Two hours march lay
before us we learned, but we did not know where we were bound. As we
waited ready to move off a sound, ominous and threatening, rumbled in
from the distance and quivered by our ears. We were hearing the sound
of guns!
CHAPTER III (p. 030)
OUR FRENCH BILLETS
The fog is white on Glenties moors,
The road is grey from Glenties town,
Oh! lone grey road and ghost-white fog,
And ah! the homely moors of brown.
The farmhouse where we were billeted reminded me strongly of my home
in Donegal with its fields and dusky evenings and its spirit of
brooding quiet. Nothing will persuade me, except perhaps the Censor,
that it is not the home of Marie Claire, it so fits in with the
description in her book.
The farmhouse stands about a hundred yards away from the main road, with
a cart track, slushy and muddy running across the fields to the very
door. The whole aspect of the place is forbidding, it looks squalid and
dilapidated, and smells of decaying vegetable matter, of manure and every
other filth that can find a resting place in the vicinity of an unclean
dwelling-place. But it is not dirty; its home-made bread and beer are
excellent, the new-laid eggs are delightful for breakfast, the milk and
butter, fresh and pure, are dainties that an epicure might rave (p. 031)
about.
We easily became accustomed to the discomforts of the place, to the
midden in the centre of the yard, to the lean long-eared pigs that try
to gobble up everything that comes within their reach, to the hens
that flutter over our beds and shake the dust of ages from the
barn-roof at dawn, to the noisy little children with the dirty faces
and meddling fingers, who poke their hands into our haversacks, to the
farm servants who inspect all our belongings when we are out on
parade, and even now we have become accustomed to the very rats that
scurry through the barn at midnight and gnaw at our equipment and
devour our rations when they get hold of them.
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