Читать книгу To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May - David Crane - Страница 17

The ground was white as far as one could see this morning with the bare trunks standing out black against it and the frosty sunlight glistening on the snow. Three inches had fallen in the night to the sorrow of all save sundry small boys who whooped and bellowed outside my window and threw snowballs at everyone and became a general nuisance.

The battalion went out for a route march under Seconds-in-Command, leaving Coy commanders with fatigue parties to try and get their houses in order. It was a problem fraught with many pitfalls for the unwary. My own especial bête noir was drainage.

This village is innocent of any such modern fastidiousness as a sewer. Indeed everything drains back on you, not away as any ignorant Anglican might suppose.

I have seen sinks dug, planned gutters here and erected dams there, and striven generally and with moderate profanity till the impossible has been achieved. Water has been persuaded beyond a higher level and my cookers now stand on a more or less dry foreshore.

Also we have dug a bath and built seats round it and a soak-hole for the water which is no longer pellucid. So altogether we have progressed and, so encouraged, I begin to feel some confidence that, did we remain here long enough, the mud might be persuaded to leave the village street.

Dear, old, tax-ridden, law-abiding England! How I would delight to see one of your wolf-nosed sanitary inspectors turned loose in this, our Brucamps.^xiii How you would sniff, how snort, how elevate your highly educated proboscis! How you would storm, how shriek and how summons! And how masterly indifferent would our grubby people be of you, how little would they be impressed, how hopelessly insane they would think you, and what grave danger there would be of a second Revolution if you or any untold number of you essayed to remove from them their beloved dung-heaps.