About a week later we were on a full pack march, around halfway through the twelve mile march. Me and the boys usually stuck together on the march, we were all in the same squad so we also were forced to be together on these long marches even if we didn't want to be, but that's beside the point.
One of our squad mates Nando was helping motivate Carlo to continue. Nando, or Fernando, Gatti was generally a good person. He was the best kind of squad mate one could ask for, he would always go far beyond what's necessary if you were his friend, and I would say we were pretty good friends, considering that we had all been stuck together for the last several weeks.
Nothing brings together men more, in my experience, then shared suffering. It was the military's quick way of making effective fighting men who had a sense of companionship with the man to the left and right of him. I never thought about it at the time, as I would say I wasn't the smartest tool then, but as the years go by I have started to pick up on some of these things. Whether I knew it or not, these long marches, and other physical challenges brought in a brotherhood with these men only beaten by the brotherhood made from combat.
The man marching right behind Nando was Adrain. If Nando was the nicest man I met at basic, Adrian was the most apathetic. This is not to say he was a bad man, far from it, but his heart simply was not in it as much as the rest of us. I didn't find out till later as to why this was, but at the time, the apathetic Adrain stayed a mystery.
Finally, in front of the stumbling Carlo was our Sergeant Marco. We either called him Sergeant, Sergeant Arezzo, or Marco if we were alone. Marco was a good Sergeant, he had one of the most important skills for leading men in my opinion. It was that he cared for his men. The six of us were close, and Marco did the best to do right by us, but with the struggles of the war, even the best intentioned soldier would falter.
"You'd think after a couple of weeks he'd be better, we've been doing this since day one" Felix said leaning over to look at the stumbling Bruno ahead of him. Adrian on the other side of me repositioned his rifle on his soldier and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. "I don't know how you're going to complete the march, we got another five miles left".
Bruno was too focused on his steps to reply to the remarks kept on trudging along. It looked like he put every ounce of his body into each of his steps. His body swayed with each foreboding step forward. "He'll make it, he always does" Carlo said, giving some encouraging words to his brother. The march went on, Bruno stumbled a couple of times and by the end he was practically limping towards the finish line. But Carlo was correct, Bruno did finish the march, not very graceful, but he did do it. It was something of an inspiration to us, even if it was a joke between us.
The weeks went on in basic training. We would target practice almost everyday, Felix slowly got better, but that was not a high bar to cross. The once major days and major obstacles that I faced in basic now seemed somewhat trivial. In fact, looking back at it all, it is mostly a haze.
No one is excited about training, everyone just wants to get into the action, initially. So most of our days were spent talking about the war and what we would do, the heroic acts we would accomplish, the fame we would get for our small town of Rus. The only talking we did about the present was complaining about our commanding officers, in private of course. Complaining about how most of the stuff we would learn would not be helpful in combat; whether we were wrong or right, we complained.
The daily shooting training would turn into bigger picture training. How to work as a unit, how to communicate with other squads and platoons, these were before the days of widespread radio use. At the beginning of the war, most of the Generals in charge would stick to tactics of the past. We were taught how to shoot in lines with our modern bolt action rifles, to shoot in volleys. The tactics of our fathers and grandfathers. This would only take the Generals a couple of months, and a few tens of thousands of casualties to fix.
But this was what I was taught. I don't think anyone was really ready for combat, a once seemingly far away idea, that every day, and every week got closer. We were excited of course, as young men usually are. But for some of us the reality started to set in sooner than others.
Eventually the Final week of Basic came. We were all in our units, and had our assigned jobs. My squad was a basic rifleman squad, so we didn't have any new tools or weapons in our squad. We were finally getting the hang of the military though, five weeks of constant training will do that.
We were a well working squad. We were up to the Legionnaires high standard of a fighting man, or we thought so at least. And after the final test of training, which was a twenty six mile march, as well as a live fire exercise, we were official legionnaires. And we wore that with pride. The symbol of the unit I was in, the 9th legionnaires was a black skull on a background of white. Every legionnaire unit, one to nine had a similar symbol.
We were supposed to be the most well trained soldiers in the Empire. And I guess we were, we definitely felt like it. When the enemy saw the skull, they were supposed to dread it. We wore that skull on our caps with pride. Our uniform was very similar to the Auxiliaries, but instead of the gray service uniform, we had an olive green one. A minor difference, but if any legionnaire was mistaken for an Auxiliary he would be quick to let them know their mistake.
The next day, after the ceremony, our entire company went out. We drank a couple of pubs dry, and to me, that was the highlight of my life up to that point. The uniform made me feel invincible, as well as the liquor. I will not recount that night, as I do not remember much of it but the morning after we all paid the price.