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November 21 

It is now late but must wait about two hours for movement orders. I happen to be in a nice warm corner so I take this opportunity to start a letter. Will try and find time each day to write in it. I mailed a letter this afternoon and hope you will get it   Monica's birthday will have passed but today I wish you much joy on that day. Our trip through the destroyed part was ofcourse during the war. But when the Armistice was signed we had nothing to do but chase the Fritz. It was a hard job. The weather was very bad, no end to the mud and then to retard us they keep blowing up the bridges and great holes in the roadway. Then the disgusting part of it all was they   left a few civilians in the villages hoisted white flags so we would not shoot? on these towns, it was to prevent the French from killing their own people we might think but it was not. It was to save their own cowardly skins. The civilians told us ofcourse many interesting incidents which occurred in their flight. Flight it was and cowardly and a thieving army. At one large village an officer was at the railroad station while the soldiers were ransacking the houses of all the beautiful furniture and dumping it on the platform of the station. They would select different things to be distributed amongst all the other officers. Every village we entered in France was completely ramsacked. What they could not take they broke it or burned it and then last of all, leave every room if there was a room a dirty sewer. You cannot imagine the filth that can be made by a people that we have been made to understand to be a clean people. Yet they are as proficient in their dirtiness as they were in their killing of people in the beginning of the war. I have had about all the experiences of war since I left Montmireille except being killed or wounded. Sometimes it has been very hard, but always so much that could be done that it was easy to forget one's own troubles. Such little annoyances as eating or sleeping had to take care of itself.

Now as we move forward our work is changing. We meet many prisoners that the Bosch have released. We leave our Foyer tonight, but warm for 60 prisoners (French) to sleep in. Now that we have no trench work to do on wounded we find the prisoners and also many civilians in great need of something to eat and warm. to drink. It will be very hard for them until the organization of revetement is well in hand. 

We are making for Germany as fast as we can through Luxumbourg. So far the Belgian(?) towns are not destroyed except the houses the Germans occupied and the villages which were destroyed in 1914. They have done everything possible to force the GermanKultur on the Belgians, but have no doubt failed. I do not believe the Bosch understand that they are on the wrong track. The towns which were occupied by them were under a cold iron rule. When they left, they left pelmell and every house they occupied was left in a condition unfit to live in.