MORE DISCLOSURES

New Zealand Times, Volume XL, Issue 9090, 8 July 1915, Page 3

MORE DISCLOSURES

LIVING, WORKING AND SLEEPING IN DAMPNESS. • ■ Special to th© “Times.” WANGANUI, July 7Public feeling is deeply stirred by the deplorable and discreditable condition of things that has been shown to exist at the Trentham camp. The allegations made by soldiers from other parts, and the disclosures by Dr Thacker, are supported by a Wanganui man in a letter to his father. The letter was written on the 3rd inst. The writer savs : “You ask me how I like camp life. Well. Dad, I am going to give you a few details of it as I have found it in Trentham. You know yourself that I have; knocked about and roughed it often, but it is the dizzy limit here- In the first place the camp should never have been here at all. and unless it is shifted soon half of the men will bo good for nothing but a consumptive home. Everything is damp—blankets, mattresses, i and clothes, -and there are absolutely no facilities for drying them. Everybody, is more or les s bad with colds, etc. Out of our comnany of 300 odd 45 are in the hospital with measles, influenza and other complaints, and up to now there are fourteen deaths in the 7th. Nothing else can be expected when you have to walk through mud and slush and rain all day and sleep in a damp tent ana wet blankets. SICK MEN ON .PARADE.

“Another thing: There is no halfway house if you are ill, but not bad enough to lay up; you have to go on parade ' and every morning some poor devil or other falls down in a faint in the ranks. I cun tell you it. makes one scratch his head and think, when you see them carrying fellows you have been working with away on stretchers to the racecourse, where every loose-box and building is full of patients. “You hear so many rumours here that you don’t know what to believe; but we are told that there is every chance of our leaving for Egypt soon and finishing our training there. I hope it is right. Prisoners better treated. “Another thing is the food. Now we don’t expect a sit-down dinner, hut it could be 100 per vent, better than it isBy the time you march up to the cookhouse and stand in the mud and rain for half an hour and get back to the tent everything is cold. Wo have an ex-prison warder in our tent, and ho swears that prisoners get better treatment than we do. Now I suppose you will think I am just a growler; but it gets on anyone’s nerves here. "Several M P.’s were through our lines this afternoon, and I believe there is going to be a. devil of a shindy. 1 think their eyes are being opened a bit. and not before it was time.”