25th. Bn. Niagara Camp
May 27th. 1915.

My little Baby:

Your dear letter came this morning and I got it about one o'clock. We left early in the morning for manoeuvres, and did not get back until one o'clock, and the knowledge that a letter must be waiting for me in my tent, made me so excited that I could hardly lie still in the grass during the attack practice – and such a nice letter it was.

Do tell me all you are doing when you write, dear. What happens at the office and about Cassie, and Ethel and Molly and all the little things we would chat about if I were at home. I do so want to keep in touch with your life, and your ideas while I am away from you, so don't for one moment think that anything you are doing or are think is too small to talk to me about. Our letters are the only way we shall have for some time of being at all together, and we must just try to live together while we are writing. Am I not right, darling?

Well, I suppose I must practice what I preach, although that is not always to my liking. I believe I could very easily spend the next page or so of this letter telling you how I love you, how I love you; how when the river has flowed to the lake, and the lake borne onward to the sea, then the fierce winds of longing lash the waves to a fury of passion. Ah dear, the ocean of my love for you has surged with that passion I know, but the sun rises again with its purifying fire and draws the angry waters up to its light; draws them and holds them in limpid misty clouds into which nothing impure can find its way. Back over the hills they are blown by some wind which I think must be nothing else than God's good Grace, there to fall again the same tender, caressing rain of my first love for you. And so, as the river keeps flowing onto the lake, and the ocean, my love for you flows on in infinite endless flow from sweetness, mirth and tender beauty to passionate majesty, and back again, and then again. There, dear, I have taken up the page after all, and still I have not begun to practice my preachings.

Anyhow here's for it, just as though we had been married fifty years, and you were rather bored by sentiment (?) Last night Arnold and I took the five o'clock car for St. Catherines. I dropped in to see Cousin Aggie Hesson for tea, but she said that she had just come from Alicia's, and that Alicia had some very fine cake, so I put on my hat and went up to tea with Alicia instead. Listen close, Austen will be a proud father before long. Ssh! Poor Austen he is such a keen soldier and feels so not being able to go, but of course that is impossible under the circumstances. The shock might be serious for both his wife and the babe, and besides I fear Alicia is not the brave sacrificing little woman that calls me Sweetheart!

This morning, as I said before, we went out for a field day or rather morning with the Mounted Rifles. Major Bickford, the G.G.O. said the attack was fairly good, but personally I thought it was a frightful mess. So you see that great minds sometimes think differently. However, the men themselves were excellent, lying for hours without a move in the grass, often quite wet and swampy.

The only serious fault I have found with our men so far, is that they are inclined to grumble about meals. The other morning we had almost a meeting because there wasn't enough bacon, and there are four or five who grouse from one day to the other, and start booming &c. if they are kept waiting a few minutes. However, yesterday I happened to be there, and threated to dismiss the parade if I heard another sound, which produced some effect. Someday there won't be any food at all perhaps, and if they get into the habit of grumbling, we should have an awful time.

Men, my darling, never grow up. They are always children, sometimes babies all their lives. When they meet a skirt they try to hand a bluff, but see about fifty or sixty together, and you would never be deceived again.

Good-bye for to-night, and God Bless my sweetheart.

Yours,
 ERROL.