War's Brave Men Then, Now

The Boston Herald

I never knew the man. He was a story told by my mother-in-law, a toy soldier moving along the game board of life, one step forward, two steps back, until he was finally cornered and died.

Her father's life seemed distant despite all her tales. He was a tailor, in his mid-30s, the father of five, when he left Scotland to fight the Germans in 1915. All the men left. Only women, children and old men stayed home.

The years without him were lonely ones. She was 8 when he returned home, the Armistice signed, that paper a ticket out of a German prison camp.

I picture her, a little girl standing at the door of her house watching her mother help a man she didn't recognize, a frail soldier in uniform, walk up the steep hill to where they lived. "My mother waited at the train station all day. She didn't know what train he'd be on."

Two years later her father died. The sum of a life, these stories and a few pictures, daguerreotypes, so old you have to squint to see them.

Or this was the sum of a life until I found the letter.

It's dated May 4, 1919. It was in a desk drawer in a brown envelope, the paper still white after all these years.

"Dear Brother," it begins and a drama unravels. It's better than the History Channel and more compelling than film because the written word, written by an ordinary man to his brother nearly 80 years ago, is, in this world of mass communication, still more vivid than a thousand pictures and truer than a hundred tales.

"I suppose you will be thinking that I am carrying sand or that I have lost my memory not writing you for so many years. But I may tell you I wrote the last letter and got no answer."

A gentle chastisement, and then praise. "I had a visit of your son Jim which was a good reminder that I had a brother in the Antipodes. We had him for a couple of weeks and he was like a breath of fresh air in the house. He came in proper colonial style, just walked in one morning half an hour after I had gone to business. Of course word was sent to me and I came away at once to make the boy at home but he was home already poking fun at my youngest boy."

Eight pages of conversation in perfect penmanship, pen dipped in ink, in this era before faxes and e-mail.

Years between letters, continents, too. But no artifice between brothers.

He writes about the war. "Jim did not get to France to have a go at the Hun and he is lucky. It was no fun fighting Jerry. I had some and I know     I will never forget the morning of the 21st March as long as I live. That was the morning I was captured in the dugout. A German machine gun corps got 14 of us in the dugout and I got a revolver bullet through my pack      as we were preparing to retire. We were tipped too late. The sergeant that came to tell us was done in at the top of the stair. We had to step over his body going out. Captain Ballie and Lieutenant Paul were lying dead about 20 yards from our dugout. Out of the 14 of us only eight got to St. Quentin alive where we were taken as prisoners and then my troubles commenced."

He never talked about what happened in the war except in this letter. "There was not huts and [we] had to sleep out on the frosty ground like sheep. My legs were frozen to the ground in the morning. I can't dance much now that the war has finished me for that."

Today we are on the brink of another war. And what have we learned? All the bravado at the conference tables, all the swaggering and posturing. That's what we see and hear.

What we don't see are all the things that might have been if there were no wars. And what we don't hear are the simple words the bravest of men write to the people they love.