Your Son.
Pau, France, Saturday, December 15, 1917.
Dear Family:
We are having sham battles every day. They thought a few of us good enough to hold over for extra training ten days and send us to a special shooting school as Cazaux. This increases our efficiency some fifty per cent before going to the Front and gives us that much more chance. I have had more training than the average, due to more luck and interest. Today I shot a machine gun at a pointed aeroplane. Out of eighty shots, of which three bullets failed to leave the gun, sixty-seven hit the square target; of these sixty-seven, twenty-seven struck the plane and the man in it. It is the best score I have seen, and encourages me. This shooting is very vital.
We leave here in about two days, and remain at Cazaux about ten. Then we go to Paris and wait for our call to the Front. I’ll be in Bordeaux Christmas, and in Paris New Years. At the Front we go into different escadrilles, French, and spend the first month as apprentices before going to fight the Boche. We attend lectures and fly all the time here and sleep twelve hours a day. It is a full-sized job, and enough for me. It may be a beautiful life in training, but I am beginning to realize that the real service will take all that war requires of any man. In fact, it will be all that I anticipated before entering the work. There has been a period in which I thought it rather an easy branch of the service. But I am much better fitted for it than the average man doing it. I was a little afraid I would be too conservative; not devilish enough—but I guess my reason does not curb my abandon. There is not much to be told just now, as we follow a pretty steady routine from 6 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. The weather has been beautiful; frost on the trees and mist on the mountains, lighted by a rose-colored winter’s sun in beauty unsurpassed. I sketch a little and read a little and struggle to keep up my correspondence. Family letters are slow in coming, but have been delayed or lost, no doubt.
Good night, and love to all from
Dinsmore.
Ecole de Tir, Cazaux, December 18, 1917.
Dear Family Mine:
Here I am back near Bordeaux where I started on my tour of France. We came to this school understanding that we were to be abused by the severest military discipline, but we are delighted to find that they continue to spoil us. We have as pleasant barracks as are to be had in France. We are permitted to eat in the sous-officers’ mess—a very special mark of favor, which is really a break of military discipline—and to cap it all, they are giving the whole camp repos to go to Paris for Christmas and for New Years. That is pretty nice. You know we are really only corporals—that is to say, privates of no rank—yet they really treat us like commissioned officers.