hardtack variant. Regardless of which label, they were all rations that only the lower tier personnel would be issued. The only way they might be palat - able would be once hydrated and heavily seasoned; otherwise, the root vegetables were bland and miserable, the fish cakes a bit better while the ry-ry merely a thin crispbread and hardtack tasteless. Slowly looking across the odd symbols and making some guesses, she deciphered the first card as follows:
[Card-01] Unsafe to be here – everywhere lurks some nasty, brutish thing. Yesterday, one of the large orange and blue crabs tried to carry off someone. Soon a long-snouted slimy caiman appeared near enough to flash whitish teeth and red eyes before splashing back into the swamp dragging a screaming replacement – we didn’t even know his name! Never learn new names, no point in it…
Once she got the sense of the writing, very extemporaneous and usually after a trauma, she came to understand better whoever the author had been. Then she got to the other cards and realized they were ei - ther badly faded, oddly child-like drawings or simply blank, nothing special. With age, they had degraded badly so she struggled to figure out what they were at all. The more Mildred thought about the cards the more it bothered her, why write this down? What purpose would it serve? To what end? Anybody who served in the War expected a hard life without mercy.
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