Original Letter
France. 20th Sept. 1917.
My Dearest Maidie:–
Une autre belle jour is upon us (I know that is rotten French) anyway it’s a grand day. This is a good place. There is a shell hole quite adjacent from which we draw our water supply and in consequence we are clean and sweet. In addition there is a bath quite close and we can get a bath frequently. So far as material comfort is concerned we are mighty well off. But material comfort is a small item I want only to be with you and I can never be comfortable until I am. Last night I had a horrible dream. You were here with me and I thought that we were going to be shelled. I was making frantic ineffectual efforts to get you away, but there you stayed. Fortunately I wakened before anything happened. I have not been dreaming very much lately. I am generally too tired to dream. I suppose that my bed is too comfortable – perhaps too many feathers in my pillow!
I think that I must be very lucky for since I joined on the end of August we have had a snap and our lines have been cast in pleasant places. And so far as work is concerned I have a much easier time than in Rouen. The hours are very uncertain – last night for instance, I was up four times but I find no trouble going to sleep again – a chance is all I need, but I haven’t yet been so comfortable that I am not glad to get up in the morning.
Sweetest of Maidie’s I worship you to-day and I just am in transports over your good little picture. Its great Sweetheart. I have sneaked a little kiss off it on the sly. I want you a lot to-day, Baby
Your own
Ross
a snap
- Note
- The Oxford English Dictionary gives snap as a slang word meaning “A share of something worth securing or getting hold of; an odd chance; a good place or job.” It appears to be the latter meaning that Ross is using.
Source: The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed, prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). - Contribute to the Project
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Rouen
- Note
- Rouen served as a base for the British Army in France. Since the Canadians were under British Command, some of the Canadians' administrative offices were also in Rouen.
Ross was stationed in Rouen from approximately March 1916 to August 1917, at which point he was transferred to the front. It seems that his role in Rouen was an administrative one.
It is unlikely that Mary was with him in Rouen, since enlisted needed to make special requests to be with their wives. We learn in the letter of Nov. 2, 1917, however, that his request to have her stay there was approved — after he was transferred to the front.
See recent photos of Rouen below. (Click on photo to enlarge.)
photos (c) André Morell, 2008 - Pictures
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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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War Diary
Training carried on including wire cutting at night. The Brass Band of 25 pieces arrived from England. Major R.B. EATON left for three months leave to CANADA.
View complete War Diary »
Photographs
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