Cheating Death - Letters from a soldier in WW1

3rd Letter

To: Daisy Walker                                                                                                                    14 Shelter Street

From: Shane Mc Clindon                                                                                                   Melbourne, Australia

Date: 20th July 1915

Blimey Dais!

It’s mighty hot here now! Everyone’s just about fed up with this heat.

A lot of people are getting very sick around here and it’s hard not to when you see that conditions we’re living in. Dysentery, diarrhoea, enteric fever and lice plagues are common to have between us all. [1] Many of us are sent back to the hospital ships (which are still overcrowded) or have to make do with the over-flowing latrines.

The trenches are filthy and lice ridden (flies too...) it’s uncomfortable and narrow. (Sometimes made by dead bodies which have not been transported out of there.)[2] It’s hot, it smells and we’re still going on with this bloody war.

Ollie is of course happy about the lack of washing he has to undergo, he’s as filthy as a pig Dais, he hasn’t had a bath since May... or even changed for that matter!

To quench our terrible thirsts we have to suck on stones, but we dug a well on ‘X’ beach and we were able to draw water! [3]It was a bit salty I will admit... but it’s better than nothing![4]

Fly tea seems to be a delicacy here... ANYTHING with flies seems to be the only food here... You open up just one jar of jam and in a couple of seconds they’ve already eaten half of it! Our cheese and bully beef are a lost cause though. [5] They’ve melted and have become inedible and the biscuits are so hard now that Larry claimed he even broke some of his teeth. (He proved it too...)[6]

The flies though, are the worst. They drink the sweat on our bodies and our lips and eyes are never free from them.[7] We can’t even squash them! The moisture from this then attracts more of them. [8](This is worse than the bloody sand!)

No matter where you are, you have your own group of flies which will follow you.[9] Not even at night do they leave us alone.[10]At first Larry, George, Ollie, Joe and I all agreed to have a sort of ‘watchman’ for when we slept, to shut our mouths so we wouldn’t swallow any flies... It didn’t matter after a while and we abandoned the idea... (This doesn’t even lessen the amount there are![11])

I know I seem much more different since my last letter, I’ve learned to get used to the death, bloodshed and horror of this place. Having a laugh is the pretty much all that keeps us going sometimes even though the situation is obviously not funny... I hope Ma, Pa and you are all alright. I’ll write when I can.

Love you always Dais,

Shane

[1] Herald Sun, Wednesday April 20, 2005 Page 5

[2] T Ornek + F Toker, Gallipoli: The front line experience, Currency Press 2005

[3] ibid

[4] ibid

[5] ibid

[6] ibid

[7] ibid

[8] ibid

[9] ibid

[10] ibid

[11] ibid