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Materials > Readings > Currin Letters |
World War I Letters of W.J. Currin
W.J. "Hike" Currin attended Denison University in Ohio, was a student of literature (classical and modern), and was very active on campus, especially as a member of the Dramatics (a theater group). He seems to have stood out most as a writer: one fellow student claimed that he "edited everything that needed editing" on campus. Currin graduated Denison in 1913, and was settling into a new job as a low-level reporter for a minor Ohio newspaper when the war broke out. Because the U.S. didn't enter the war until much later, Currin determined to go to Canada to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force. What follows are excerpts from the letters he wrote to two women during the war.
March 14, 1914
Uncle Sam, I am going to Chicago this coming Summer and if you do not help me to get a job out in the open somewhere where I can hear the birds and see the flowers and the green grass and the blue sky I will not own you for my uncle. I am tired of sitting on a three-legged stool just a cub reporter for a penny paper. I want to live my life in all its largeness and its fullness and its joy.
September 30, 1914
Dear Lily,
Here goes my last stamp -- and my last chance to use it, too. In a few hours the pilot we have on board gets off, an escort of British war ships picks us up and -- if nothing unexpected happens -- we're off for England: about fifteen big liners, transports, and some thirty thousand infantry and artillery with the latter's horses. This my friend L.B., this is life!
Salisbury Plains, November 13, 1914
Dear Lily,
I read your letter in sections out on a route march with the guns the morning it came. Please tell S -- for me that I decidedly am not a 'wild, sweet spirit.' If he could listen to me cursing reveille at 6:00 am, just before plunging out of a wet, floppy tent into eight and a third inches of mud, he'd change his opinion. Wait a minute, I'll take part of that back: let the 'wild' part stand -- why, we don't even wash for four days at a time and go about covered with mud and horse hair until we look like fifth century hermits just come out of our caves.
What do you think of it all? I'm not ready to give a permanent opinion yet. Just now civilization seems like a skin deep grafting tied onto one by easy-thinking, quill-driving theorizers who would get along without too much honest work or thought. Playing lady's maid to a couple of war horses works havoc with one's finer nature.
Heard of R.A.'s wounds and the healing thereof. That sort of thing must be nice. Personally, I'm just a plain soldier of the king -- God send him victories! -- and will probably have to die unsoothed and unshriven both when my time comes. In the meantime, I am,
WJC
Flanders, undated, 1915
Dear Lily,
This comes from the kitchen table of a French farmer's house with Monsieur et Madame et les enfants occupying all the space around it that I am not, drinking caf้ and something-or-other, talking Flemish French to me and French Flemish to each other and doing it all at once, simultaneously, Professor McKibben would observe.
I'd tell you where we are but I suppose you'd see merely the censoring smudge of official disapproval -- anyway we've been here a week, half a dozen miles back of the firing line, and very probably by the time you read this we'll be on that said firing line.
Nearly everyone is quite stolid about it, though. We do our horses and make our little marches, and I suppose will go and be shot at or buck 'em. We might have been doing it since Caesar's fall by Pompey's statue. Sometime in the blessed Pax Brittanica that is to follow this little flurry I'll tell you about all this. Now I must go feed my stamping steeds, then myself.
WJC
Flanders, April 30, 1915
Dear Lily,
I am writing this on a cannon in the midst of the first battle I have ever seen -- was sent back to the ammunition columns about an hour ago with some others to get shells for one of the divisions, but no one has come for them yet -- in the meantime I'll wield the pen instead of the sword.
Two words will tell the story of everything we've done since I wrote last -- digging trenches. It is beastly work. Yesterday this fair France land was prinking in the sunlight, putting on most marvelous garments -- pink and gray and green and gold -- today one can't see through the smoke; the ground is trampled into mud a foot deep; bullets are popping merrily; men dropping like flies. Everywhere around me as I write noise and dust and dirt and confusion and tomorrow -- the first of May.
WJC
Flanders, September 24, 1915
[Printed at top of page: 1st. Do not mention your work, battalion, brigade, or the names of places; 2nd. Do not mention expected operations, movements, or number of troops; 3rd. Do not mention casualties nor make reference to the moral or physical condition of the troops. Directly under this Currin writes:]
My Dear Miss Sefton:
I suppose you have returned to your school duties. The south is a beautiful place -- you must love it very much. Our army is still in the same place and we are having a pleasant time drilling and caring for our dear equine companions. The enemy, too, are in the same place. When we have ammunition we shoot at them. They often shoot back at us. Once they killed one of our men. I was very sad, but I must not talk about sad things. I hope you are well. I am well.
Very truly,
William J. Currin
That, my friend, is an ideal letter from the front -- keep it! Nothing said that might prejudice outsiders against army life -- no hint of what one might do with a change of air -- a statement of personal excellent health -- a proper show that the soldier is not bored by the simple life of the army in the field.
As for the details of this excursion, it's all mud and muck and would, in the common phrase, drive an angel to drink. Most of our angels go without driving, by the way, you can't blame them much either; but it's a horrible thing to watch six feet of animate clay working along brainlessly because its stomach is filled with booze. These blooming Germans have no hearts at all. A few weeks back, after several days' hard marching and digging, we settled down for the night in a place that we knew was proof against their guns. What did the beggars do but start the gas. We stood it for awhile but had to move on about daybreak. I thought when I wakened first I was back in Willie's recitation room with you and Brummie below concocting the vile smells you used to send up there. Every once in a while when George Rex and his government declare war on a new suburb of Europe they come around with requests for all men who know its lingo to come up and be interpreters. Soft job! Why didn't I learn Turkish and Serbo and Yiddish in school instead of babbling with Horace
?
WJC
Flanders, ?, 1915
Dear Edith,
It's a rumor -- I ain't a shiver! Thank the Lord they've moved us off the Plain and billeted us in villages and empty old manor houses that my lord Thingamabob and my lady Old-what's-her-name have been trying to rent for the last century or so, and are glad to let in this fashion to us and get gracefully out of the struggle. After us they're due to be made over into government parks, very likely, and my lords and ladies will be well rid of their ancestral estates.
Ah! Good old Samuel Taylor C. -- In those days he could scribble boring answers to the soldiers' fond folks and be remitted a portion of the penalty of his sins. Now the soldiers can all write -- confound 'em! -- and the industry in amanuensis is fallen on slender times. Wherefore we raise the question, "Why is a college man a soldier when they can't find enough bricklayers to line the Panama Canal?"
Really, now, y'know, it is droll -- the army. Oh, a shocking, comical thing the Canadian Volunteer army 'tis now. But just the same we'll be off to that doubtful and variable place, the front, they say shortly, and there will maintain worthily the glorious traditions of the Empire, etc., etc.
In the meantime we're happy in a real house with walls and a fire in it, and a hour or so's walk, trot, and gallop every day to exercise the horses. As for the dubious front, they've stopped all passes for me to visit their homes -- and that speaks louder than many speeches from the General Officer. Commanding upon discipline, glory, and why don't we see our pay oftener than we do.
Hang it, though, I was up to go to Scotland, way up in the Highlands, for a week with some old friends of my maternal grandmother's, and the "no-pass-getting-ready-for-France" stuff has knocked that in the head. If I hadn't a clear crime sheet so far I'd run for it, I think, and join a Highland crowd instead of coming back. It's -- in part -- only the motion of never getting another chance before my er -- glorious end, to wear those supports of society, trousers, ornaments taboo to Highlanders, that keeps me from it.
Consider: Lancelot Gobbs in service uniform, driving whip in hand, with his untarnished record on the one hand and a vista of Ben Nevis and Loch Lomard (where I was for going by the way) on the other:
"Budge," says the friend, and "budge not" says the blank crime sheet.
"If I budge," say I to myself, my clear sheet is clearly made unclear, and my virtue gone. Lo, am I damned.
"If I budge not, I shall surely die without sight of the bonnie hills of Scotland, and that were worse than to be damned. Beside thou mayest in any case be damned hereafter, and there -- oh, to be doubly damned!"
"By all means, budge, and risk one damnation," says the friend. "Pluckup a heart, and take a chance!"
"Remember," cautions the white crime sheet, "remember that discretion is still the better part of valour, and stand fast. Besides the Germans may not shoot straight, and thou mayest come back, and for thy budging then loose a good conduct medal and the one hundred dollar standing offer made by the city of Toronto. Surely, it were better to stop where thou art. Have a care friend."
And so poor Gobbs Currin, No. 15793 Canadian Overseas Ex. Force, stoppeth in the middle of the road, with 'is two feet wetted by the mud, and considereth the respective calls of duty and pleasure.
May the best man win! Amen.
Honest, it's a ___ life. Oh, to be a soldier, and a khaki coat to wear. In the words of the prophet (it being time for lights out),
Goodnight,
WJC
Flanders, April 30, 1915
Dear Edith,
Just a line this afternoon to have you know I'm still here and did read your letter. Glad. So you have motor rides and manage to keep pleasantly stimulated, then? That's well, dear friend. A little gentle excitement of some sort is an excellent thing. If you want to know -- I've been more interested in the fact that spring has definitely come and the elm trees all out in thin green leaf, with white blossoms in the plum trees, than I've been in all the war I've seen so far. And for a solid week now we haven't seen a lot else. The Germans advanced one night, shifted us out from place in the line, and we've been hammer, hammer ever since, with slight let ups. Then after five days of shelling and carting ammunition to the guns thru shelling from the other side. Heaven be unkind to 'em! -- and as many nights spent standing by our horses ready to pull out at a word, I woke up all at once and saw that we were in the delicate soft spring we had wanted so extraordinarily in last winter's mud and cold rain, and waited for so long. It had been here for days and I hadn't seen it!
Well! The smashing drilling of gunfire makes a bigger racket than the sprouting elms, but the elms last longer.
Have all the motor rides you can. Like shrapnel, they're good for restlessness. And motors are rather cheaper at that.
Sincerely,
WJC
Flanders, June 12, 1915
Dear Edith,
I have a shrinking memory of a letter by you written to me (sure) never answered. If it were possible that I had, accept this as a first entry [and] credit [the] new account -- but I know better. Why trifle with my better self and stifle conscience with prevarication -- I might end by not ending this?
This at it's most will be a scratch, a scrawl, or scribble, done to appear hastily composed, and to convey to the reader's ear regret for the hard fate of the writer, languishing so far from all that know and love. (I'm 'most done with this letter now! So are you very likely). But let it stand for a message from the firing line whatever that means to you, something different from what we know it to be, I roughly guess. You are to understand I have not yet taken any bullets, odd chunks of shrapnel, nor any portions of that charming gas, chlorine, so handily distributed by our friends of the grey-drab uniform, into my unperverted system -- in spite of sundry rumors industriously invented by my nearest, dearest and best at home for sometime, till I heard of the practice and issued several hundred official denials. I hope no one still lingers on trustfully in the belief -- holding what should be must be! -- for I dislike to disappoint people and eventually the truth will out, of course.
Today is Sunday and we celebrate high mass to Mars on a grumbling cacophony of gunfire since midnight last night. And then the brave ___ up a few more rounds, and discretely retire before the enemy has half a chance to get any of 'em.
Upon retiring, as above indicated, we sit in the sun, read the London "Graphic," and even here inevitable "Sat. Eve. Post" and a volume of R.L. Stevenson's letters we found in an abandoned cottage once. I thanked God for that good luck. I hadn't read that particular volume before.
We have Geo. Fitch with us, too, in the American Magazine for May and laugh at Cupid vs. Geography. This still in the sun. But when it rains it's deuced uncomfortable, that's flat, and I wish I were in a decent town in a pacific republic -- somewhere you guess there's still one left -- and had an umbrella over me! An umbrella -- Lord!
Hush -- enough of this chatter. I must go take a load of cannon-food up to the guns. They're still playing the deuce up there (afternoon now) and require a little stoking to carry on. We're the stokers of this engine -- so away we go, and I have the pleasure of writing myself,
Sincerely,
The Patient Shell-heaver,
WJC
Flanders, July 17, 1915
Dear Edith,
July 2nd was my natal day all right, but I'm darned if I knew it had happened till it was all over and July 3rd's sun was shining. Which seeing, I bethought myself, and said, "Young man, art aware 'tis a New Year's sun?" and answered myself surprisedly, "Aye, lad, aye."
Whir-r-r-r-oo! I'm a quarter of a century old and not killed yet. Brethren, let us gather around and hope for the best.
Thank'y for the picture, Miss Philbrook. I didn't know ye at first. Neither did I know my own sister. I haven't seen you, I think, for quite a time, but do you resemble your picture, friend?
Your picture dropped out before I read what you had to say to me, and I thought, "Humph, she has sent me a class re-union group of 1912."
So then I read your letter (I'm glad you saw my sister and think her amiable) and looked at the picture again and turned it over and set myself down to see if it were true. I can see my sister now, but I do not know Miss Edith Philbrook, if the lady in white next to her (read sister) is she.
You are two drolly competent people, if there ever such people, and I wish you were in charge of the war. But -- I look at your bran-new picture alongside my sister on the Shepardson grass, and, oh, I have my doubts about your examining statistics of English literature into silly (or stupid) high school noodles quite indefinitely. Certainly, surely, you will not? Oh, come on out to the war!
Hang it, Edith M. Philbrook, teacher of English etc., in Illinois somewhere, why do you sit there by the three other Misses of '12 and look so "darned" different, while they are exactly the same? Have you adopted a theory? Are you going to assassinate somebody (Mr. Bryan for a good start and no offence)? You've the newest, strangest glint of "something doing" in your bran-new face, and I'm curious what it's all about. Something must be up. What is it? For heaven's sake get someone to flick another kodack at you and let me see if this is for keeps.
Well, it's getting rainy, dark, and I've been sitting here scribbling this nonsense to you till I've a cramp in my leg, now doubled under me in the likeness of a figure eight. If I don't get up now I'll likely perish on the spot and be buried here. And I wish to see your other -- newest -- picture yet.
I post this, go down into the horse lines and rub the two cold noses of my two rained-upon horses, return presently to my sheltering and detestable shack of sacking, rubber sheet, and wire, get into my two grey blankets and go to sleep. Another dollar ten!
Yours,
WJC
P.S. -- Our wage is, daily, 1.10 cents. Compris?
Flanders, September 26, 1915
My Dear Miss Philbrook,
Just a few lines in answer to your most ever welcome letter witch the Yanke received last night. He was very pleased to find you were enjoying the best of health as it leaves him at present. The reason why I am writing to you is Yanke is too lazey. He is in bed reading. He is very tired because he was out nearly all last night. But he could not have been very tired when he got in at two o'clock this morning and sat down and read your letter before he went to bed. And another thing, he hasn't shaved for four days. He looks like a Russian-Jew with his black beard and hasn't washed for two days. Believe me he is about the laziest around here except myself, but I can't be very lazy or I would not be writing to you. I like to see a letter answered as soon as possible because you are always looking for an answer soon after you write, but you won't receive an answer for a month if you wait for him. There are three of us in a dug-out. We took sand-bags and built the walls. We got them up so high & they fell in on us so we put them up again. We were putting the other side up when a fellow came and sat on the edge of them. Down they came again; he also came in with them, so we are all good hearted. We did not make him put them up so we started again. It is finished now but they may fall down any minute. But Yanke is on that side [where] the bags have a drop of five feet so if one falls on him when he is asleep he might accidentally wake up, but it won't kill him. Well it is getting pretty late so I must close. The Yanke hoping to hear from you soon.
I remain yours,
Sincerely,
H. Vine
Flanders, November 8, 1915
My dear Edith,
Never again will I use an amanuensis -- that already feminine intuition is too quick for comfort. In the concise tongue of the metropolitan back alley, "don't kid yourself" for it was a bad hunch. I'm neither slain nor yet seared to the point of illness nor has there happened anything else to disquiet one's self with. Is that explicit enough? Not a blessed scratch and very small chance, I think, of that sign of the sure-'nough hero. I'm not lucky and never could endure to tote a rabbit's foot.
"H. Vine" was in a writing stretch that night, and I was certainly not. Therefore -- . But I'll not be careless, again, no, not if you never have a letter from Flanders.
Well, this has nothing to do with the fact that it's nine o'clock and by the same token bedtime. Better luck to your next guess!
Yours,
W.J. Currin
Flanders, December 29, 1915
Dear Edith,
A line or so to confess having had your letters of Nov. 1 and Dec. 6 and regretting that circumstances and my natural habit make this the sort of answer you get.
Who said "pomes"? Certainly this excursion into manual labor provoketh no muse to rise in me. Who shall sing the glory of mud or tell the valor of men who live therein -- and do little else? And if there should be uncertain star for us, who am I to make recital of its shining for the easy interest of tame folk who stop at home? That is how I should like to answer a request received tonight from one C.H. Read of Baum Boulevard, Pittsburgh -- how the deuce could one live in a place with such a name? -- stating that "our class letter will be published about Feb.1 and you should give us a very interesting letter." Indeed! Give him a dime to buy bread with if he were starving, maybe -- but tell him and other tame folk what I am given to know and feel?
And if I told him that they would shrug their lack of interest and forget all about it before the next time to go to a restaurant for their dinner.
Moral: When convinced of the value of your prophetic mission in this life, buy twine to stop your mouth and don't unsew it for 100 years. And dig to the dirt for your own potatoes. Hang the rest of the world. They wouldn't know what was in your most prophetic "pomes" if they bot 'em, once they were read.
Do you know the first poems of the war -- to shift to fact for a minute -- written in French, by one of those Frenchmen whose conduct in this war is the model for all and is approached by few -- make a thin little volume not "big" enough to be called a book, and appeared only the other week? French critics compare them to Whitman's, by the way.
The English -- what old pope was it, according to the tale, who seeing the first captives of that folk, fair-haired and blond in Rome, said "non Angli sed Angeli?" -- well, Angeli cantant nihil, either, and the more they find they have to "do," organize, fight with science, fetch out of it all a real victory of endeavor and conscious fortitude, the jolly well less they will sing about it. Even those strangely materialist-sentimental people, the Germans, seem to vapour not so much now when they come to see the gravity of the thing they started so lightly and so arrogantly, which is to say blindly.
Moral No. II (of all this vapouring) -- When you've really something to say you don't say it. Or, out of empty heads cometh a multitude of words. I desire to spare words -- do you believe it? -- is the inference sufficiently clear? In any case, pome me no pomes and expect no pomes from me.
So you went to Paris and returned? Truly an event dear friends. Permit me to offer my felicitations, and upon the rest of your Victrola-amused generation.
Pardon in me that savagery, please. But, oh, the "great American pee-pul" would so blessed well do with some savagery of the sort. Will they, like Britain, require to be quite taken by the throat before they realize that they form part of the world, as well as of that extremely provincial territory, the United States of America! I suppose so. The British were only thirty miles from Europe, but they wouldn't have it other than that removed them there from as far as Heaven itself. And how ludicrous they were when they woke up to the situation as it was.
I see you write to my sister. You are become, so, a friend of the family, a doubtful honour enough. I trust it will not tire you. I detest rising similarities to myself in that sister, do you know, and have the grace to feel shame and sorrow over my own idiotic (and lengthy) adolescence. What oddities are done in thy name not for thy fame, oh gourd-headed youth! Be thankful thankful that L.B.S. takes my brother off any one else's hands! He is a real lad, that, and I find that I like him. Or I think I do. Perhaps everything is a delusion.
Scene: Billet in tents on Belgian frontier. Drivers and gunners in Canadian Field Artillery service going, or gone, to bed, wooden, hard therefore, and none too wide, four about a tent-pole. W.J.C., an unknown prophet, seated on edge of his bed, scribbling in a small note book rough and uneven lines, by the light of three stubs of candles, arranged in line before the notebook. Notebook and candles are placed on a bit of board held upon his knees.
Coats of various degrees of wetness, cleanness, and size hang upon tent-pole in center. They are all khaki. Upon the other side of the pole the heads of two beds run into the shadow. Rounded clumps of grey blankets show the beds are occupied. A bit of straggly moustache (King's Rule and Regulation No. DCVIII) of indeterminate color sticks from under the blanket of the third bed. The blanket rises and falls periodically as the occupant inhales and exhales a cloud of smoke from the end of a ragged cigarette.
Outside it rains. To anyone thrusting his head outside of the tent for an instant the darkness appears quite black; relieved in one direction by momentary flicker of paleish light, apparently falling at a slow rate from an uncertain point above the horizon, and "going out" as it falls, That way lie the trenches of the first infantry line.
An unsteady, faintly yellow blur of light upon the night, near at hand, as it moves hardly throws into relief the shadowy lines of blanketed horses, though which a night picket is passing. The horses move restlessly under the gradually roughening wind and rain.
Upon the left, a certain distractness of shadow suggests the shoulder of a hill rising to an inconsiderable height. Dim blobs of luminosity probably come from partly shuttered windows in houses at the top. An obscure projection of the shadow in a sort of line over the rest of the hill represents a row of tall Flemish elms, with bushy, leafless tops, following the road or village street.
The only noise is a kind of hum arising from all the tents in the billet, which refuses resolution into it's elements: Occasionally a snatch of English comic song or American-Canadian dime lyric makes itself heard.
Some tents glow dully, seen from the outside, with the light of the candles burnt within. Others are simply cones of shadow, of which an observer is scarcely able to determine the size and height. On all of these the rain is blown gustily. Some with grey ropes not properly tightened flop or seem to sway uncertainly under the force of the wind.
Act I Scene I, Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
It really would not be so hard -- but who wants to make even "prose pomes" when you're the chap inside the "bally tent," scribbling with the three candles guttering in front of you and blown upon from without by the dull spite of the obstinate winter rain season?
No, no, kind friend at home, it's too moving a picture of your own misery to be comfortable doing. So leave it at this and be content with knowing you have actually hereby had more words written to you than I've strung together to any (1) girl (2) fellow, or (3) relative or other friend for the last month and more; certainly more descriptive adjectives than I will think of again "for the duration of the war."
Commentators and bibliographers are free to arrange any theory of this present writer from observation of above given sequence of correspondents.
Anyway, you get a green envelope with this, and that's more than I had intended or rather supposed when I began this "line or two."
My best respects to all the tame people you may know that I have acquaintance with in that land of the free and home of the brave (but too proud to fight?) which I call home.
Yours,
WJC
Flanders, July 24, 1916
Dear Edith,
It's a little later in point of time and that's all the difference I can think of.
[T] he silly war gets on by slow degrees and we still stay in Flanders.
I think I've an engagement somewhere south of the island of Guam when I'm through with Flanders. I've always favored those warm countries, anyway, and resent Flemish rains, cold from the North Sea, the more because of it.
Then onto post; and I tarry not for descriptions of the daisies and dandelions of July in Flanders. They're the same as everywhere else and the grass is merely green.
Yours,
Hike
Flanders, August 10, 1916
Dear Edith,
I enclose copy of one of the "trench journals" put up by some of our infantry shops. You may find some interest in it, or not. I suppose a trench-written and trench-edited thing could have some kind of a handicap start over the Century or Atlantic.
Same old stuff going on with us. If it were not for the newspapers from England you would be justified in imagining there wasn't a war, that the whole thing had died of inanition, that 'twas "nopod" (French patois for all over and thru with) and you could settle here on the soil, marry Marya Vendernenten and plow oats and kill army rats from abandoned trenches till a kind death did supervene -- and never know the difference. However, the newspapers say the war moves elsewhere, and we wait hopefully.
WJC
Flanders, May 30, 1917
Dear Edith,
Brevity is the soul of wit and the main body of most soldier's letters. Lily Bell S. told me a week ago -- or complained shall I have it? -- that I wrote like Charlie Warner. I answered her -- Praise the Lord! Temperature Normal.
I ask everybody I know (not many): "Are you joining the army before they make you draw a long or short match for it!" or "Are you going to be clever Red Cross thing in a dinky uniform and bind up heroic wounds?" Are you, by chance? Come on over -- it's a bee-yooteful life.
Hope you had a good thing out of your play. It's really a great lot of fun. Next year I suppose you will be violently militaristic. I hazard a guess there will still be school keeping next year? Or will those individual garden plots take all the nation's time. Really I'm very curious about what you all do over there for the war. Over three years remember. For every new ally, you know, Fritzie pulls off something new and brainy and brilliant and it lengthens right on out.
In the meantime the weather is of summer, the grass green, and the cannon fodder -- still khaki, of course, and carrying on much as usual. Blighties are dished out occasionally, but none so far for your poor friend,
WJC
Flanders, undated June, 1917
Dear Lily,
Do you know Captain Bruce Bairnefether's cartoons of the British army in France and Flanders? Take them with Raemocker's philosophical cartoons of the war and you have the whole show out here -- the hurt of it -- the fun of it.
As for me personally these days -- and nights -- I labor with pick and shovel. We're a new battery -- did I tell you? -- and are building new gun positions to occupy at some indefinite date. Can't work at it to any extent in the daytime lest Fritz sees what's up. Consequently we do it in the dark; working party goes up front -- say three-quarters of an hour's walk, about eight, nine, ten o'clock in the evening according to the clearness of the weather. We work so aforesaid with pick, shovel, and sandbag till daylight or perhaps a little before if the lieutenant in charge has a heart. Then we pick ourself up and stroll merrily back to billets and beds. Program is sometimes diversified by an occasional short whiz-bang strofe from Fritz which may incline you to think that his sausage balloons have found you out if you're given to worrying over that sort of thing, or it may be illuminated by the beautiful yel-low yel-low moon which shines here just as it does at home (slow music from the violins, please); or it it's the other kind of night, possibly soaked by a pleasant midnight rain. A pick-and-shovel tour of Belgium by night with a cold bath thrown in for luck may be profitable and instructive -- is possibly entertaining enough in children's books of "how they fought the Great War in Yurrope" but it's "damned depressin'" for the troop that's doing the touring. Starting to rain now, by the way, and we're due to make the usual evening march "fo'ard" in about an hour.
Give Uncle Sam my new address and tell him to do it right -- otherwise I'll scalp him with an entrenching tool
and as I seem to be good at dodging bullets and as the blessed old Allies are having a turn, now, some bright morning I may walk into the laboratory and say, "Good-morning, I used to be Hike Currin you know."
I had to stop here last night and go to my favorite pastime of mucking Flanders with a pick. But you get the idea, don't you -- sad, old chap -- a la cigarette (center stage, well down) blowing idle smokepuffs in Fate's face. Home this morning at three. Rain. Mud. Rotten tired.
Tut! Tut! What talk is this of three-years' terms and such things as that? Dae ye nae ken we're in it for guid and will be e'en waitin' here tar its end? And the end, my good friend, verily, verily, the end is not yet.
The job drags L.B., it drags horribly and the active mind turns to the lost images it knew of a different order of life in a little college town. The only common, decent, civilized life I've had a glimpse of for two years and a half now is English -- another two years and a half and I shall know you and your civilization's ways no more -- I've darned near forgotten 'em already.
Flanders, undated, 1917
Dear Lily,
I've only been back over here some three weeks from my
leave in "Blighty." Those cards I sent were as near as I got to correspondence -- one makes very virtuous resolves when he starts on a leave -- I'll go here -- I'll go there -- I'll see this or that.
Does he do any of it? Certainly not; he lands, he rushes to but whatever he needs to live in a civilized manner for ten days (and very likely a lot he doesn't need in a very intoxication of spending) hops into a Turkish bath and proceeds thereto to be scrubbed clean for the first time in several months, to his hotel, his home, or his train, according to his luck. Wherever he goes, it is a mere door to ten-days' of speeding-up. He has paid, and having paid, he naturally enjoys.
The ten days slip by and presently end -- the scenes shift in the cinema -- flicker! flicker! -- Victoria Station -- the leave boat from Folkestone -- the shores of France -- and he is back again.
back to the familiar cook-house and army grub, the "bully-beef" luncheon and half-burnt tea that makes him long bitterly for the flesh-pots -- the dear, delightful flesh-pots -- of "Blighty."
Ichabod! Their savor has departed! His leave is done. He may think of it when he rolls into his blankets in his stable of a night -- but his leave is done.
He is back and the job has him again -- the stupid job of killing men and that by machinery! What an insanity that really is you comprehend only when you have been part of the machine -- insanity and a species of prostitution.
I hope these details of our lives interest you -- they do us, you can bet, just as the Easter hat of a Chemistry teacher interests her. Easter time and Easter frills -- oh, I sigh to rest my eyes on them -- can it be that only three years ago I jeered at them?
I'm writing this in front of a cheerful enough wood fire in a fireplace of chopped and broken bricks that extends up and out to the top of the ground. The room's a cellar, twelve feet by nine and ten feet high, perhaps, smoke blackened and pretty grimy altogether. Others have lived -- and died -- here before us -- others will doubtless live -- and die -- after, and the rats will have company and another fellow will sit and write letters back home and over there you'll keep on planning Easter bonnets -- Lily Bell, does our country -- yours and mine -- not know or does she just not care?
Last Easter Sunday of an early evening, I remember, I walked a beat, with sloped rifle behind the broken red-brick, red-tiled barn that concealed our guns, and watched a visiting chaplain celebrate a shortened Church of England service. Up thirty paces -- thirty paces down -- about turn -- about turn -- thirty paces up and down -- while the little candles glimmered palely against the fresh young grass and new green hedges. Twenty-five khaki backs bent silently as the sun dropped into the trees away behind and the white surplice of the chaplain praying there gleamed less bring each time I'd turn at the end of my beat.
The Easter before I can't remember -- it was just before our first turn at Ypres and we were out for a preparatory march. What we may have this Spring is still to show.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow -- a long round of tomorrows spent in loosing a mercenary trigger at Brother Bosches fighting over the way "Fur Deutschland uber Alles and the Freedom of the Seas." The devil run away with him and his accursed Uber Alles, his Black Crosses, his army, his navy, his submarines -- the Curse of Cromwell, as they say in Ireland upon him and all his House. No, no long paragraphs of pity, please -- it's our life and we're for it, that's all.
Now I must get to work shoveling some more of Belgium into sandbags.
Flanders, undated, 1918
Dear Lily,
[Out among the blackened stumps of trees I spied this morning a daffodil], a straight, sturdy yellow thing disdaining both shelter and support and born apparently of sunrise and of the Spirit of Spring who is abroad this morning. It is good to be alive even with rheumatic arms and legs. I tell you, L.B., that even tho Fritz should put his stamp on me this night, I regret nothing that lies behind -- between me and Granville. It has been Life, and Life, my friend, is not to be despised at any cost.
Two months later, a short notice appeared in the Granville newspaper: "Died of wounds -- W.J. Currin"
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