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[Page 13]
18 Sept. 1916
Dear Mrs. John
Thanks so much for your last two letters, they were cheery & splendid: even my fund of good cheer has begun to run down lately, & from being a teatotal mess, we have sunk down to a low ebb and drink whisky once more: it is raining good & solid. We have been waiting and waiting in the rain for a chance to go through, and now it seems the rain has robbed us of it just as it seemed we should be successful.
Everything is wet through, and the country now impossible for horses and vehicles, you've no idea how rain can hang things up specially where the ground has been properly shelled, no one who hasn't seen it can have any idea what shelled country is like, great tall woods full of big solid trees, villages, cellars, hedges, trenches become all absolutely one level mass of churned up earth and debris, not even room for a fly to sit anywhere, the whole lot pitted just where the last lot of shells happen to have fallen, and then the next lot alter it all again, in some places you cross this for a mile at a stretch: and every day