Letter To An Unknown Soldier

Amanda Craig, Writer

Dear Grandfather,

You met me once, my father said; it was after both Wars, and I was your only grandchild: a babe in arms. Dad said he was afraid to let you see me. Your wife had killed herself the day my Dad was demobbed, though he always suspected you might have murdered her. I think he was afraid you would do something to me, too.

To everyone else, you were a hero – a soldier who came through the Great War without a scratch, an officer and a gentleman. You were pointed out in the street of the small town you came to live, with pride and respect. For King and Country you said, unyielding as your waxed moustache. But to your family, you were the tyrant who took to beating your wife and sons when drunk, and let’s be honest, you were drunk most of the time. Once, my father and his brother ran away but it was cold and they had no money, and after three days of hunger they came back, to more beatings. Your speciality was whipping my Dad, then locking him up in a cupboard, because although he was the younger he was the brave one, the one who tried to defend his mother and brother. You weren’t the sort of hero who respected courage, or who rescued others at Ypres or Passchendale. One of your medals was for taking out a nest of machine gunners, one by one. You were a killer, a bully, a dead shot, who had found his natural element in war.

All his life, my father suffered from his own anger, and from trying to understand you; he hated violence and injustice because he had experienced so much of yours. Was it shell-shock that made you behave as you did, or your own nature? Was it your own upbringing? Dad said you loved the military life, had been bred for it, brought up to it and expected your sons to follow you into the Army when the next War came along. They joined the Navy and the RAF instead. They spent their whole lives trying not to turn into you, grandfather, and my father never hit us, or our mother, not once, even when rage and booze boiled through his veins like poison. But Dad would always stop himself. That was his own War – not the one in which he was blown up, shipwrecked and made deaf in one ear. It was the War with you, grandfather.

Did you have any feelings, or did anger and alcohol consume them all? Was it a form of shell shock, to turn your family into the enemy, long after the War was over? I never knew you, and I never knew my grandmother. She was the loveliest woman, gentle and kind, my father said; an innocent. You would have loved her, and she you. He would weep, remembering, right into his own old age, but he never wept for you.

Amanda

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