Feature Letter of July 14th, 2025
Platt, Henry Errol Beauchamp
It is a week since I have been able to write you at home. Time seems to fly past here and one cannot do more than one thing in an evening because the hour for retiring is earlier than in the more complex civilization of cities. So if I can’t sit right down to letter writing after tea I put it off to another evening. You know there is nothing that annoys me more than to have to grab up a pen, scratch a few lines, with love, etc., and then dash off to something else. Perhaps I haven’t the mental energy I should have, but these sudden transitions always leave me with a sense of the incompleteness of everything I have done. One’s aim should be to convey the impression in a letter that it is the one absorbing interest of the moment and that nothing else could possibly supervene. However, I am afraid that the vicissitudes of war may very probably teach me numerous lessons in conciseness and make it necessary no doubt to come back to a letter half a dozen times for each ten lines or so. Well we should worry; every experience has accompanying inconvenience, which in time possibly becomes a very useful habit.
Just at present I am lying full length on my sleeping bag and blankets, which are stretched across the floor of my tent. Clad in a khaki tunic, my old grey flannel trousers (remember) folded down over a pair of brown rubber boots, with two candle lanterns on the floor in front of me, a bottle of ink and your letter of June 18th beside me. I am doing my best to make some sort of a fist at writing. One’s wrist gets rather bored holding up a solid ivory dome for a half hour at a stretch so I have to make frequent stops to wax it along. Damn, just burnt my fingers picking up the blawsted lantern by a dooced hot part!! Help! Fire Extinguishers! Not that there is any danger of a conflagration for it is raining pink puppies outside in a way it has over here; no thunderstorms but just a steady all night rain. Some poor blighter with more energy than musical taste is banging away on a piano over in the officers’ mess, and Arnold is wheezing peacefully on the floor beside me. Young George is away in Folkestone visiting his family. Just handy to my reach is a ten pound tin box of Peek & Frean’s biscuits, so everything is ready for the final assault.
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As we move away in time from past conflicts and as our veteran population declines, it becomes increasingly difficult for Canadians to understand the sacrifices that men and women made, both on the battlefield and on the home front, during wartime. The Canadian Letters and Images Project has been sharing their stories, and Canada’s story, for the past quarter century.
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