XX
December 3rd, 1917.
Dear ——[F]:
Thanks for the merry, merry wishes for the gay Xmas season and I’ll try to remember them when the day comes along. Sundays and holidays are not very much noticed here at the front, except that on Sunday the mechanics all get full of pinard and song and devilment—the pinard (meaning cheap red ink used by the French in place of drinking water) is of course responsible for the two latter. In the villages, the entire male population likewise drinks much wine and everyone—man, woman, child, dog, and domestic animal, parades the streets—dressed up all like a picture book (applying mostly to women and children). Occasionally they cross the sidewalk, but the middle of the street is the place to walk.
One Sunday, I went to church, the first time since last Easter, I think, to attend the mass given for the departed brethren of the escadrille. The chapel is in a little town a few miles from our camp. Along in the Middle Ages or anyway a long time ago, there was a beautiful cathedral there—now the town is insignificantly small. The front of the cathedral is standing almost in its entirety and the walls for a little way back, dwindling down into glorious ruins and finally tumbled masses of rock and stray pillars. Where the back wall once stood, there now runs a little brook (I almost called it bubbling, but it happens to be an unusually dead and not over-clean little stream). The chapel is a place about as big as a minute, snuggling in beside the big front wall of the ancient cathedral. The service was meaningless to me—what wasn’t Latin was French. I followed the fellow in front of me and didn’t miss it once on the getting up and down (fortunately, militaires don’t have to kneel, I suppose because they appreciate the fact that most of them wear breeches made by French tailors).
But they fooled me once. What must have been the village belle (what a village!) passed a little button bag affair in baby blue ribbon, and gathered up the shekels. I dropped mine in and horror—here comes the young sister with an identical bag and asks for more and I was unprepared and had to turn her down amidst my blushes. I thought she was working on the other side of the house as we used to do at evening service and to this day I don’t know why they took up two collections though it has been explained to me three times in French.
Have had some very pleasant trips over the German border (present, not 1914), have watched a few Archies bursting at a safe distance away and seen some specks which were Boche planes, but am not ready to write a book yet. Yesterday morning we had the first sortie at 6:45 daylight. A solid bank of clouds over the camp here at 2,000 metres. The lines are parallel to a river and a few kilometres north. The edge of the cloud bank was over the river, sharp as if cut by a knife and all Germany cloudless. We slipped out from under it and back on top just in time to see the sun get over the horizon—almost as far away as Rheims, which we just cannot see. The river and canal were just silver ribbons on a black cloth stretching for miles due east. Under us we could make out the ground on one side and the clouds on the other, and to the west the cloud bank continued to follow the lines, a gloriously beautiful panorama. The cloud bank stayed nearly the same the two hours we were up. From a distance above or below, a cloud is just a big, soft, quiet cushion of cotton fluff, but near to it is a seething, irregular, tossing, furious jumble of mist.
We saw a few Boches, far behind their lines. An hour after we were back, they said that Lufbery had just brought down another machine, his 15th, in flames. He was using a new machine and the gun was not properly regulated—seven balls were in each blade of the propeller, yet it held together and brought him home. I was down at the Lafayette hangars talking to Bill Thaw, and here comes the mighty man in a hurry from reporting his flight. With fire in his eye he got in his old machine and off again for the lines. At noon he had brought down another, which hasn’t yet been officially homologué, but is none the less sure for that. Thaw brought down one this morning. They are doing well, these men of the American Escadrille—still French, however, though shortly to be transferred, we hear.
May your Xmas be a happy one, and the new year and those to follow bring you ever better fortune than the last one.
Stuart.