Cast your eye over an expanse of ocean and look at me. Yesterday afternoon they made us do some real physical work, and as a result I was so tired that I stayed in bed until 11:45 today. Isn’t that a shameful waste of none too frequent leisure?
Now it is gray and afternoon and I am up in the office, feeling very heavy and sleepy. I missed some mighty good war news, too, for the Americans made a very satisfactory advance and our map looks good now. Most of the bunch has gone to a football game or is working, but I hadn’t enough energy for either. This Sunday business of sleeping late is demoralizing. I hereby vow to you that when I get back, if ever, I won’t do it. I’ll be up bright and more or less early every Sunday, so we can catch the __ o’clock boat for something or other.
But did you know that I was coming back surely? Once I wrote you about staying here. I don’t want to now. I think it was a foolish idea in the first place. One good rule in the army is never to volunteer for anything. It never is a success. It would be better to take my chances on the regular course of things and not tie up to an unknown proposition like a stay in France.
Paris is beginning to feel peace in the air. Yesterday I saw a householder scraping from her windows the blue paper which provides low visibility of light from within to the acute observer two miles above in a Boche plane. Every lamp in Paris and outskirts has been shielded in this way for a long time, because blue of course is the color of lowest visibility. Now lights are commencing to re-appear. In some sections of the city one can even see one’s way in the streets.
People are sitting around now awaiting the end. You can’t imagine how it feels to be in on the finish of the world’s greatest event, and to realise how small a part of it is your own daily work. It seems so far removed from war – this business of a half hour’s drill in the morning, eight hours of work which is about the same stuff I used to do in civil life, an idle evening and a lazy Sunday. It is hard to comprehend that I am really acting some part in the greatest thing in history.
And you are too, did you know it? All the stay-at-homes are doing something for the world. One of them is the man who will dictate how peace shall be made. From him down they’re all for us, and it is good to know that.
I am reading “Le Maitre de Forges” by Georges Ohnet, in French. It is sort of mid-victorian, verging on the new. Good French practice, if nothing else. My English pupil, who by the way is suffering from grippe and hasn’t had a lesson in two weeks or more, sent it to me.
I haven’t had any pictures taken recently, because we haven’t been down to see old Lozach recently. Some Sunday we are going down again and then you’ll have some more. Also, Frank is making a pinhole camera, which ought to be some good, judging from the amount of effort he seems to have put into it.
These French around here have been having a three-day holiday, which doesn’t make for top-notch efficiency in the Americans who have to work. We are feeling rather like drudges, and extending a great deal of self-pity.
Next post November 5.
Letters from Sidney Friend During The Great War 