New View

H.Q. Base Camp The Troops C. Roche N.Brunicardi Laird's Story Duties UDC Letter Letters Home War Songs B.Hammond Maps Interviews Final Leaving Photo Mêlée Quiz Biography Credits E mail

My dear ones,

Thank you for the cake and shirt. I didn't know I had left one behind.

The enclosed are a couple of songs an old fellow was singing here in the streets. They're rather typical, aren't they? Some of the rhymes are quite in the "Little Willie" style.

I must tell you a story about our doctor. It's rather obscene, but a good side-light on Army methods. J. Murphy O' Connor is his name (yes, you're right; not a Scotchman); he was qualified about six months ago; a raw Cork fellow, you know the kind. Well, we'd been having an awful lot of men shamming diarrhoea to get off parades; it's favourite stunt, because it's so difficult to disprove. (A man of mine, though, was more naif and original; "ye see, sor,"said he, "it's this way; in the barrack-room I have me health grand, but the minyit I hear the Fall-In goin, I do be chance in the great game you will carry on the traditions of our 1st and 2nd Battalions. Dismiss the parade, please, Mr. Adjutant."

Then he mounted his horse and rode slowly down the road out of our lives, as the stories say. Everyone wept like children. It was a great speech wasn't it? No sentimentality or heroics; just plain and soldierly like himself.

Last week-end I went to Cork for the first time. We played the Connaughts up at Kilworth in the afternoon - hockey - ( we drew, 3 all; I scored for us), and afterwards Charlie Denroche said he would take me to Cork in his side-car if I'd come. So I put a pair of pyjamas in my great coat pocket, with a toothbrush and comb, and we started off, just like that. Of course we broke down half-way, miles from anywhere by the roadside, but we patched her up with a piece of wire we found in the road (!), and finished the journey very gingerly with a bit of rusty wire between us and ruin. We went to a music-hall that night, slept together in the last remaining bed at the Metropole, went to a Turkish bath on Sunday morning, and returned in the evening.

They say Cork is the coming city of Ireland (Dublin was, Belfast is, Cork will be), but I didn't think much of it, except the river-view, which is pretty and rather continental: white houses clustering on wooded slopes both sides of the river. We heard "the bells of Shandon sounding so grand on the pleasant waters of the river Lee," but unlike Father Prout we thought the girls of Cork horrid. Still, it was something to get into civilisation again, with electric trams and cafes and plate-glass windows and theatres, after Kilworth Camp.

The signalling goes on fairly well, though the men are a bit slow. Lamp and buzzer work is what we do all day long now.

All my love.