Jasper County Democrat, Volume 21, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 May 1918 — LETTER FROM ROSS BENJAMIN. [ARTICLE]

LETTER FROM ROSS BENJAMIN.

Sunday, March 31, 1918. Dear Mother: — These oil lamps we have here are a long ways from being like the lights at home and we wear a cap like a teacup, without any on in front, so I am writing with a post card in the front of my caps to shade by eyes from the light. In this room we have to furnish our own heat and light. We have oil lamps and an oil stove. We buy oil from the commissary at the- post. At the post there’s a lot of Field Clerks (stenographers), who have their own mess and we eat there. Breakfast at 7:30, dinner at 12:30, and supper at 5:30. Tomorrow they change the breakfast hours to six thirty, but we have made arrangements to have our breakfast at 7:30 as before. Shortly'after I came here they set the clock ahead an hour, so six o’clock really means five o’clock. I like that pretty well, for although we get up pretty early, it gives us a nice long evening. We quit work at 5:30, *which really means 4:30. We go to bed about nine o’clock as there is not much else to do. We went to church this Easter morning at a little chapel in an old French hospital near the post and heard some very fine music. Couldn’t understand much they said as it was all in French. Nearly .every body over here are Catholics and I hardly know how to act in a Catholic church but there is nothing else to go to here. *Went through an old Catholic church last Sunday that was built about a thousands years ago, some time in the twelth century. It is really over seveft hundred years old. Most of the housese here look about that old.

The fighting up north has been pretty fierce this last week, but if it was notfor seeing so many men in uniform here we wouldn’t know there was a war. I suppose you read all about that in the papers about as soon as we do. I haven’t had any mail yet and have been here over three weeks, but I guess I can’t complain for a man comes into the office now and then and says he has had no mail for two months or more. Been raining for two days now but up to that time the sun hits shown almost every day since I have been here. Have a pan of water on the oil stove that is hot and am going to take a bath such as it is. They say there are only two or thfee bath