Читать книгу To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May - David Crane - Страница 24

Another uneventful day so far as general interest is concerned. Just the usual Brigade Route march for the battalion during the day and the usual unfruitful tour round the byways after dark in search of wood for the fire at which we are wont to thaw our feet before retiring. It is not our fault that we take the spare wood of the village in this clandestine fashion. One must be warm. That is unanswerable. Yet the people are so constituted that they will not sell their beloved bois. Then, what would you? To see an otherwise honest and respectable English gentleman, sneaking stealthily from one shadowy wall to another and flitting swiftly across the open spaces where the moonbeams flicker, with a large and cumbersome fence post under his arm, is not a sight one of a strict moral rectitude similar to my own, can look upon with equanimity, but when one is reduced to a choice between witnessing it or enduring the sensation of slowly freezing from the feet up, not to mention the other minor disadvantage of becoming the possessor of an enduring dew-drop, one is liable to find oneself weak. And certainly I confess that as the flame leaps joyously upwards from our stolen fuel it thaws into non-existence the last ice of my own honesty.