Читать книгу To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May - David Crane - Страница 20

Another trek today. Up whilst the moon was still in possession, with a wash in a bucket in the farmyard in water from which the ice had to be broken before we could use it. Then petit dejeuner of bread and butter and the finest café au lait one could wish for, prepared by our good friend Madame de la ferme. Afterwards came a ripping march over frozen roads through a freezing air to these our present quarters [at Raineville].

We rest here, I believe, for four days. It has some pretensions as a village but is only really more or less of a large collection of mud and wattle buildings surrounding an untold number of ‘middens’. The men are snug enough in straw strewn barns but we officers have struck rather a bad patch as regards chambers though so far as comfort is concerned we are not doing badly. We are in a peasant’s cottage, Murray, Bowly and myself have commandeered wood and are now sitting in an inglenook thawing ourselves and scratching notes by the feeble light of a tallow candle. Our rations stand on the table – some bacon, two chickens, several loaves and a tin of jam. With the candle, stuck in an empty baccy tin, shedding its flickering light on them, with Bowly asleep in his chair and Don Murray bent over his letter pad, both so familiar and yet so strange in these meagre surroundings, it all seems to me unreal and at the same time familiar. Unreal because of my comfort loving companions, familiar because so d’Artagnan soldiered as did Micah Clarke and the one and only Sir Nigel.^xv

I had a letter from you today. A very welcome letter, breathing as it did of you and Baby and home and all dear, clean English things in this new land where dirt and stinks seem the accepted companions of the populace and where comfort is not even slightly understood.