France.
6th March 1918
My Own Dearest:–
I love you to-day. I think perhaps more than yesterday, my heart’s beating faster anyway. Do you suppose that I would be loving you more? But I could never love you more than I do now. I get waves of love that never subside – and the next one piles on top of it and so on. Last night I went to bed bien early. I have a comfortable bed and I had a book. But the book was poor and despite my comfortable bed I didn’t go to sleep easily. So instead I lay there and had good dreams, mostly about our month that we are going to have. Of course its going to be in the summer and I could like it to be in Ontario. There is a little lake in the Rideau “Sand” lake and it is, I believe the prettiest place I’ve ever seen. We will – so he dreamed – rent a little cottage – there are some beauties and have our month there. This is only one scheme I have had hundreds – all good. But really I do not care where we are just so long as I have you all to myself. I’m a stingy devil when you think it over, I want you all to myself all the time.
To-morrow I am going to ride over to the town we were in last December, with Charley Holmes. It isn’t very far – it wouldn’t need to be, as it is I’ll probably be pretty sore – and it won’t be my feet. There are good baths over there and I need a bath badly.
I didn’t get any letter to-day. Probably that’s the reason I am even more uninteresting than usual. I don’t seem to get over being acutely lonesome. Before I had myself fooled into some sort of a state which I persuaded myself was contentment but now its hopeless. But I love you Dearest and you love me so I should be contented.
Your own Ross qui t’aime toujours
Part of any rest was a bath parade, ideally once a week, sometimes only monthly. Facilities ranged from former breweries with open vats to the elegantly tiled minehead showers near Vimy Ridge [see Ross’s letter of Nov. 25, 1917] where the men were crowded three to a stall. Many baths were housed in prefabricated metal huts where the winter wind whistled and water froze on the duckboards. Rusty nozzles emitted a few minutes of warm water, stopped for men to soap themselves and gushed a few more minutes of cold water, leaving the shivering men to dry themselves with a dirty towel or a flannel shirttail. Medical officers insisted that hot showers would be “enervating.”
“Imagine a watering can with all the holes but three blocked up, spraying tepid water for three minutes in a room without doors or windows, and a cold windy day,” Garnet Durham explained. A detail of men could be processed in thirty minutes. They were soon lousy again. Most baths included a laundry where Belgian refugee women washed, sorted, and sometimes repaired socks, shirts, and underwear. Attendants tossed “clean” clothes to shivering soldiers as they emerged. Sharp-eyed soldiers spotted the larvae that remained in the seams of flannel shirts and woollen drawers. In 1918, when lice were finally identified as the carriers of trench fever, a pair of Canadian medical officers finally had their ideas on effective disinfection adopted, and both baths and disinfection improved.