Читать книгу To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May - David Crane - Страница 57

We have had a really useful day in the open as the first of our new Routine. We have been on an improvised range and have run a competition in rapid fire which 5 Platoon won.

It was quite a lovely day, though cold, and lunch out there on the hill-side, with the wood to shield us from the wind and with no sign of house or man in all the landscape to disturb our sense of isolation, was most enjoyable. It was quite like one of the old days on the Plain and one felt it hard indeed to realise that only a few miles off there was real war.

Bunting has come back. A bedraggled and repentant Bunting, clothed in a wonderful mixture of garments which he has conned from various friends. I had meant to be angry with him but his repentance was so deep and his condition still so sad that I had not the heart. He has now gone sick with a septic foot and is on ‘Light Duty’. I wonder he has not succumbed to a combination of diphtheria and typhoid fever. Had any one less inebriated than he fallen in the pond there is no doubt but that would have been his fate.