home comfort from certain passages in his letter that day.
“We're in an old wine cellar tonight, dad,” he wrote, “in water to our knees. Rats everywhere—no fire—a drizzling rain coming down—rather dismal. But it might be worse. I got Susan’s box today and everything was in tip-top order and we had a feast. Jerry is up the line somewhere and he says the rations are rather worse than Aunt Martha’s ditto used to be. But here they’re not bad—only monotonous. Tell Susan I’d give a year’s pay for a good batch of her monkey-faces; but don’t let that inspire her to send any for they wouldn’t keep.
“We have been under fire since the last week in February. One boy—he was a Nova Scotian—was killed right beside me yesterday. A shell burst near us and when the muss cleared away he was lying dead—not mangled at all—he just looked a little startled. It was the first time I’d been close to anything like that and it was a nasty sensation, but one soon gets used to horrors here. We're in an absolutely different world. The only things that are the same are the stars—and they are never in their right places, somehow.
“Tell mother not to worry—I'm all right—fit as a fiddle—and glad I came. There’s something across from us here that has got to be wiped out of the world, that’s all—an emanation of evil that would otherwise poison life forever. It’s got to be done, dad, however long it takes, and whatever it costs, and you tell the Glen people this for me. They don't realize yet what it is that has broken loose—I didn’t when I first joined up. I thought it was fun. Well, it isn’t!
