Letter To An Unknown Soldier

Jo Clifford, writer/playwright

My dear friend

Thinking of you today as i write this letter makes me realise you have been with me all along.

You were there when I lived as a boy and my school made me wear a uniform and walk every day under an archway on my way to classes. The archway had the names of your comrades from both world wars carved into it: the names of all those who had been murdered in the conflict. And the other side of the archway was the huge statue of the brooding man, the field marshall, who our country honoured for stifling his humanity and sending you to your deaths.

We were made to wear army uniform on Monday afternoons, uniform of the kind they made you wear, and blanco our puttees and polish our buckles and our boots. We were inspected on a parade ground and made to march up and down carrying rifles while sergeants shouted at us.

The rifles came from your war. You had to carry them too; and later we were taught to take them apart and oil them and grease them and then fire them at targets with human faces.

This was done to us for the same reason it was done to you: to make us into what they called men.

And so I associated my hatred and fear of all this with my deep desire not to be a man at all.

Longing to be a woman was something I was so ashamed of because I had been told, like you, that to be like a woman was the worst shame of all.

As I grew older, my dear friend, I learnt of your sufferings and the desperate cruelty of it all and like so many of us came to understand that what we had both been taught about the glory of war was a terrible evil lie.

To think of war as something unnecessary and cruel was almost impossible when you were alive; but you helped strengthen that thought in us.

And along with that understanding it became more and more possible for me to learn to respect, honour and love the woman in me and to allow her full and open expression in my life.

Which is why now, as a woman, I have come here with all the other travellers to stand at your feet and honour you. My dear love, you must have felt so helpless.

But there was a power in you that you knew nothing of.

Your death taught us that we do not have to go to war.

That there is another way.

That in honouring compassion, pity and mercy, those so-called women’s qualities, we can learn to truly honour the women in us.

And then, as humans, truly understand what it means to be a man.

With love and thanks,

Jo Clifford

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