I Want Home

This text contains the horrors of war and may affect your mood.

[Line censored], 9 October 1917, France.

Born: 25 July 1890.

Regiment: 2/10 Middlesex regiment.

Regiment number: 2857

Rank: Private

This letter is being delivered in an 'Honour Envelope' and shall be read and censored only in London, avoiding all the other checks. 

Hello, my sunflower.

I am sorrY I don't have the time to write you more letters (I would like though). It's been quite a tough time here, since the end of September my division went to Passchendaele. The whOLe August we spent moving back and forth between the frontline and the secOnd. Worked on and off, firstly reinforcing our back lines with sandbags, preparing all trenches for the next battlES, working on some extra layers of defense, or going up to the frontline where me and my boys with Canadian corps were keeping the night watch from 1 am to 3 am.

And af But then things started to get worse. Darling, I wish Belgium was like in your pictures that you have been keeping around our house; in reality, it's a chapter of hell, our armies and German soldiers have been fighting for this tiny nothing since July and now it's terribly gone, dear. Bare treES steaking out like unhammered nails from the ground. No branches, no leaves, just bare trunks among burned ground. The sun always hides beyond smoke and fog from the artillery and clouds are so grey. I don't even remember the natural color of the sky. And it is pouring rain as hell here all the time. Soldiers keep disappearing in no man's land, unable to find German pOsiti ons during the attack, where the mud swallows them in waterlogged shell holES.

Go D, what have they done with such a beautiful land?

BefOre the battle had started my division joined the corpus of far lands soldiers. We were sleeping that night in some old and shaky barracks on the frontline. So difficult to sleep here peacefully like in London (still think that our capital would suit me better than this land). Always need to keep one eye open and the noise of fire and shOOting keeps you awake. We were supposed to start our night watch at 1 am but Germans had started attacking us earlier. My dear, I don't know how to describe it even; all I managed to do was run out of the barracks when the bombing had started; and the next thing I remember that I was lying in the trenches, trembling, I realized right away, that a bloody bomb got us. A soldier, such a young fella from New Zealand, was crying mama.. water, I managed to crawl towards him in order to give him my flask but at the moment I wanted to reach it... Dear God, I simply couldn't. He was looking at me and stopped screaminG, in horror.

I didn't have my right hanD. Up to the elbow, it's all gone. 

In a few seconds, I fell unconscious. I still don't know the reason. Probably the pain after shock that started waving me heavily or out of realizing what happened.. all in all, I remember how two soldiers were carrying me on a stretcher and I thought they must be Germans because when they noticed that I awakened they started speaking with me in a language I didn't know. I understood they were French only by their uniforms. Remember I thought where is that kiwi from New Zealand, is he alive? I lOOked up at the gray lifeless sky, and I still don't know what's better: that dead, hopeless sky or the blasted mudscapES I was being carried through, and then I fell asleep or unconscious again. 

I awoke at the hOSpital. Those FRench guys were literally crawling all the way back with me, through waist-deep muck. The doctors took care of my hand or rather what had left of her... I hope it's explaining my terrible handwriting here. I have not usED to write with my left stiL L, and I would like to tell you that I am on my way but the truth is I'm in despair. 

Oh, what a mess we have mADe off of things. I don't know what is right or wrong right now. The captain came to visit me a few days ago, he told me that he had sent a list of brave soldiers with my name in it to our headquarters, and told me that I was about to receive a medal or so. I didn't say him anything but do I care about this DSO Distinguished Service Medal? The hell with them, the hell with this war and endless shootings outside. I lost my bloody hand. I couldn't even write well from now on, I am a child again who desperately trying to learn how to live one m how to do simple things from zero. But with one exception. I am learning the basic things one more time right in the middle of the war.  

Dear, I swear I was trying to do everything to keep myself safe, to come back home on Christmas Eve. And even if I c But now it's done. One night and after I'm half alive. More than anything during these months I wanted only one thing - to hug you. To round you with my arms and hug, feel your heart beating and breath. The breath that is full of home and peaceful warmth. But now this thought makES me miserable; did I want so much? Just to hug you. Embrace with my arms. Hold close to me. My beautiful flower.. I couldn't do even this anymore, not to mention returning to my previous life. How am I supposed to work back in my car workshop with one hand? The desire to live leaves my body whenever I am trying to imagine how I'm supposed to hug you with only one hand. The same as patting a cat when you wear gloves. This is not right. It's a nightmare, my Love.. The nightmare that is real. I don't want to be here, please. I am fed up with digging up holes for dead bodies, living day in day out with not a single moment of silence, and even if we have one, I start to panic more than ever. The silence is something we are not acquainted with anymore. 

The nurse said tO me I am a lucky one. A hand is a cheap price for someone who constantly lives under the risk of being shOt or stabbed with a bayonet in the back. I wanted to s She said I should go and see #3. So on my way to the canteen, I was walking along the corridor and stopped near rOOm #3. My dear flower, I dare not.. I wouldn't call them humans in the way we used to think. Legs are missing, someone did not have even two arms, fellas without eyES.. I couldn't look at them, so I turned away to the window. "It's pretty lovely weather out there, isn't it, chap?" he said. I looked at his body.. it did not have anything, but his head and two arms. He smiled at me. And I ran out of the room. The misery had swallowed me at that moment. I couldn't stand there anymore, knowing the cause of these injuries. How does he even exist? Moreover, he was smiling. In a moment I was eating in the canteen, not being able to hold a piece of bread and a spoon at the same time.

I have no conclusions here, such a cruel and beautifully ruined restless world what does he try to make of all of us?

And I didn't give up on trying to sleep from time to time and every night I have two or three dreams about me and my hand; how I desperately seeking it among that battlefield. Sometimes I even manage to find it and thaT kiwi is always screaming in my head. I can't help hearing him all the time how he asking for mum and water. Again I'm trying to reach my flask but at this time he is holding my hand. My severe right hand. He is giving it to me, and he seems smiling this time; I'm trying to attach it, to plug it in, to connect, and one second before I wake up I have only one thought: is it for real or not? DO I really have the hand again? Of course not. And this NOT is washing me over with the most forlorn and dark thoughts, I am falling deeper and deeper into the abyss of dismay and seems to me there is no exit for one-handed people from there. My sheet is soaked with sweat because of these dreams. The dreams that flung me to those very trenches. Sick to death, God-forgotten trenches which are riddled with rats. These rats, you feel them all the time, they are alwAYS here. Thousands of them. Looking forward to gobbling bodies. And the stench. The smell of death that making fun of a bunch of people who are about to be killed or simply drown in the mud but still joking and hoping for something. For letters from sweet home, for warm dinner, for seven days rESt on the back lines, for a football game, hoping for the end of this war. Shaken, jolted, and battered, not knowing even why are they here, holding Lee Enfield rifles which are gummed up with mud.

They to ld me I was no good to continue to fight. They will send me home sooner or later. I have been almost one year on this continent and now when I am not able to carry a rifle they will send me home. Used me, broke me and... I just wish you were here in the hospital, my Love. No one like you could calm me down, breathe a new life in me, a new hope, light me from the inside. You always know which words need to be uttered to please my wicked soul. But for the time being you are not here. I am alone.

It's tOO late. This creaky bunk is my tomb. My tomb that is near the frontline, where Canadians, Australians, British, and others, huddled in porridge-like mud, among open landscapes without buildings or some other covers; all of them, laying there, hoping for tomorrow, paltry, weak, under relentlessly harrowing rain, the drops of which falling on casques helmets, and this is the only sound you hear when few seconds of silence begin. I think Mother Earth weeping at that moment onto our wicked bodies.

I close my eyes and dream, dream about you. Only you. My bosom wife. Nothing I need anymore. 

I want home, I want hOME, I WANT HOME.

Forever yours on Earth and in Heaven [Line censored]