Read Online As the Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer - Free Book Online

crossing
bringing up what little food they had eaten for breakfast.
    “No
officers coughin’ up as far as I can see,” said Tommy.
    “Perhaps
that lot are used to sailin’.”
    “Or
doing it in their cabins.”
    When
at last the French coast came in sight, a cheer went up from the soldiers on
deck. By then all they wanted to do was set foot on dry land. And dry it would
have been if the heavens hadn’t opened the moment the ship docked and the
troops set foot on French soil. Once everyone had disembarked, the sergeant
major warned them to prepare for a fifteen-mile route-march.
    Charlie
kept his section squelching forward through the mud with songs from the music
halls, accompanied by Tommy on the mouth organ. When they reached Etaples and
had set up camp for the night, Charlie decided that perhaps the gymnasium in
Edinburgh had been luxury after all.
    Once
the last post had been played, two thousand eyes closed, as soldiers under
canvas for the first time tried to sleep. Each platoon had placed two men on
guard duty, with orders to change them every two hours, to ensure that no one
went without rest. Charlie drew the four o’clock watch with Tommy.
    After
a restless night of tossing and turning on lumpy, wet French soil, Charlie was
woken at four, and in turn kicked Tommy, who simply turnd over and went
straight back to sleep. Minutes later Charlie was outside the tent, buttoning
up his jacket before continually slapping himself on the back in an effort to
keep warm. As his eyes slowly became accustomed to the half light, he began to
make out row upon row of brown tents stretching as far as the eye could see.
    “Mornin’,
Corp,” said Tommy, when he appeared a little after four-twenty. “Got a lucifer,
by any chance?”
    “No,
I ‘aven’t. And what I need is an ‘or cocoa, or an ‘ot somethin’.”
    “Whatever
your command, Corp.”
    Tommy
wandered off to the cookhouse tent and resumed half an hour later with two hot
cocoas and two dry biscuits.
    “No
sugar, I’m afraid,” he told Charlie. “That’s only for sergeants and above. I
told them you were a general in disguise but they said that all the generals
were back in London sound asleep in their beds.”
    Charlie
smiled as he placed his frozen fingers round the hot mug and sipped slowly to
be sure that the simple pleasure lasted.
    Tommy
surveyed the skyline. “So where are all these bleedin’ Germans we’ve been told
so much about?”
    “‘Eaven
knows,” said Charlie. “But you can be sure they’re out there somewhere,
probably askin’ each other where we are.”
    At
six o’clock Charlie woke the rest of his section. They were up and ready for
inspection, with the tent down and folded back into a small square by
six-thirty.
    Another
bugle signaled breakfast, and the men took their places in a queue that Charlie
reckoned would have gladdened the heart of any barrow boy in the Whitechapel
Road.
    When
Charlie eventually reached the front of the queue, he held out his biltycan to
receive a ladle of lumpy porridge and a stale piece of bread. Tommy winked at
the boy in his long white jacket and blue check trousers. “And to think I’ve
waited all these years to sample French cookie’.”
    “It
gets worse the nearer you get to the front line,” the cook promised him.
    For
the next ten days they set up camp at Etaples, spending their mornings being
marched over dunes, their afternoons being instructed in gas warfare and their
evenings being told by Captain Trentham the different ways they could die.
    On
the eleventh day they gathered up their belongings, packed up their tents and
were formed into companies so they could be addressed by the Commanding Officer
of the Regiment.
    Over
a thousand men stood in a formed square on a muddy field somewhere in France,
wondering if twelve weeks of training and ten days of “acclimatization” could
possibly have made them ready to face the might of the German forces.
    “P’raps
they’ve only ‘ad