A DELHI
BOY WRITES
HOME FROM FRANCE
Mrs. Wilbur H. Whitside of Delhi
received the following letter from her son, Lieut. Roy Whitside,
now at the front in France.
My Dear Mother, -- A letter from
you came in today, before I posted my letter written yesterday, so
I'm sending them both together.
I can't tell you where we are
now, but I can tell you that we did hold the line at Ypres for a
while. You did make a fair guess in your letter though.
Young Dick Quance came in to see
me a few days ago. Everything is going along all right and I am
very well. Murray and I managed to get a bath yesterday,
which
is quite an event here.
Ernie McKay has, I hear, gone
back to Canada to do instruction work. He has been here a year and
was very lucky.
There is no news at all that I
can tell you except things are going well with us, and the Bosche
seems to lose heart easily when he is anything near beaten. The
one thing he seems to do without fail when you get near him is to
throw up his hands and say, "Merci, comrade I Nix bomb!"
My job as works officer is to
have charge of all the construction work done by the battalion;
building trenches, dugouts, drains, etc., and I plan all the work
parties which have from two to 200 men, each day. If a Bosche
shell blows down our parapet I have to repair it, and all that
sort of thing.
The socks you sent are all right,
and I am always very glad to get them, for even if I don't need
them somebody always does. Some socks came in today. Thank you and
please thank Mrs. Smith, I will write her myself, and would be
very glad indeed to have her send some for the men. They are
always short.
I have been through some of the
old German dugouts today which are really quite wonderful. One had
a suite of rooms 30 feet underground, diningroom, bedrooms,
kitchen and servants' quarters. Electric light, big leather
chairs, polished table and a real live kitchen range. It has an
inscription on the door saying it took nine months to build and
would take nine years to get them out of it. They were a bit off
on the last half, all right. Give my love to all.