It is Christmas Eve once more, and we are still fighting mud and
water and Germans. I hope that by next Christmas we shall be doing
so no longer. We hope to come out of the front line on Tuesday next,
and have four days in Brigade Reserve, and then go back a good long
way for a rest. So about New Year's Day we shall probably be on the
move somewhere, and we hope that our long-looked-for rest of several
weeks' duration may actually come to pass at last. But we shall see.
I have just been wading through the mud and water of the trenches,
and they are pretty bad, but we are all very cheerful, and try to
make the best of our Christmas-time.
CHRISTMAS EVE (_to his Sister_).
It is Christmas Eve once more, and I have just come back from wading
through the mud and water of front line trenches. I am tired and wet
and dirty, and would that the men of strife would cease their noise
and hear the Angels sing. But we must keep up our hearts. One gets
sick to death sometimes of it all, but still it goes on and on, and
we somehow live or dream through it. The night is clear with a
bright moon, and it is dry at the moment. Pumps and mud and water
and sandbags and chalk and bullets and more mud and bayonets and
gum-boots and shells and signal messages and artillery retaliation,
seem sometimes to be all jumbled up, and dance before your eyes, and
haunt you night and day. But at other times things are not so bad,
and everybody is really very cheerful.... I've got nothing to give
you this Christmas except my LOVE, from the midst of all the dancing
muddle of mud and rain and other things.