come downstairs & say hello

The worse things get, the more benign his letters to Jemma are. He leaves out anything about assaults and artillery, but tells her about the Indian troops he’d patrolled with and the Christmas he’d shared eating cold rations with the Anzacs. His “death letter”, as Hunter calls it, remains unsent. 

Fitz calculates that in the last one-hundred days of combat, they have had six real days rest. Even then nobody had a real rest. Just a couple of days when they knew straight away they were going back to the line. Fitz’s mind never registered it as a rest. They’re weary and fed up. The handful of veterans that had fought across North Africa joke morbidly about missing the sand to maintain their sanity. He rereads Jemma’s letters every day and spends most of his free time gazing at her photograph, trying to assure himself that she’ll still want him if he should somehow return from this.  

Fitz pulls Jemma’s photo out from his tin hat and wonders how he’ll ever tell her about days like today. Blood is still trapped under his fingernails and soaked into the fabric of his uniform. Not more than a year ago, he remembers confessing to Jemma how squeamish he was around blood. He told her one of the reasons he loved engineering is because he liked the clean nature of his work. He could design a prototype and predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy how it would operate. But there is no logic or predictive analysis to combat.

It was all so horribly simple. Every time they met the Germans they killed as many as they could and the Germans, in turn, killed as many Jocks as they could. After the fighting, they tended to the dead and wounded, headed back to camp or continued the mission. Then they woke up and did it again. That was the life of a soldier in Italy. It was all so painfully simple. Accomplishing the mission, seizing the next ridgeline meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. You fought until you died, got wounded or went home. 

Fitz does the math. He takes out the replacements and calculates how many soldiers with the company have been there since Sicily. He tries to figure out how many have not been wounded once. Aside from scrapes and abrasions from their time in the mountains, he’s made it through relatively unscathed. With no sign of the war in Europe ending anytime soon, he knows he doesn’t have to do predictive analysis to know his number is up.

He writes Jemma, not knowing where she is or when she’ll even receive this.  He doubts mail call will happen anytime soon. They’ve been eating cold rations for weeks and still have yet to be supplied with their winter clothing.  He doesn’t want to write a letter like this. It seems much too maudlin and fatalistic, but Hunter assures him he’ll feel better when he puts everything on paper.

He writes to Jemma and doesn’t bother with any attempt at security this time. If they are truly moving inland, he knows it will be months, at least, before he receives another stack of letters from her. The ones he has received already take up half his haversack and Hunter teases him for wanting to pack them all in the first place.

“You’ll already be loaded like a bloody pack mule.”

“I’ll be fine,” Fitz dismisses stubbornly. He has done this three times before after all, packed his gear and prepared for the unknown. This time is different though. In France, he hadn’t known what to expect, but it had been early in the war and nobody knew how to prepare. In Sicily, he’d known his mission was to prepare the beachhead. In Italy, he’d known it would be much of the same. But this is different and Hunter is quick to remind him of that on every occasion.

He looks out on all the items laid atop his groundsheet. They’ve just completed their equipment draw and move out in an hour. There’s everything on the sheet from a gas cape to a sewing kit.

“Do you have wire cutters?"

“I do.”

“And spare batteries for the radio?"

“Smyth’s got those.”

“I’d go see if you could draw more in case Smyth goes down.”

Fitz knows the matter-of-fact warning comes from a man well-experienced in combat. Hunter advises him how many socks and pairs of gaiters he should pack and the best place to fix his medical kit on the webbing.

When he does go check on the rest of the section and, rather forebodingly, attempt to obtain more field dressings, Fitz struggles to stuff everything into his haversack and pockets. Try as he might, he can’t make it all fit and keep all of Jemma’s letters. He’d rather pack them than the two Mills bombs since his skill at throwing a grenade is even worse than his skill with a rifle. Hunter would never let him hear the end of it and, whether he wants to admit it, he knows it would be foolish to leave them behind. So with less than an hour before they’re set to move out, rather than secure more ammunition and chargers or hunt down the wireless batteries, he sifts through Jemma’s letters and tries to determine which ones to keep.

There’s the one where she’d quoted the lyrics to “We’ll Meet Again” and the one he swears she’d dabbed rosewater on so it smells like her. There’s the one she’d fondly recalled all the memories from the first time they met in London and the one that detailed the wonderful week in Edinburgh. In the end, he settles on five letters that he hopes will be enough to sustain him through whatever is about to come.

“Got bandages, five more chargers, and some rope!” Hunter returns happily, dumping his haul on the ground in front of Fitz.

“Rope?”

“There’s mountains here or did your sand tables not show it?” He tosses some to Fitz along with two more rolled field dressings. The teasing comment is meant to be a joke, but it paralyzes Fitz. No amount of studying the terrain can prepare him for what they’re about to do.

While he’s done plenty of road marches in nearly five years in the Army, Fitz has never done it with such a heavy fighting load or nearly as much trepidation. Even the field dressings are difficult to stuff into his pack.

Though nobody makes mention of it, it’s obvious what they’re training for. There’s rope climbing and cliff scaling, wire crossings and scramble nets. Everything is done on land at first, but he knows what’s to come. He’s seen the other units training. He tries not to let onto the other Jocks that he’s not a very strong swimmer, even though he gets the idea that none of them are either.  He’s rubbish at climbing from the cargo net to the landing craft too. The thought of dropping into the freezing water, even when it’s not in the ocean, but on a loch, is terrifying. Even more is the notion of being crushed like a fly between the boat and the landing craft. It’s all much too real. The notion of where he’s going and what he’s training to do.

He writes her in his head. He tells her about the new unit, the combined arms training they’re doing with the Navy and the RAF, the deep respect he has for these veteran soldiers who know next to nothing about him, the fear about where he is headed. He won’t put it in a letter though. This is a new chapter of his life: a new unit, a new mission, a new Private Fitz. The two other fresh-faced privates in his section seem in awe that he’d actually fought in France. Fitz doesn’t try to tell them retreat is a more accurate term than fight. 

Her letters finally catch up with him after months of training. The large stack that arrives at mail call reminds him of when he’d halted writing her after his return from France. Then it had been his own uncertainty of the nature of her feelings that had halted his correspondence. This is different. This is certain. Oh. He can still hear the single word in his head.  He hates that that’s the last words they’ll probably exchange, but he can’t see a point in talking about things now. Not considering where he is headed.