Ecole d’Aviation Tours, France,
October 4, 1917.
Dear Bob:
Your letter arrived about three days ago. I am mighty glad to hear that you are going to Lake Forest to school.
You will make good; you have to make good because your name is Ely—and we are here to prove that the Elys make good. You will be away from home a good deal and I think that will do you a great deal of good. But when you do go home, make the most of it; it is your duty to be with mother and father as much as you can; they need you and it is the one way you can repay them directly. There is another thing, confide in mother and father; just because they are older, don’t you think for a moment that they do not understand children. They will not blame you if you tell them things which you think may be wrong, and your conscience will blame you if you do not tell them. And they will show you the best way out of trouble; father can give more of a sermon in three minutes than any minister I ever heard could preach in an hour—and it will not make you feel foolish either. That’s at home.
At school you will have no trouble making friends. It is worth your while to make acquaintances with everyone, there is good in all of them. But the best of them are none too good to be your friends. Most of the boys swear and smoke and tell vulgar stories and a few may try liquor; they do it because men do it and they want to be men. Men do it usually because they started when they were boys.
Vulgar stories will keep you from becoming a strong man; once in a while you cannot help listening to them; never remember one, never tell one under any condition, and people will learn to know you as a boy with a clean mind. Liquor will keep you from having a happy home; never touch it. Smoking will keep you from being as strong and healthy as God meant you to be. Everybody who smokes will say it doesn’t hurt them, but when they want to make a team they quit smoking. Nobody can keep you from smoking but nobody can stop you either. Many good business men will not hire boys who smoke. Swear if you must, smoke if you want to after you are a man, but for goodness sake, do not do it in order to be a man or because other boys do it. If you cannot be a man without it, you can’t be a man with it. And an Ely doesn’t do things because other people do them. And you’re an Ely.
Amen.
You should be over here and see France. It’s the greatest farming and fruit country I ever saw—Wisconsin included. I went for a long walk today and I was eating all the time. I’d come to a vineyard with white grapes—just finished them and along came purple grapes. I’d just finished the purple grapes when I came to a place where walnut trees were on each side of the road and the walnuts were being blown down faster than one could pick ’em up—just as the walnuts were gone, I came to the apples and then the raspberries and blackberries and peaches and chestnuts. I was full by that time. At one place there was a village dug out of the chalk side of the cliff; strange doors and passages and dark rooms as old as America and wells a hundred feet deep; wine presses and wine cellars and stables—all cut from the rocks.
We still have our good scraps. Yesterday there was one with eleven men in it. We knocked over seven beds and one man, whose head was cut, got blood on five of them. It’s our only real exercise and we enjoy it.
The other night three Frenchmen stood out in front of the barracks keeping us awake. George Mosely ran out in his nightshirt and tumbled one over, and the other two ran away. Ten minutes later, four men who had been drinking came along and put a man in the rain barrel full of water.