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smackenzieDavies has never been as miserable in his life as he is in the trenches in December. He is cold and wet and muddy and sleep-deprived and occasionally sick. At least he's not alone, as everyone else in his platoon – indeed, in the entire battalion, it seems like – is in the same straits. His one consolation is that he hasn't been buried by a trench wall again, and he doesn't have trench foot.
But he is still at risk of being shelled, or shot, or infected with trench fever. The men have taken to attempting to get their water from shell craters, and every so often they'll find a dead body in the crater, bloated and contaminated, which sends them off to find a new water source. Davies does not bother to detail all these things in his letters, telling his parents and half-sisters only that he is still alive, Powell is still alive, he is cold and wet, the shelling is incessant, and could they send him another muffler.
Both Captain Bradford and his second in command, Captain Harris, are temporarily out of commission – Captain Bradford in England recovering from his gunshot wounds and Captain Harris at a base hospital recovering from trench fever – and while Davies and the rest of the men mostly like their replacement, a Captain Clarke from a different company, he isn't the commander they're used to. More than once, in quiet hours when they're sure no one is listening, Davies' platoon will mutter about how much more Captain Bradford seemed to care. It doesn't help that Lt Fiske is also back in England, recovering from a head wound, and may or may not be able to return to the front.
"Doesn't make much difference," Naylor mutters one day, after Captain Clarke has come by on inspection and reminded them to change their socks. He tries to rotate his shoulder. He has recovered nicely from having been shot during their last push towards the German line, but his shoulder can get a little stiff in the cold. "Commanders come and go. Get shot, get killed, get replaced."
"It's not right that Lt Fiske was shot twice, though," says Powell. "And in the head, even."
Naylor shrugs. Lt Fiske's replacement is one of their own, another private surprisingly promoted to corporal so someone can lead the platoon. His name is Simonson and Davies considers him a good man, although how well he can lead a platoon remains to be seen. They've been rotating through the trenches but not advancing at all since the last push in November. So far Simonson seems to be doing well enough as platoon commander, but mostly he delivers orders from Captain Clarke and occasionally does an inspection.
Davies, Naylor, and Powell hear a splash and someone cursing inventively from around the traverse nearest to them.
"Hope he didn't fall in the latrine," Powell comments.
"Be kind of shitty if he did," Davies says. Powell blinks at him, not quite understanding, and then laughs. Naylor snickers. Davies grins to himself.
"Good one, man." Powell claps him on the shoulder.
A shell whines overhead and falls to the ground between them and the support trench. The men duck involuntarily. Davies still finds himself sidling away from the trench wall when that happens. He only had to be buried once.
That shell is followed by more, and then some machine-gun fire from both sides. The three men crouch in the bottom of the flooded trench until Corporal Simonson trots by, slaps them all on the shoulders, and tells them to stand to. Well, at least they're out of most of the water that way. Most of the battalion, when it can, has been trying to build up the step to keep it above water.
The men actually get a day of leave about a week before Christmas, and because they don't have nearly enough time to go home, Davies and Powell content themselves with heading to Amiens to sleep in dry beds and eat decent food and pay for the company of pretty ladies.
The pretty ladies, when they do find them, aren't quite as pretty as either Davies or Powell had hoped. Powell suggests it's the stress of the war, and the fact that they probably can't get all the cosmetics and fancy clothes that they're used to. A man standing in line ahead of them says that the pretty ones probably go to Paris.
They have to queue up outside the brothel, but the line outside is short and some of the other men convivial. The brothel isn't much – a front room with a madam directing traffic, a row of doors down each side of a short hallway – but it contains the first women that Davies and Powell have been allowed to touch since the summer.
Davies isn't used to paying for sex. He will if he has to, though. And girl in the room he's directed to is pretty enough, and actually smiles at him when he walks in. She's blonde and short and skinny, but she has a nice face and the dressing-gown she's wearing isn't completely threadbare.
He gets two minutes, he was told. It doesn't seem like enough. The girl is sitting on the bed. She beckons to him, pats the mattress next to her, then stands up and shucks off her dressing-gown. Davies can almost count her ribs.
But he's not here for her ribs. Her breasts are small but round, her skin fair, and when he walks over to the bed, she sits up and starts undoing his belt. Her hands are small, the skin rough, and he wonders what they would feel like wrapped around his cock. What would her mouth feel like?
He struggles out of his uniform and climbs onto the bed. The girl pulls him close and kisses him – her breath tastes like mint, an incongruous detail that makes him feel oddly affectionate towards her – reaching for his cock with one hand so he can find out exactly what those small fingers feel like stroking him off.
He rubs against her, trapping her hand against her thigh, and she whimpers softly as he slides a finger inside her to make sure she's wet enough for him. She is, which shouldn't come as a surprise – she is a professional, after all – and she wraps her legs around his waist as he grabs her hips and shoves himself inside her.
She moans like, well, like a whore as he fucks her, the bed creaking with every thrust. He thinks some of her moans might actually be words, but he doesn’t know any French and so can't tell what she's saying, if she's telling him how big he is, how good he feels, or if she's cursing him out for bringing his muddy boots and his machine guns and his long-range shells to trample all over her country.
But he doesn't care what she's saying. She's hot and wet and active underneath him, goading him on, whimpering and moaning, and he's close but not quite there when someone bangs on the door.
Two minutes. Time's up.
"Piss off!" he yells, breathless, hips pumping desperately as the girl bucks under him. He knows enough about working girls to know she's putting on an act, she's trying to make him feel virile and manly, but right now he doesn't care. He paid for her time and her body, and by god he's going to stay here until he's finished.
The madam and another soldier have other ideas, though, and the door bangs open just as Davies climaxes with a groan. The madam complains to the girl, who shrugs under Davies' weight and waves a negligent arm. The madam snaps at her, but pulls the soldier with her back out of the room. Thank god – now Davies can get dressed in peace.
He pulls out of the girl, slides off the bed, puts his uniform and boots back on. By the time he's done, the girl has tied her dressing-gown around her again, and as he's about to turn and leave, she puts her hand on the side of his face, pulls him down, and kisses him on the lips. It feels like a genuine kiss to him, like she really means it.
Then she pats his cheek as if he were a child, and he leaves.
He looks back at the men lined up outside, all of them waiting their turn, waiting for their two minutes with their own girls, and he feels oddly empty. He feels like he missed something. He got what he paid for – two minutes, slightly more, with a girl in a private room – but now that he's had it, he's not sure it's what he wanted after all.
The fuck is wrong with you? he demands of himself. You want soft sighs and sweet words? Flowers? That’s for peacetime girls who don't need to be paid. An English soldier only rates a working girl in this hell. And they're all desperate, so they're all working girls.
It's depressing, is what it is. Depressing and a god damn shame. His friends are dead and dying, and for what? What have they accomplished? Bloated bodies in the drinking water. One day off since May, and two minutes with a skinny blonde girl.
Davies finds a café, takes a seat at a little table, and proceeds to pour bottle after bottle down his throat - the strongest stuff the waiter can bring him – until all his money is gone and he's too drunk to stand, and Powell has to carry him back to their shared room in a shabby hotel.
Davies is pretty sure he and Powell have an actual conversation, but as neither of them is sober – although Powell at least isn't falling down from drinking too much – it doesn't make much sense. Davies tries to explain how wrong it is that they're here, that they're forcing pretty girls to make money on their backs, that they're going to die for nothing, and Powell tells him to shut up, he's going to jinx them, they're not going to die, they're just going to be hungover and oh, Christ, it's back to the mud and the flood tomorrow.
Davies thinks he might be sick, and then all of a sudden he is. The hotel has provided them with chamberpots, as if Amiens was stuck in the nineteenth century and no one has heard of indoor plumbing, so at least he doesn't get it all over the floor, or himself. He really does feel as if he's going to die, and he tells Powell so. Powell, predictably, tells him to shut it.
Davies curls up on his side on the sagging bed and prays for unconsciousness. Right before he passes out, he remembers, strangely enough, his eighteenth birthday and how his friends and some of his stepdad's friends took him down to the pub and bought him drinks to celebrate. At the time he'd wondered why, because eighteen didn't feel much different to him than seventeen had. He was working for his stepdad laying bricks, good, solid work, and turning eighteen didn't earn him anything he didn't already have. Maybe they all just wanted a reason to celebrate. In any case, they stood him round after round until he was slurring his words and stumbling on his feet, and the pretty brunette girl who had been hanging off him for an hour grabbed his face and kissed him, and then reached down between his legs and cupped his cock in her hand.
He kissed her back, sloppy and hard, wanting her more than he'd ever wanted anyone, but when she got him outside – because she was that kind of girl and that kind of desperate, and he was too far gone to argue – fumbled his trousers open, and hitched up her skirts, he was much too drunk to get it up. He tried, but she laughed at him. And he was so embarrassed, so mortified, that he slapped her. And she slapped him back. And he lost his balance and fell on his ass in the alleyway, where she left him.
That is the last thing he remembers from that night. He knows someone took him home. He knows he passed out somewhere. He knows he came to in his own bed with the worst hangover he'd ever had before or since. And he knows he embarrassed himself with a pretty girl who wanted him, because he was eighteen and didn't know better.
He doesn't really think he knows better now. He just takes the girl before he takes the bottle.
In the morning he's sick as a dog, and the last thing he wants to do is go back to the battalion and the front. They'll be in the support trenches at most, but they'll still be in a trench. He can't believe he drank his money away last night. He can't believe how sick he feels. His mother, if she were here, would probably be furious with him. His sisters would laugh. His stepdad might understand. And Captain Bradford, who is so very serious about the physical and mental state of his men, would only look at him with concern.
For once, Davies is glad that the captain isn't even in France. He's not sure if he could face the man's discipline, or his care, and even if he did want to explain, which he doesn't, he doesn't think the good captain's personal experiences contain anything that would make him likely to understand.
words: 2284
total words: 47,548
note: the idea of common soldiers only getting two minutes in a brothel i stole from regeneration. i admit this without shame. :D but the thing about drinking water from shell craters, and finding a dead body in your water source, and then having to find a new crater - that did happen. at this point in the war, a front-line trench was probably one of the least hygienic places on the planet.
But he is still at risk of being shelled, or shot, or infected with trench fever. The men have taken to attempting to get their water from shell craters, and every so often they'll find a dead body in the crater, bloated and contaminated, which sends them off to find a new water source. Davies does not bother to detail all these things in his letters, telling his parents and half-sisters only that he is still alive, Powell is still alive, he is cold and wet, the shelling is incessant, and could they send him another muffler.
Both Captain Bradford and his second in command, Captain Harris, are temporarily out of commission – Captain Bradford in England recovering from his gunshot wounds and Captain Harris at a base hospital recovering from trench fever – and while Davies and the rest of the men mostly like their replacement, a Captain Clarke from a different company, he isn't the commander they're used to. More than once, in quiet hours when they're sure no one is listening, Davies' platoon will mutter about how much more Captain Bradford seemed to care. It doesn't help that Lt Fiske is also back in England, recovering from a head wound, and may or may not be able to return to the front.
"Doesn't make much difference," Naylor mutters one day, after Captain Clarke has come by on inspection and reminded them to change their socks. He tries to rotate his shoulder. He has recovered nicely from having been shot during their last push towards the German line, but his shoulder can get a little stiff in the cold. "Commanders come and go. Get shot, get killed, get replaced."
"It's not right that Lt Fiske was shot twice, though," says Powell. "And in the head, even."
Naylor shrugs. Lt Fiske's replacement is one of their own, another private surprisingly promoted to corporal so someone can lead the platoon. His name is Simonson and Davies considers him a good man, although how well he can lead a platoon remains to be seen. They've been rotating through the trenches but not advancing at all since the last push in November. So far Simonson seems to be doing well enough as platoon commander, but mostly he delivers orders from Captain Clarke and occasionally does an inspection.
Davies, Naylor, and Powell hear a splash and someone cursing inventively from around the traverse nearest to them.
"Hope he didn't fall in the latrine," Powell comments.
"Be kind of shitty if he did," Davies says. Powell blinks at him, not quite understanding, and then laughs. Naylor snickers. Davies grins to himself.
"Good one, man." Powell claps him on the shoulder.
A shell whines overhead and falls to the ground between them and the support trench. The men duck involuntarily. Davies still finds himself sidling away from the trench wall when that happens. He only had to be buried once.
That shell is followed by more, and then some machine-gun fire from both sides. The three men crouch in the bottom of the flooded trench until Corporal Simonson trots by, slaps them all on the shoulders, and tells them to stand to. Well, at least they're out of most of the water that way. Most of the battalion, when it can, has been trying to build up the step to keep it above water.
The men actually get a day of leave about a week before Christmas, and because they don't have nearly enough time to go home, Davies and Powell content themselves with heading to Amiens to sleep in dry beds and eat decent food and pay for the company of pretty ladies.
The pretty ladies, when they do find them, aren't quite as pretty as either Davies or Powell had hoped. Powell suggests it's the stress of the war, and the fact that they probably can't get all the cosmetics and fancy clothes that they're used to. A man standing in line ahead of them says that the pretty ones probably go to Paris.
They have to queue up outside the brothel, but the line outside is short and some of the other men convivial. The brothel isn't much – a front room with a madam directing traffic, a row of doors down each side of a short hallway – but it contains the first women that Davies and Powell have been allowed to touch since the summer.
Davies isn't used to paying for sex. He will if he has to, though. And girl in the room he's directed to is pretty enough, and actually smiles at him when he walks in. She's blonde and short and skinny, but she has a nice face and the dressing-gown she's wearing isn't completely threadbare.
He gets two minutes, he was told. It doesn't seem like enough. The girl is sitting on the bed. She beckons to him, pats the mattress next to her, then stands up and shucks off her dressing-gown. Davies can almost count her ribs.
But he's not here for her ribs. Her breasts are small but round, her skin fair, and when he walks over to the bed, she sits up and starts undoing his belt. Her hands are small, the skin rough, and he wonders what they would feel like wrapped around his cock. What would her mouth feel like?
He struggles out of his uniform and climbs onto the bed. The girl pulls him close and kisses him – her breath tastes like mint, an incongruous detail that makes him feel oddly affectionate towards her – reaching for his cock with one hand so he can find out exactly what those small fingers feel like stroking him off.
He rubs against her, trapping her hand against her thigh, and she whimpers softly as he slides a finger inside her to make sure she's wet enough for him. She is, which shouldn't come as a surprise – she is a professional, after all – and she wraps her legs around his waist as he grabs her hips and shoves himself inside her.
She moans like, well, like a whore as he fucks her, the bed creaking with every thrust. He thinks some of her moans might actually be words, but he doesn’t know any French and so can't tell what she's saying, if she's telling him how big he is, how good he feels, or if she's cursing him out for bringing his muddy boots and his machine guns and his long-range shells to trample all over her country.
But he doesn't care what she's saying. She's hot and wet and active underneath him, goading him on, whimpering and moaning, and he's close but not quite there when someone bangs on the door.
Two minutes. Time's up.
"Piss off!" he yells, breathless, hips pumping desperately as the girl bucks under him. He knows enough about working girls to know she's putting on an act, she's trying to make him feel virile and manly, but right now he doesn't care. He paid for her time and her body, and by god he's going to stay here until he's finished.
The madam and another soldier have other ideas, though, and the door bangs open just as Davies climaxes with a groan. The madam complains to the girl, who shrugs under Davies' weight and waves a negligent arm. The madam snaps at her, but pulls the soldier with her back out of the room. Thank god – now Davies can get dressed in peace.
He pulls out of the girl, slides off the bed, puts his uniform and boots back on. By the time he's done, the girl has tied her dressing-gown around her again, and as he's about to turn and leave, she puts her hand on the side of his face, pulls him down, and kisses him on the lips. It feels like a genuine kiss to him, like she really means it.
Then she pats his cheek as if he were a child, and he leaves.
He looks back at the men lined up outside, all of them waiting their turn, waiting for their two minutes with their own girls, and he feels oddly empty. He feels like he missed something. He got what he paid for – two minutes, slightly more, with a girl in a private room – but now that he's had it, he's not sure it's what he wanted after all.
The fuck is wrong with you? he demands of himself. You want soft sighs and sweet words? Flowers? That’s for peacetime girls who don't need to be paid. An English soldier only rates a working girl in this hell. And they're all desperate, so they're all working girls.
It's depressing, is what it is. Depressing and a god damn shame. His friends are dead and dying, and for what? What have they accomplished? Bloated bodies in the drinking water. One day off since May, and two minutes with a skinny blonde girl.
Davies finds a café, takes a seat at a little table, and proceeds to pour bottle after bottle down his throat - the strongest stuff the waiter can bring him – until all his money is gone and he's too drunk to stand, and Powell has to carry him back to their shared room in a shabby hotel.
Davies is pretty sure he and Powell have an actual conversation, but as neither of them is sober – although Powell at least isn't falling down from drinking too much – it doesn't make much sense. Davies tries to explain how wrong it is that they're here, that they're forcing pretty girls to make money on their backs, that they're going to die for nothing, and Powell tells him to shut up, he's going to jinx them, they're not going to die, they're just going to be hungover and oh, Christ, it's back to the mud and the flood tomorrow.
Davies thinks he might be sick, and then all of a sudden he is. The hotel has provided them with chamberpots, as if Amiens was stuck in the nineteenth century and no one has heard of indoor plumbing, so at least he doesn't get it all over the floor, or himself. He really does feel as if he's going to die, and he tells Powell so. Powell, predictably, tells him to shut it.
Davies curls up on his side on the sagging bed and prays for unconsciousness. Right before he passes out, he remembers, strangely enough, his eighteenth birthday and how his friends and some of his stepdad's friends took him down to the pub and bought him drinks to celebrate. At the time he'd wondered why, because eighteen didn't feel much different to him than seventeen had. He was working for his stepdad laying bricks, good, solid work, and turning eighteen didn't earn him anything he didn't already have. Maybe they all just wanted a reason to celebrate. In any case, they stood him round after round until he was slurring his words and stumbling on his feet, and the pretty brunette girl who had been hanging off him for an hour grabbed his face and kissed him, and then reached down between his legs and cupped his cock in her hand.
He kissed her back, sloppy and hard, wanting her more than he'd ever wanted anyone, but when she got him outside – because she was that kind of girl and that kind of desperate, and he was too far gone to argue – fumbled his trousers open, and hitched up her skirts, he was much too drunk to get it up. He tried, but she laughed at him. And he was so embarrassed, so mortified, that he slapped her. And she slapped him back. And he lost his balance and fell on his ass in the alleyway, where she left him.
That is the last thing he remembers from that night. He knows someone took him home. He knows he passed out somewhere. He knows he came to in his own bed with the worst hangover he'd ever had before or since. And he knows he embarrassed himself with a pretty girl who wanted him, because he was eighteen and didn't know better.
He doesn't really think he knows better now. He just takes the girl before he takes the bottle.
In the morning he's sick as a dog, and the last thing he wants to do is go back to the battalion and the front. They'll be in the support trenches at most, but they'll still be in a trench. He can't believe he drank his money away last night. He can't believe how sick he feels. His mother, if she were here, would probably be furious with him. His sisters would laugh. His stepdad might understand. And Captain Bradford, who is so very serious about the physical and mental state of his men, would only look at him with concern.
For once, Davies is glad that the captain isn't even in France. He's not sure if he could face the man's discipline, or his care, and even if he did want to explain, which he doesn't, he doesn't think the good captain's personal experiences contain anything that would make him likely to understand.
words: 2284
total words: 47,548
note: the idea of common soldiers only getting two minutes in a brothel i stole from regeneration. i admit this without shame. :D but the thing about drinking water from shell craters, and finding a dead body in your water source, and then having to find a new crater - that did happen. at this point in the war, a front-line trench was probably one of the least hygienic places on the planet.
