TCD MS 10823 folio 33a recto
[Sept 1918] as no one ever came into them. The country was flat & for the most part wooded, chiefly with Scotch fir, but occasionally there were quite fine oak & beech forests, & through them the tracks were often hard to find. On the fourth night out, it was blowing such a gale with a driving rain, that I could scarcely walk against it, & on finding a nice little garden in a village with a thick yew hedge, I lay under it for a couple of hours until the fury of the storm had blown over.
Starting about five or six in most evenings, while it was still daylight, one could get a good start, & though I met many farmers & labourers returning from work, I used to pass the time of day with them, ask them about their crops & they never suspected anything. I saw a number of Russian French & Belgian prisoners of war working on the land, but as a rule these were fairly well treated.
Going through villages, I usually had a bad limp as though I were a discharged soldier. Avoiding all main roads, I kept to the small tracks which were very difficult to find at night, but the maps that I had were accurate, & the compass would soon tell me if I were going in the wrong direction: there were plenty of sign posts at cross roads & here the electric torch came in very useful on the dark moonless nights. After going for five or six hours, I used to have a rest about midnight for an hour or an hour & a half, eating a little chocolate & sucking some Horlicks lozenges. At dawn, I would seek out some suitable plantation & settle down there for the day. The average nights march was between 25-35 Kilometres & very tired I was by the morning. Sleep however seldom came in the day time, as the weather was too cold or wet, so that for eight or nine days I had practically no sleep whatsoever.
During the night I used to dig up a turnip & a potato or two, with occasionally a small white cabbage, & these cut in thin slices & eaten raw with a little Oxo smeared on them were often the only meal I had & extraordinarily nasty they were too. Edmundson had unfortunately all the bacon with him & our only canteen for cooking. On the fourth day my air cushion, which I used to fill with wa [ms damaged] it was the only substitute I could get for a water bottle [ms damaged] punctured among some thorns & had to be thrown a[ms damaged]