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Patullo Family Letters

Letters from James Burleigh Pattullo and George Robson Pattullo Jr. to their father George Robson Pattullo. 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-1188

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Next day they moved us all out and back to this hospital, because there isn't anything for the Boches to hit but the hospital, where we were, and he is almost certain to get it one of these moonlight nights. I came back in my own car, with my own driver--a small limousine the press censor sent up for me. So I kept warm and suffered no hurt from the trip.

But if they expected us to be free from airraids here, they were wrong by a mile. I've been here five nights, and we've had four raids so far. They missed one night and switched over for a whack at Nancy instead. Promptly at 7.30, the sirens blow and the bells ring for the people to take cover; then the anti-aircraft guns begin to bark and the machine guns to chatter; next we hear the big droning bees approach. A few minutes and Whang! Whang! That performance is repeated five or six times every night. In fact it's gotten so that I can't get to sleep without my little air-raid first.

But this is a fair-sized place, so one has less chance of being the goat. I mean there are so many other places the bastards can hit without getting this hospital.

I'll be out next week; then Ho! for Nice and Monte Carlo for a rest and relief from war. I'll write some stuff there too.

Never got such good material in my life as I did in the trenches. Am now doing some of it. The articles will be Dirty Work at the Crossroads; Sitting on the World; On Night Patrol; No. 13 Rue Treize--a fiction story that's a bear; and Bombing Mumps in France.

Under no circumstances--please take careful note of this--under no circumstances give out anything to the Woodstock or any other papers of anything I have written or shall write home in my letters. Firstly, because the censorship regulations forbid; secondly, the American papers might pick some of it up; and I'm not giving any stuff away when I can sell it for 20 cents a word. I cannot emphazise this too strongly. My letters are for yourself and my immediate family; and nobody else whatever.

The enclosed clipping comes from Dallas. State Press

BC Archives MS-1188 Box 1 File 4 PATTULLO, George Robson, 1845 - . Woodstock, Ontario Selected letters from his son George R. Pattullo Jr., 1917-1918.

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