The crop is yet most of it out in the fields for want of help though bad wether also kept it back. Also they want miners & other workers & yet thousands of Canadians are kept in camps doing nothing. It is all right to keep new men in camp for a while but you cant help a man who had been in France any length of time. I was there 14 months.

Although we do not go over the top in charges & lately not often to the front line we never for 5 months got out of short range shells (let alone long range) & for 32 days before I got hit we had been getting hell, working under shell fire & our work often having to be done several times over in one 24 hours as we have been under direct observation most of the time & Fritz often distroys it & some of us & often makes us scatter over a wide area & hide in shell holes (lately full of water) & when we lay down to sleep would often get shelled in camp then made to get up & scatter to save our hides so that we could be used to build some more or repair what Fritz has distroyed since we left it

BC Archives, MS-0426 Box 1 File 5 / TREGILLUS, Frederick James, 1862 - 1962. Barkerville, miner. / Correspondence from Ernest Seeley, 1915 - 1919.