April 25th, 1916
My dear Mother,
I am getting along well. Had several home letters lately and one from Mr Ogilvie.
The big wheat yield is good, isn’t it! We got a Sydney Mail with a photo of a big stack of wheat. It’s a decent change after the season before.
I’ve been in France for about a month. It’s a lovely country and very heavily populated.
The farmers are finishing sowing wheat and many crops look splendid. They are mostly small paddocks. Many are only five or six acres but it’s all cultivated with a single furrow plowsmall harrows and drills with four chutes. Women are plowing and sowing.
it has rained every second day with five or six straight for a change, but it is the wet season now. All the fruit trees are in blossom, all the timber is planted and they prune the firewood each season. I could count as many villages as we have houses at home. Most of them have big buildings. All the farms have mileage pits. I could tell the age of farms by the number of silos and each is a bit bigger than the last. They build almost every farm house the same – the same four buildings all joined with a 20 yard square patch in the middle where all the stable manure input in winter. When it dries out it is put on the ground in springtime. There is a lot of smell that comes from the piles. We are billeted in a farm. There is a McCormick R.B. here too.
We have had two periods in the trenches. We get as long out as we spend in the firing line and get a good hot bath and change of underclothes when we come out. We are much better off here for comfort than we were in Turkey and so far it has not been nearly as strenuous.
Some kisses for Nona.
Love to all
Stid
