France,
12 May 1917.
Dear Ones All,
I wish I knew what has happened to my American and Canadian mail. My last letter from across the Atlantic was dated somewhere about the second week in March (excepting one from Aunt Mannie written on March 24th) and Molly hasn’t heard from any of you either. I hope it all turns up eventually but I should like even more to hear from you now.
We are back on day jobs again, the night work apparently being "washed out" for the meantime. I had the pleasure (?) of leading a formation yesterday on a four hours' patrol of about 30 miles of front. Beastly monotonous work, no Huns in the air to speak of, and any that were up were miles away over in Hunland and nothing to do but to chase up and down that line keeping our eyes on our old artillery spotting buses below us, and trying to keep awake by watching "the war" on the ground. "Archie" kept us from losing all interest in life and we rather blessed him for his occasional "C R-R UMP" when he got one near us. The air was full of our machines, as it usually is, and it was quite congested in spots with monoplanes, biplanes and triplanes. The Hun doesn’t like our triplanes much, by the way, and we can always count on seeing him get wind up when a bunch of them appear.
This afternoon I am on a photographic stunt. Hope we meet some Huns. It is nearly ten days since I have been in a real scrap.
Molly is leaving the R.F.C. Hospital very shortly. She is anxious to get out of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Nursing Society to which she was supposed to go on leaving the R.F.C. Hospital, because now she has found an opening in a nice hospital in London, and that will, of course, give us a chance to see something of each other when I go on leave, whereas the Q.A.I.N.S. is like the Red Cross and she may be sent to Egypt or anywhere at a moment’s notice. I think probably her resignation will be accepted by the Q.A.I.N.S. as they appear to have a long waiting list. My leave is only a few weeks off now and I can hardly wait to get back to good old London town again. I never thought that I would ever speak like that about the place but it makes all the difference in the world now that Molly is there.
You should see our hut. Duncan and I are living together now and we have been spending all our spare moments in decorating it, making and covering furniture & buying little odds and ends for it.
The mail is going now, so must close.
Heaps of love,
Eric.