The End of the Beginning

(Source)

It struck Caporal Guillaume Micheaux as ironic that he would be traveling deeper into Germany as a prisoner-of-war in the same type of rail car which had transported him to the front in late 1939.

It was one of the ubiquitous "Quarante et huit" boxcars, designed to hold either forty men or eight horses. It had obviously not been cleaned in some time and was overpacked, to say the least. If Guillaume had to guess, there had to be at least sixty men packed into the car. From what he could see, not all of them were alive.

The men were so packed in that one could barely move, let alone sit or even perhaps lie down to get some sleep. Guillaume had started awake not long ago, he had actually fallen asleep while standing up.

"Hey Caporal, do you see that man near the air vent?" Guillaume heard the dusty rasp of the voice in his ear but it took him a moment to realize that the man was talking to him.

"Where? Oh ... I see him now."

There was a man just under the air vent, most of the openings in the car had been boarded up by les Boches, no doubt to prevent escape. A few vents were left in order to let the occupants at least breathe. Looking hard at the man, Guillaume noted the vacant stare, the slackness of the man's mouth.

"He's dead, isn't he?" Guillaume whispered.

"That fellow is my old sergeant. Owed me money he did. Now the bastard's died on me. I blame the f**king Boches, for what it's worth. I'm Etienne by the way, Etienne Larousse, late of the 27th Regiment."

"Um, Caporal Micheaux, Guillaume to my friends. Do you know where we are headed?" Guillaume didn't expect the man to know any more than he himself knew, which was nothing, he was just making conversation. Which he felt was rather absurd, maintaining the social graces when packed into a filthy Quarante et huit.

"Probably the coal pits in the Saarland. The Boches wouldn't bother packing us into a train and taking us into Germany just to pen us up in a POW cage. No, I think we're meant to be used as laborers." Larousse opined.

Guillaume grunted and asked, "Is that legal? Aren't we protected by the Geneva Convention?"

Larousse sighed and said, "The men with the guns get to make the rules. Perhaps the Boches will let you hire a lawyer, sue the Reich. You can ask, if you're insane."

Guillaume shook his head, "I think I'll pass."

"Bollocks!" Private Robert McLaren swore loudly as he jumped from the top of a lorry into the boat which was pitching and rolling as if to purposely throw him into the Channel. In the process he lost his grip on his rifle, which caused the outburst as the young man watched his rifle disappear into the depths.

"Easy lad, I'm sure the King will let you have another." Private Teddy Fraser quipped. "Or here, you can have mine."

The other men laughed, only to stop when the man captaining the small boat barked at them to sit down and stay out of the way. In truth, the small pleasure yacht was seriously overloaded with, from what Sergeant Major Cornwell could see, a good thirty plus men.

"Aye laddies, settle down, it's a long trip back to Blighty. Might as well be comfortable. Dinnae worry about your Lee-Enfield McLaren, you'll get another. Provided we all survive the boat trip!"

As the boat pulled away from the makeshift pier, the movement of the small boat in the angry chop caused more than one man to lose his breakfast over the side.

Private Malcolm Bain remarked, "I'd puke too, if I'd eaten anything in the past couple of days. When d'ya think we'll get fed Corp?" 

Corporal Billy Wallace turned to the young soldier and said, "Sing out if ye see a mess tent or the like. Okay, Bain?" Then he leaned over the side and once more had the dry heaves over the choppy waters of the English Channel.

Fahnenjunker-Unteroffizier Jürgen von Lüttwitz watched through his field glasses as the last few boats disappeared over the horizon. Turning to Obergefreiter Sepp Wittman, technically the 2nd Squad leader but now the de facto assistant squad leader in Jürgen's 3rd Squad, he said, "I think that's it then, the Tommies have fled, most of the French seemed inclined to surrender at this point."

"Ja Uffz, I think you're right. We had a messenger come in not long ago while you were reconnoitering up here, we're commanded to rejoin the company. Seems the war isn't quite over. According to the messenger, we're going to be attacking south, into France. Apparently the French are trying to dig in along the Somme." Wittman then took his own glasses and studied the wreckage which lay all along the shore. He wondered just how the Tommies could continue the war, most of their equipment was here, along the beach.

Jürgen contemplated the name, the Somme River. So many had died along that waterway in the first war, would history repeat itself? He thought not, with few exceptions the French soldiers he had seen had lost the will to fight. They were stunned at the rapid German advance to the Channel. He wondered if they would bother to fight at all once the panzers turned and moved south.

Would they even fight for Paris?

"Sepp, would you fight for Berlin?" Jürgen asked.

"What? Berlin, why would I fight for Berlin? Leipzig? Sure, maybe even Dresden, but Berlin? Why would I fight for that Prussian shithole? I'm a Saxon, f**k the Prussians."

Jürgen could tell that Wittman was not angry because of the Prussians, well, not solely on their account. Most Germans associated the National Socialists with the Prussians, when actually that movement had originated in Bavaria, in München. Sepp was no doubt upset at the losses they had sustained over the past week. The Prussians were all considered to be warmongers anyway.

"I'm just wondering if the French feel the same way about Paris. Why would a Gascon die for Paris? It's not his city, is it?" Standing up and brushing the sand from his uniform, Jürgen turned to join the remainder of the squad. What had started as a half platoon of eighteen men, now had only eleven men.

"Let's go Sepp, let's go finish this."

Wittman shook his head as he followed von Lüttwitz. The man was something of an idealist, probably make a good officer someday.

If he survived.