October 28, 1918

Now I feel much better than last time I wrote. I was in bed at quarter to ten and had an awful struggle making reveille at 6:50 this morning.

They have given us an extra mid-day half hour – from 1 to 1:30 – and I’m using today’s to start my letter to you. It is a wonderful day – balmy and blue, sunny and sienna. It makes me long for the old Hackensak and for those walks on the Palisades.

And it is great to be freed again – to know you can walk around the block if you want, or do down to the park or eat at Mme. Jeanne’s or go to Paris. Hope no one else around here gets sick.

6:45 P.M.

Supper and the day’s work finished. At four o’clock I went out and bought the evening paper, which contains the afternoon communiques. These were almost out – boldfaced by the headline: “Austria Demands Separate Peace.” I don’t see how this note can well be refused, but it’s too bad it’s crumbling this way. I’d much rather it were crushed at one time than gradually. I want them to be convincingly beaten.

Tonight at 7:30 I’m going to try to talk the supply sergeant out of a new pair of breeks. My old ones are still good to sit down in; if there is a wall well within manoeuvring distance, they’re not so bad to stand in. After that job is done, guess I’ll get a trailer or something and cart my laundry around to the blanchisseuse.

Ten minutes off writing time while I discussed yesterday’s football game with George Kummerow, one of the shattered survivors. He is about 6 foot 2 and weighs some 200 lbs. – the biggest man in the game, and consequently the mark for our opponents. He was knocked out in the second quarter, but his vitality didn’t suffer, and he got back in for the end of the game. We play again next Sunday. I have a notion we’ll win.

Did you ever have some on in your family learn to play the saxophone? No, I know you didn’t, but you’ve missed something. Downstairs in the dugout Jim Harding is scaling up and down and it’s awful. Every ten minutes he holes out with the middle line of some song, and leaves it hanging in the air. If only he’d get a last line it would help.

They’ve O.K.’d my bum pant and some day I can draw a new pair. While in line I weakly yielded to the suasions of one Gowing who rooms at Mme. Streiffs’, and went over to see her for the first time in two weeks. Spent an hour and a half there. And then back to finish this.

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