World war crime- crime most fowl

Transcript

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World War Crime. This is a short little snippet of a podcast, a little series I fancy doing for a little while, to tell you some of the crimes that occurred during the First World War, how it affected soldiers on the Western Front, and what happened to them afterwards. I'd like to thank the British Newspaper Archives, Ancestry.com, the Commonwealth War Graves, and several other platforms to do so. So this will be a little podcast on a Friday afternoon you might want to listen to on the way home. They're short, sharp, sweet stories about soldiers during the Great War, and possibly might get some to go for the second. Theft most foul. I do admit that some of the reading the petty sessions you do get across smokesuit corkers, which are quite hilarious. Having been a police officer for 17 years, anything and everything can happen in a day's work as a constable. During the First World War, special constables would be introduced to help and keep the peace and stop disorder, and over a hundred years later, the special constables still do an amazing job. However, for PC Bertram Smith of the Cambridges Constabulary, sometimes you do wonder what they got up to in a day's work. Charrington Hospital would be used as a hospital to look after and care for injured soldiers who came from the front. It did have its own independent Canadian wing, and four soldiers of the same battalion of the 51st Canadian Infantry would be involved in a theft most foul. The four had escaped from the hospital, and whilst wandering around the countryside, they came across a wayside farm. In its rear yard there were several chickens and rabbits. The four Canadian soldiers grabbed these rabbits and chickens and made off down the street. When they were challenged by the young special constable, one made a run for it, and he was apprehended by the special constable, whilst the other three legged it. However, on a closer inspection, he went back to the hospital, and the four soldiers were reprimanded for the theft of four chickens and two rabbits. It was in order for them to either sell or eat for their own means. However, I can't see what they received for such a petty crime.