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Updated: May 22, 2025
As a punishment he was made to march on foot, carrying a full pack, from Rome to Padua. He showed us his old military pay-book, his medals and other souvenirs. Next year he will be seventy years old and will begin to draw a pension. Having returned to Sirmione, we arranged with him to drive us next day to the neighbouring battlefields of 1859, San Martino and Solferino.
I have seen men with twopence and no more, men who were longing for a dozen things themselves, share what the twopence bought with comrades who had not even a penny. I passed two young soldiers near the door of a canteen. One of them stopped me and very shyly asked me if I would give him a penny for an English stamp. He fished it out from the pocket of his pay-book.
When I returned late at night my bed had been made and my pay and pay-book were placed neatly on my bed, by whom I never found out. Military offences were few and usually petty but in the eyes of authority charges had to be laid and these were heard in the Company Office, the Nissen hut just inside the entrance gate.
All our little articles were taken from us and put into two parcels, which we were allowed to carry, but not keep, and which were eventually returned to us, and, whether it was done by carelessness or not I do not know, but by some fortunate circumstance my maps were left in my pay-book case and put in the package, but I did not see them until after my punishment was over.
He was brought back at once to the trench, and it fell to me to examine the man and to remove all papers from him except his pay-book and identity disc. I went out and examined him in a mixture of such broken French and German as I could summon at so short a notice. I also went through his papers with the aid of lighted matches.
There was virtually no crime apart from petty offences against military law, in fact the reverse was often the case as was demonstrated when one pay day I had to dash off from pay parade, dump my pay and pay-book on my unmade bed and rush to catch the lorry going into town to see a show.
Custom has sharpened our clinical instinct, and where, in civil life, we would look for meningitis, now we only write cerebral malaria, and search the senseless soldier's pay-book for the name that we may put upon the "dangerous list." As this name is flashed 12,000 miles to England, I sometimes wonder what conception of malaria his anxious relatives can have.
There was even a totalisator for those, which meant everybody who could obtain an advance on his pay-book, who liked what is called in racing circles "a flutter"; and there were always several amateur "bookies" as well. The only adjunct familiar to the race-courses at home missing from our meetings was the professional tipster, with his information "straight from the horse's nosebag."
He returned with a handful of filthy papers. "I oughtn't to do it; I know I shall rue it; but you have overpersuaded me and I liked Herr Eichenholz, a noble gentleman and free with his money see here, the papers of a waiter, Julius Zimmermann, called up with the Landwehr but discharged medically unfit, military pay-book and permis de séjour for fifteen days.
I had the compass in the middle of a package of tobacco; my maps were still in the pay-book case in my pocket. We gave ourselves up to the joy of labor, and pulled weeds all day with great vigor. We wanted to behave so well that they wouldn't notice us. Of course we were not sure that any chance would come. We might have to carry our stuff for several days before we should get a chance.
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