France
3 May '17.

Dear Little May,

With any luck this should reach you by the 23rd and you will know that I shall be thinking of you very often that day, and all my wishes for you Dear are that you may have many, many more anniversaries of that day, and that each one may usher in a year full of blessings and happiness. You deserve all that and more, May Dear!

I have enjoyed your letters so much. How I should love to see those kids of yours! They are quite the most interesting family I have ever known. It seems so impossible for little Jack to be really talking, the last time I saw him he could only frown, squirm and grunt and we all seemed to be quite content with those accomplishments.

The minstrel show must have been great fun, and a pronounced success too, judging from yours and mother’s accounts of it. I shall never cease to regret that I missed seeing you appropriately costumed for the role of "end man" and then the cake walk and the cork leg dance! It must have been great fun for you all.

Behold me, writing letters in bed at 9.30 A.M. Who says "hardships of war" In half an hour my battman will come in and prepare a bath for me in my folding bath tub. Then after I get dressed I’ll have some breakfast and probably lie around on the grass in the warm sun most of the day. There’s a reason for my being in bed at 9.30 A.M. instead of being up at 3.30 as I have been most every day of late- and a reason for the day of idleness ahead of me: "A" and "C" flights in our Squadron are hereafter to do nothing but night work. I am in "A" flight so from now on I’ll be a "fly-by-night"

For the next week there will be very little for us to do I expect, until we get to know our way around this part of France by night. Then after we get a bit accustomed to the work we’ll get the usual jobs assigned to night, flying aeroplanes. I was up at 10.30 last night for about 20 minutes and found it good fun. The air is so still at night and everything looks so pretty with the little twinkling lights scattered about on the ground below.

That Owen Sound boy, Bill Bishop, in the scout squadron near here, has now brought down 16 Hun machines and 8 balloons. If he doesn’t get a Hun every day he is very unhappy. Cheerio May Dear. Best love to Will and to all.

Always your loving brother
Eric