Bexhill 28/9/1918

My Dear Mother:-

While I am doing nothing in particular, I will write you a few lines. I am O.K. and am going on twelve days leave this coming week and then back to the M.G. Depot at Seaford where I will have to be a soldier once more after my six weeks rest. I am going to Scotland and as MacCormac from Basingstoke expects to go about the same time we will likely spend our time together. The last four or five I want to spend in London just to see some of the recent shows. I will get the money you cabled me on Monday and that with the £10 we get from the army will, I hope, see me through in good shape. I was down town last night for the first time. It is a very nice little town and very much alive with Canadians who come here to qualify for Commissions in various branches of the service. After I came back to Camp I heard a very good lecture in the YMCA hut by a YMCA representative who has just returned to England after touring Canada in the interests of the Association. Of course his "message", as it was called, was of the usual type but it's always good to hear someone from just across. The only thing I didn't like to hear him report was the extent to which rumors of immorality among troops in Eng. are being spread in Canada. I myself see no cause for any such alarm and my opinion is that anyone who is behind such statements is either misinformed, acting from an ulterior motive or a deliberate pro-Fritzie worker trying to undermine the people['s] confidence - the trust of Can. fathers and mothers. There is certainly all kinds of temptation flouted here but it's in everyone's hands - purely an individual affair - if he wants to go to the Devil. My firm belief is that man-for-man Canadians in Eng. are just as clean-living and of as high a moral standard as the general run of exempted heros etc. who sojourn in your midst today. But I'm not writing a sermon.

The war news is very good today. It makes one hunger to be over with the thrills. I see the Canucks are in again. If they keep going and pound away I don't see how the old man can hang out much longer. I haven't heard from Reid. I am sending you a small parcels [sic] of some snaps you can keep for me - the bullet which laid me up - and arm-band (Enemy) opposed to us when I was hit.

With kindest wishes and love -

Yours

FC