Keep the Home Fires Burning - detailing wartime life in the towns and villages mentioned.

NBT 1917 Jan. 23rd Tues.

Mr. William Arnold, formerly of Stoke Hammond, writes from Jersey City, U.S.A.;

“As I get your newspaper from time to time in this part of the globe, I thought I would write and tell you how interesting it is to read the news of the old country places around your district. When a few years ago I crossed the water, I went to Canada. I arrived there just before the haymaking commenced. I went across country and camped down with a farmer on the prairie. There I stayed and worked all through haytime, and this was my experience of hard work and cold spring water, which I think speaks much for a temperate life, for at the finish of the season I was healthier and had gained twelve pounds in weight. After that I worked for an electrical company through the cold Canadian winter, and I never felt the cold, as I did in changeable England. Canada is a splendid country. I had an accident which caused me to have a long spell of illness. I was in the States when the war actually started, and there I have stayed amidst the whirling of strap and wheel, perhaps doing a humble share for old England. In the time I have been here, I have worked with men of many countries, and I say with honest pride that when it comes to hard and arduous work, sticking to it with pluck and tenacity, the British lads are second to none, and that’s the time when our determined spirit shows. One thing I have in particular seen amongst the hundreds of Germans here - they never want to go back to that kultured (sic) land where the iron heel of militarism reigns supreme. I sometimes hear the criticism of the Yankee folks on some of your great men, and there is one man in particular, whose spiritual home was Germany, who is spoken of very strongly. Either he was blinded and infatuated by the artful German hospitality, or he saw and knew what was going on. For a short time last summer, I travelled through the southern states and where the civil war was fought, and there I saw parts of villages that were still in ruins - had never been re-built - and in some of the church steeples there are still the remains of shot and shell. I could quite imagine the desolation in Belgium and France. In the Western States the German machinations are wide and deep; money has been scattered like water. Many dirty dastardly things have been done, and the Yankees ‘guess and calculate the dirty Germans were at the bottom of it.’ Of course, we Britishers look upon Bernstorff as an oily rogue, who ought to have been bundled out bag and baggage long ago. One thing I am quite sure of, if it had not been for the British navy, America would have been worse off to-day. The popular hope amongst the most rational and sensible people here is that the Allies will so crush and maim German despotism and the Kaiser’s ideas of world domination, as quite to destroy it. I was blown out of bed by that great explosion that occurred here - no doubt that was a German plot - but I was not much harmed. I have been very sorry to read in your pages of the deaths on the field of battle of some I knew. I still hope to have the pleasure of perusing the pages of your paper, but just now newspapers, letters, etc., are very uncertain. We Britishers here, hope and look forward to seeing our old flag still float, and may it never be lowered, and wherever that flag unfurls may there be liberty and honour.”