shell shock (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The following is a work of fiction. No representation of persons living or dead is intended by it.

Dearest Catharine

I’m sorry. But if all goes according to my plan, you will be finding this letter after I am dead and gone. My prayer is that you will get over the loss in a few months and go on to a decent life. Your family have means, and you are an intelligent, capable woman. You’ll find a way. Tell the kids their dad died of a brain illness. That’s what it is. Or was, I guess, by the time you read this.

God, I wish there was some way to get out of this hell and not hurt you! 

But there is not.

I hid my pistol in the woodshed under a loose board, in case you are wondering.

The memory of that last time we fought, and I hit you with my open hand across the side of your head and put you on the floor has proved too much for my flimsy conscience to bear. Drunk again. After promising for the third time in 7 years that whisky and I were done. The truth is I have come to loathe myself. The much harder truth is that I know now I can’t change.

So this is good-bye. The one person in this life who really loved me and I have gone and hurt you again. But this time is the last.

   

                                               Canadian school children 1937

                                            (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

You’ll get over this, Kate. You’ll go on. Go to the Innisfail School Board. Or the Red Deer one. I am confident you can go back to teaching. And your income will not be quite as much as what we have grown used to but not far off. I wasn’t much of an insurance salesman. In addition, Dave Junior and Heidi are old enough now to help you in serious, useful ways. 

You are all better off without me. Of that, I am certain.

There are things I never told you about the war. My distinct impression was that you did not want to know. Not really. Not the ugly stuff, the stuff that made me drink. And I don’t blame you. No one really wants to know things like that.

I’ll tell you one. Aaron, my sergeant, was peeking over the top of a trench with a pair of spotting binoculars. Corporal Ward was standing near him. A sniper round came in with no warning and took Aaron’s head off. I, as a captain, was back one row of trenches, but I happened to be looking their way and saw what happened. It was an exploding round. I’m sure of it. We and the Boche were not supposed to use exploding rounds in small arms on the Western Front. But when the Germans who had been freed up by Russia’s surrender began arriving in France, I guess some of them had brought a few of the special rounds with them. For special targets, probably. Aaron was a very good sniper himself, though not officially assigned as one. The other side must have figured out who he was. That was my theory then, and it’s still my theory.

From a yard and a half away, with no warning, Ward was suddenly splattered with his friend’s brains. He began screaming, clawing at the wet tissue clinging to his face and shoulder. Then, with no preamble, he scrambled over the trench and ran straight at the enemy. They cut him down out in No Man’s Land, of course. All of this took place before my eyes in under ten seconds. Maybe, under five. I just don’t know.

I’d seen so many ugly things by that point. I’d been at the front, off and on, for nearly a year. But something about the – I don’t know – the arbitrariness of it, the suddenness of it, it caught me with my mind unguarded. The image stuck in my memory. I couldn’t shake it loose. Still can’t as I write these words to you.

Then, there is the one that is in my record that you think you know about, but you don’t. Yes, I was lost for two days behind the Boche line, but no, I was not hiding,  running, and fighting for my life the whole time.

No one knows this but you, and I’d just as soon you did not tell anyone ever. I only tell it to you because I am hoping to make you somehow feel the anguish (I guess is the word) that made your husband end his own life. Then, maybe, you will be able to forgive.  

   

                                     No Man's Land, World War One, France 

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The truth is that for over forty hours I was doing nothing at all. I found a small cellar somehow left even after all the shelling, but with its entrance almost fully covered in mud and debris. It suddenly hit me that with a little extra material pulled over the one opening that I had found, that cellar would hide me from the war for however long I wanted to stay down there.

I had food and two canteens of water. I had a blanket and the closeness of the space meant that I would be warm enough down there to sleep. Even the floor was almost dry.

What happened to me during those forty hours is nothing. At least, not on the outside. I could peek between the shattered pieces of lumber and brick that lay over the entrance I had disguised and watch my fellows and the enemy pass quite near, fighting now ahead and now back three times in those two days. And I was safe. Nothing happened to me. Except in my mind as I watched.

I was sickened with shame after a while because I saw guys die not thirty feet from me. Two bayoneted that took hours to die, groaning in agony. But I was safe. A captain and I’d let my boys down. I was just so fed up with the dying. So I try to tell myself, anyway. It's a pathetic excuse.

That is the memory that haunts me the most. I did make my way, one night, back to our lines. I did make up a story about getting trapped behind enemy lines and fighting my way back. Only Major Mack looked at me - I guess, suspiciously – when I reported in, but he never said anything. But I knew that he knew.

The memory was made worse by the way events just followed each other in those safe hours. I watched young men just like myself, Germans too, just like myself. And a feeling I had been fighting off for months just would not be shut out anymore. Why were we there? We all knew that the tales we had been told about the glory of the Empire and the fight for freedom and the war to end war and so on …they were all lies. We were boys. Just boys. On both sides. Doing what elders we trusted told us to do. Killing each other. In every way we could devise. Sharpened trench shovels even.

And all that pain and death was just stupid waste. In the course of history, it would mean nothing. We were doomed in a few years to become an irritation, or a joke, or both, to the next generation. Like you, like the kids, they would not understand us or what we went through and would not want to. The sun is up, the sky is blue, the air fresh, beer tastes good, there are girls all around. I don’t even blame them. It’s just that all of those things are lies to me too now.

So what has happened? What made me cross a line and make the decision? It may not seem important to you, but for me as a history enthusiast it seems very clear. The goose-stepping clowns in Germany and Italy are not clowns at all. I saw the news reel at the Rialto last night. This is what I fear.

It is all coming again. I don’t know when. Germany will need time to grow some new men. But it will come. Between humanity and another war of even greater horror, I see nothing to block the path.

This all sounds over dramatic, overdone generally, I suppose. But Remarque’s book, which I read in about forty hours just this past March, with all the feeling it contained and all that it stirred in people all over the world, and the film I hear they are going to make of it, and all the vets like me, and all the mothers that went to Crazy and never came back, it all will not make a pinch of difference.

Exert your every ounce to keep Davy out of it. Or maybe, push and push him to follow his love of Mathematics. He will get a job behind the lines then. And hopefully stay out of the hot fighting zones.

I can’t bear it even as I write. Millions like Aaron and the money, time, and resources wasted. For nothing. The stories they will tell you on every side, I tell you now, they will all be lies. There is no purpose to war. Just pain and death.

It’s that that is making me do what I am about to do. As well as I can understand myself, anyway. The hitting you is just a symptom of a deep brain disease which is only going to get worse and worse. It is unbearable now, this feeling of emptiness. We are led by idiots who have no idea what they’re doing. Again, the men will fight for a pack of lies. I can’t bear this knowing.

                         Your David, now forever and ever, I love you Katie, truly,

                                                                                  D.

   

                                            Serre Road Cemetery no. 2 

                                       (credit: Gary Dee, from Wikimedia Commons)