the room. “And I swear to God in all those years, I never once raised my hand against another human being.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say.”