He could feel it sliding down his right temple and down his cheek, to disappear inside his collar, which was already soaked with body oils. He sniffed and found he was starting to smell like his dog’s bed blanket. What a fucking dump! Thomas ‘Tommy’ Evans was twenty-four years of age, a carpenter’s son and a soldier, and the last place he wanted to be at that moment was where he actually found himself. There wasn’t one redeeming feature about it, and the words hot, dusty, shit-smelling, fly-infested and pig sty sprung to mind. He had never gotten used to the smell of cow or goat shit, or whatever the hell shit it was; it stank. They seemed to use it for a wide variety of things. “The main one,” he thought,”is building their homes. And what makes it worse are the flies. Millions of sodding flies, big, fat, bloated flies.” Why the hell anybody wanted to live in a shithole like this, let alone fight over it, was beyond his reasoning. He could have been in Germany or Canada or somewhere like that, getting pissed and wooing the local females with his god-like qualities.
