64
and had our dinner there at 5.0 pm! The net result of which was that we lost two meals -- tea and lunch! Why did I join the Army?
Monday Jan 24
I was woken up this morning by Frankan switching on the light. I had been lying in a sort of half awake state before that. I wondered why he had put the light on at 3.30 am when suddenly I looked at my watch & found it was 10 to 7. In this part of the country it is still dark t 7.0 presumably because we are getting farther north.
The country we are in now is much different from any we have been through yet. It has quite a lot of hills in it & at times we see the snows. It is difficult to describe. It is mostly a series of rolling hills cut into at every yard by mullahs and dry watercourses. There is very little vegetation beyond a few rather stunted trees & bushes. It must be extraordinarily difficult country to fight in.
Our progress now is at the rate of about 10 miles an hour. This is scarcely to be wondered at. We had two big fat goods engines to pull a load of 16 ??? carriages each about 40 tons = ???? tons plus 16 four wheel baggage wagons which are ordinary covered vans of about 10 tons ??? & 19 tons capacity. Consequently the weight of the train can't be