This is Jockel Podcast number 384 with Echo Charles and me, Jockel Willink.

Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

I was studious by nature and I had read considerably about the war.

I knew that the careless way in which we fired our guns and dropped bombs in

France was hurting lots of people.

The average time in which a British soldier was still able to fight after he landed

in France was three months, killed, wounded, gasped, captured, something put

them out of action in an average of 90 days.

So I enlisted with my eyes open, expecting to get killed, but hoping to have

done more than my part before I got mine.

I was young enough that I had a desire to be something great when I died.

So that my parents would receive a posthumous reward of some sort of

metal and know that Bob had died bravely.

But I did have ideas about the way I was to die if I must.

And none of these ways was with a bayonet or a knife in my ribs.

I had an antithopie toward cold steel entering my body and trained hard to learn

all I could about bayonet work.

In fact, all through the war, I trained just as hard as I would for an important

athletic contest.

I often thought that might be out in no man's land or meeting some form of an

attack where I would come upon hand-to-hand fighting with a German.

...