Missing by Frances Itani

Chapter One

    March 4, 1917
    A village in northern France
    Luc Caron was twelve years old when the black object fell from the sky. He had never seen anything like this before, and he didn’t stop to think. He ran as fast as he could towards the place he thought the object would land.
    This was a time of war, a terrible war that people would later call World War I. Already, it had lasted almost three years. More than one year ago, the Germans had captured Luc’s village in northern France. Not all of France was occupied by the Germans, only a smallpart in the north and east. But Luc’s village was one of the unlucky ones.
    Fighting and shelling had destroyed many houses and roads and shops. Soldiers had moved in and taken over. Men of fighting age were taken prisoner and sent to Germany. There, they were forced to work in factories.
    The old men, along with the women and children, stayed on in the village. Farmers continued to farm, and shopkeepers kept the shops open. Women did the laundry and hung it out in the wind to dry. Children went to school. Two sisters baked bread in the bakery. The blacksmith, an old man, put shoes on the horses and repaired farm tools. The priest, also an old man, visited the sick and said Mass, but that was all. The villagers had to obey the new rules. They could not leave their houses after eight o’clock at night. The only time they could meet in groups was when they went to church.
    The soldiers gave orders; the villagers did as they were told. There were soldiers everywhere, checking to see that people obeyed. But no one had ever said what to do if you saw something falling from the sky. Something like the blackobject that twelve-year-old Luc saw on that Sunday morning in 1917.
    Ten minutes earlier, just after eleven o’clock, Luc had left the village church. In the sermon, the old priest had talked about hope that the war would soon end. After three years, the village had suffered enough. The people in the parish listened with their own quiet hope. When they left the church, they hurried back to their homes to take up their hard lives again.
    Luc’s mother had gone home ahead of her son to prepare the noon meal. She and Luc lived alone in a small house at the far end of the village. Luc’s father had been a soldier, but he had died two years ago, while fighting the Germans. Luc’s mother was now a widow.
    Luc was not in a hurry, and he did not go straight home with his mother after church. He pictured her in the kitchen, making his lunch, slicing a bit of pork from the bone. She would be looking out the window while she sliced, wondering where he was and why he hadn’t come home. Now that his father was dead, she worried about him all the time. She watched to see if he had buttoned his jacket and wrappedhis scarf around his neck. Every day, she warned him to dress warmly so he wouldn’t catch a cold.
    Luc liked to prowl around the village, to see if he could find out what was going on. He was always alert, always watching, ready to run if any soldiers came too close. He practised spying whenever he could, but if the soldiers saw him, they shouted and told him to go home. Still, that didn’t stop him from snooping.
    Luc shivered on this cold and bitter morning, but he took his time and walked slowly along a dirt path. He held a stick in his hand, and he poked it at the ground and under bushes. He was looking for small treasures. Stones that glinted of silver, old birds’ nests, shiny buttons that had fallen from uniforms. One afternoon, Luc had been lucky. He had found a German coin that one of the soldiers had dropped. He kept his treasures in his bedroom, some on a small table, some on the windowsill. He hid the best ones in a canvas bag under his narrow bed.
    Luc picked up a sharp pink rock and turned it over in the palm of his hand. At the same moment, he heard the sound of pecks andrattles coming from far above. He knew, right away, that he was hearing machine guns. Long ago,