Date:
Recipient:
Location:
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1st RWF
BEF
December 10, 1915
My dear Eddie
I have just got Georgian Poetry and your last letter: I was waiting for the book to arrive before I answered the letter that promised it. I am tremendously grateful as I have been without fresh books for a long time now and at a very loose end in the evenings in this dull little place, for we're here for two months, we are promised, training in open fighting about thirty miles behind the line in the Somme department: our battalion has been given the compliment of being made the divisional training school. It's great to know that we won't have any trench-work for so long and that we'll have Christmas out and can be sure of living and keeping well till February at least.
Congratulations on getting that job with Asquith: it must be a great relief to know that you're pulling your weight again after totting about in that stagnant Duchy business.
This battalion, for a change, is full of delightful people: the CO is a brilliant soldier called Minshull Ford whom we all worship, a man of immense technical and practical knowledge, and a very kindly, tactful person who doesn't grouse.
The younger officers are an exceptionally nice lot and I'm very cheered with life. Siegfried Sassoon is here and sends his affectionate remembrances: a very nice chap but his verses, except occasionally, don't please me very much.
That reminds me about the verses Monro forwarded to you. It's very unfair. My father has again played me false: I especially charged and adjured him to do nothing with the copy he'd got until I'd picked out what I wanted to keep and put these few to a thorough examination and revision. It makes me hot with shame to think what crude miscarriages you've got there of mine. I am angry. Please forget you've seen them at all until I send you a revised version. Please!
Yes, I wrote to Arthur Parry, a sort of cheero! letter the other week but was not quite sure if his battalion was the 8th or the 9th RB so I expect it's been wandering about the Pas-de-Calais in a vague way for some time.
The country is lovely round here, actually hilly! Around La Basee the nearest approach to a hill was the canal bank or the sides of a mine crater.
I don't know what this mobile training is leading up to, whether it's the Spring Push, as they say, or whether we'll be sent to some other war theatre like Egypt, Serbia or Mesopotamia. I don't really care so log as we're lucky enough to avoid the trenches in January.
We were up at Festubert the other day. The state of the trenches there made me think a little.
I only hope all these rumours of riots and quarrels in Boscheland are true: we all feel much more optimistic now and have at least a sporting chance of coming safe through the whole ''lot, we think. Golden après-la-guerre seems appreciably nearer now. '
I'm glad you liked my old father. He's a man who's never made an enemy in his life and I firmly believe hasn't committed the smallest peccadillo since he was my age, and has worked like a black m beastly surroundings for years and years though hopelessly dreamy and unpractical and absent-minded. I do admire him even when he's most hopelessly and pathetically wrong-minded.
Well, au revoir.
Robert
You are a brick, Eddie
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