September 28th, 1915, Loos

My darling Es,

My word of the week is doolally. It was used to refer to a lad who was sent a roll of lavatory paper from home and used the whole lot to bandage his eyes. When his mates finally tore it off, the poor bugger was blind. He was ridiculed for faking, but he genuinely couldn’t see a thing. War neuroses, according to the doctor. Doolally, according to his mates. I suppose it’s an easier word to relate to—leaves room for a laugh.

I’m beginning to feel the English language is burdened by this war, Es. Everyone I meet has a new word for toilet paper, and I’ve not heard one that doesn’t accurately convey its origin or the experience of using it. Yet only a handful of words exist to convey a thousand horrors.

Horror. It’s war-weary. It is the word we use when we have no words. Perhaps some things are not meant to be described—at least, not by the likes of me. A poet, perhaps, could arrange words in a way that creates the itch of fear or the heaviness of dread. They could make an enemy of mud and damp boots and raise your pulse just at the mention of them. A poet might be able to push this word or that to mean something more than what has been ordained by our Dictionary men.

I am not a poet, my love. The words I have are pale and slight against the hulking force of this experience. I can tell you it is wretched, that the mud is muddier, the damp damper, the sound of a flute played by a German soldier more beautiful and more melancholy than any sound I have ever heard. But you will not understand. There is not a word in Dr. Murray’s dictionary that can rise to the challenge of the stench in this place. I could compare it to the fish market on a hot afternoon, to a tannery, a morgue, a sewer. It is all of those things, but it is the way it enters you, becomes a taste and a cramping in your throat and belly. You will imagine something awful, but it is worse. And then there is the slaughter. It comes to you in the Times. The “Roll of Honour.” Column after column of names in Monotype Modern. I have no way of describing the wrenching of my soul when the ember of a fag still glows in the mud, though the lips that held it have been blown away. I lit that fag, Es. I knew it would be his last. This is how we do it. We light fags, we nod, we hold their gaze. Then we send them over the top. There are no words.

And now there is time to rest, but we can’t. Our minds will never be quiet. It will start up again, and so everyone is writing home. To the wives of three men and the mothers of four, I will be the letter-writer. We have been told not to describe it, as if that is even possible, but some have tried. It is my job, tonight, to censor them, and I have blacked out the words of boys who are barely literate as well as boys who might become poets, so their mothers continue to think the war a glory and a good fight. I do it gladly, for their mothers, but from the start I have thought of you, Es, and how you would try to rescue what these boys have said so you can understand them better. Their words are ordinary, but they are assembled into sentences that are grotesque. I’ve transcribed every one, and I include the pages with this letter. I have not corrected or truncated, and each sentence has its owner’s name beside it. I could think of no one better to honour them than you.

Eternal Love,

Gareth

P.S. Ajit was not invincible.