I have the sense that my grandpa and his sister Lene were good pals. They wrote a lot to each other and always sounded really fond of each other. At the end of the war, Lene is just bursting with impatience for him to get home.
Most of the letters are more legible but this is one that breaks my heart a bit. It's less than a month after armistice, and my grandfather is languishing in the hospital. He writes of previously having sent Lene a pressed flower. And then he says, "I had lot of other things I intended to send to you but lost everything in the lines of Verdun. I did not care much for sending souvenirs home, when I'm about 100 ft from the Germans the only souvenir I wanted to get home then was to get myself home. You don't blame me do you." He references those lost souvenirs in other letters so clearly it meant a lot to him, having to leave them behind, whatever they were.
He did manage to bring home a souvenir from Verdun though. It looks like a piece of a flag, from the church he also references in the letter. I wonder about the story behind it. Did he and his pals cut up a small French flag and write on a it a reminder of the source? I find it curious that it says "Cathedrale" rather than the English spelling. My grandpa wrote occasionally of picking up some French and actually wrote an entire letter to Lene in French, just for fun. But it makes me wonder because it strikes me as odd that he'd use the word "Cathedrale." I suppose an enterprising French person may have sold it?
