35th. Battalion,
Niagara Concentration Camp,
May 25th. 1915.
My darling Mother:
I have just one minute before the piquet falls in to scribble you a short note to tell you how I love and miss you all. I shall try and write at greater length to-night, but I want you to get this to-morrow and must post it right away.
Mother dear, it has been so hard to leave you and Dad and the girls, not that I regret anything for myself, but that it hurts me so to know you all will miss me. Sometimes I have thought during the last few weeks that I could not do it, but we are a queer inarticulate lot where our deeper feelings are concerned, and I hope I have never appeared indifferent through my silence on the subject.
I never knew until I had to leave you how much I loved you all. However, in a crisis like this one must believe as Lloyd George says, that it is not what happens to one in life that matters, but the way one meets it, and so I shall try to do my share.
Fernie said to me the night before I left, "Errol, take are of yourself and come back to me, but if it is ever a matter of doing your duty, forget that I am alive. And I know that is the way you feel too.
One needs such an infinite faith though to believe that all this sacrifice is really useful and will really make the world a better place for us and those who come after.
Well, dear, I ramble on, but I should get used to it in a few weeks I suppose. I must run now. Love to all.
Yours most lovingly and longingly,
ERROL.