Transcription

B. E. F.

6. 9. 16.

(rec 12 9 16)

My dear Family,

I have lots of letters to thank you all for, in fact from the whole billing including little G. from the far Equator, also various papers & photographs, which I was very glad to get. I was accosted to-day in the march by one Tucker who seems to live in High St. & be one of Fathers pals though I don’t know him myself.  Anyhow we had a short & sweet discourse about the old homeland & were interrupted by a heated Traffic Control officer who was most indignant with the Battalion Transport for shipping up his road, & did not meet again as I had to go & see to it. I was at the moment examining

[page]

some guns, which had been taken earlier in the show from the Bosch.  there were about a dozen of them, all from Liege or Russian, which I suppose the Bosch had captured earlier on.  They are all badly smashed up, evidently by the Hun himself, so they are now lying in a by road behind.  We have our backs to the enemy at the moment and are out of the line for a bit.  The Rt. Hon. Erbert Enery Asquith was mucking about this morning & has by this time probably blown himself up with a bomb or been blown up by a shell – this is no place for globe trotters.  Everyone is much pleased with Cecily’s poem which had not penetrated to our

[page]

far off clime.  I am quite sure it is not sung in the trenches as I have never heard anyone sing anything there, though someone did come across a fellow playing a mouth organ to himself in a shell hole where he had been for some hours waiting for help as he couldn’t get out himself.  Our Doctor has a story of an Irish soldier he tied up, who was very tired of things. He had gone in to a show determined to bag a Bosch, which he did & was bringing him back when somebody else who didn’t like Bosches, abolished him, so he had to go back & get another & then when on his way back with the second, he got hit himself & someone else took off with his Bosch again.  He appears to be quite convinced that he would have been allowed to take him back to Ireland.