...a ninety-nine year old Christmas gift

"To my dear sweetheart. Wishing you a happy Christmas. Your loving husband Fred. 24th Dec. 1917."

We shall never know the identity of this affectionate couple, who have doubtless long-since departed this world. But this touching expression of sentiment remains.

Among this anthology of Longfellow's poems is his marvellous Psalm of Life.

 

Lives of great men all remind us

   We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

   Footprints on the sands of time

...the continuing conflict

Christmas 1916 was a miserable one for the progress of the War, with the bloody Battles of the Somme and Verdun barely over, and the 1915 Battle of Champagne - to which this postcard refers, and during which some fifty thousand died - by then just a distant memory.

There was no Christmas truce in the trenches this year, as there had been in 1914, and even in a few places in 1915.

"The War to end all wars" ground on.