Letter To An Unknown Soldier

Kathryn Hughes, Writer

Dear Grandfather

I’m sorry that I was born nearly a decade after you died in 1952. But, even if I had met you, I know that you would never have breathed a word about being on the Somme in 1916. That’s how it was.  The men who came back never said what they’d seen, ever.  But your body did your talking for you: you went out fit and whole and you came back with a limp that never went away.

I always found it stunning that you’d insisted on joining up as a private soldier.  You were a clergyman’s son with a public school education, and could easily have been an officer. I know that’s what I’d have done, taken the job that appeared to offer the cushiest berth.  Something in an office, well back from the Front, stationed in one of those little French towns in the Pas de Calais where you could still get a good lunch at midi. In a letter to your sweetheart you say that you feel ‘lucky’ because you have been sent to France while other poor chaps are still stuck on Salisbury Plain.  You are 24, not 18, and you really mean it.

I was recently given all your letters from the Front and at first I thought they were a joke. They read like something the Hugh Laurie character in the final series of Blackadder might have written. You ask your sweetheart, who is also your cousin, about people called ‘Chuffie’ and ‘Bingo’.  You thank her for the ‘ripping’ cake she has made, politely pointing out that the address to which she has sent it is slightly wrong ‘although it really doesn’t matter’. You thank your mother for sending some ‘deliciously ripe’ pears from the rectory garden.

And ‘Grannie’ gets a letter too, acknowledging the marvelous muffler she has knitted: it gets, you explain, really rather cold now that you are out in the open all the time. You make it sound like you’re shooting pheasants on Dartmoor rather than standing in a trench firing at other pastors’ sons. Does Grannie have a clue what you’re doing? It would be condescending to assume that she doesn’t.  I think you are all talking in code.

There is, finally, one thing I’ve always longed to ask.  Did you get teased a lot because of your name? You were christened ‘Hilary’ because you were born on St Hilary’s Day, 13th January 1892. As a child I used to find it endlessly amusing that I had a dead grandfather with a girl’s name.  Did the men fighting alongside you – the Bills and the Berts and the Bobs – find it funny too? Or perhaps I’m showing a tin ear to History.  I think in the early 20th Century men always used surnames with each other, whether they were in uniform or out of it.  Even when you were lying next to a dying man in the trench, I’m sure you never intruded on his privacy by using the name that his mother called him. And I’m equally certain, too, that you were hurt in ways that we, with our fake familiarities and instant intimacies, cannot begin to imagine.

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