Also known as: ‘And we think we have problems with the mail, and waiting more than five minutes for a reply? Horrors!’

“Dec. 30, 1918

My dear Dad,

Your letter of Dec. 9th and mailed on Dec. 12th just received so mail is going to be better perhaps. It usually has taken much longer you see. By Dec. 9th you should have heard from me, but Lord only knows what becomes of mail from this end. No! I’m not a Major but have had the pleasure of running three of them as operations officer thru the fighting and am back at my old job as Reg. I.O. and quite content as I’ve written before. When anything is fresh in my mind, it seems as if I could sit down and write reams of interesting stuff, but the old war is stale already and tonight no incidents pop into my head to come out on paper – when the things you wanted to know about happened old boy Censor was on the job, (he still is by the way on certain matters – casualties for one) and opportunities to sit down and write those reams were few and far between. What we want most is to sit down and talk about it and as the soldier was never accused of being any kin to the violet we will do some talking one of these days – even in talking amongst ourselves the stories that were originally concerned with patrols are now all about attacks – from some of the clippings you have sent, New York is already suffering. Wait ‘til we all descend on you!

New Year’s Eve is almost here and our mess is much troubled over the outlook – shopping for food hereabouts is difficult but today I managed to find some wild boar meat and know where the champagne tree grows – it still flourishes here – so we won’t fare badly at all. Our Xmas was a great success – did I write to thank you for the cigarettes? They helped a lot – at that time none had received a Xmas 9 x 4 brick and we All appreciated this one.”

From a letter by Capt. Bradford Ellsworth, A.E.F. 306th Infantry, 77th Division; to his father, William Webster Ellsworth, back home at Esperanza. (although by the time he received the letter, they would have closed the house for the winter and would have been in NYC, delaying its arrival even more!)

Yes, still working on that transcription project.