Letter To An Unknown Soldier

Naomi Alderman, Writer

To the unknown soldier,

I’m sorry.

It wasn’t your fault, and it’s not my fault and yet, still. I’m sorry. Because, I suppose, though you started out older than me, you are younger now than I am. Because when I first met you, I could think of you as fatherly, as the kind of man who would lay his life down for the child I was. Because children expect that from adults; expect to be able to leap into arms that will catch them, and that other lives will be laid down for theirs.

When I first stood in front of your statue in Paddington Station, I was a child, and your sacrifice seemed noble, right and proper. This is what adults do to secure the future.  And now I’m older than you. And I can’t offer you what you gave me. It’s the wrong way round, now. It’s not just that you won’t grow old, as we who are left grow old. It’s that you’re getting younger every day.

I’m sorry because we haven’t managed to change enough in the meantime to seem a good bargain with the loss of the sixty or seventy more years you might have had. And because the things we have changed – we try to live good lives, still, by our own lights – probably wouldn’t have done anything for you. Whatever it was you thought you were fighting for: country, honour perhaps, pride, the desire of the young to be heroes… we’ve turned away so thoroughly from those things now that the idea of dying for them seems strange, foreign and pointless.

I’m sorry for the generation of young women you left behind. Maybe that letter in your hand is from a sweetheart who knew, after you were gone, that she’d live her life alone. Who kept your letters carefully in a paper-lined box and knew that those letters would have to do instead of your love, and the life you’d have made together, and the mess and joy and chaos of a family. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that it wasn’t over. That the war didn’t end all wars. That we haven’t found a way to do that yet, with all our medicine and technology and space rockets. We still haven’t found a way to stop people from hating one another to the point of a spear or the bursting star of an explosion. We are still just as bad as we ever were, and I’m sorriest of all for that.

The only thing is, I suppose, the poppies. There are things that bloom unexpectedly from a field of blood. There have been a few green nubs pushing up through the earth.

Women’s suffrage; you might not have approved of that of course, but it might never have happened without all the women in the munitions factories saying “I can do this just as well, you know”.

After the horrors of gas in the trenches, we’ve tried to keep poison gases out of our wars. The international laws against them don’t always succeed in keeping Sarin out of babies’ lungs, but we try to enforce them. We do our best, in our own ecstacy of fumbling.

We’ve thought about what we teach young men about violence and heroism, we’ve tried to come up with some better ideas.

I know it’s not enough to offer in exchange for your life. A handful of trinkets that we should have been able to make without the sacrifice. But here they are. Like the poppies. I’m sorry.

- Naomi

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