Happy New Year 2022

First of all, I want to wish you a Happy New Year 2022!

Let’s do that with a New Year postcard from 1916 that Jean Sazy sent to his wife from the front.

As you will see, the text is a bit difficult to read. Jean has always had a handwriting style that I find a little difficult to decipher, and even more so as time spent at the front gets longer. You can feel the fatigue, the lack of sleep, the stress, maybe not so much in the handwriting itself, but in the mistakes that become more numerous, the punctuation that is a bit random, and these kinds of things that do not help reading his text.

Moreover, as he often did, only having postcards as writing support (or if he had simple paper, it did not reach me), his text lasts over several cards. And as I don’t have the cards themselves with me, and as I hadn’t sorted them out when scanning them, I have no idea where the rest of the text is (but it’s on my hard drive, so maybe it’ll show up here one day).

In short, it’s not a very “interesting” text and it has a lot of holes (if you can read French and want to help me fill them, click on the card below to enlarge it) :

Saturday, January the first of 1916

Dear Jeanne and family.

I can tell you my dear that today is New Year’s Day and that I party(ied?). I’m on duty at the police station. But finally this (?) so maybe tonight we will (?) a little. I can tell you that we have been able to rest (?) since the 26th and since the first day we arrived we weren’t pleased because (?)

So, as you can see that’s not a lot. Jean seems to be away from the front a little (although, I assume it’s the military police station) and will be able to rest and maybe celebrate a little.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for more.