The Arboreal Volunteers

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Isabella Kalirion
Posts: 394
Joined: Fri Jan 22, 2016 10:44 am

The Arboreal Volunteers

Post by Isabella Kalirion »

An address to the people of Apollonian Arboria by the Natopian Secretary of Defence has been broadcast on Radio Tirlar, directly after the 10 p.m. news:
"With the present war emergency we wish to leave nothing to chance. In order to supplement from sources as yet untapped the means of defence we already have in place, we shall be asking the people of the Principality of Arboria to help us in a manner which will be welcome to all patriots. All adult citizens, presently not engaged with military service now have the opportunity to do something for the defence of our Bovic Empire.

We want large numbers of such men and women in Arboria and New Aquitaine, who are Natopian citizens, between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five, to come forward and offer their services. The name of the new Force which is now to be raised will be the Arboreal Volunteers. It will, in the first instance, comprise of sixteen regiments of militia, twenty squadrons of auxiliary combat support personnel, and twenty squadrons of trained weapons systems operators, the type and variety of which will be revealed in due course. The initial force of Arboreal Volunteers will not exceed twenty-four thousand men and women under arms. Volunteers in excess of that number will be noted down and assigned to civil defence duties as the developing situation requires.

For the forty squadrons this will become a full-time paid occupation and those who join these squadrons will be formally enrolled into the Natopian Army. However, for the militia regiments, voluntering is a part time job, so there will be no need for any volunteer to abandon hos or her present occupation. When on duty you will form a part of the Natopian Defence Force. You will not be paid, but you will receive a uniform and will be armed.

In order to volunteer, what you have to do is give in your name at your local police station; and then, as and when we want you, we will let you know."
Patroness of Kalir
Elder of the Simrani branch of the House of Ayreon-Kalirion
| Countess of Amity, Mirioth and So-Sara

Isabella Kalirion
Posts: 394
Joined: Fri Jan 22, 2016 10:44 am

Re: The Arboreal Volunteers

Post by Isabella Kalirion »

Witness A, joined the Arboreal Volunteers not long after the first recruitment broadcast was made by the Secretary of Defence. The first wave of volunteers, some 24,000 men, were bedevilled by problems with equipment, training and discipline, so much so that some characterised the Volunteers as an unruly mob sent lurching off vaguely in the direction of the frontier. The testimony of Witness A regarding his company in the 15th Battalion in the Southern Sector may be considered as being typical of the state of affairs in those early days, particularly when it comes to the culture shock and harsh realities that awaited civilians as they entered an entirely different way of life.
Our time in the Arboreal Volunteers was decidedly peculiar. For one thing we received barely a day's training before we were packed into wagons and sent southwards towards what was then optimistically referred to as 'the front'. For another, our equipment comprised of a pickaxe stave and a green armband with the letters 'AV' stencilled in black ink on the side. Anyone who had a shotgun or a hunting rifle was encouraged to bring it along. Whenever we enquired about we would receive modern rifles, anti-tank weapons and training, the answer would always be 'soon, soon', offered with genial reassurance by the slovenly old cove who was, apparently, our NDF liaison officer.

The other character who stood out from those early days was our captain, a rotund pompous little fellow, full of himself and preening. Apparently he had been a clerk in the NDF a few years previous and had some how managed to parley this into a wartime commission and had convinced himself, on the strength of this, that he was a martial genius on a par with Ras Diga (Note: An Atteran warlord whose name is sometimes still used to frighten children). He would have been the sort of fellow who might have had a grenade rolled into his tent before he could lead us into any mischief. The lack of grenades at this stage removed that option from consideration, unfortunately. We didn't even really have tents at the start.

The wagons disgorged us at the railheads outside Meiridosa, where we were met by a gaunt ashen faced Decanus, a Shirerithian NCO roughly equivalent to a corporal, who had a lit cigarette balanced between his lips and a look of abject dismay as he saw us tramping through the fields towards him. Naturally I can't speak their bloody Præta lingo, but from his tone I would say that his first greeting to us was something along the lines of:

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

He did everything in his power, after that, to have as little to do with us as possible, instead keeping his counsel with a bottle of gin and occasionally yelling obscenities at our captain for his latest bumbling manifestation of clueless imbecility.

Our company, in addition to the captain, our reluctant instructor and myself, consisted of about two-hundred men, a couple of boys, a couple of girls unconvincingly disguised as boys, and a goat who no one would admit to having stolen. Regrettably all five of the latter began to attract unwelcome attention from the lads, it takes all sorts I suppose, and I found myself assigned to the duty of baggage-guard, on the not-unreasonable assumption that any advances I might make would be spurned on account of the warts. And that is how I came to have my sergeants stripes.

On the second day we were given spades to dig latrines as the other companies in our vicinity were beginning to complain of the smell. Our captain sought to enquire of the particulars of latrine digging from our NDF liaison officer and received the curt instruction:

“You dig deep, and then you squat over it, and then you shit. Now fuck off.”

Later that Shirerithian corporal wandered over and muttered that we were digging in the wrong place, hauled me over to one side, complained that I stank and then suggested that we didn't want to be puking our guts up, we might wish to consider digging our shitpit further away from the tents. When I asked what tents those would be, he merely gestured to a newly arrived pile of tarpaulins and told me we'd have to find our own poles and guy ropes. We, of course, didn't.

On the third day we were given our first meal since boarding the wagons. Rye bread and raw potatoes. I think most of us were eyeing the goat hungrily by now.

On the fourth day, trucks arrived, to load us up and move the company nearer to the frontier with Jingdao. Along the way we stopped at a service station where our captain had the notion of emptying out the wine and spirit bottles from the adjacent cash-and-carry and to fill them up with gasoline. The captain might have had the intention of requisitioning the bottles after disposing of their contents down a drain, but the lads had slept poorly with grumbling empty stomachs, so the inevitable happened and the store-keeper and his wife had to flee as we ran amok and drank our fill. The captain, who had at first slyly sought to join us for a drink, implored us to remember our oaths and stop drinking. He was on the verge of tears when he asked me to restore discipline, but frankly the bottle of Treesian Red I'd found was worth more to me than a couple of stripes inked onto an armband so I told him where he could shove them. The captain had then slunk off dejectedly to join the instructor and the liaison officer, who both in turn moved away shunning his company.

I don't remember much more than that, except somehow that the store had caught fire, we'd eaten curried goat and one of the women who'd tried passing herself as a boy had returned to the campfire looking rather dishevelled.

The next day I was awoken by a well aimed kick to the gut from the instructor, who I discovered was partial to wearing steel-capped boots. It was not a pleasant discovery and I rather suspect he enjoyed the pained grunt he had exacted from me.

“You snore like a pig.” He said by way of a greeting and explanation. “Come on you bastard, up.”

Reluctantly, realising this was a fight I could only lose, I hauled myself upright. It transpired I had been sleeping awkwardly in the gutter where I'd passed out. Groggily I gradually took in that a fire engine had arrived at the scene and was dousing the flames of the burnt out cash-and-carry. It was then that I'd noticed, with a start, how close the store had been to the now abandoned gasoline pumps of the service station. But that shock was nothing compared to the sight of the corpulent form of our captain dangling lifeless from one of the still smouldering beams of the store.

“That's right boyo, playtime is officially over.” The NDF liaison officer's unfriendly voice whispered in my ear. “He lost control of his men so he paid the price. You were lucky to have been so far gone that even the sirens couldn't wake you, otherwise we might have strung you up as well.”

We spent the rest of the day making petrol bombs, whilst behind us the crows flocked to peck at the lifeless eyes of our former commander.
Patroness of Kalir
Elder of the Simrani branch of the House of Ayreon-Kalirion
| Countess of Amity, Mirioth and So-Sara

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