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kill more men than a German machine gun, and my bacon was harder than a bullet.
    By the spring of 1918 the army reckoned we were ready to go across the seas to fight the German army. The colonel sent for me. ‘Trooper Clay,’ he said with a sad shake of his white-haired head. ‘What am I going to do with you?’
    â€˜Send me to France to fight, sir?’

    â€˜You can’t shoot straight, you can’t march straight, and you can’t look after the horses or the trucks.’
    â€˜No, sir.’
    â€˜We could sent you over to France and tie you to a post. The riflemen could use you for target practice.’
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ I muttered. My boots were too big and the wool uniform itched and made me sweat. I felt as miserable as a whipped puppy.
    â€˜Tell me, Trooper Clay, is there anything you are good at? Any single thing?’
    â€˜I can run ten miles in an hour,’ I said.
    The colonel looked happier. ‘That’s good. The men in battle need to send messages quickly. Telephone wires get cut or snapped so then they use runners.’
    â€˜I could do that,’ I said.
    â€˜It’s a dangerous job,’ he said.
    My mouth went dry. ‘Dangerous?’

    â€˜The men in the battle may want supplies. Or they may want to tell our heavy gunners where the enemy troops are, so they can drop shells on them. Now, Trooper Clay, what do the Germans think of that?’
    â€˜They don’t want the big guns dropping shells on them, sir?’
    â€˜Exactly,’ the colonel said. ‘So your enemy will do all they can to stop the messengers getting through. They send snipers to pick them off. Know what a sniper is?’
    â€˜A lone sharp-shooter with a rifle,’ I said.
    â€˜You’ll be trying to run five miles with a message and the sniper will be trying to shoot you. Or they may call up the German Air Force to attack you with planes carrying machine guns. A dangerous job.’ The colonel rubbed his hands together. ‘Trooper Clay, I’ll have you posted to a troop of messengers in France.’
    â€˜Thank you sir,’ I said. But I don’t know why I said that.

Chapter 3
Hawks and hunger
    It took eight days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. We landed in a place so green and peaceful I couldn’t believe there was a war going on. I was used to the endless flat and dusty plains of Kansas. This was a land of fresh rain, rolling green hills and little fields with sheep and cows.
    I said, ‘France sure is a great place.’
    The sergeant sneered at me. ‘We’re in England, you dummy.’
    The men heard him and laughed. After that no one called me Joe any more – they all called me Dummy.
    We spent a couple of weeks in England doing more training. No one was faster than me down the lanes and over the green fields. ‘It’ll be harder when you get to France,’ the sergeant warned me. ‘Running in trenches and ditches to stay out of sight, running in darkness or wearing a gas mask.’

    I got stronger and my feet got used to the heavy boots. At dinner the other men moaned about how much they hated the army food. I ate everything they put in front of me.
    After dinner, some of the men went into the towns on the lorries to drink English beer. But I went down to the other part of the messenger troop: the pigeons.
    The soldier in charge of the pigeons was Corporal Bobby Mason – a man nearly as old as Pa, with hair going grey at the sides. He didn’t call me Dummy and he listened when I told him about how I trained my birds back home. Now he taught me the way the army did it.
    â€˜We get our birds from the pigeon men of Britain,’ Corporal Mason told me. ‘They’re tough little fellers and don’t seem to mind the gunfire. Some fly all the way fromFrance to England. They reckon nineteen out of twenty get through safely.’

    â€˜What happens to the others?’ I asked.
    â€˜The