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.
Wrenching & beautifully written.
Yes.. I think the first world war is a great topic for the prompt… and I guess the worst horrors where never put on ink… (after all the letters would have been censored).
Well evoked. I wonder how many of us will see the battlefields of the first world war in the prompt and how many the camps of the second.
Sadly I also was reminded of the First World War, like the Second World War that they happened horrifies so many of us. That last line, …
K Rawson said it best. Great job.
Chilling.
I have many letters written by my Uncle and my father in law from WWII. The war had changed, but the end result remained the same. I always wondered about what they didn’t tell, couldn’t tell…
I am certain I now know.
Pathetic war that strips life from us!
Gut wrenching, puke rising, all too too real. Great descriptions.
Internalizing that kind of horror is awful enough. I can understand not wanting to burden the family with what a soldier has seen. WWI was supposed to be the war to end all wars, but I think as long as there are humans, there will be war. Tragic. Well told story.
The barbed wire did make me think of the Great War and the no man’s land. You told this just perfectly. Especially that last image.
No words. No words at all.
OK, maybe two. Superb story!
The last line is very powerful. Well written!
Wow! This is an amazing and dark picture. I am feeling shades of WWI.
What a powerful piece…
Some 60 years later, my dad told some of the horrors of his war. Things he saw and felt were too much sometimes even then to share.
Nice WWI reference and story. The poor soldiers, suffering yet compassionate enough to withhold the truth from their families so that they would not worry/suffer more.