Six months on the Italian frontPrice, Julius M. (Julius Mendes)
History
Six months on the Italian front
Price, Julius M. (Julius Mendes)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Italo-Austrian; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
In common with most Correspondents, I have always made it a habit to
have my kit kept more or less packed ready for emergency, but not
to the extent of one of the brotherhood, who, in order to obviate
the danger of finding something missing from his trunks while on the
war-path, had lists of the various items pasted in the lid of each
trunk which he would carefully verify before starting. An excellent
idea, and even amusing in places, as on the occasion when his old
soldier-servant had described one of the important items in the list,
“False tooth (Supernumerary).”
That the selection of every detail of one’s baggage when travelling
“light” is an all important matter is incontrovertible, but personal
experience and individual fancy can be the only guide to what one
is likely really to want on a hazardous journey. For myself, I have
contrived to sort things down to an irreducible minimum, which will
go in a car or the luggage rack of a railway carriage. This, together
with a small attaché case for my books, papers and spare pipes,
constitutes my entire baggage, of which I never lose sight.
Two pals came to see me off, and one, a connoisseur in these matters,
brought me a box of his choicest Havanas to smoke _en route_, and
delighted though I was at his kind thought, I felt I was going to
have trouble with this unexpected addition to my luggage. And it
started when I found that my bags were so full up that I could find
no immediate home for a box of 100 big cigars, much as I could
appreciate them. I could not help feeling that had my friend given me
a leg of mutton to carry to Rome it would have been a less awkward
parting gift.
The trouble I had with those cigars makes me smile even now when I
think of it—they seemed to get everywhere—rather than carry the box,
I endeavoured to distribute them in various pockets—with the result
that I was simply overwhelmed with Corona Coronas, and although
I smoked hard all the way it seemed to make no impression on the
supply, and the thought of what might happen at the Italian frontier
became a positive obsession.
I had already spent six months on the French front, so was pretty
familiar with the warlike scenes that presented themselves on the
other side of the Channel, but to most of my fellow travellers they
were quite new.
Several well-intentioned ladies in the train from Boulogne to Paris
had provided themselves with big supplies of “Woodbines,” and all the
way to Etaples, whenever we passed soldiers along the line, they were
busy throwing the small packets of cigarettes out of the windows to
English and French indiscriminately.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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