This is my ideal of happiness: (under war conditions) to arrive back,
after a hard day's navvying among the nice big bangs (I really do like
the noise of guns--unhealthy taste, eh?) to come back to camp and tea
healthily tired, to come back by the _first_ batch of cars thereby
ensuring a wash unhurried and evading the wait by the roadside at
"----" _and_ to find a letter from you waiting for me. I am sure you
think my effusions over your letters mere civil romance but they are
not. I cannot exaggerate the pleasure I feel when I wade into a letter
from you.
I am so very glad that you are to have the blessed with you again. I
hate to think of you and him apart. It makes me feel altogether too
"scattered" (compris?) to have a son here, a wife there, a mother
somewhere else, a sister elsewhere. Keep him with you all you can and
talk to him about me a _lot_. I do so want to come home to you both.
We are launching forth in many directions: beds (for patients of
course) and a young drug store under a roof of its own; no longer
housed with the Quarter Master's store. At present _I_ and some score
of others are going up to the line daily doing the most glorious
navvying: knocking cellars into each other and whitewashing the whole
into operating rooms and waiting rooms, and bearers' billets; digging
special R.A.M.C. stretcher trenches to connect them (A) with the
general communicating trenches and (B) with each other and filling
billions of sandbags to protect the entrances to these cellar-stations.
I love the work, three days I slaved at a part of the trench where it
traverses a mine-yard and came back a Frank Tinney at night. Yesterday
I was housebreaking with hammer and chisel or pick connecting up
cellars by holes knocked in walls and making bolting holes to get in
and out through. Also we go investigating the rows and rows of empty
houses (the line where we work passes almost through a mining townlet
now deserted) bagging chairs, mirrors--there are many quite good ones
unbroken in the midst of the chaos of bent girders, scattered walls,
roofs, pavements even.
Everybody seems very high-spirited out here and grumbling is a thing
of the past. I suspect that the weather is reason. Day after day is
glorious--though night after night is _cold_.
As the weather grows colder my appetite increases, _cake_ most
acceptable.
Posting this the morning after writing it. Was called away to
interview M. Le Directeur des Mines apropos d'une affaire forte
difficile, _je vous dis_.
Love to the dear--I wish I were going to see you both again soon.
Wanted!--
[_The above was the last letter ever received from Harold Chapin. The
following unfinished letter was found in his pocket-book after his
death. It was written some days before the preceding letter._]