Search The Archive

Search form

Collection Search
Date: May 25th 1915
To
Mother
From
Errol
Letter

35th. Battalion,
Niagara Concentration Camp,
May 25th. 1915.

My darling Mother:

I have just one minute before the piquet falls in to scribble you a short note to tell you how I love and miss you all. I shall try and write at greater length to-night, but I want you to get this to-morrow and must post it right away.

Mother dear, it has been so hard to leave you and Dad and the girls, not that I regret anything for myself, but that it hurts me so to know you all will miss me. Sometimes I have thought during the last few weeks that I could not do it, but we are a queer inarticulate lot where our deeper feelings are concerned, and I hope I have never appeared indifferent through my silence on the subject. 

I never knew until I had to leave you how much I loved you all. However, in a crisis like this one must believe as Lloyd George says, that it is not what happens to one in life that matters, but the way one meets it, and so I shall try to do my share. 

Fernie said to me the night before I left, "Errol, take are of yourself and come back to me, but if it is ever a matter of doing your duty, forget that I am alive. And I know that is the way you feel too.

One needs such an infinite faith though to believe that all this sacrifice is really useful and will really make the world a better place for us and those who come after.

Well, dear, I ramble on, but I should get used to it in a few weeks I suppose. I must run now. Love to all.

Yours most lovingly and longingly,
ERROL.

Original Scans

Original Scans