Fresh off the boat

It was late Summer when we completed our training, August in England is something you either love or loathe and I was ready for the short time along the coast. Now Back home most people are used to the idea of traveling a hundred miles or so on occasion. State Capitals, business trips and weddings take lots of us out atleast fifty miles or so from time to time. In England we learned you are never more than about sixty miles from the ocean, and yet the average person in England probably traveled less than twenty miles on any given week. With or without the war mind you, with the war there are limitations on a lot of non-war essentials like fuel and other consumables as well as placing a premium on train tickets.

But we are Americans, and dammit we wanted to see something of the country who was sending us over to fight and die for them. So we bought some tickets, first class with our pocket money and then with some new friends we'd made in basic training and the very short advanced training for tunneling which I and the rest of my new friends had also found ourselves a part of. These boys were largely speaking Australians, some British kids from mining families too and were there for "not English" and treated as such by the English.

Our little excursion to the coast was interesting, however like everything else in England I learned that the beaches are not the same as the American beaches. These are largely round / large pebbles it seemed and the towns which are all along the coast where we spend the weekend were very quiet as the war kept a lot of people at home rather than taking vacations.

When we got to the departure point with less than an hour to spare, seems someone forgot several pieces of kit and we went all over hell and back to make sure everything was accounted for. Anyway the boat ride was pretty much what you'd expect; several thousand kids and young men with some older guys too. Everyone of us was checked, our gear checked and then we were ordered about. Then standing five deep on the decks of some run down old boat we waved to the crowds as the ship pulled away and into a course east. It wasn't a long trip, a couple hours and all the while France was just there in our sights. When we landed in France It was a much more curt affair, there along some dock was waiting for us a collection of under officers, quarter masters and French Officials who each wanted our man power for their own divisions or some other purpose. But thankfully the officers sent with us were reasonably aware of the practices where an under serving officer went out on leave to try and wrangle some new troops off the boat before they realized that they were off to the wrong spot. Woe be him who fell into their hands, for his pay was stopped without his presence at the correct place and some times charges filed until the truth was learned. But rarely did someone find their way back to the original unit after that and with so many losses being suffered most of the men simply got eaten up by the war without a word from them to reach home.

I will skip over the train ride to the border, and of France we saw at first very little though it looked lovely from the speeding train cars. Ours was a complete unit when we got into the train, an entire company with all it's baggage and support structures in tow. The train cars were filled with supplies and then men, first into box  cars and then later men were given to stand around on top of the flat cars on the trucks and supplies which were tied down. The trip only took a day, with some stops along the way to drop off goods or take on mail I do not know specifically and never asked. It was just then that we got our first looks at what the war had to offer us.

What we saw was a change as subtle as it was horrific to realize, less than an hour behind us on the train ride up were rolling farms and people going about their affairs. Here and there we could now see a house or farm which was blown apart, dead horse in a field some times and a tree which was stripped of all it's growth. As the train pulled up to our final stop we saw the worst thing upto then any of us had ever set eyes on. The area was a massive and sprawling expanse on one side of the tracks which looked like some kind of prison cross bread with a stock yard from hell. Barbed wire and towers with men and rifles, while hundreds of other men ran out to meet the train and hurriedly unloaded the flat cars right away. Horses pulled carts along once filled to the distant battle field some thirty miles away from our position. Even then we could hear the sound of heavy guns firing and see the flashes as some exploded.

The weather was still rather good, and we were quickly put to the task of unloading the train cars from all their cargo, then loading it onto the many carts and wagons which awaited our arrival. The few trucks we saw were almost all medical corps owned and no one was allowed near them, seems that they had a lot of pain killers and other stuff not intended for regular troops to handle. That took nearly a day to finish up, and after that we were put to a small filthy field where pairs of men set up their shelter halves into tents and began the short experience we had as soldiers in a "proper fighting unit" as one of the officers would tell us. For soon all of us were going to be shoulders deep in it; and if we were lucky maybe even a few dozen feet deeper where there were only slightly fewer things trying to kill you at anyone time.

Before dawn the next morning we were called up into formations and we struck camp for an all day forced march towards front lines and the battles just visible on the horizon some times. The English are a brutal bunch when it comes to many things, their pay for military men is completely arbitrary and they are as far as I know the only country to pay the infantry less in combat than on parades. The hours a soldier gives up as well as all his other sufferings are without count, but they excel at one thing in particular; they have an over developed sense of propriety and after five hours marching one of the officers took it into his head to stop for a bit of lunch. And we were all allowed to stop while he ate. Then four hours later he stopped for tea with the rest of the red jacket bunch and again we stopped. This time however everyone had tea, for it seems that if there is any equality in the British army it is that every man is believed to be afforded tea once a day. Then another four ours of marching brought us to a spot where all armies came to make camp before setting off again, it was almost perfect in a way. For so many had used it that the tent spots were already arranged and the foot roads were lined out as were fire pits for cooking and so on. This greatly sped up our evening actions and allowed some relief for a bit. Then we were ordered to not have any fires, lest the German flyers see us and report our movements... Who could hide a thousand men making a camp in a field? I wondered but already knew that there was no point in asking such things from the officers.

The Morning was coming too soon, so we ate cold rations before rolling ourselves into the pairs of blankets afforded to us along with the fifty odd pounds of equipment the military so graciously ladelled onto our backs at the point of embarkation. The Morning came painfully early for it was still dark when we marched down the last ten or so miles and saw all these horrors which until then had been myth and rumors.