Post by Harry Machin on Jan 26, 2012 2:49:25 GMT
The Staffordshire Moorlands. A bleak place of windswept, rolling hills, capped with bracken and heather. Stony walls marked out sweeping paddocks of pasture where sheep huddled for warmth and the occassional bullock muttered to the wind. The place was dominated by a sub-mountain range - The Roaches - visible from all sides.
It was farmland here, and isolated communities eeked out difficult living on these grounds, trading with the nearby townships of Leek and Buxton, and Macclesfield. The moors sat on a point - the locals named it Three-Shires Head - where the counties of Cheshire, Derbyshire, and Staffordshire collided seamlessly. Rumour had it that in the hills, Fryar Tuck had given sermons in a natural chasm named Lud's Church. But the folk living nearby gave little heed to those stories, focussing instead on the hard living of farm work and travel over the uneven roads to the nearby townsteads.
But there was an army base here on these rolling moors, Anzio camp, where a chunk of the idling Expeditionary Forces lingered, and drilled, and marched, and maneouvred. Where Harry Machin trained with his Enfield like the rest, until his eyes were sore and his ears were ringing, and his aim wandered around the target as he remembered Sergeant Clappham's dying face - blood leaking through his teeth, on his knees in that forrest in France.
They practiced throwing grenades until his arms were sore, and he could land scrapped letters to his family in the barracks bin without even looking. Everything became routine. More so than his basic training had been. That had seemed so rushed. There was a purpose behind this now, a desperation. England had been routed - routed, the United Kingdom of Great Britain - in disgrace from the beaches of Dunkirk. And so they trained. It was all they could do.
Until finally, his shooting eye didn't blink when he fired, and his ears didn't seem to notice the noise. Until he could run a mile and recover by the time the kettle had brewed. Until he could disassemble his rifle every which way and put it back together again and still hit the bloody target. He even learned to drive.
Aside from training, the men received weekend passes to visit families - which for Machin, was brilliant, because he got a sunday dinner every week as his family lived in nearby Stoke-on-Trent - a bus ride away from the base. The trip was jovial, and he met many of the locals and learned that he had missed these bleak moors and their inhabitants. The women would coo fondly at his uniform, an attention he never received as a floundering ne'er do well before enlistment, and old men would share their stories of the Great War and he tried to take them seriously and gather their advice.
But there was a war on. It was only a matter of time before his marching orders came through. Every time he visited his family it became harder and harder to suppress the knowledge - the certainty - that he would eventually be sent back to reclaim the ground lost at Dunkirk. Or to some other far flung hellhole - a burning desert devoid of life or meaning, where men from all over the world converged to fight and die in the sand and the arid hills.
Harry tried not to let his forboding colour his visits. But he could feel that the time was fast approaching. He tucked into every homecooked meal with abandon, wasting nothing, unsure which was to be his last before leaving.