Hospital Militaire Bonsecours
26/1/1918
My dearest Mother
Thank you so much for your ripping long letter. I am sorry you have had such a rotten time victualling just now: anyway I suppose you have a better time than the people in the big towns.
It is very simple for us as the wretched quartermaster lieutenant has to worry it all out: but we are much less short of food in France than in England I think: things are obtainable here, at a price of course. Bread and sugar are short the French eat a tremendous lot of bread and feel the privation.
We have less butter than we are used to and only two lumps of sugar a day. Of course if we have a pudding that wants sugar they give us a ration for that.
I will write to John and Elsie and thank them for their kind present. Isabel Beatty and I went to Paris for Sunday last week; I spent some of Father’s Christmas present on that. We went on Saturday night by the express and spent the night at a ripping little hotel the Prince de Galles close to the Gare st Lazare and the next day we went out to Versailles and spent the day rooting about there. We got back to Paris in the afternoon and did a little shopping and came back here by the evening express.
We have been playing hockey this week on the gymnastic ground which is cinders and much too small, but it is great sport. I am horribly stiff at present. The sweater arrived quite safely may thanks. Are there any more Christian hockey sticks at home: if there are I must get someone to bring them out as we are a bit short of weapons.
I have had quite an orgy of ops lately: I went to see an appendix hiked out and two nerve ops during the last ten days. I have quite got over my theatre sickness now and can stand and watch quite comfortably and it is more trying to loaf about and watch than to help.
I have been awfully busy this week the orderly who arranges the doctors daily visit is ill in bed and I have had to make the lists of patients to be called for the doctor’s morning visit (all men in treatment have to be re-examined every three weeks and all new patients when they come) and when they come they have to be arranged and their diagnosis found in the case books and then I have to stand by the doctor and take off dressings and put them on again, hand him things, find his places in the books, switch the current off and on and a hundred and one little jobs. It is some game I can tell you: and my own work to do into the bargain. However I am in rude health and full of beans.
Don’t let Fuller touch any of the rose trees: I am nearly certain to get leave in April.
Best love to you all
your loving Dorothy
About Alford 