Sometimes it seems to me that we just can not live through the winter waiting for that . `` I had a great batch of letters from overseas this week . Shirley is at the front now , too , and writes about it all as coolly and matter-of-factly as he used to write of football at Queen 's . Carl wrote that it had been raining for weeks and that nights in the trenches always made him think of the night of long ago when he did penance in the graveyard for running away from Henry Warren 's ghost . Carl 's letters are always full of jokes and bits of fun . They had a great rat-hunt the night before he wrote -- spearing rats with their bayonets -- and he got the best bag and won the prize . He has a tame rat that knows him and sleeps in his pocket at night . Rats do n't worry Carl as they do some people -- he was always chummy with all little beasts . He says he is making a study of the habits of the trench rat and means to write a treatise on it some day that will make him famous . `` Ken wrote a short letter . His letters are all rather short now -- and he does n't often slip in those dear little sudden sentences I love so much . Sometimes I think he has forgotten all about the night he was here to say goodbye -- and then there will be just a line or a word that makes me think he remembers and always will remember . For instance to-day 's letter had n't a thing in it that might n't have been written to any girl , except that he signed himself ` Your Kenneth , ' instead of ` Yours , Kenneth , ' as he usually does . Now , did he leave that 's ' off intentionally or was it only carelessness ? I shall lie awake half the night wondering . He is a captain now . I am glad and proud -- and yet Captain Ford sounds so horribly far away and high up . Ken and Captain Ford seem like two different persons . I may be practically engaged to Ken -- mother 's opinion on that point is my stay and bulwark -- but I ca n't be to Captain Ford ! `` And Jem is a lieutenant now -- won his promotion on the field .
He sent me a snap-shot , taken XXXXX his new uniform .
about as at for in of on through to with