Gertrude clapped her hands . I wanted to laugh and cry , mother 's eyes flashed with their old-time starriness and Susan emitted a queer sound between a gasp and a whoop . `` This will not comfort the Kaiser much , ' she said . `` Then we went to bed , but were too excited to sleep . Really , as Susan said solemnly this morning , ` Mrs. Dr. dear , I think politics are too strenuous for women . ' '' 31st December 1917 `` Our fourth War Christmas is over . We are trying to gather up some courage wherewith to face another year of it . Germany has , for the most part , been victorious all summer . And now they say she has all her troops from the Russian front ready for a ` big push ' in the spring . 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 XXXXX 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 .
about as at between in on over that through to