Envelope dated 29^th April 1916 (two letters in this envelope)

                                       To          2^nd Lt G.F. Odell,

                                                Fenny Stratford Signals Depot

                                       England       

                            

Dear G,                                                                                                                                      28.4.16       

                                There are just two or three little things which might interest you, & which want a letter in themselves.

                    This 5’ burying does want to be concealed from the Bosch aeroplane, but apart from that you don’t bring out large working parties by daylight within a thousand yards of the firing line. We had a machine gun on us one or two nights. Very pretty to hear it traversing. Naturally the sound of any gun varies according as you are more or less in front of it. And the clatter of a machine gun is recognisable anywhere.  So when you hear the chatter get louder & louder & sharper & sharper you can tell quite well what’s happening, without attending to the yip – yip ping which makes an almost continuous whistle over your head. In the course of an evening you get quite adept at lying down, whether standing in mud or water;  & most extraordinarily flat you lie; though according to the testimony of experts & the probabilities of the case the bullets are from 25 to 50 yds up above.  Anyhow the MG didn’t get anyone. One of the evenings the officer who came up with part of the working party, opened that he couldn’t do any good walking about, & if he lay down it would save him the trouble of repeatedly lying down & getting up. So lie down he did from start to finish, while his men stood up to work, - incidentally working down under cover until it was time to fill in. There is a phrase out here ‘getting the wind up’ which describes his situation.  But besides the MG there was a fired rifle, or it might have been only an occasional stray shot; & one evening that got one man, in the groin. It missed the femoral artery but hit a long vein. There was fortunately an infantry officer there who was all but a doctor, & he bandaged. But the man lost a lot of blood on the way to the dressing station, & didn’t recover. That’s the first time I’ve had a man under my charge hit – he wasn’t one of my section, only one of the working party. It makes you a little sick of the damnfoolery of war, often repeated would perhaps get on your nerves;  - not I think to the extent of supervising for a whole evening in the prone position.

                    I am not yet tired of watching the phenomena, which depend for their interest on the difference in speed of sound & light. In the position where we were last, there was a ridge about 2000 yds from the Bosch, he being on the next ridge, & visual line beneath him across the valley. I often saw things which I’d only occasionally been in a favourable position for seeing formerly.  It is everywhere quite common to see a little white cloud come into existence in the sky, & then hear a roaring whistle rush up to it, ending with a great bang when it reaches the place where the cloud is dissipating.   The sound lasts several seconds, say two or three commonly, so you have ample time to follow its parabola through the air. But if you do, i.e. it is the sound which first attracts your attention, the cloud is disappearing by the time you have located it. You locate it of course by looking ahead of the sound on the path on which its travelling. Or instead of a cloud in the sky you may see a splash on the ground, or a sudden fountain of dust, & then a roar will rush over & drop on it with a crack. With these larger shells, fired a longer range, you have longer to study the phenomenon. I have followed the sound of one of our 6” guns for 20 seconds watch it land, & then I did not hear the shells explode. If you are going to translate this into range to test my accuracy, don’t forget that the shell doesn’t go in a straight line to it’s destination. You don’t hear a Bosch shell for so long, for naturally you can follow a diminishing sound far beyond the point at which a crescendo would first attract your attention. But there is ample time to form a judgement where the splash should come, then correct it because the sound has a flatter trajectory than you first thought, & then to see the splash some hundreds of yards from your last guess.  This does not apply to whizz- bangs from short range on the front line & supports; as I have told you before they are just whizz-bang! & you must hurry over the whizz & come down hard on the bang.

                             If at any time you see a number of little white clouds burst high up in the sky (a 1000 feet or more, shrapnel badly timed should not be over 200’) look somewhere else for an aeroplane. There may be a second group of bursts, which with the first will tell you the direction in which the ‘plane was flying’ a minute before; but probably it will since have doubled back,- not dodging, oh no, just serenely pursuing its purpose.

                             - How fluent I am on subjects which are taboo, - but I think this last is fit for general consumption, for you must be having the same sort of thing in England, so I’ll save the rest of it for a letter home.  – The thing has just started outside my window, - I can see a score of puffs, but the plane must be in another quarter of the sky.

                                      __________            

                             I forget if there was anything else I was going to describe, anyway it will keep.

                             Yours affectionately

                                                Bert