Women of War - A Band of Brothers Story

Returns and Replacements

A/N: Hey guys. I'm so, so sorry for not updating yesterday, I feel terrible. I promised to update on Wednesday and to return to my original posting schedule and yet, here I am, already a day late again... I really planned on uploading the next chapter yesterday, but then I started working on my bachelor thesis and went to rehearsal and suddenly, it was 11 pm and I was dead tired.

Instead of making more promises that I'm not sure I can keep, I'll just leave it at this: I do my best to update once a week, but when life gets in the way (as it usually does), there might only be a chapter every two weeks. I hope you're not too disappointed or cross...

Thank you all for being so patient and, of course, for reading this story :) If you have any ideas, suggestions, wishes as to what should/could happen in the future chapters, leave me a comment or a PM :)

Okay, now enough from me and on with the story:

The seven-day passes soon expired, the soldiers flocking back to Aldbourne now that their leave was over. Wounded returned from the hospital and were greeted with much enthusiasm. The atmosphere was filled with a sense of joy to be alive, a highly justified sentiment in everyone's opinion.

Still, Winters, who was promoted to Captain and now officially Easy's CO, quickly had them focused on the work at hand again.

The soldiers had always taken their training seriously. Sure, there had been a few pranks and jokes back in basic and also afterwards, but overall, they had all known that it was important. They all had bitched and grumbled and griped about it at some point – they were soldiers, it was basically good form to do that – but that didn't mean they disparaged its importance.

Now, however, they saw the training in a different light.

Drills and field exercises, marches and night problems, everything carried the added weight of knowing the consequences of treating it lightly. Death or serious injury. They knew because they had experienced it. Jumping into combat and watching your friends die had a way of putting things into perspective.

Which was what irritated the veterans the most about the replacements that were brought in to fill Easy's depleted ranks. Fresh of the boat from the states, quite a few of these boys had the nerve to actually bemoan the fact that they hadn't been a part of the D-Day drop into occupied France.

"I would have shown those Krauts", one of them boasted as they prepared for PT in the morning.

Jessica snorted. "You wouldn't have lasted a day", she informed him bluntly, eyeing him with a mixture of disgust and ridicule.

It was obvious from the first day of training that the replacements' skills were very far from the standards Easy Company was used to. That wasn't entirely their fault. In an effort to bring its sometimes severely diminished units back to full combat strength, the Army had compressed the two years of intense training into a meagre eight months.

The replacements knew the very basics of jumping and manoeuvres, but little more than that. And so, it fell to the veterans to whip them into shape, bring their skills up to scratch and build up the fitness and stamina these boys lacked.

The NCOs especially worked hard to impress on the new guys that mistakes could get you killed and that war wasn't glorious, but ugly, brutal and absolutely nothing to look forward to.

***

Maxine, due to her upper-class upbringing, was very talented when it came to schooling her features and being perfectly polite even when she thought somebody was the height of idiocy. Also, she had a natural authority about her and as the veterans knew, she had no problem asserting her authority as a senior non-com and squad leader.