Arthur Douglas Crease Letters, Diaries and Scrapbooks
Letters from Arthur Douglas Crease of Victoria to his brother Lindley Crease and his mother Sarah Crease; instructions for the offensive of July 26, 1917; a regimental notebook, diaries and scrapbook. Learn more.
*All transcriptions are provided by volunteers, and the accuracy of the transcriptions is not guaranteed. Please be sure to verify the information by viewing the image record, or visiting the BC Archives in person.
BC Archives MS-0055; BC Archives MS-2879
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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
BC Archives, MS-2879 Box 69 File 1 / CREASE FAMILY / Selected letters from Arthur Douglas Crease to his mother, Sarah Crease, 1916 - 1918.