day 3: the front – arrival
Dear Jessica,
It was still raining and dark when the trucks pulled into the lookout station. Even those who slept seemed to be exhausted from the ride. After we got each other off the benches and into the mud, the sergeants did headcounts of their platoons. At one point, there was some yelling going on about a man who was missing. We weren’t allowed to go to our sleeping tents until they recounted his platoon maybe five, six times. Someone nearby told Theo and I that he must’ve jumped off during the ride. That’s loony.
Now Jess, this is kind of incredible, but the mats we have in the tents are even worse than what we had back at the training camp. At the camp, we actually had real beds, inside real cabins, on top of real dirt. The mattresses were a bit on the hard side, but I would surely prefer that over what we have to manage with now. After saying good night to Theo (he seemed very eager to sleep so I’m not sure he heard me), I found my assignment next to his, and I crawled inside after undoing some stubborn knots. While it was at least dry, that’s more or less anything good I can say about it. The tarp kind of sticks to the mud below, so you always feel like the tent is about to start sliding down an incline. I sleep on some dingy mat of compressed cotton. And you know what else? I don’t even think the tent is really mine. What I mean is that the pillow smelled old, and there were some pictures of men in uniform. But I was really too tired to think about that for long, and so I slept.
They had the sergeants going around with bells at dawn. I had awoken when they first started, but I didn’t get up until I heard them right outside. Everything was a light sort of blue, and the men seemed worse than ever. Theo had this look in his eye, and you just knew that he was thinking of home. I would’ve taken a picture, but it was still too early in the day.
After some porridge at the mess tents, we strapped on our rifles and began marching to the front, which is at the bottom of a very gently sloping hill. As we proceeded in line formation, there was little conversation. Perhaps everybody was still getting over the aftertaste of the food. At one point, we found some more platoons coming up from the opposite direction – I guess we were their “relief.” One of those men is probably the chap who shares my tent.
I wish I could tell you exciting things about the front. There are long stretches of trench in either direction – just a deep ditch, really, supported by wooden beams. I noticed an additional line of barbed wire a few feet away from the trench, but couldn’t see much else at first, because the sergeants didn’t want us to dillydally around. They seemed to make it a point of getting us in very fast.
And then we waited. We ate lunch. We retold old stories already swapped back at the training camp. Andrew Sartre, our resident comedian (every platoon has one), said that all this waiting was just to build up our “endurance” for our wives-in-waiting. Sorry Jess, I laughed.
The boredom got to be a bit much by evening, so I went down the trench to the lookout post, which is a slightly more exposed section of the ditch. After saying hello to the soldier assigned there, I took a quick peek at what he was looking at. Jessica, it’s a desolate, godless country out there. From what I could make out, behind that mound of dirt, I saw what looked like a vast plain of potholes, going as far as the eye can see. In the distance, there were the remains of a town, not unlike our home. Except it was gutted. I could see a fallen church steeple, and just beyond that, grey flags that were not ours.
Not long after I left to go back to the men, we heard a single crack of a rifle being fired somewhere down the line. It was the first break in the silence we had all day. The sergeant then told us to be very quiet. We’ve been sitting in the dark ever since, just waiting.
Yours,
Trent
yesterday
- tomorrow
