“MY DEAREST MOTHER,

“Just a line to tell you I’m A1.  By the time you get this our rest will be over, and we shall be entrenched.  Thanks for socks.  The stove is going a treat.  We finished a fatigue at 4 o’clock this morning and made some porridge.  It was great, and of course up in the trench it will be trebly handy.  We are taking up two big packets of Quaker Oats, and with the tea, cocoa, coffee, and oxo we ought to do well.

     “Glad to hear about Herbert’s wound.  Sounds funny, no doubt,
     but he’s lucky to get back at all, for he was at Ypres and
     it’s hot there.”

From a letter to a cousin in the United States.

“I have sent you one or two photos which may be of interest, and which may be useful to check the ‘strafe Englands’ of the German who comes to your office.  Ask him, if in these pictures the Huns look as if they believe they’re winning, and then compare them with those of our boys and of the Frenchies in the trenches, and with those of our wounded.  My! there’s just all the difference between them!

“I also send a French field service card, so you now have an English and a French one.  I’m afraid a Russian card is out of the question, unless I get sent near them in the Balkans; and when I think of that I also think of a ditty that we sing, which runs: 

          “I want to go home, I want to go home,
          The Johnsons and shrapnel they whistle and roar;
          I don’t want to go to the trenches no more. 
          I want to go home,
          Where the Allemands can’t get at me,
          Oh my!  I don’t want to die; I want to go home.

“You’d better not show this to that German or else he’ll believe we mean it as well as sing it.  We have a rare lot of ditties.  We often sing across—­’Has anyone seen a German Band,’ or ’I want my Fritz to play twiddly bits on his old trombone.’  We really have a good bit of fun at times; other days are—­crudely, but truthfully putting it—­’Hell.’  The first month I had out here was such.  You heard of Hill 60 back last April, and the second battle of Calais.  It was during that time that I lost my friend, with whom I joined.  Since we were thirteen years old we’ve been inseparable.  Only 40 per cent. of the draft I was on are left, and in my pocket I have a long list of chums whom I shall never see again in this world.  It seems wonderful to me that I should be spared whilst so many better men go.  Naturally I am thankful, especially for mother’s sake, that I have escaped so far.  Only once during the eight months out here have I been more than ten miles from the firing line, and ten miles is nothing to a gun.

“Well, now I must knock off for dinner, the variety of which never changes.  You’ve heard of ‘Stew, stew, glorious stew’; perhaps, however, beer was the subject then.  Well, I’ll resume at the first possible moment; for, in the Army, what you don’t go and fetch you never see, and then again, first come first served, last man the grouts.”

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