Letter XXI

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October 18th, 1910

Dearest M.:

I've come down to the lines to-day; to-morrow I go back again. I'm sitting alone in a deep chalk dug-out--it is 10 p.m. and I have lit a fire by splitting wood with a bayonet. Your letters from Montreal reached me yesterday. They came up in the water-cart when we'd all begun to despair of mail. It was wonderful the silence that followed while every one went back home for a little while, and most of them met their best girls. We've fallen into the habit of singing in parts. Jerusalem the Golden is a great favourite as we wait for our breakfast--we go through all our favourite songs, including Poor Old Adam Was My Father. Our greatest favourite is one which is symbolising the hopes that are in so many hearts on this greatest battlefield in history. We sing it under shell-fire as a kind of prayer, we sing it as we struggle knee-deep in the appalling mud, we sing it as we sit by a candle in our deep captured German dug-outs. It runs like this:

    "There's a long, long trail a-winding
    Into the land of my dreams,
    Where the nightingales are singing
    And a white moon beams:

    There's a long, long night of waiting
    Until my dreams all come true;
    Till the day when I'll be going down
    That long, long trail with you."

You ought to be able to get it, and then you will be singing it when I'm doing it.

No, I don't know what to ask from you for Christmas--unless a plum pudding and a general surprise box of sweets and food stuffs. If you don't mind my suggesting it, I wouldn't a bit mind a Christmas box at once--a schoolboy's tuck box. I wear the locket, cross, and tie all the time as kind of charms against danger--they give me the feeling of loving hands going with me everywhere.

God bless you.
Yours ever,
CON.