Then we could wash and delouse, and eat better food, and sleep. Because the trenches were full of shit and flies and corpses, it made the beautiful places behind the lines seem even more beautiful. The Franks had no areas behind the lines, because their bridgehead was very small, so they cannot have had any good rests as we did, as we could always shoot or shell them wherever they were. It would have been very bad to have been a Frank.There was a village where we stayed that was a Greek village, but the Christians had mostly gone because of what happened to their women. In this village there was a well that had no wall around it. It was just a hole in the ground, and one day a goat fell in.The first thing we knew was that we heard echoey bleating coming up from it, and Fikret went to have a look, and he called us over, and we saw the goat very dimly down below, swimming and kicking out at the sides, as if it thought it could climb them. I went to fetch Lieutenant Orhan, and he came and looked over the side, and he said, “If it dies down there, it’ll poison the water, and anyway, this is a good milking goat.”
