“Tom? Promise me no matter what that Margaret always gets letters. She’s a nice girl and she deserves it.”

“I promise.”

*  *  *

The register nurse didn’t have the sort of paper needed for international mail, so Tom walked to several of the offices until he found one that could oblige. By the time he got back, William’s cast had been set, but his friend was sleeping soundly.

He put the paper aside, but then reconsidered. William had been adamant that the letter go out tonight rather than waiting a week. And, knowing what letters from home meant to the soldiers, he imagined that Margaret might also be eagerly awaiting the next one. He and William lived the same details of the same days. Surely he could conjure up what his friend might want to say.

Dear Margaret, he began.

Though he’d written the words several times before, a liberating sensation came over him. The chance for this to be his own, as if he were writing in a diary. Which he might as well have been. Margaret was just a name on paper—faceless to him. Anonymous, save for her brother’s stories and her compelling observations in the few letters that William had received. Tom felt like he could say anything to her.

It was not as if they would ever meet. It was not as if his name would be signed at the bottom.

I didn’t know until coming to England that fog has an ever-changing personality. It can be thick as oatmeal, nearly suffocating you when you step into its opaque mist. It can be translucent, distorting your vision of reality. It can be dangerous—our planes were grounded today. And yet, in the right circumstance, I can see how it has crafted for itself a permanent place as a character in old-time British novels.

I’ve learned that you can’t light a fireplace in such weather—the heaviness of the fog acts as a closed flue, sending smoke into a home.

I imagine that war is a similar entity. Difficult days surely lie ahead of us. And yet, it has also bred friendships unlike those I have never known before. The men I’m serving with—I would die for them. And they for me.

Today’s weather has lifted at last and the sun has set so low that all that remains is a purple glow through which the small buildings surrounding me look like silhouetted dots. Fickle thing that fog is, tomorrow morning is expected to be clear and sunny and excellent for flying.

That is how I have to think of the future. As a sunrise, full of promise.