It's Over
Having had the courage to submit my first book to Kindle originally name one mans ideolgy I changed the title to THE BROKEN BUSH
HERE IS THE FRIST CHAPTER OF ANOTHER BOOK I AM WORKING ON COMMENTS WELCOMED GOOD OR BAD
Its Over
I
A cheer rose on the crowded deck as the English coast came in to view in the early morning light. The troop ship Adriana had left the quay side at the French port of Le-Harve, as darkness fell the previous night. It was over at last they were going home to a land fit for heroes; the armistice had been signed two months ago, now the problem of repatriating over a million men to both sides of the world was a logistical nightmare. For the last two weeks the men of The City of Glasgow Battalion, Highland Light Infantry had been waiting to board a ship. Tomorrow, tomorrow, you leave tomorrow, now they actually were on their way. As they tied the hawsers in Pembroke docks the lines of motorised and horse drawn red crossed ambulances waited to take the wounded from the fourteenth Welsh Regiment. He watched is silence as they disembarked, stretcher after stretcher, men on crutches missing limbs, others armless, rows of head bandaged blinded hands on the shoulders of the man in front. When the cargo of human misery had been unloaded the Adriana sailed into the Bristol Channel. As Swansea came in to view he could see the crowds that lined the quays waving their red white and blue flags, a band playing We’ll Keep a Welcome in The Hillside, as the troops marched down the gangways at mid-ships and stern. As they marched off the quay in formation through the cheering crowds, The Adriana slipped her mooring ropes and steamed back in to the main channel and headed back towards the open sea. The process was repeated further north when the men of the Kings Liverpool Regiment disembarked, the wounded and maimed were fed to the ambulances waiting in the docks at Bootle and the able-bodied soldiers marched off with bands playing and crowds cheering.
The decks were less crowded and he lay on top of a canvas covered deck hatch in the late afternoon sun. He had been away from home for four years; he first saw action at the battle of Ypres in April nineteen fifteen, and the deadly effects of Phosgene gas men chocked as the gas seeped in to the trenches. The war had dragged for four years, and his regiment contained very few of the original men who had left Glasgow with him. They had fought in many of the major battles of the campaign some of them less known. The true carnage came in the major battles, Loos, Verdun, Somme, and Passchendaele. As the sun slipped below the horizon a stiff breeze blew and the Adriana started to pitch and roll. He made his way below decks where the holds of the ship had been converted to dormitories, where wooden bunk beds had been constructed in rows. He slept most of the night on the bare wood of the bunk, his kitbag as a pillow, tea bread and butter constituted breakfast. He took his up on deck and watched as the Ailsa Craig slipped past with the isles of Bute and Arran in the distance ahead. At Greenock the wounded and maimed were disembarked in the same manner as before, but this time it was more pungent to those who watched in silence, this was their regiment, their comrades. They watched as the Adriana made her way up stream on the River Clyde, sights most of them had heard of but never seen Helensburgh, Dumbarton Castle mounted high on its rocky perch. The shipyards could be heard before they came in to view under the towering cranes men still hammered and banged on the steel hulls of ships yet to start their journeys to the four corners of the world. They ended what had started out in nineteen fourteen billed as the big adventure, as he formed them up in front of the Queens dock warehouse sheds. Now as a twenty three year old sergeant he had been told to inform his men to line up in the dockside shed, to collect their pay and discharge papers. At one of the many paymasters sat on stools using wooden crates as desks, he signed for his pay thirty seven pounds and eighteen shillings. He had no way to calculate it, his initial pay was two shillings a day as a private and as he rose in the ranks it varied, and now as sergeant was three shillings a day. As the tramcar clattered its way from the dock towards the city he was happy nearly forty pounds in his pocket that would set him until he got a job. He couldn’t help but notice as he stared out the tram window the numerous casualties of war, men with crutches one trouser leg pinned up where the limb was missing, or jacket sleeve pined to a lapel, some in wicker basket push chair, others feeling their way with white sticks. He arrived in the city centre where he could walk over the bridge to the south side of the river, as he walked young women looked old draped in black shawls on their shoulders and covering their heads. They were the wives of the ones who would never come home; the fathers of the children who followed them lay in some foreign field.
