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would be paid off with three thousand denarii, about two hundred pounds sterling. After twenty years a British soldier would get about a quarter of that.
    "Well," Cockney Dave ruminated, "for all that, it beats being down the mine."

CHAPTER FIVE
    The troopship was yet another shock. It was a derelict hulk laid up ready for scrap and had now been pressed into urgent military service. The British Army, despite its global responsibilities, had no regular means of conveying its troops abroad and depended on commercial shipping companies.
    The SS Plymouth was an antique rust bucket, a tramp steamer registered in Panama, barely seaworthy, commanded by an elderly neurotic with a polyglot crew hastily recruited from numerous waterfront bars. One hold had been converted to convey the troops with crude timber bunks one atop the other and hammocks slung between. The only ventilation when the hatch covers were closed was a single pipe vent.
    The troops spent most of their time in endless lines waiting for their food, drinking water, to use a toilet, to shave, and to wash. The hold stank like a cesspit, but the soldiers were forbidden to travel on deck.
    The Territorials disembarked in France on August fifteenth, the day the last Belgian resistance collapsed. The huge German army had entered Liege on August fifth, but Belgian troops under the determined command of diehard General Leman had demolished all the city's bridges and retreated to a dozen modern, thick-walled forts on high ground.
    Over the next ten days, German 420mm siege guns demolished the forts one by one. Colonel of Fusiliers Erich Ludendorff succeeded in getting lost with his three brigades and was harassed severely by civilian snipers. He gave orders for the summary execution of these "Francs Tireurs," and the German firing squads were kept busy shooting every civilian they found at large. Many hundreds were slaughtered including a number of elderly priests.
    On August 10, Fort Barchon was captured from the rear, then Ludendorff and his fusiliers got lost again. By August 15, Ludendorff had found his bearings and laid siege to Fort Loncin. Toward nightfall the gallant General Leman was carried unconscious from the ruins.
    The previous day, August fourteenth, German troops engaged a large French force in Lorraine. The French general Lamezac was defeated in what became the ten-day battle of Charleroi.
    Meanwhile the British Expeditionary Force of ninety thousand men under the Boer War hero Sir John French was idle. The troops spent their days in unending, trivial drill, digging latrines, cleaning and re-cleaning their tents, and telling and retelling the numerous rumors.
    It seemed that Germany had eighty-seven divisions, each with eighteen thousand men, equipped with Mauser rifles and Maxims, the machine gun invented by an American-born Englishman. Each German division was backed with thirty-six 105mm and sixteen 150mm howitzers.
    The French had mustered sixty-two divisions, each with seventeen thousand; barely a million men, about two thirds of Germany's strength. And they had three hundred medium and heavy cannon against Germany's three and a half thousand.
    The British Expeditionary Force totaled a mere ninety thousand in six slender infantry divisions armed with rifles and bayonets and five cavalry brigades with lances, sabers and carbines. Their only heavy weapons were four five-inch guns and two machine guns per battalion. There were also a few bicycle detachments, field telegraph and carrier pigeon detachments, and some observation balloon units. When the Kaiser was advised of the arrival of this force, he sneered, "A contemptible little army."
    At last, on August twenty-second, the British troops were issued equipment. Far too much equipment, it seemed to Casca. Each man was weighed down with a total of sixty-six pounds.
    Casca divided his mountain of junk into two parts – the rifle, bayonet, ammunition pouches and two Mills bombs he wanted, also the water