My Son-bird, how are you? I'm quite well but a little stiff in the joints. We've been doing a lot of digging: making a _trench_ to carry wounded people up and down, and we've walked miles and miles back from the place where we did the digging and we are tired. We are not very near the Germans _here_, but we can hear them banging away in the distance sometimes, and last night all the sky was lit up in their direction by a big fire--houses burning. Yesterday--too--while we were up digging near to them some Germans climbed up a tower behind their lines, and we had to bob down into the holes we were digging to prevent them seeing us and then _our_ cannons banged at _them_ and they came down from the tower in a hurry. I do hope you are a good little boy. It's so much nicer to have a good little boy at home than to have a regular little pickle. Please write and tell me if you are a good little boy--I shall be so pleased to hear it. Love from your Doody. XII--LAST LETTER TO HIS WIFE--AT DEATH'S DOOR Sept. 24th, 1915. SWEETHEART MINE: This is my ideal of happiness: (under war conditions) to arrive back, after a hard day's navvying among the nice big bangs (I really do like the noise of guns--unhealthy taste, eh?) to come back to camp and tea healthily tired, to come back by the _first_ batch of cars thereby ensuring a wash unhurried and evading the wait by the roadside at "----" _and_ to find a letter from you waiting for me. I am sure you think my effusions over your letters mere civil romance but they are not. I cannot exaggerate the pleasure I feel when I wade into a letter from you. I am so very glad that you are to have the blessed with you again. I hate to think of you and him apart. It makes me feel altogether too "scattered" (compris?) to have a son here, a wife there, a mother somewhere else, a sister elsewhere. Keep him with you all you can and talk to him about me a _lot_. I do so want to come home to you both.