Private Peaceful: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Tommo finds himself falling asleep, but wills himself not to. “After this night is over,” he tells himself, “you can sleep forever, for nothing will ever matter again.” He then decides to keep himself awake by singing “Oranges and Lemons” the way Big Joe always used to.

Back at training camp, the company are told that they will be going up “to the front”; they are all relieved because this means that they will be leaving “Etaples and Sergeant Hanley forever.” Their new captain is called Captain Wilkes, and he often encourages the men to sing to boost their morale. Wilkes was a choirmaster at home. As they march to the front line in Belgium, the boys become almost cheery from the singing. Soon Tommo and Charlie start singing “Oranges and Lemons,” and everyone else joins in. Tommo can’t believe the contrast between Wilkes and Hanley. Wilkes is very considerate and kind to the men, so they treat him with equal respect.

The company are heading for a quiet sector, so everyone is quite relieved. In fact, all Tommo has seen of the enemy so far is a group of disheveled German prisoners. He claims they “seemed much like us, only dirtier.”

The company are released from camp one evening, and they head to the nearby village of Poperinghe (“Pop”) to an estaminet, which is like a pub. Wilkes claims it serves “the best egg and chips in the entire world,” and all of the boys have a wonderful time there, eating and drinking “like camels filling up at an oasis.” The daughter of the owner smiles at Tommo as she serves him, and the others tease him for it, but he continues to think about the girl that night. Still, he finds that her face keeps turning into Molly’s in his mind.

The next night, the company go up to the front line. They have to be silent as they crawl through the mud towards their dugout. Other soldiers are heading back the other way, and the “haunted, hunted look in their eyes” says everything that Tommo needs to know about what he is going up against.

Tommo’s experience on the front line is, at first, a quiet one. Day after day, his company waits for a sign of German shelling, but it never seems to come. Tommo is “almost disappointed” by the lack of action.

The trench and dugouts are a mess from their previous inhabitants, so Captain Wilkes sets the men to work cleaning them up to avoid rats. The rats inevitably arrive anyway, and Tommo is the first to discover a nest of them. Luckily, Little Les from their village was a rat-catcher at home, and he easily kills the rats until they stop coming so frequently. Lice are another problem in the trench, and one which no one can seem to get rid of. The men try to burn them off, but the only thing that would really help would be to have a bath: a luxury that they are not entitled to. Most of all, though, the rain is the men’s “greatest scourge.” They are always wet and cold, every one of them has trench foot (a condition in which the foot begins to rot away due to being constantly wet), and the mud never dries out, so they can barely walk through it. Only “sleep and food” bring any “real relief.”

Captain Wilkes and Charlie also help to keep morale up with their positive attitudes, and Tommo claims that there isn’t a “man in the company who doesn’t look up to” Charlie after how he handled the field punishment in Etaples. Tommo is prouder of his brother than ever before.

The men eventually return to the rest camp, but even there they are kept busy. Nevertheless, there are a few comforts. The Peacefuls have received letters from their mother and Molly, who have also sent “knitted woolen scarves and gloves and socks.” The men also have “communal baths in great steaming vats in a barn down the road and, best of all, egg and chips and beer at the estaminet in Pop.” Tommo particularly enjoys these visits because he gets to see the “beautiful girl with the doe eyes” who smiled at him before.

Winter arrives and brings snow with it. Tommo is actually pleased about this, as the snow is no colder than the rain, but at least allows the men to stay relatively dry. The company have still faced little action: only a few men have been injured, but none so far have been killed. Tommo suspects that they are in “just about the luckiest sector” they could possibly ask for.

Eventually, an order arrives that the company must go out and investigate the German regiments that have just arrived in the trenches opposite them. Tommo points out that this seems fairly pointless as there “are spotter planes doing that almost every day,” but the men obey their orders, and every night a few go out on patrol to try and reach the German side in secret.

Tommo’s turn for patrol comes, and he is slated to go with Charlie, Nipper Martin, Pete, Little Les, and Captain “Wilkie” Wilkes. Tommo finds he is “not so much frightened as excited” for the task ahead. He feels like he’s poaching again at home.

The men wriggle their way to the German wire on their stomachs, and they head into the German trench in silence. They make their way to the source of some music and light, where they can hear voices. Just as they approach, a German soldier leaves the dugout. He sees the men, and runs back inside screaming. Tommo says that the man should have surrendered and gone with the British, and that he made the wrong decision by turning back. One of Tommo’s company throws in a grenade behind the soldier, and suddenly there is chaos and the firing of guns from all sides. When Tommo edges closer, he sees Little Les lying dead on the ground. All of the Germans except one are also dead.

The one remaining German soldier is “beside himself with terror.” He is whimpering, “naked, blood-spattered and shaking,” and Tommo notes that he himself is also shaking. The British men give the German a coat and get him out of the dugout, and then start frantically trying to escape before they attract further attention.

Tommo’s company manage to escape the German trench, but as they start heading back towards their own trench, they are caught by a flare. Tommo presses himself into the ground and finds himself thinking of his father, and imagining himself apologizing to him for causing his death.

Further shelling begins, and the British soldiers hurry to a crater to shelter themselves from the attack. Wilkie is stuck further up a slope, and tells the boys that he can’t move his legs, so Charlie carefully drags Wilkie into the crater for protection. When the shelling stops, Charlie carries Wilkie “on his back the whole way, until the stretcher bearers came for him in the trench.” Wilkie makes Charlie promise to come and see him in hospital.

Tommo hears the German prisoner praying to himself and realizes that they both call “God by the same name.” Soon, the German stops praying and starts rocking himself “like a child, like Big Joe.” When they arrive back at the British trench, the company has a cup of tea and a cigarette with the prisoner before he is taken away. They don’t speak, but as he leaves, he thanks the men. Nipper remarks how strange it was to see the man “with not a stitch on,” because without uniforms “you can hardly tell the difference” between the German and the English. Later that night, Tommo finds himself not thinking of Little Les, as he supposes he ought to be, but instead of the German prisoner. He feels that from the short time they spent together, he “somehow knew him better than [he’d] ever known Little Les.”

Tommo and Charlie go to see Wilkie at the hospital. Wilkie has already been transported back to Britain because he was “in a bad way,” but he left a golden watch for Charlie. Charlie thinks the watch is “ruddy wonderful” and promises Tommo that he can have it if anything ever happens to him.