verse 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, Apres le Guerre Finis; it goes on to tell of all the good
times we'll have when the war is ended. Every night I invent a new story
of my own celebration of the event, usually, as when I was a kiddie,
just before I fall asleep--only it doesn't seem possible that the war
will ever end.

I hear from the boys very regularly. There's just the chance that I may
get leave to London in the New Year and meet them before they set out. I
always picture you with your heads high in the air. I'm glad to think of
you as proud because of the pain we've made you suffer.

Once again I shall think of you on Papa's birthday. I don't think this
will be the saddest he will have to remember. It might have been if we
three boys had still all been with him. If I were a father, I would
prefer at all costs that my sons should be men. What good comrades we've
always been, and what long years of happy times we have in memory--all
the way down from a little boy in a sailor-suit to Kootenay!

I fell asleep in the midst of this. I've now got to go out and start the
other gun firing. With very much love.

Yours,
CON.

XXV

November 1st, 1916.

My Dearest M.:

Peace after a storm! Your letter was not brought up by the water-wagon
this evening, but by an orderly--the mud prevented wheel-traffic. I was
just sitting down to read it when Fritz began to pay us too much
attention. I put down your letter, grabbed my steel helmet, rushed out
to see where the shells were falling, and then cleared my men to a safer
area. (By the way, did I tell you that I had been made Right Section
Commander?) After about half an hour I came back and settled down by a
fire made of smashed ammunition boxes in a stove borrowed from a ruined
cottage. I'm always ashamed that my letters contain so little news and
are so uninteresting. This thing is so big and dreadful that it does not
bear putting down on paper. I read the papers with the accounts of
sing