France

22/9/17

Dear Ella:-

Have received two letters from you now so I guess I'd better answer them eh! So I've got a new second cousin. Great excitement I bet and I hope Maudie comes to life now and bucks up.

I guess you've heard all about the swell time I had on leave by now so I wont say the same things over again. Glad to hear you got the souvenirs O.K. and have a lot more in my trunk in London. Gee! it's punk getting back to this hole again. The night before last I was on liaison and on the way we go straight down a road. They must have seen us as we were machine gunned for 3 minutes. The first shot zipped past my ear and we were on our gut trying to look like paving stones before the next one arrived. I was so fed up that I was honestly hoping for one in the shoulder but am quite happy to have a whole skin now. We crawled to the edge of the road and that was all the excitement we had that night. I went around [sorry the darn thing tore] the front line in the morning but nothing interesting happened so we came back. I was at the O.P. all yesterday with Warren the Canadian from Montreal and we spent the whole day kidding each other and got both our batteries on to a boche heavy trench mortar who was annoying our trenches and shut him up.

This morning I had an interesting walk back to "A" battery to synchronise watches. They were shelling it like stink and I had to jump into a shell hole every minute or so. I met an orderly going there too so we waited for the next shell to come then ran for the mess. It wasn't the mess however and just then we heard one coming. There we were looking all around for it and just as the shell arrived we saw it in time and dove in getting covered with mud. Well that was that and I got away all right although I did two more dives before getting away from it.

Well, kid, I guess I'll close now with best love and kisses to all.

Bev