Otterpool Camp

Shorncliffe

June 26 1916

My dearest Mother

The country here is very peaceful though we are surrounded on land and in air with signs of war. The camp is on an upland with many large open fields full of sheep + lambs. The copses and hedges are full of singing birds and skylarks are always overhead. One can never travel more than a mile along any road without coming on a sleepy old village with the gossips at the doors and the children playing about. Everything looks as if it had not changed for a couple of hundred years.

Yet there are a group of military camps at this spot containing six or seven thousand men and in this district there are from fifty to sixty thousand Canadian soldiers. The air is hardly ever without one or more aeroplanes or airships and the sea is full of patrol boats and minesweepers.

At night and especially at dawn we can distinctly