NOT FIT FOR HEROES FIRST CHAPTER OF MY NEW BOOK COMMENT
The Great War is over Jake King like thousands of others who had survived the carnage of trench warfare are returning home. He had spent the last of his teenage years fighting in France and Belgium. They had been promised a land fit for heroes. What he came home to was the same toxic slum, a city plagued by filthy squalor, poverty, unemployment and violence. A city of widows, orphan’s, cripples and territorial gangs.
I
A cheer rose from the men on the crowded decks as the English coast came in to view in the cold January morning. The old tramp steamer Adriana had been converted to a troop transport, she had set sail from the quay side at the French port of Le-Harve, as darkness fell the previous night. They had squeezed as many men on to its decks and holds as possible. It was over at last, the prime minister promised them they were coming home to a land fit for heroes; the armistice had been signed two months ago, now the problem of repatriating millions men to both sides of the world was a logistical nightmare. The last of his teenage years had been spent fighting in the trenches of France and Belguim, when he enlisted at seventeen they were told it would all be over by Christmas. The last two months had been a frustrating wait for the men of The City of Glasgow Battalion, Highland Light Infantry. Tomorrow, tomorrow, you leave tomorrow they were told over and over, now they actually were on their way. They were told they were returning to a land fit for heroes. As they tied the hawsers in Pembroke docks lines of motorised and horse drawn red crossed ambulances stood row up on row waiting to take the wounded men 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 wasted and wounded human misery had been unloaded the Adriana sailed again 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, as the troops marched down the gangways at mid-ships and stern. As they marched off the quay in formation, through the cheering crowds, as steam belched from the twin horns on the Adrian’s funnel and 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 further up the Mersey in front of the Liverpool in front of the Liver building where they marched off with bands playing and crowds cheering. She slipped her moorings as the winter sun sank beneath the horizon to continue the last leg of their journey north to the Clyde nosing her way in to the Irish sea as the lights of Liverpool faded to her stern she started to plough through the increasing swell stirred by a stiff north-westerly wind sending sheets of white spray over her bows each time she crested a wave the decks were less crowded, sitting on top of a canvas covered forward deck hatch with his back resting on the rust scared paint work of the old ship, the spray from her bows sent a fine mist to where he sat which seemed to wash away the horrors of the last three 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. His regiment had been decimated very few of the men returning were original men who had left Glasgow with him. They had fought in many of the major battles of the campaign and some of the lesser known, but all were just as bloody and brutal. The true carnage came in the major battles, Loos, Verdun, Somme, and Passchendaele. Their world was a broken place, everything broken and smashed, death was never far away it was soaked into the earth they walked and slept on; it was in the air they breathed. The consistent scratching at the body lice on their unwashed uniforms gave them no rest when the guns stopped in the rat infested trenches. The wind was gathering strength chilling him as he pulled up the collar of his great coat around his neck and the old ship started to started to pitch and roll heavily. He made his way below decks where the holds of the ship had been converted to makeshift dormitories; the wooden bunk beds had been constructed in rows. The air was a nauseating a mixture of damp, sweat, chloroform and morphine, but exhaustion blocked it out. He stretched out to his full five feet eight; it felt good as on the journey from France, what sleep he had managed was in a sitting position on the crowded deck. Sleeping soundly on the bare wooden bunk, the engines thundering rhythm nursing him as he slept using his kitbag served as a pillow. Bread spread with dripping and a mug of hot tea sweetened by condensed milk constituted breakfast. He sat on a hatch cover in the clear cold air, the mug held in both hands to retain what heat he could from the mug the winds had died during the night to a gentle breeze as he watched as the granite hump of the Ailsa Craig slipped past with the isles of Bute and Arran in the distance snow capped mountains further to the north. His memory slipped back to the outward journey and the train journey to Portsmouth and the carriages full of young men the mood was euphoric mixed with trepidation after all they had been told it would all be over by Christmas. She moored at Greenock in the Clyde estuary where the wounded were unloaded on the same manner as before, but this time it was more pungent to those who watched in silence, this was their regiment, their comrades. As the Adriana made her way slowly up stream on the River Clyde the flat calm water only disturbed by her bow wave of the rising spring high tide glimmered, as the mirrored refection of Dumbarton Castle slipped passed. It's granite battlements standing sentential as they had for centuries high on the volcanic slug of rock, the green moss contrasting the grey granite and a pale blue winter morning sky. Eastwards towards a mantle of iodine coloured smoke hung heavily over the city in the in the distance with smoke from the thousands of coal fires and factory chimneys in the city. The shipyards could be heard before they came in to view under the towering cranes men still hammered on the steel hulls sending home the rivets of ships yet to start their journeys to the four corners of the earth. It was finally over, it had ended, what had started out in nineteen fourteen it was known as the big adventure. As she tied up at the quayside in the Queens Dock, Major Harvey called him and ordered him to form the men on the dock side. They were to march the three and a half miles to their barracks in the Northwest of the city. At twenty years old he had been promoted to sergeant, not due to merit but by the decimation of the regiment lost in battle. He called the men to order and they formed ranks on the cobbled dockside. The major came down the gangway and took his place at the head of his men swagger stick tucked under his armpit, the pipes and drums of the regimental band played as they marched off. Boots echoed on the cobbles between the dockside warehouses their khaki kilts swaying at the band opened up on both sides of the dock gates playing the black bear the regimental tune when they returned to barracks. As they marched through the streets in silence he occasionally shouted out “left right left right left†to ensure the ranks kept in step no crowds gathered on the pavements as they had done three years earlier. Two weeks later he walked out the guard room and on to the busy road, he was a civilian he had his discharge papers in his left tunic breast pocket and his pay thirty seven pounds and eighteen shillings in the left. 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 four shillings a day. As the tramcar clattered and swayed its way from the barracks towards the city he was happy nearly forty pounds in his pocket that would set him up until he got a job. He couldn’t help but notice as he watched the city go by from the upstairs 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. Arriving in the city centre rather than take another tramcar, he decided to walk to his mothers in the east end of the city it was no great distance. He shouldered his kit bag and started out, as he walked nothing had changed the city was still a corrosive slum. The once light grey sandstone tenements now blackened by years of coal fires, had dirtied it in some areas but not in others. It appeared the buildings were trying to camouflage themselves to hide their embarrassment. Filth and squalor still ruled the city, young women looked older than their years, draped in black shawls on their shoulders and covering their heads. Stood at corners or tenement close entrances, their sunken eyes that seemed to see nothing, 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. Many of the widows had long since spent the twenty six pounds terminal gratuity paid to them by the war office when their men died some as far back as nineteen
