Letter To An Unknown Soldier: A New Kind of War Memorial. Kate Pullinger

know you will face further grave danger in the weeks and months ahead.

      But be in no doubt; however dark this time of War – our world would have been far darker if you had declined the call to act. Without your service, our security, our values, our very way of life would have been lost.

      Know too, that from your toil and sacrifice there will in time be a better world. It will not happen immediately. There will be yet more unthinkable horrors along the way. But one hundred years from now your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will enjoy a peace in Europe and a quality of life that is almost unimaginable.

      Historians too will trace back some of the world’s greatest advances to your time. From the development of medicine that can heal wounds and sickness to the emancipation of women and the advance of civil rights for ethnic minorities.

      Your bravery and selfless determination will never be forgotten. Your name – and the names of your fellow servicemen – will be celebrated on memorials in villages, schools, churches and universities across the land. Plays and poetry will honour you. Painting and monuments will depict you. Ceremonies will be inspired by you. Thousands will write about you, many will even write to you a hundred years from now.

      So as you go from here, know that you are in our hearts. Your service will forever be part of our national consciousness. We are humbled by what you have given for us and we will never forget you.

      Yours sincerely,

      David Cameron

      David Cameron

      London, Prime Minister

      Dear Unknown Soldier

      That is what you are – unknown, unknowable. You are a sign, a symbol: a simulacrum in a shadowy world of simulacra.

      There is a gap between what you really are and what you represent, a gap between the fire and the wall, where we stand, transfixed by the shadows in front of us.

      Please mind the gap

      – the gap between writing this letter and taking real action to rid the world of suffering.

      Please mind the gap

      – the gap between my sofa and the images of Palestinian slaughter on my television.

      Please mind the gap

      – the gap between this country and others that don’t have commissioned art memorial projects.

      Please mind the gap

      – the gap between now and then that allows us to remember.

      And remembering is important. But I hope, for your sake and the millions like you, that remembering is not all we do.

      Yours truly,

      An Unknown Soul

      Anonymous

      West Calder

      Dear Soldier,

      Standing at your feet, looking up at you, my cousin Susan and I wonder if we ever noticed you before. It’s odd, looking with clear blue, fresh eyes at you, recalling our childish days when we struggled by with our suitcases – her miserable and back to boarding school, me happy and off to endless Cornish seaside holidays. Living our separate lives, blonde-haired, blood-tied.

      We and our children are part of the line that you saved through your bravery and care, at a time when so many other lines were broken. Is it possible that it was you, on that day, somewhere in France and in a foreign field, in all that noise and terror (when surely the only thing to do was save your own soul), you found Harry Black? Was it you who dragged him up out of the trench that had so nearly claimed his life? He took one, bought one, his comrades had all copped one. Harry, the last man left alive and for three days, barely so, lay waiting to be taken up the line and home to a life-changing but nonetheless dignified life?

      Standing at your feet I resolve to write this letter to you, because you need to understand what you did that day. We are the line that will go on to prove you right. There was a world worth fighting for, a line to walk, a line to make and a line to hold.

      Love,

      Vikki

      Vikki Heywood CBE

      Chairman 14-18 NOW

      Dear Grandfather,

      You met me once, my father said; it was after both Wars, and I was your only grandchild: a babe in arms. Dad said he was afraid to let you see me. Your wife had killed herself the day my Dad was demobbed, though he always suspected you might have murdered her. I think he was afraid you would do something to me, too.

      To everyone else, you were a hero – a soldier who came through the Great War without a scratch, an officer and a gentleman. You were pointed out in the street of the small town you came to live, with pride and respect. For King and Country you said, unyielding as your waxed moustache. But to your family, you were the tyrant who took to beating your wife and sons when drunk, and let’s be honest, you were drunk most of the time. Once, my father and his brother ran away but it was cold and they had no money, and after three days of hunger they came back, to more beatings. Your speciality was whipping my Dad, then locking him up in a cupboard, because although he was the younger he was the brave one, the one who tried to defend his mother and brother. You weren’t the sort of hero who respected courage, or who rescued others at Ypres or Passchendaele. One of your medals was for taking out a nest of machine gunners, one by one. You were a killer, a bully, a dead shot, who had found his natural element in war.

      All his life, my father suffered from his own anger, and from trying to understand you; he hated violence and injustice because he had experienced so much of yours. Was it shell shock that made you behave as you did, or your own nature? Was it your own upbringing? Dad said you loved the military life, had been bred for it, brought up to it and expected your sons to follow you into the Army when the next War came along. They joined the Navy and the RAF instead. They spent their whole lives trying not to turn into you, Grandfather, and my father never hit us, or our mother, not once, even when rage and booze boiled through his veins like poison. But Dad would always stop himself. That was his own War – not the one in which he was blown up, shipwrecked and made deaf in one ear. It was the War with you, Grandfather.

      Did you have any feelings, or did anger and alcohol consume them all? Was it a form of shell shock, to turn your family into the enemy, long after the War was over? I never knew you, and I never knew my grandmother. She was the loveliest woman, gentle and kind, my father said; an innocent. You would have loved her, and she you. He would weep, remembering, right into his own old age, but he never wept for you.

      Amanda

      Amanda Craig

      London, Writer

      Our only boy,

      I hope this finds you.

      I miss you.

      We are doing well as can be expected, considering everything.

      We miss you.

      How long is it now? A month, a year? One hundred years?

      I’ve lost track …

      I asked your father if he thought there would ever be peace. He said that people have to want peace for there to be peace. I said people need to be able to see peace to want peace. He said people need to feel peace to see peace. You know what our conversations are like …

      I felt peace: When we had you. When you were here.

      But since you’ve been gone – (one hundred years) – I can’t feel it anymore.

      And I fear I won’t again, until you come back. And stay this time.

      Your room is still empty.

      So I have no peace.

      So I am no help at all.

      Come