throat never troubles me and I'm free from colds in spite of wet feet.
The main disadvantage is that we rarely get a chance to wash or change
our clothes. Your ideas of an army with its buttons all shining is quite
erroneous; we look like drunk and disorderlies who have spent the night
in the gutter--and we have the same instinct for fighting.

In the trenches the other day I heard mother's Suffolk tongue and had a
jolly talk with a chap who shared many of my memories. It was his first
trip in and the Huns were shelling badly, but he didn't seem at all
upset.

We're still hard at it and have given up all idea of a rest--the only
way we'll get one is with a blighty. You say how often you tell
yourselves that the same moon looks down on me; it does, but on a scene
how different! We advance over old battlefields--everything is blasted.
If you start digging, you turn up what's left of something human. If
there were any grounds for superstition, surely the places in which I
have been should be ghost-haunted. One never thinks about it. For myself
I have increasingly the feeling that I am protected by your prayers; I
tell myself so when I am in danger.

Here I sit in an old sweater and muddy breeches, the very reverse of
your picture of a soldier, and I imagine to myself your receipt of this.
Our chief interest is to enquire whether milk, jam and mail have come up
from the wagon-lines; it seems a faery-tale that there are places where
milk and jam can be had for the buying. See how simple we become.

Poor little house at Kootenay! I hate to think of it empty. We had such
good times there twelve months ago. They have a song here to a nursery
rhyme lilt, Après le Guerre Finis; it goes on to tell of all the good