Original Letter
France 8-10-17
My Dearest Maidie:–
I did get one letter to-day and am all set up about it. The letters make all the difference. Without them this can be an existence très drab, but when they do come, why, its a good old world after all. We are at present very comfortable. Did I tell you yesterday that there is a little river just back of our house? It’s a very narrow and not too dirty little river and well wooded and one can be quite unobserved while washing on the edge of it. This afternoon being urgently in need of a bath and suspecting the presence of toto I went down to la belle rivière and had a good old bath and creosoled my clothes well. It pelted rain all the time but that didn’t bother me at all Now I feel like a new man. I rustled a clean shirt and, of course, had clean socks so I’m really right in town. Taken all around I’ve had a pretty couchy time since I came up here and although I haven’t lived exactly in t he purple I have never had any real hardship. My private opinion is that its a cynch and is much exaggerated. However my dope seems to be good about hitting the long trail in a day or so and I’ll probably get fed then. Baby I love you to distraction and I am just as lonesome for you as I ever was and more so. I keep on pretending as before but it is slim work, isnt it. But everyone seems to be agreed that the end is very near and that it will be over by Christmas. God send it may be as I am sick at heart of being away from you. Why don’t you take me away somewhere, Dear, and keep me and love me – always.Your Own
Ross
little river
- Note
- The little river that runs through Olhain in a photo taken in 2008. (Click on the photo to enlarge.)
photo (c) Phil Playfair, 2008 - Pictures
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creosole
- Note
- Cresols are organic compounds often used as solvents, disinfectants, deodorizers, or insecticides. “Cresol solutions are used as household cleaners and disinfectants, perhaps most famously under the trade name Lysol. ... Cresols are found in many foods and in wood and tobacco smoke, crude oil, coal tar, and in brown mixtures such as creosote ... which are wood preservatives” (Wikipedia).
Presumably what Ross was using was something specifically designed for killing or repelling body lice. The experience of a creosol treatment may have been a bit like dousing oneself in Lysol — not necessarily an entirely comfortable experience, since Wikipedia also notes, “Skin contact with high levels of cresols can burn the skin.” Ross seems to have discovered this, saying in his letter of September 18, 1917 "I am getting the smell of creosole out of my nose but my back is pretty raw."
Source: “Cresol,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cresol, accessed 28 January 2008. - Contribute to the Project
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couchy
- Note
- Although there is no documentation (that we know of) to support Ross’s use of the word couchy in this way (the same is true of his use of greg for grig; see the letter of Sept. 10, 1917), from the context it is fairly clear that Ross is using a variant of the better known cushy, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “Of a post, job, etc.: easy, comfortable, ‘soft’.”
It would be interesting if any documentation of this unusual word use (is it distinctively Canadian? unique to the WWI period? or simply a "Ross-ism"?) could be found.
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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toto
- Note
- The Oxford English Dictionary gives toto as a military slang word — specifically from WWI — for louse. Lice were a huge problem for soldiers in this war. See notes on lousy (letter of Aug. 31, 1917 and others) and creosol (letter of Sept. 3, 1917 and others).
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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dope
- Note
- The Oxford English Dictionary gives dope as “Information, esp. on a particular subject or of a kind not widely disseminated or easily obtained; (a statement of) facts or essential details...”
Several of the OED’s citations for this use of the word are from the WWI era:1914 JACKSON & HELLYER Vocab. Criminal Slang 8, The most popular slang term in use today in the unregenerate world — ‘dope’ ... signifying ‘news’, ‘intelligence’, or ‘meaning’. 1917 A.G. EMPEY From Fire Step 103, I was to send the dope to Cassell and he would transmit it to the Battery Commander as officially coming through the observation post.
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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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
Parades 8.00 A.M. to 12.noon. Afternoon – Route March. Lieut. T.M. TWEED returns from leave.
View complete War Diary »
Photographs
petite rivière:
little river: