My Dearest Luna
Your absence from my life has taken a toll heavier then I could ever express. Nightly do I dream of you, the soft curve of your cheek, the scarlet flush they get when you smile, the sparkling green of your eye. Often I will sit in my bunk and simply think of single aspect of you. The timbre of your laugh. The softness of you hair. To be without you is torture. If I was not kept so busy, I might go insane.
However, my sanity is kept quite stable in that respect, for I am worked nearly to death here. When I joined the Legion I expected hard work, and having been raised to be a Blacksmith's apprentice I am no stranger to it, but the training exceeds anything I could have expected.
When I left off we were just arriving to the train. Having never left our small village, I know you have never seen one and perhaps it is better that you have not, for your delicate female sensibilities might have been terrified were you to. They are hulking mammoths of steel and iron, all abuzz, everything moving, spouting steam as a dragon might spout fire. The platform was all chaotic for it seems this train was commissioned specifically for recruits of the Legion, and it seemed there was thousands of us. My three traveling companions I quickly lost in the crowd, and very soon I was terrified that I would miss where I was supposed to be and become crowded onto the wrong car, or even the wrong train! Luckily, a massive brute of a man wearing military dress shepherded all the men in my area onto one car, fastidiously went through and checked our papers, ejected those who did not belong and kept those that did, all the while bellowing such obscenities as would most like strike Pastor Victor deaf upon hearing them.
The train ride was unpleasant, but no more so then the carriage. In my car (for that is what the sections are called my love, car's, each linked together and pulled by an engine) was perhaps fifty men, though if you had asked me before hand I would say the space was meant for twenty. I was lucky enough to get a seat, and spent the majority of the trip asleep, attempting to ignore dreadful scent of fifty young men stuffed into a wooden box in April.
The journey was begun mid-afternoon, and continued into the night, with bread and water handed out so as to keep the men from rioting. We arrived in the morning to Camp Boyle. The location of Camp Boyle is still somewhat a mystery to me. The general consensus seems to be several miles south of London, but I see no indication of the great city being any where near by, and when I inquire as to why this is thought, none can give a definite explanation.
Upon arriving, myself and the other forty nine of us (for my estimation was correct, there was exactly fifty of us in the car, not including the burly military man who shepherded us) were herded out of our car, marched with unsettling brutality and speed to a large and open field, and then arrayed, by hight, into five rows of ten. The sight of this group of men, all in civilian dress, being treated as soldiers might be, bewildered and confused, was one I will never forget, though I look at it with hilarity, and melancholic resentment, in turn.
When the whole train had been arrayed and organized like this (there were six cars, and, assuming that there was fifty men in each car, something I still do not know for sure, so in total, three hundred men) we proceeded to wait. And to wait. The military men, who I discovered to be sergeants, marched up and down the lines, jabbing, slapping, and berating any man who slouched, coughed, moved, looked around, picked his nose, or attempted to talk, which, being all civilians and almost entirely young men, there was quite a bit of. Finally, a large and imposing man on a magnificent horse made his way from a nearby thicket to the front of our arrangement, hurrumphed, and began to yell.
It is to my greatest regret that I could not comprehend a word of it, for my group was near the back, and the man's voice had a wheezing quality that made it impossible to understand, though quite possible to hear, at a distance. Later I discovered that the speech more or less explained as follows. That we were to be the third battalion of the fourth army, of the first legion, and that we had quite a bit of tradition to live up to, so would we kindly not besmirch the reputation of this fine institution that this old man had apparently been a part of since it's inception back in the thirteen hundreds. I suspect that the man who conveyed this to me might have colored it with his own viewpoint.
After that we were taken to a large set of tents that I have come to realize is, in its entirety, Camp Boyle. We were made to all strip naked, dump our clothes into large bins, where I suspect they were burned, given physicals (the details of which I will avoid so as not to offend your delicate sensibilities), then forced to run for the rest of the day. On my word, I have never run so long in my life. It seems that the Legion is very keen on running, and I suspect that after this I shall be able to run the length of our great island if it keeps up the way it has.
I have much more to tell you, my beautiful flower, but I have not the time, for the night grows old, and I suspect we shall be rising early tomorrow for more running. Life is difficult my rose, but I expected it to be so. The greatest challenge though, has been my absence from you.
Yours, wholly and completely
Johan B Hackworth
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