Letters from the Front

The first letter I wrote to Margaret was on a scrap of paper torn from a field manual. It was September 1944, and I was somewhere in France. The ink ran in the rain, but I wrote anyway, because if I didn't write to her, I wasn't sure I'd remember who I was anymore.

We'd been married exactly forty-seven days when I shipped out. Forty-seven days of burnt toast and laughter and learning how she liked her coffee—black, no sugar, strong enough to stand a spoon in. I carried the memory of those mornings like a talisman.

The foxhole was cold that night. Private Jenkins was asleep beside me, his breathing shallow and steady, and somewhere in the distance artillery rumbled like a summer storm that never quite arrived. I balanced the paper on my knee and wrote by candlelight.

The letters became my lifeline. Every week I wrote, sometimes twice, filling pages with the small observations that kept me human: the way the French countryside looked in autumn, the old farmer who shared his wine with us, the stray dog that followed our company for three weeks.

I never wrote about the fear. Never mentioned the sound that mortar shells make when they're close enough to feel in your chest. Those things I kept locked in a room inside my mind, a room I wouldn't open for forty years.

Margaret's letters arrived in bundles. She wrote about the victory garden, about rationing, about saving my place at the dinner table every night, setting a plate and a glass of water, because it helped her believe I was coming home.

I kept every letter. Folded them into a tin box that I carried in my pack through France, through Belgium, through the frozen hell of the Ardennes.

When the war ended, I came home on a ship full of men who'd aged decades in months. I found Margaret in the crowd at the dock, wearing the blue dress she'd bought for our wedding. She ran to me and I held her and neither of us spoke for a very long time.

The letters are in a shoebox now. The paper has yellowed and the ink has faded, but the words remain. Sometimes, on quiet evenings, Margaret and I sit together and read them aloud, and for a moment we are young again—connected across an ocean by nothing more than pen and paper and the stubborn belief that love is stronger than war.