June 1918. Letter from Guy Beech, Chaplain to the Forces, former curate at Tring
With a Middlesex Regiment Battalion BEF, May 3rd 1918 As the address shows you, I am now attached to the “Diehards”. My last letter was written just before I left the reinforcement camp to join the Division. Eventually I reached it close to the town I had left the week before!
I was posted to this battalion whose padre had been killed in the recent fighting. But how long I shall be with it is uncertain, as it seems likely to be broken up, which will mean my being transferred to some entirely different unit.
Most of the men have been drafted away, and their place may possibly be taken by Americans. We have been perpetually on the move from one village to another in back areas, quite a long way from the fighting line. We are billeted in first one, and then another French house; usually a farmhouse built four square like an Oxford college quad, and usually with a refuse heap in the centre!
In the last village my bedroom overlooked a pretty little valley with an aerodrome on the opposite hill and on clear evenings I used to watch the aeroplanes come out one after the other from their hangars, like wasps from a nest, and go off in formation, laden with bombs for the enemy territory. Here in another farmhouse, I am roused at by the old French peasant starting forth with his plough and horses for the fields. The French are indeed wedded to the soil. Everywhere you see them working on the land, the women and old men, and there they are from sunrise to sunset every day. Doubtless it is one great reason of the strength of France, and one can’t help wishing we English people loved the soil as they do.
We are under orders to move again tomorrow and have a seventeen mile march before us.
