"By this time you will have experienced some awful times & you will realize fully just what it means to be a soldier, a real soldier. You wanted so much to be one didn’t you & now you are in the thickest of battle are you sorry I know you are not no need to ask..."

Sadie, 12 Sept 1916

"[W]hat were once trenches are now an indescribable ruin – the shell craters have left not a semblance of the former country – the shells still come over but there actually isn’t much of the ground which hasn’t been ploughed and blasted till now it’s a pulverized mass of heaped mud out of which appear some very sickening and terrible things which were once men – the whole dead have been buried when they lay free from the dirt but the pieces of human beings still lay scattered about – clothes containing the decaying pieces of men – boots with human feet still in them – broken rifles bayonets equipment, helmets shattered by shell fire and these are both British and German..."

Harry, 7 Oct 1916

"[A] shell burst right over me and the next I knew several minutes afterward was a cloudy recollection of having been hit on the head by a sledge hammer and a party of my men around me in the bottom of the trench, a piece of shell had hit me a glancing blow on the head and stunned me, the steel helmet probably having saved my life, another piece hit me on the arm breaking a perfectly good watch but saving me from further injury excepting a bruised fore arm..."

Harry, 22 Oct 1916

"[S]o glad you weren’t more seriously hurt when you were knocked unconscious. Oh Harry if you had been – I try not to think of that though, but when you read of such terrible happenings one can hardly help it."

Sadie, 9 Nov 1916

"Am wondering... if you have been accepted for that aviation course. You wonder if I approve of that – your latest move – would it matter very much if I did not Harry? ... I know a boy who went to this war as an aviator & now he is buried somewhere over there."

Sadie, 8 Oct 1916

"Haven’t heard any more about the Aviation course since the applications went forward but some how I feel sure of its’ being accepted because they do need men... Dear afterward after the war aeroplanes will be all the rage – they will be fashionable – then we shall fly Sadie..."

Harry, 7 Nov 1916

"This they tell me is Sunday and a very very happy one for us because it is our last day on this awful Somme... Have heard nothing more from the application to the Royal Flying Corps... I feel that I would love it, there we act on our own courage, skill and initiative and haven’t the responsibility of fifty or sixty men’s lives on our minds and the exhilaration of flying away up there in the pure air and sunshine away from the mud and filth of the trenches..."

Harry, 26 Nov 1916

"I am not going to say a word about this flying stunt, you have cut your eye teeth, so use your own judgement. They say the Almighty looks after fools and children, I don’t think you fit in either of these classes, you must be in a class by yourself. You know I’m a fatalist so if God wants you to fly, it’s not my place to object."

Harry, 5 Jan 1916

"I now belong to #1 Wing #10 Squadron “G” Flight in the Royal Flying Corps, British Expeditionary Force, France (Somewhere In)."

Harry, 25 Jan 1917