Original Letter
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
Charley Holmes
- About Quarter Master Sergeant Charles B. Holmes
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bath
- Note
- Desmond Morton, in When Your Number’s Up, tells us that
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.
Either Ross is not being completely frank with Mary or he was lucky, since he seems to have had more pleasant experiences with bathing than the average soldier as described by Morton.
Source: Desmond Morton, When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (Toronto: Random House, 1993), 145. - Contribute to the Project
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