Letter To An Unknown Soldier

Christina Reid, Writer

When I was a child, I thought there was just the one of you.

“Who was he?” I asked my grandfather.

“Nobody knows.”

His reply was interrupted by one of his recurring bouts of coughing. I knew, from eavesdropping on adult conversations, that this was because of ‘the-oul-chest-he-got-from-the-trenches-and-the-gas’. (My grandmother and my mother always spoke in hushed hyphenated words about things that were best not said in front of the children) I was sent from the room while the foul-smelling liniment was applied to his chest and back.

“Nobody knows”.

What did he mean? How could that be? Somebody must have known you. You may or may not have been a brother, a husband, a father, but you were some mother’s son. And you fought in the war alongside lots of other soldiers, not all by yourself.

As I grew up, I learned that there was not just the one of you. There is a host of lost unidentified soldiers like you commemorated all over the world on walls and monuments, in churchyards, memorial gardens, military graves and tombs. I also learned that the total number of casualties, dead and wounded, known and unknown, soldiers and civilians, can only ever be estimated as about 40 million. The actual total can never be known for sure. I wonder why it was called ‘The Great War. I wonder why my grandfather called the horror that was The Battle of the Somme ‘A Glorious Victory’.

When my mother died, I inherited an old biscuit tin filled with the family history of two world wars and her two Best Beloved Known Soldiers – her father, who survived the first one and her twenty-two year old brother, who died in the second, ‘from-wounds-received-at-Dunkirk’. In the tin with the dreaded telegram from the army confirming his death there are handkerchiefs embroidered ‘Souvenir of France’. They could be from either war. The postcards and letters sent to Belfast from the battlefields of Europe are full of love and hope. Some humour even, from brave men putting a brave face on it for the mothers and sisters and wives back home: Keeping the home fires burning and praying for their safe return.

I read the letters and think of them. I think of you. That you never came back and were called ‘unknown’ does not mean that you were never someone’s Best Beloved.

I find an undated letter written by my grandmother. Faded pencil on yellowed paper with blue lines. Among the words of love and hope for better times, she says (long before The Beatles made a song of it)

‘It’s been a hard day’s night.’

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