Tonight we've been singing in parts, Back in the Dear Dead Days Beyond
Recall--a mournful kind of ditty to sing under the circumstances--so
mournful that we had to have a game of five hundred to cheer us up.

It's now nearly 2 a.m., and I have to go out to the guns again before I
go to bed. I carry your letters about in my pockets and read them at odd
intervals in all kinds of places that you can't imagine.

Cheer up and remember that I'm quite happy. I wish you could be with me
for just one day to understand.

Yours,
CON.




XXIX

December 3rd, 1916.

Dear Boys:

By this time you will be all through your exams and I hope have both
passed. It'll be splendid if you can go together to the same station.
You envy me, you say; well, I rather envy you. I'd like to be with you.
You, at least, don't have Napoleon's fourth antagonist with which to
contend--mud. But at present I'm clean and billeted in an estaminet, in
a not too bad little village. There's an old mill and still older
church, and the usual farmhouses with the indispensable pile of manure