Series 03: John Brady Nash letters, January 1914-December 1915 - Page 440
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[Page 440]
The arm chair generals know all about what should have been done, of course, they find it so easy to criticise, when at a safe distance from the shot and shell. We had at Mena field marshals by the score, happily I am free from them here.
Rene Silk might be a success on the stage. My best wishes if she makes the venture.
We all pray for a move in some direction along the various fronts where the contests rage, according to the cables every day. Most people have come to mistrust the news, because each cable is so like the other, and the armies are in the same spots as they were six months agone. But what is the use of going over the familiar talk. You all take a lively interest in Bruce MacLachlan [McLachlan], he must be a soldierly chap. Good luck to him. The training of a soldier produces gentlemen out of him who is worthy. I may have chance to meet him on this side.
The managing of the typewriter makes me almost swear.
Kitty appears to have a lot of privates as friends in the encampment where Dr. Phipps presides. My greatest regret in life is, and has been for some years, that during the first twenty year of my professional work there was not within my anatomy sense enough to make me save money which might have made you possessed of enough money which lodged safely in the bank would be counted as an independance. alas, the start made by me was good, but the keeping going of the intentions and acts of my first eighteen months of professional work was the weak spot in my progress. I thought that I, an M.D. of a swell University, was a swell, and that it behoved me to act as such. Unhappy thought, it crossed my good intentions in regard to becoming rich by slow degrees by more and more, the result being that instead of being rich at fifty my fortune is at as low an ebb as ever. However you will be able to manage for a few years, and after that there be none who can tell what is to happen. You can hope for the best, it may eventuate.
I have heard nothing about Harry Stokes.
The Lusitania. Yes, an episode of the worst. Mater Phipps always reminds me of your Grand-Mother, my Mother, an Irish woman of the very best. R.I.P. Pease convey my best wishes to her when you see her again, several of her sons help to hold the fort. That is good. What better can a woman do than give her sons in the defence of their country? Glad to know that you think the Johnson girls to be of such good class. To them please give my kindest regards. The small income that they have will be found to be useful. Their Grand-Mother Johnson was a woman full