Dear Da,

Cold here still, but that’s April for you. Ha ha. Thank you for the stockings, You have no idea how we covet them here. I think the last time my feet were really dry was at Christmas. 

He stopped, pen poised. He was out of topics.

He wouldn’t describe the hellscape of mud and splintered trees and rotting corpses, of the trenches filled with icy water long after the rains ceased.

He would not write of the soldier, his friend, caught in the wire of no man’s land, every night screaming for someone to please please kill him.