Dear Great-Uncle Fred,
Thank you very much for the postcards you sent back to Northampton. They’re beautiful - little sheets of embroidered silk glued into cardboard frames - flags and flowers, a butterfly with the Union Jack on one wing and the Tricolore on the other, a crucifix, a cottage, the Badge of the Royal Sussex Regiment. On each one some uplifting phrase is stitched in capitals or cursive: God Bless You… Happy New Year… Entente Cordiale… To My Dear Sister… Home Sweet Home… I find it hard to believe such things came from a battlefield. I guess there must have been French and Belgian women working with needles and thimbles in clean, quiet rooms somewhere far from the mud and the guns.
You’re fifteen. Or sixteen. We’ll never know for sure. You lied about your age so you could join up early, and all the other records have been lost. You’ll be dead within the year.
I wish you’d said more. “From Fred to Nell, hoping you are in the best of health,” you’ve written on the back of one card. “From Fred to Mother, 3/12/16,” you’ve written on another. Most of the cards are blank. Did you have nothing to say? Or too much? Were you under orders? Or did you not want to worry everyone back home?
Now ninety eight years have passed and this is all we have left of you, fourteen cards mounted under glass in a dark wooden frame standing in the corner of my room in Oxford. And in the centre of the cards a sepia portrait of a teenager in uniform - bright buttons, big collar, black hair brilliantined and parted. At first glance you could be anyone’s great-uncle, but if I look hard I can just about see something of myself in you, that double twist of blood and genes spooling back through time, getting finer and frailer every year.
Remembrance… Honour to England… Until the End.
Yours,
Mark
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Letter To An Unknown Soldier
Short StoryThis story is a collection of short letters that have been submitted to the Unknown Soldier project. The project is inspired by a statue that stands on Platform 1 of Paddington Station in London, representing all the millions of soldiers who died –...
