Original Letter
France
13th Nov. 17
My Dearest Maidie:–
I haven’t written you for ages and I just feel like rotten hell over it. Our move involved two days and did not involve a billet during that period. I wrote you that we would probably be leaving at 4:00 am. the next morning. It was changed the night before and Reveille was at two o’clock and we shifted at three! Its kind of dreary getting up at two but we had a good breakfast and it wasn’t so very dismal. But it was kind of spooky poking along the road in the dark of the morning. No one feels very chirpy and of course there isn’t any singing or joking much – that comes with the day. Its the first time that I haven’t had time to wash and shave in the morning – nobody had – and I felt incredibly dirty About eleven though we stopped long enough to manger and I had a perfectly good clean up in a bit of a slough. To-night we are back in our previous stamping ground again but not in our own place that we built. We have a little house not quite high enough to stand in just about the size of the washroom in my room at Madame Desdouits. It was all built when we came. It is dug down in the earth like a cellar about three feet and then a wall of sand bags about two feet above that and covered with corrugated iron. The door is a blanket and the little stove has been installed The only disagreeable thing about it is the water. The floor is very marshy and we have it covered with ‘bath mat’ – a slat walk effect – even at that it has to be baled out morning and night and the Sgt. who vacated to-day when we moved in said he had to get up in the night and bale but that was when it was raining To me it looks like a good cosy home. I know that you would die laughing at the places we sleep and live in. But we are all quite seriously pleased at this last place Nobody thinks much of this place but I think that it is great although there are angle worms on our floor three and four inches long. Turkey declares that in a month or two he will turn into a gopher.
Rumour says that we will get mail to-morrow but I can’t think it possible. Always when we move we lose out on the mail proposition. The last letter I wrote I posted in a little Field Ambulance Post Office the morning we left. Our own goes out of action as soon as a move threatens.
I gleaned a bit of dope to-day which may or may not be useful later on. Leave up to eight days in France will not count as a regular leave – I do not know that it is worth anything as anyway I intend trying for fourteen days. But its information. Sweetheart, do you truly love me to-day? – love me, love me, hard? I could enjoy being really loved to-night and babied for I’ve been tramping around for two days and I just want to settle down and be quiet for a good long time. Nice old quiet Louviers! It scarcely seems possible that it really exists. I think of our stay there – our honeymoon – always and I hone for it again often, but always, Dear, I hone for you. Your own
Ross
Louviers
- Note
- A town in France (in a region known as Haute-Normandie — Upper Normandy — which also includes Rouen) where Ross spent his two-week leave with Mary prior to his transfer to the front.
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Turkey
- About Sergeant Lawson Turcotte
- A fellow NCO in Ross’s battalion. Of all the men in the battalion, Turkey seems to have been the one Ross worked with most closely in the course of his duties.
Does anyone have any more information on this person?
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gopher
- Note
- “A name used in North America for many animals which burrow (e.g., pocket gophers, some sousliks, a burrowing tortoise, a burrowing snake, and some salamanders); said to be from the French gaufre, ‘honeycomb’ — a reference to the burrows.”
Ross and Turkey clearly feel that underground living is more suitable for burrowing animals than for people.
Source: Penguin Encyclopedia, rev. 3rd ed., ed. David Crystal (London: Penguin Books, 2006). - 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
In Divisional Support. Occasional shelling and bombing by planes throughout the day. No training possible as ground too congested and moreover too muddy. Working party of 6 Officers and 300 Other Ranks.
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