Letter To An Unknown Soldier

Kate Pullinger, writer

Dear Soldier –

I see you there. You are gripping that letter, and you are angry.

We are asked to remember, but it isn’t easy. I have no experience of war and what it does to you, even though the troops – the British, the American, the Syrian, the troops in so many countries, in fact - are engaged in war almost continually. The closest I’ve come to your war is the memorial in Ely Cathedral; my great-uncles, W. A. Low and H. Low, both killed at the western front, are named on it. I didn’t know those uncles. My mother, their niece, didn’t know them either; they were killed before she was born.

My grandfather – their brother - left England during your war; he married my grandmother, fled the Fenlands and travelled to Canada, beating conscription and thus avoiding their fates. He died before I was born. I look at you on your plinth, soldier, and I think: how can I remember people I never knew? How can we know the unknown soldier?

My family has no artefacts, no touchable, tangible family history. When my mother died and we emptied my parents’ house, the only remnant of their parents’ generation was a badly made plywood plant-holder that my grandfather, a railway worker, knocked together in the 1950s.

A railway worker, like you.  But alive and well in 1918, the year, perhaps, you lost your life; head down, hard at work, making a new family on a big lake in a fertile valley in the western-most reaches of the new Dominion, far far away from Europe and the dirt and the blood and the horror. Eventually, he built a house for that family to live in. They thrived.My mother married a man who had been to university.

But you, you died on a battlefield. You got more than you bargained for, I imagine, like W.A. and H. You stand there, gripping that letter, and you are angry.You look up, away from the letter, at us, all the people, one hundred years later, and you open your mouth and you roar. You roar at everyone gathered at the cenotaphs and memorials, you shout at everyone with their speeches and their sermons and their poppies and their wreaths, and you fill those minutes of silence. You want us to listen to your message.

But we don’t hear you. We drag our suitcases up the platform past you and we look at our phones and we worry about missing the train, and we do not hear what you are saying. And the troops are deployed, and re-deployed, all over the world, again and again.

Kate Pullinger

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