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.]
XIII—LAST LETTER TO HIS MOTHER—AS HE DIES