Dear Aubrey,
Dinna forget28 you, never could. While the homefront is seeing recruitment slowing down, Canada is still seeing soaring numbers. Big news: the 2nd Division, commanded by Boer War Victoria Cross recipient hero, Major-General R.E.W. Turner, arrived on September 13th. This means the “Canadian Division” has ceased to exist. The Canadian Expeditionary Force, or the Corps, has been created. However, English units are still attached to the 1st Division for guidance.
The commanders are quite stringent about regulations and authority. Slowly but surely, army discipline is improving up and down the lines.
Duty requires a Tommy to be at the front for four-six days, then rotate to support trenches for another four-six days. In the support area, we are made to take ammunition, supplies, and the like to the very front lines. After this, one is away from the front for four days or so for drill and instruction, work, and leisure in abandoned areas a few miles behind the lines. We usually co-habit with livestock in the barns. Horses fare better care than us chaps because horses are harder to come by. Switching companies of chaps in the front trenches and in the rear is done during nighttime for safety. This is one of the uttermost dangerous tasks of the effort.
Where we reside is called the trenches, but that is a formidable overstatement. Ditches without a rubbish or a sewage removal sytem is a more accurate description. Putrid is not a strong enough word for the odor that eminates in these areas. One can, at times, hardly bear to be in the trenches for this reason, and I write with certainty that every mate who has been in these areas will remember the smell of the front for the rest of his days. Numerous fellows have gangrene or cholera. The trenches are now deeper, at about two metres, and are still quite narrow, although they are narrow for a purpose: to minimize eruptions overhead from impacting those in the trenches.
The evening brings all home29 to the trenches, but during a smash, casualties will crawl back to the safety of our trenches and will be injured further by the lads who are yet attacking. The cries of these boys never seem to leave you. In the trenches, clean air is positively non-existant, given chaps are beneath the earth. Come wintertime, the British have already informed us it will always be frigid at the front. I will, of course, refuse to wear trousers in wintertime, too. Those trousered units! The kilted units make fun of them. An inordinate amount of time is spent filling proper sandbags, which we now have atop the trenches, and maintenance on parapets; every able-bodied chap is required to do eight hours of labour per day. Behind the lead trench, three to four backup trenches are taking form. While digging the new trenches, we’ve been singing “Miles and Miles Behind the Lines.”
“We’ve got a sergeant-major
Who’s never seen a gun
He’s mentioned in dispatches
For drinking privates’ rum
And when he sees old Jerry
You should see the begger run
Miles and miles and miles behind the lines”
Leather boots disintegrate all the time in the wallow. This grievance simply doesn’t stop. Chatts multiply beyond belief and all over kilts and trousers, though they make jolly bunk mates. Every infantry lad in warfare history has had chatts, and now I understand this.
I would say daily portions are sufficient; we usually have biscuits with honey and jam, corn-beef and bread, tea, evaporated vegetables, cheese, and bacon. However, others say rations are too small and those mates are consistently famished. But bread, milk, coffee, and butter can be purchased from the farm people. Cigarettes are given out weekly. At least at breakfast time, there are agreements, by each army all down the lines, of a ceasefire during the serving and eating of the meal. This includes the wagons that bring the food. However, if a senior officer becomes aware of the agreement, he attempts to have it stopped.
At daybreak, and right before dusk too, there is often times a chance of an assault because the opposing army would have to counterattack in broad daytime, though at least both sides are always on guard this way, and there is rarely an assault at dawn. Once this is over, inspection happens, then breakfast, and the daily rum portion is given out. All the lads are given a daily two-ounce tot of rum. Rules are a Tommy has to have an officer for company in order to be allowed rum; however, some officers are teetotallers and do not permit their troops to drink at all. These troops receive lime juice and pea soup instead. Rupert tried his first shot of rum. He fainted and was taken away on a stretcher. I tried my first tot, met the same fate, and was carried away as well. We both missed the next stand to and were given latrine duty again. If our fathers knew we had been drinking, they would be glad to have us shot at.
Playing jolly baseball games, reciting poetry, and performing musicals above all are the most fancied hobbies of the Corps. That our officers partake in baseball games with us regulars, and partake in the name-calling too, has the English standing aside the playing fields looking on in bafflement. They do not understand how officers and privates chum around with each other, go on leave, or take meals together.
Because the recently published Anne of Green Gables is so favoured in Canada, it has been distributed in the trenches to read.
Brother clasp the hand of brother stepping fearlessly through the night30. This line reminds me of the other evening, when Rupert was leaving the front for rotation. He saw brother boche from across No Man’s Land and threw over a sweet from his last care package. Brother boche, jolly with his gun, thanked him with a smile and a small nod. A Lieutenant-Colonel watched the whole thing, became frightfully cross towards Rupert, and cursed him with latrine duty.
“Jack Johnsons,” after the Yankee boxer or high explosives, are endless. So too are “Whiz-bangs.” These are shrapnel shells. You can tell which one is flying towards you by their sound. A chap either bobs his head down or holes up against the side of a trench, depending.
After any given scrap, there is usually a flag raised in agreement, and both sides help with burying the other’s deceased. When not our prisoners, Germans can be trusted as stretcher-bearers.
News is that Newfoundland suffered the first death in their ranks this September, a twenty-one-year-old Pte. Hugh McWhirther. He was shelled by the Turks shortly after they landed in Sulva Bay, in the Gallipoli Peninsula. The first of our lads, four of them, were killed off the Chilean coast in the battle of Coronel, back in November of last year. They were the first English Canadians to die in battle in this war.
As of to-day, troops cannot obtain permission to pay for a discharge, and wives can no longer prevent their husbands from joining future divisions. As you most likely know, troops can now be granted harvest leave, though neither Rupert nor I will be going back this fall. But don’t take fright, it can’t be long before we return.
There is not a lot else going on at the moment so I will write my goodbye,
Briarch.