Your loving Son,
ALEC.
I meant to send this letter off to-day, but I have not been able to. This morning we breakfasted at the gentlemanly hour of 9-0 off omelettes from the estaminet, bacon (a ration), coffee, marmalade and bread and butter. We did a little work this morning, lunched off bread and butter and marmalade and then a lecture, and then we went into the town for tea and dinner. They have a very nice cafe place here—a private house. Madam's husband is a prisoner, and her husband told her to be "gaie," so she runs a cafe and enjoys herself. We had a very good tea; they have some very nice cakes called gauffes (I don't quite know how to spell it), like sweet pancakes, and afterwards a bath. The division has some baths. There is a starch factory—I think it is—and there are some large sort of square vats in it. They are used as baths for officers; they have three big vats, one very big, and they are as hot as you like, and are 8 feet by 4 by 4 feet deep, and you can have a topping bath in them—you can just swim a stroke or two. Then afterwards we had a cold plunge in a very big one. It was simply delicious and cost us nothing. One of the best baths I have ever had. I had one bath to myself and Bill Fiddian the other. Then we went to dinner and enjoyed ourselves muchly. Soup, veal, chicken, coffee, all for 3/9 or rather five francs—a franc equals about 9d now, as English credit is very good—and then home to bed.
To-night the machine guns seem rather busy. I have just heard one let off a few hundred rounds, but I don't think one round in a thousand hits a man. There is one busy popping off now. It is funny being a sort of spectator. Things are pretty quiet really at present, as I saw in a captured German letter from a German soldier to his mother. "In the spring the curtain will rise"—I wonder who will pull the string. They are noisy to-night, a lot of waste of ammunition, both rifle and machine guns going on. It is a calm night so the noise carried.
Well, good-night, Mother,
Much love to all,
From your loving Son,
ALEC.
There they go: rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat, a machine gun.