To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      16th November ’15

      More snow greeted us this morning. It is about six inches deep now and the fall continued up to lunch time. It makes the district look very beautiful and, but for the slush underfoot, would constitute no nuisance, since the temperature remains quite mild.

      I sent the Coy out under Murray for a march which warmed the men up and, having rescued an ambulance wagon and an ASC [Army Service Corps] lorry from two separate drifts away out in the country, they come back very pleased with their morning’s labours and looking very red-faced and healthy withal.

      It has been a day of settling claims for billet damages. I think the French peasantry have Hebrew blood in their veins in degrees of varying intensity. They claim 30 francs for firewood. You offer five and eventually after Madame has dissolved into tears, and protested by various saints her inability to supply firewood of less than two sous the stick, you settle for ten amid a shower of mutual protests of undying affection.

      Prince is about again and looking much better. I am very glad because we move tomorrow and it would have been hard luck on him to have been left behind. Also now he can take his Platoon, which is altogether desirable.

      As I say, we move. But whither I know not. It is a strange feeling this of being moved about an unknown country like pieces on a chess-board as helpless as they to control our movements and as ignorant of why and wherefore. Yet it has its advantages. It saves worry. One gets into a regular happy-go-lucky way of looking at things, conscious only that one will fetch up somewhere all right and that we will get to the trenches just so soon as the master player decides that we are wanted.

      17th November ’15

      As anticipated we moved today and, in passing, struck some of the most vile roads one could imagine. The snow had deteriorated on the fairway to a thick slush which made the going heavy and penetrated the stoutest boots. It also has, up to now, defeated the efforts of the heavier transport vehicles to get here but we have rounded up the lighter ones and the men have been fed and are too tired to worry about the lesser trouble of an absence of blankets.

      We started out for St Vaast but found that, on arrival, to be in the possession of an Ammunition Column and no room left for us. We had, therefore, to hump on to this little village [Fremont] where we have been rewarded by finding comfortable billets and a most hospitable country folk.

      We B officers are billeted in on old farmhouse whose good dame is full of tender felicity for ‘le pauvre soldat Anglais’. Her son is a trooper in the Chasseurs and has been at the war since August 1914.^xiv She is a really kindly soul and is doing her utmost to make us as comfortable as circumstances permit and now we are all sitting round the tiled kitchen with a roaring fire rushing up the chimney, thawing ourselves out and talking shocking French to the inhabitants. Shocking that is with the exception of Shelmerdine. He is very good at the game and I am afraid we will be rather lost when he leaves us and will run grave danger of obtaining lamp oil when we ask for jam.

      Cotton has just made a sound remark. ‘We who are nearest the firing line,’ he says, ‘Know least about the war.’ It is sound, is that. We know nothing. And we have had no news of the progress of events for more than a week. It came as quite a shock to me to realise it. I have not thought of the actual fighting for days. How different to when we were in England and The Times came every morning. Then we were greatly concerned with what was going on down the road. Now we do not trouble. We are too busy.

      18th November ’15

      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.

      19th November ’15

      A more or less uneventful day in billets. Getting them in order, with all the little odd arrangements which make so much for comfort, takes a long time and considerable thought but there is not a deal to show for them afterwards and really nothing to record. One thing, however, worthy of note is the way in which the men have come on in the way of making themselves comfortable. Mostly town-bred, they were slow at first to see that men can live in comparative comfort in the most unpromising circumstances but they learn with avidity and in another week or so the oldest campaigner will be able to tell them little indeed.

      As yet they still lose things – lose them at a most СКАЧАТЬ