Series 01 Part 02: Hughes family correspondence, 3 April 1917-22 September 1918 - Page 279
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[Page 279]
6.
us all intimately from your description of us. We see from Auntie Mary's letter that you were engaged once more for your leading role as "Best Man" for Cicely's & Austin's wedding.
When you come home again you can advertise in the papers that Captn. or Major or Colonel Geoffrey Forrest Hughes is prepared to accept engagements on reasonable terms for all fashionable weddings, & can guarantee the best results no matter how inexperienced the bridegrooms may be. References permitted to leading members of British & Colonial aristocracy.
Fr. Thornton, our old friend of Rome, wrote to me the other day in reply to my congratulations on his D.S.O. [Distinguished Service Order] for the capturing of those Germans that I told you about some months ago. He said, "Here is poor Roger gone in the pride & bloom of his life. God rest his gallant soul. How like his death was to that of the glorious Sir Philip Sidney, who also refused to be attended to till his soldiers had been seen to. It is only we Catholics who can see & appreciate the intervention of young Geoffrey at the last moment. What a consolation his arrival must have been to dear Roger. God is good! Laudate Eum omnus gentes!" [Praise him all nations.]
Then he goes on to say that he has said Mass for Roger & for you, & then he asks –
"Are you really sure that the bonnie laddie whom I knew in Rome is not only an officer in the R.F.C. but is teaching others to fly & fight? The cheek of the young beggar! And yet I'm not surprised in the least as I have seen so much of the Australians that I can appreciate their precocious development, & their quick arrival at all the attributes of a man"