Letter To An Unknown Soldier

Owen Sheers, Writer

Dear unknown soldier, I am the unknown great grandson of the man you killed.

You were chosen for a raiding party. There were ten of you in all. You were a big man, strong arms and a farmer’s grip. So you know why you were chosen. ‘In case things get sticky’, that’s what the officer said. He’d seen you throw sandbags like they were nothing. He knew that if it came to the bayonet, the cudgel, the shovel or the fists, you’d be a good man to have on that raid.

In the end, you needed none of those. Your party found a way through the wire and surprised the German trench. Two men were taken, privates from Düsseldorf, both. But then there was movement in a dugout. Men’s voices, the sound of boots on wood, rifles being shouldered. So you threw in a couple of mills bombs. And then you and your party were gone, through the wire and into no-man’s land, a maxim gun searching its shell holes. Behind you, in that dugout my great grandfather was dying, a broken piece of wood through his throat and both his hands blown off at the wrist. By the time you reached your own trench, he was gone.

And so was I. Because of those mills bombs he never returned from France. He never arrived home and went back to his job on the tourist boats on the Mosel river. So one summer’s day he never saw my great grandmother stepping out of a rowing boat. He never approached her to offer her his hand. They never made love a few weeks later. And so they never had a son who would have had a daughter of his own, who in turn would have given birth to me. Instead, because of you, we are all never.

A month after that raid your regiment were in the line again. An attack was ordered. Half way across no man’s land a shell landed at your feet. And then your children became never too. They found bits of you, but your name was lost. You were known but unknown. And I am sorry for that, I really am. I am sorry for it all. That you had to be a killer, and then had to be a killed. And despite of what men did to each other in that war, and what they still do to each other now, I am sorry too, that I never got a chance to be. Life, for those lucky enough to live it, looks rather wonderful. I should have liked to taste its air, see its colours and know its love. I should have liked to have been known, not unknown. But instead I am never, along with the millions of other nevers born on those fields in France. Millions, who like me, are sorry. Sorry for it all.

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