Alma Russell Letters
Letters of British Columbia men on active service with Canadian and British Expeditionary Forces, 1914-1918. Learn more.
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gaining any distinction at it, but still it is fairly safe and the work is not hard. I really think that the Sunday night you dreamed of me I really was in rather a bad place. I was carrying up lumber with a sapper and small party when Fritz started a mad bombardment of the communication trench we were in. The rest of the party beat it but as we were in a deep part of a good trench the sapper and I preferred to stay where we were. I have seldom seen shells come so fast and his shooting was good though his shells were rotten. We crouched at the bottom of the trench and tried to cover ourselves with one eight inch plank apiece and wished they were thicker. I could only laugh at the efforts of the enormous sapper to squirm under his plank as he heard the shells coming. Three in succession I thought were going to get us, big shells one knows how close they are going to burst by the speed with which the roar of their approach increases. Each one struck our trench but all three were duds. I shall never get a nice "Blighty" at this rate. You know we call a wound a blighty if it is severe enough for the recipient to be sent back to England. It has its funny side, War, A man will be on the ground whimpering like a puppy in his agony, while his pal stands over him telling him how fortunate he is to have got such an excellent blighty.
Shells are unanswerable - they are like motor-lorries, one can only get out of their way; the venomous hiss of machine gun bullets over one's head fills one with dread, but the fire of a sniper directed on me fills me with hot murderous rage. A week or so back I had a lot of work to do over the parapet clearing away sandbags of chalk and dumping them in a shell hole, soon after I started a sniper spotted me, heard me perhaps or caught a glimpse of me by the light of a flare. He never gave me any more peace that night but just kept firing where he thought I might be. He reduced me to a state of delirious rage as I
BC Archives, MS-1901 Box 1 File 19 RUSSELL, Alma M., 1873-1964. Victoria; librarian. Letters from Cecil Harrow Unwin, 1916-1917.