Читать книгу To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May - David Crane - Страница 16

Sunday. Church parade at 10 a.m. in an old, broken-down Church with nothing inside it save damp and mildew.^xi

Afterwards, we toured the Coy billets and had to strafe some of the men for having them untidy. For the most part, though, they were quite good although a lot of the men are pretty sorry for themselves, thinking straw but a poor bed. They may, however, be thankful they are doing so well and I have no doubt will fully realise this before we are many months older. Many of them realise it now and are thoroughly enjoying themselves while they may.

Prince is laid up with bad neuralgia and toothache. The day before yesterday cracked him up and he is pretty dicky today. I am very nervous about him because, as you know, I never thought him strong and I am afraid he will prove a weakness if we have hard slogging to do. It is a pity, because he is such a good boy when he is in form.

We have had Bethmann, our interpreter, to lunch today. He is a very decent chap and works hard. We like him. Also he is a good man to keep in with because he has all the arranging of billets etc. – and B Company is not averse to a decent billet when one is going.

We strolled around the village this afternoon and thoroughly explored it. On the top of the hill east of the place there is a great crucifix hanging over in the wind and looking very desolate and sad. Just below it is a hovel or two standing in its attendant heap of manure. These heaps are the chief – at any rate they are the most obtrusive – features of the landscape. They assail the nostrils at every turn and are prolific to a degree. Every house has one, and the bigger the house the larger its heap. Pride of place seems to go with the magnitude of one’s dung-heap. Every man to his own taste, of course. This one, however, certainly strikes a mild outsider like myself as strange.^xii

Doc, who is Scotch, calls these heaps ‘middens’ and curses them unceasingly. He swears we will all die of typhoid if we remain here a week. The well from which the battalion water is drawn he looks upon as chief drain to the collective ‘middens’ and he chlorides of lime like fury. The well, by the way, only fills a dicksie (two galls.) in four minutes, and since it takes about 100 dicksies per day to make tea for the battalion and another 100 or so to fill the watercarts, you will understand that everyone does not look on the well with the same degree of antagonism as does the Doc. It is a splendid thing to put a defaulter on to. One day’s turning of that handle will cure a man of the most divers evils.