A Soldier Unafraid Volume 133, PT. 4; Letters from the Trenches on the Alsatian Front (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: amused. "Well, there's a lot of talent in your first company," he remarked. December 24- We are still in the mountains and among the pine trees. We haven't many comforts here, but we are not hard to please; and then we look on the bright side of things and get some fun out of all that comes our way. When we are crouching down in our awful little hole, Farjat and I repeat twenty times a day a phrase that always sets us off laughing, ? "If our families were only to look in and see us!" But one can get extraordinarily hardened to anything. Why, sometimes with only our trousers and shirts on we take a wash in a brook, ? when we have time for it. To think that to-morrow is Christmas! I mistrust the Boches, and I am expecting a pretended attack. This was their way in 1870. Yes, peace on earth, but when the Teutons are destroyed. God bless you and guard you. Our communion in Him unites us and brings us closer together. December 26. Christmas has come and gone. The day did not differ from all those which we have passed since we came here. Farjat and I both tried very hard to properly celebrate Christmas Eve, but I was afraid our neighbors over the way might play us some nasty trick and in the guise of a " Minuit Chretien,"l the wretches might, in order to please the "Old German God," send us a good shower of grape. So I made a round of the trenches and saw to it that the men were on the lookout, with their eyes and ears on the stretch and their guns in the embrasures. But is that the way to celebrate the Night of Bethlehem ? The Boches on their side were in the same state of mind in regard to our intentions, and during the whole night their patrols were on the move around our outposts. The result was that throughout the whole of Christmas Eve an uninterrupted fusillade ...