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smackenzieFor 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.
"They did what?" Powell cackles on the way back to the battalion. Because as sick as he feels, Davies can't lie when Powell asks him about the girl at the brothel. The part about the madam and the next soldier bursting into the room and interrupting him makes a good story, anyway.
"I was almost finished," Davies continues. "If they'd just waited a minute...."
Powell cackles again. "Did they let you?"
"They didn't really have a choice. What was the madam going to do, pull me off?" He grins, trying to imagine the scrawny middle-aged Frenchwoman doing anything more forceful than yelling at him. She didn't even think to smack his ass. Which he might not have minded, come to think of it.
"Two minutes." Powell shakes his head, disappointed in the French opinion of an Englishman's staying power. Although if they consider the line of men waiting their turn, staying power probably has less to do with it than simple supply and demand, and holding the men to two minutes just increases the number of men the girls can see. "At least she was cheap. And I didn't drink my whole pay." He nudges Davies with his elbow, but now he's hit a sore spot, and Davies just swats his arm away. "It's probably a good thing we don't get leave all that often, if that's how you treat it."
"Next time you can buy me a drink."
"Next time!" Powell snorts. "There won't be a next time. We'll be stuck in trenches for the rest of the war."
"You sound like Naylor." Although Davies wouldn't be surprised if Powell's prediction was accurate.
Powell shrugs. "I could be right."
They trudge on in silence. They managed to hitch a ride on a truck almost all of the way to Albert, and now they're on foot again. At least they're not far – the 18 Div had moved to the reserve trenches when the men of the battalion were given their leave.
The road is muddy and pockmarked from shells and general wear and tear that roads near the front suffer as a matter of course. It's cold out and the ground is frozen in weird waves and craters. Every so often a cart will rattle by, or an ambulance, or Davies and Powell will pass – or be passed by – a knot of men, some of them on their way to a dressing station or even possibly a casualty clearing station, to judge by their bandages and their limping.
That was us, Davies thinks, not so long ago. He doesn't miss it at all, and he isn't looking forward to it again.
They're only a couple of days in the reserve trench before moving up to the support trench. They're still there for Christmas – "At least it isn't the front line," Powell comments in response to any complaint he overhears – which isn't quite as horrible an experience as Davies was expecting, all things considered. It's still cold and muddy and unpleasant, but the army sends plum puddings and rum and decent bread and even something approximating a roast, and the men have cards and gifts from home, and for once the shelling and machine-gunning stop and the front is quiet.
Corporal Simonson tells the platoon about the Christmas miracle of 1914, when French and British and German soldiers on one part of the line put down their rifles and met in the middle of No Man's Land to exchange Christmas greetings and holiday food, and to form up teams to play football on the cold ground.
"The Huns even put up little Christmas trees on their side," he says. "Just over the parapets."
"Doesn't look like they did that this year, sir," offers Naylor, who is doing sentry duty right there.
"As long as they're quiet, I don't care what they do. Enjoy your puddings, men. This may be the last quiet we see for a while." He sips his rum.
"A toast!" someone cries, and it echoes up and down the line. Men raise bottles and flasks and tin cups. "To General Haig. Long may he rot."
This brings a round of bitter laughter. There is no love lost for the general down in the trenches, among the men who have to carry out orders they now know they have no hope of surviving.
"To Lt Fiske!" someone else calls, not two feet from where Davies is standing. "To Corporal Simonson!"
This is something the men can support, and enthusiastic cheers are followed by long swallows of rum.
"And Captain Bradford!" a voice adds. Davies can drink to that. Captain Bradford is no doubt having a much nicer Christmas, though. He gets to have it at home.
"We should toast Captain Clarke too," someone admonishes, which leads to a round of toasts to their current company commander.
"To our fallen comrades," Powell offers, raising his cup. "Brave men, all of them. May god have mercy on their souls."
This is followed by a reverent silence, as the platoon remembers the men who fell and died, who lost limbs, whose bodies were never recovered.
"You're good men," Corporal Simonson says, after a respectful length of time has passed. "I will be proud to lead you to victory in our next assault." He raises his flask. "To a quick victory, and imminent peace! May we all be safely home this time next year!"
This of course is greeted with more cheers, backslapping, clinking of cups and flasks, and wild speculation as to what exactly they'll do when they all get home.
"Mr Charteris," Corporal Simonson says, patting a soldier on the back. "Take over sentry duty so Mr Naylor can enjoy his Christmas dinner." Charteris, who has been with the platoon all of two months, climbs onto the step next to Naylor, who slides down, sits, and tucks into the food that has been waiting for him in a dixie. It's cold, but at least it's better than what they normally get, which is always cold too.
The men light cigarettes and finish their drinks and whatever's left of their dinners. They discuss their Christmas presents, if they received any, and their Christmas cards and letters, which everyone seems to have received. Davies has the card his family sent him tucked inside his tunic, where he hopes it will be safe, if not necessarily particularly dry. (The mud gets everywhere, even in winter when half of it is frozen.) It's a commercial card, nothing special on the front, but inside his mum wrote a short note wishing him a Happy Christmas and telling him that his family loved him and missed him and was proud of him and prayed daily for his safe return. Not an unusual message at all, even coming from his mum, but just to be able to read the words made him miss her terribly.
Both his half-sisters signed it too, and even his stepdad, who scrawled "HAPPY CHRISTMAS LOVE DAD" across the bottom of the card in mostly-legible green ink. Where he found a green pen, and why he decided to use it, Davies has no idea. It looks festive, anyway.
It's as if Davies has his entire family with him in one tiny space. He feels closer to them than ever, and also farther away than he's ever been.
Powell nudges him with an elbow and hands him a peppermint. The Powell family sent him a pair of socks stuffed full of them, hard little candies each twisted inside a piece of waxed paper. He also got stationery and a couple of pencils, a not-so-subtle hint from his sister Bea to get him to write to her. Davies laughed when Powell opened the parcel in front of him and pulled out the writing paper.
Davies has never had much of a sweet tooth, so his family didn't send him candy but rather some good soap, rat poison, another muffler, warm socks, two packets of biscuits, which arrive broken into pieces but not stale, and oddly enough a packet of sultanas, because Davies' mother read about scurvy somewhere and seems to think it's a danger for a fighting man in France.
He offers them to Powell now, in exchange for the peppermint. The biscuits didn't last long at all – he shared them around the platoon until they were gone because he knew they'd get stale or wet otherwise.
"Happy Christmas, Dickon," he says.
"Same to you," Powell returns. They nudge shoulders, the closest to a comradely hug that either of them is willing to do in front of their fellow soldiers.
New Year's Eve they're in the front-line trench, and as if to celebrate, the Germans lob shells at them for a solid seven hours. Their aim is actually pretty good, and men fill up the first aid post with shrapnel wounds and more than one injury caused by a clod of frozen mud. Davies catches shrapnel in the face, and when he makes it to the first aid post so someone can look at him and clean out the cuts – he's ordered there by Corporal Simonson – the orderly who does so remarks that it's a good thing he was wearing his muffler, otherwise the shrapnel would've gotten him more in the neck and that could have been dangerous.
Three days later Captain Bradford returns and Captain Clarke allows himself to be demoted back to second in command of his original company. They learn that Captain Harris managed to get pneumonia in the base hospital where he'd been sent to recover from trench fever, otherwise he would have come back to the battalion by now.
Captain Bradford goes back to making the rounds as he always did, not just for inspections but to make sure the men are ok and know what to do. He asks about their Christmases, reminds them to try and keep their rifles clean and to see Dr Craig if any of them even think they might be getting frostbite or fever, and he talks to them. Charteris, who hasn't been around long enough, finds this immensely weird, that the company commander would stop to have a chat, but he is reassured that this is just something Captain Bradford does, and he'll get used to it.
Davis won't admit that he's glad the captain is back, nor will he admit that a part of him wishes that he stayed in London.
The routine is the same for the next couple of months – front-line, support, reserve, the occasional stint in billets. Patrols, trench repair, attempts to drain the bottom of the trenches, fetching and carrying between reserve and front-line. Shells, always shells. And the cold and the mud. Men come down with pneumonia (Captain Harris returns at the end of January, looking pale and thin but evidently fully recovered) and bronchitis and trench fever, and several are sent to base hospitals with trench foot. (At least one of them has his foot amputated at a dressing station or a CCS first.) Powell gets frostbite on his nose, of all places, and then in his fingers – he ultimately loses the tips of the three middle fingers on his left hand – and Naylor is hit by shell fragments and sent to the base hospital in Rouen. A sentry is shot in the head by a sniper, not ten minutes after Corporal Simonson stops to get a quick report from him. Davies comes down with something and is carted off to a casualty clearing station when he has a coughing fit so bad that he chokes and nearly stops breathing. That he does this in front of Captain Harris, who frog-marches him to the medical officer immediately, is both embarrassing and lucky. He's at the CCS for a week – they don't think it's worth it to send him to a base hospital, even though the place is shelled three days after he gets there – and returns to the battalion just in time for another few days at the front line.
He hates France. Aside from the cold and the mud and the flooded trenches and the fact that everything, but everything, is wet and dirty and the tea tastes like death, his days are alternately boring and terrifying, long stretches in the support and reserve trenches trying to get something done in the sucking mud broken by days at the front line where his only job, it seems, is to avoid being shelled or frozen. There are dead men in the trenches, some of them frozen solid, because no one can take them anywhere for a decent burial. Every so often a working party will be shoring up a trench wall and uncover a body, or at least parts. Davies doesn't ever feel completely well, and no one else does either. Once in a while he sees the commander of A Company, a man who seems to be good friends with Captain Bradford and completely at ease wandering through someone else's men, and every time, this captain is whistling. Davies wonders if he's gone mad.
Charteris does in fact go mad, or at least Corporal Simonson explains it that way when the poor man breaks from his patrol one night and walks right up to the German line, or as close as he can get to their barbed wire before a sniper takes him out. Privately, Davies thinks he's a coward. There's no easier way out of this than death.
words: 2254
total words: 49,802
note: a dixie is basically a metal pot that soldiers and cooking staff and would use to carry food back and forth between the trenches and the mobile kitchen. it would have have straw in it to theoretically keep food hot, and yet stuff would still manage to be cold by the time it got to the men.
"They did what?" Powell cackles on the way back to the battalion. Because as sick as he feels, Davies can't lie when Powell asks him about the girl at the brothel. The part about the madam and the next soldier bursting into the room and interrupting him makes a good story, anyway.
"I was almost finished," Davies continues. "If they'd just waited a minute...."
Powell cackles again. "Did they let you?"
"They didn't really have a choice. What was the madam going to do, pull me off?" He grins, trying to imagine the scrawny middle-aged Frenchwoman doing anything more forceful than yelling at him. She didn't even think to smack his ass. Which he might not have minded, come to think of it.
"Two minutes." Powell shakes his head, disappointed in the French opinion of an Englishman's staying power. Although if they consider the line of men waiting their turn, staying power probably has less to do with it than simple supply and demand, and holding the men to two minutes just increases the number of men the girls can see. "At least she was cheap. And I didn't drink my whole pay." He nudges Davies with his elbow, but now he's hit a sore spot, and Davies just swats his arm away. "It's probably a good thing we don't get leave all that often, if that's how you treat it."
"Next time you can buy me a drink."
"Next time!" Powell snorts. "There won't be a next time. We'll be stuck in trenches for the rest of the war."
"You sound like Naylor." Although Davies wouldn't be surprised if Powell's prediction was accurate.
Powell shrugs. "I could be right."
They trudge on in silence. They managed to hitch a ride on a truck almost all of the way to Albert, and now they're on foot again. At least they're not far – the 18 Div had moved to the reserve trenches when the men of the battalion were given their leave.
The road is muddy and pockmarked from shells and general wear and tear that roads near the front suffer as a matter of course. It's cold out and the ground is frozen in weird waves and craters. Every so often a cart will rattle by, or an ambulance, or Davies and Powell will pass – or be passed by – a knot of men, some of them on their way to a dressing station or even possibly a casualty clearing station, to judge by their bandages and their limping.
That was us, Davies thinks, not so long ago. He doesn't miss it at all, and he isn't looking forward to it again.
They're only a couple of days in the reserve trench before moving up to the support trench. They're still there for Christmas – "At least it isn't the front line," Powell comments in response to any complaint he overhears – which isn't quite as horrible an experience as Davies was expecting, all things considered. It's still cold and muddy and unpleasant, but the army sends plum puddings and rum and decent bread and even something approximating a roast, and the men have cards and gifts from home, and for once the shelling and machine-gunning stop and the front is quiet.
Corporal Simonson tells the platoon about the Christmas miracle of 1914, when French and British and German soldiers on one part of the line put down their rifles and met in the middle of No Man's Land to exchange Christmas greetings and holiday food, and to form up teams to play football on the cold ground.
"The Huns even put up little Christmas trees on their side," he says. "Just over the parapets."
"Doesn't look like they did that this year, sir," offers Naylor, who is doing sentry duty right there.
"As long as they're quiet, I don't care what they do. Enjoy your puddings, men. This may be the last quiet we see for a while." He sips his rum.
"A toast!" someone cries, and it echoes up and down the line. Men raise bottles and flasks and tin cups. "To General Haig. Long may he rot."
This brings a round of bitter laughter. There is no love lost for the general down in the trenches, among the men who have to carry out orders they now know they have no hope of surviving.
"To Lt Fiske!" someone else calls, not two feet from where Davies is standing. "To Corporal Simonson!"
This is something the men can support, and enthusiastic cheers are followed by long swallows of rum.
"And Captain Bradford!" a voice adds. Davies can drink to that. Captain Bradford is no doubt having a much nicer Christmas, though. He gets to have it at home.
"We should toast Captain Clarke too," someone admonishes, which leads to a round of toasts to their current company commander.
"To our fallen comrades," Powell offers, raising his cup. "Brave men, all of them. May god have mercy on their souls."
This is followed by a reverent silence, as the platoon remembers the men who fell and died, who lost limbs, whose bodies were never recovered.
"You're good men," Corporal Simonson says, after a respectful length of time has passed. "I will be proud to lead you to victory in our next assault." He raises his flask. "To a quick victory, and imminent peace! May we all be safely home this time next year!"
This of course is greeted with more cheers, backslapping, clinking of cups and flasks, and wild speculation as to what exactly they'll do when they all get home.
"Mr Charteris," Corporal Simonson says, patting a soldier on the back. "Take over sentry duty so Mr Naylor can enjoy his Christmas dinner." Charteris, who has been with the platoon all of two months, climbs onto the step next to Naylor, who slides down, sits, and tucks into the food that has been waiting for him in a dixie. It's cold, but at least it's better than what they normally get, which is always cold too.
The men light cigarettes and finish their drinks and whatever's left of their dinners. They discuss their Christmas presents, if they received any, and their Christmas cards and letters, which everyone seems to have received. Davies has the card his family sent him tucked inside his tunic, where he hopes it will be safe, if not necessarily particularly dry. (The mud gets everywhere, even in winter when half of it is frozen.) It's a commercial card, nothing special on the front, but inside his mum wrote a short note wishing him a Happy Christmas and telling him that his family loved him and missed him and was proud of him and prayed daily for his safe return. Not an unusual message at all, even coming from his mum, but just to be able to read the words made him miss her terribly.
Both his half-sisters signed it too, and even his stepdad, who scrawled "HAPPY CHRISTMAS LOVE DAD" across the bottom of the card in mostly-legible green ink. Where he found a green pen, and why he decided to use it, Davies has no idea. It looks festive, anyway.
It's as if Davies has his entire family with him in one tiny space. He feels closer to them than ever, and also farther away than he's ever been.
Powell nudges him with an elbow and hands him a peppermint. The Powell family sent him a pair of socks stuffed full of them, hard little candies each twisted inside a piece of waxed paper. He also got stationery and a couple of pencils, a not-so-subtle hint from his sister Bea to get him to write to her. Davies laughed when Powell opened the parcel in front of him and pulled out the writing paper.
Davies has never had much of a sweet tooth, so his family didn't send him candy but rather some good soap, rat poison, another muffler, warm socks, two packets of biscuits, which arrive broken into pieces but not stale, and oddly enough a packet of sultanas, because Davies' mother read about scurvy somewhere and seems to think it's a danger for a fighting man in France.
He offers them to Powell now, in exchange for the peppermint. The biscuits didn't last long at all – he shared them around the platoon until they were gone because he knew they'd get stale or wet otherwise.
"Happy Christmas, Dickon," he says.
"Same to you," Powell returns. They nudge shoulders, the closest to a comradely hug that either of them is willing to do in front of their fellow soldiers.
New Year's Eve they're in the front-line trench, and as if to celebrate, the Germans lob shells at them for a solid seven hours. Their aim is actually pretty good, and men fill up the first aid post with shrapnel wounds and more than one injury caused by a clod of frozen mud. Davies catches shrapnel in the face, and when he makes it to the first aid post so someone can look at him and clean out the cuts – he's ordered there by Corporal Simonson – the orderly who does so remarks that it's a good thing he was wearing his muffler, otherwise the shrapnel would've gotten him more in the neck and that could have been dangerous.
Three days later Captain Bradford returns and Captain Clarke allows himself to be demoted back to second in command of his original company. They learn that Captain Harris managed to get pneumonia in the base hospital where he'd been sent to recover from trench fever, otherwise he would have come back to the battalion by now.
Captain Bradford goes back to making the rounds as he always did, not just for inspections but to make sure the men are ok and know what to do. He asks about their Christmases, reminds them to try and keep their rifles clean and to see Dr Craig if any of them even think they might be getting frostbite or fever, and he talks to them. Charteris, who hasn't been around long enough, finds this immensely weird, that the company commander would stop to have a chat, but he is reassured that this is just something Captain Bradford does, and he'll get used to it.
Davis won't admit that he's glad the captain is back, nor will he admit that a part of him wishes that he stayed in London.
The routine is the same for the next couple of months – front-line, support, reserve, the occasional stint in billets. Patrols, trench repair, attempts to drain the bottom of the trenches, fetching and carrying between reserve and front-line. Shells, always shells. And the cold and the mud. Men come down with pneumonia (Captain Harris returns at the end of January, looking pale and thin but evidently fully recovered) and bronchitis and trench fever, and several are sent to base hospitals with trench foot. (At least one of them has his foot amputated at a dressing station or a CCS first.) Powell gets frostbite on his nose, of all places, and then in his fingers – he ultimately loses the tips of the three middle fingers on his left hand – and Naylor is hit by shell fragments and sent to the base hospital in Rouen. A sentry is shot in the head by a sniper, not ten minutes after Corporal Simonson stops to get a quick report from him. Davies comes down with something and is carted off to a casualty clearing station when he has a coughing fit so bad that he chokes and nearly stops breathing. That he does this in front of Captain Harris, who frog-marches him to the medical officer immediately, is both embarrassing and lucky. He's at the CCS for a week – they don't think it's worth it to send him to a base hospital, even though the place is shelled three days after he gets there – and returns to the battalion just in time for another few days at the front line.
He hates France. Aside from the cold and the mud and the flooded trenches and the fact that everything, but everything, is wet and dirty and the tea tastes like death, his days are alternately boring and terrifying, long stretches in the support and reserve trenches trying to get something done in the sucking mud broken by days at the front line where his only job, it seems, is to avoid being shelled or frozen. There are dead men in the trenches, some of them frozen solid, because no one can take them anywhere for a decent burial. Every so often a working party will be shoring up a trench wall and uncover a body, or at least parts. Davies doesn't ever feel completely well, and no one else does either. Once in a while he sees the commander of A Company, a man who seems to be good friends with Captain Bradford and completely at ease wandering through someone else's men, and every time, this captain is whistling. Davies wonders if he's gone mad.
Charteris does in fact go mad, or at least Corporal Simonson explains it that way when the poor man breaks from his patrol one night and walks right up to the German line, or as close as he can get to their barbed wire before a sniper takes him out. Privately, Davies thinks he's a coward. There's no easier way out of this than death.
words: 2254
total words: 49,802
note: a dixie is basically a metal pot that soldiers and cooking staff and would use to carry food back and forth between the trenches and the mobile kitchen. it would have have straw in it to theoretically keep food hot, and yet stuff would still manage to be cold by the time it got to the men.
