Of Fauji Days on the Battlefront: Love, Letters & Soldiers

It was never quiet on the western front, or any other, for that matter.

He was almost 30 when he wrote it in 1929. And I was almost 30 when I first read it in the mid-1990s. It was so, so painful for me to read it, primarily because Erich Maria Remarque’s writing was so, so visual. In that shell hole, after Remarque's Paul Bäumer sent the dagger plunging into his heart, the French soldier took hours and hours to die, and I could feel the hours passing by as I wrenched in pain, turning the pages very, very slowly.

He had killed him.

As Bäumer reached into the bleeding man’s coat pocket and took out his stuff, I could almost ‘feel’ the texture of the leather wallet, I could ‘see’ that letter the dead soldier’s wife had written to him. Wait, there was her picture, too, and of a little girl, standing against an ivy-clad wall. I remember at that moment I so, so wanted to ‘read’ that letter, even though, like Bäumer, I hardly knew any French in those days. But I liked that Bäumer promised the corpse: ‘I will write to your wife... she must hear it from me, I will tell her everything I have told you, she shall not suffer, I will help her, and your parents too, and your child.’

I knew then that I wanted to read that letter.

‘This dead man is bound up with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise everything in order to save myself,’ Remarque's Bäumer was almost saying it on my behalf. I was writhing in pain, and I wanted to inflict more of it upon myself. It was the least that I could do. ‘I will fulfil everything, fulfil everything I have promised you, but already I know that I shall not do so,’ Remarque was poignant, Bäumer suddenly seemed heartless, and I felt my bluff has been called by a man who had just died at least three pages back.

I immediately resolved to write that letter.

And then, a few weeks later, I mustered up the courage to watch the movie. The British Council Division-ran library on the Kasturba Gandhi Marg in Delhi had a respectable video collection. They would lend out VHS tapes, but primarily stocked British cinema. However, they did have the 1979 ITC production, a collaboration between the yanks and the Brits, normally not a good idea, but I decided to check it out anyway since I had some respect for Delbert Mann, having already watched ‘Marty.’

It was past mid-night when I slipped the tape into the VCR. It was just a 21” television screen, but I don't remember regretting that hadn't watched in a movie theatre. All I remember is that I paused repeatedly at that scene, peered more keenly to see if I can read a word from that letter, if I can see that picture of his wife and children a little better.

VHS tapes were notorious when it came to stabilising the image. And deep down, I was grateful I could not get a good look at her, or her letter. I cried myself into the pillow, and to sleep.

I spent the next many years wondering what had she written in that letter, and how would she have reacted if he had written back, telling her what it was like to be on the front, and in a shell hole.

In fact, till I had read All Quiet on the Western Front, I had no idea what a shell hole was. As I paused the VHS tape and the image blurred and kept quivering despite my repeated efforts to press ‘pause’ at just the right moment, I almost felt I was in that shell hole. I have no memory if I felt I was the German who had sent that dagger plunging into his chest, or if I was the French who lay dying for hours. All I remember is that picture of a woman and a little girl, against an ivy-clad wall, and that letter in the dead man’s pocket.

It became important.

Since there were no trenches along the Kasturba Gandhi Marg, one day I went diagonally across the road to the USIS’ American Center. A helpful staffer quickly found me the 1930 Lewis Milestone version of the movie. I found myself pausing again. This time I had a better look at her face in the photograph, and I caught myself again committing the same sin: I was trying to read the letter.

The 1930 black and white version had the German telling the French – ‘I'll write to your wife...I'll write to your wife.’

For years I wondered what would he have written. For years I wondered if I should try writing.

A few weeks back, I ran into Edward Berger's Paul Bäumer - on the Netflix. And I paused. He stabbed him in the chest, and took out his wife's picture and letter. He did not say he'll write to his wife, but I ‘heard’ him. May be I was hearing the voices buried in a shell hole in my head decades back, but this time I was determined.

I’ll write to his wife.

And when I do, I want to make sure that I sound authentic, that my letter should not arouse suspicion. Will it even reach? Voltaire tells us that faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

In his 2013 Ancient Greek Letter Writing, Paola Ceccarelli talks of the time when letters were the latest technology, superseding the oral message, but exactly for that reason, these were often regarded with ‘suspicion and disapproval.’ After all, these were personal, and Greeks were more into communicating through public decrees rather than letters.

Recall Euripides’ tragedy. Iphigenia is sacrificed because Agamemnon agreed to write that deceitful letter to her mother telling her to send the girl to be a bride for Achilles. A letter could be a deceitful stab in the chest.

Any letter I plan to write to the woman in that photograph that came out of the dead man's pocket must read authentic.

I have never been to the front. I have never been to the trenches. And I have never had shells flying past me. I have never had to jump over bodies of fallen comrades. I have never watched my friends being ripped apart as part of my day job. So, I had little idea of how does one come home to write a letter back to a loved one.

I went to those who did all of the above, and more.

I went to Dear John.

Journalists covering wars would often come across letters on the battlefield. Letters that fell out from dead men's trenchcoats, or strewn around by those who took the trenchcoat off a dead soldier to make better use of it and, as they didn't want to be burdened by the dead man's burdens, simply threw away any letters found in a pocket.

Many war reporters brought these letters to the notice of readers, and often, these were 'brush off' missives.

Dear John: I don’t know quite how to begin but I just want to say that Joe Doakes came to town on furlough the other night and he looked very handsome in his uniform, so when he asked me for a date…

Felt like a stab to the chest?

Dear John: This is very hard to tell you, but I know you’ll understand. I hope we’ll always remain friends, but it’s only fair to tell you that I’ve become engaged to somebody else.

Clearer this time? The stab went deeper, eh?

Susan L. Carruthers wonderful, wonderful 2022 work, Dear John: Love and Loyalty in Wartime America, is illuminating, and kept taking me back to the shell hole as I flipped pages.

When the world goes to war, I or II, labour assumes a gender. It falls to women to wait, and to write. Propaganda posters and radio addresses tell men they were fighting for home. Men in uniform wait for those letters. In all the three versions - 1930, 1979 and 2022 - you wouldn't miss the moment a bagful of letters arrives, making men dive into the pile.

I am sure the soldier from the front had more tales to tell – of friends who lost a limb or sight or hearing or sanity or, simply, died. But the stab that a Dear John letter would deliver went much deeper, sending a young lad into a shell hole of the soul.

And yet, in most cases, the letters stayed in a pocket next to the heart. Pulitzer-winning poet W.D. Snodgrass underlies what was worse than not returning from the war front: receiving a Dear John letter. With no one to come back to, a man was less likely to come back.

For years after reading Homer’s The Odyssey, I used to wonder how would the story have progressed if Penelope, the model of connubial chasteness, instead of fighting a hundred suitors with her cunning yarn, had written a Dear John missive to Odysseus?

But then all letters were not of Dear John variety. There were Dear Selma letters, too. Bernard Brown was 19, almost the same age as that French soldier in the shell hole who Paul Bäumer had stabbed to death. Bernard was writing from the battle front in WWII. Paul had found the letters in French soldier's pocket in WWI.

Like Paul, Bernard, too, had landed up on the front because he was drafted. He wanted to keep in touch with home, so began writing to a childhood friend, a young woman named Selma.

His letters read as letters from the front often read: ‘After spending four nights and three days in the mud, sleeping, eating, and trying to fight…’

Life in a foxhole is not very different from life in a shell hole. And the letters he received from home couldn't be very different from the letter that Paul found in the pocket of the dying French soldier. But they met a very happy fate, before being forgotten.

‘If you only knew how much I want to come back so that you and I can start living a life together.’

The edition of the All Quiet on the Western Front that I had in 1996 had a blurb-style quote emblazoned on the paperback's title: ‘They left for war as boys, never to return as men.’ Every time I would encounter the book on the shelf, it would sadden me.

But this time, it was different; this tale ended on a much happier note. Four days after D-Day, Bernard Brown was on a ship, sailing for Europe. He had it all sorted, in his letters. In 1945, the Germans surrendered. Three months after returning, Bernard married Selma. It was still 1945. They lived together for 72 years. Then, in 2017, Selma passed away, survived by Bernard, three children and five grandchildren.

When the family was making preparations to shift Bernard from their home in Salem, Oregon, to a retirement facility in Portland, his daughter, Shelley, stumbled across a dusty old box. There were letters in it; letters that smelt of love, passion, plans, and, of course, war front.

From 1941 to 1945, Bernard wrote 246 letters from the front lines of World War II to Selma. If a chill hasn't run down your spine, read that again: 246 letters. Each one of them could have been his last, the un-posted one might have been found in his pocket if an enemy soldier had stabbed him in a fox hole.

When Shelley published Dear Selma: A World War II Love Letter Romance, she dedicated it to those who didn't make it back home. So, in my mind, in a way, and because I do not have the address of the woman whose picture tumbled out of the dying French soldier's pocket in WWI, writing this piece about Bernard and Selma's love is my letter to that woman, and if you have read it this far, then it has reached. Remarque would have understood that.

Some couples, separated by war, remained remarkably stable. A very young Richard Beard, who provided psychological counselling to soldiers suffering from emotional trauma at the 142 General Hospital in Calcutta during World War II, would take time off, almost every day, to write to his wife, Reva, half a globe away in Findlay, Ohio. He would tell her of his time on this now almost forgotten China-Burma-India war theatre, of comrades missing in action, and of soldiers in pain, while she would write back to tell him of rationing and scarcity; but both would never forget to pack in a lot of ‘kisses and caresses’ and ‘sweet dreams and goodnights.’ Richard finally made it back to his wife, loved his family, and passed away in 1997. And then someone found the letters! The world got to know this From Calcutta with Love story only in 2002.

My earliest memory of a soldier reading a letter from his girl back home is from 1980 when we, the Class VII students, were marched, single file, from our Government Model School, Model Town to the nearest cinema, Preet Palace, in Ludhiana, to watch Haqeeqat. It was an India before flyovers, and there was no over-bridge on the Link Road. So it was only a 10 minute walk.

‘मैं ये सोचकर उसके दर से उठा था / के वो रोक लेगी मना लेगी मुझको ‘

It was the first time I had heard those words. Mohammad Rafi's vocal silk, the solo violin played by a very young Pyarelalji of Laxmikant Pyarelal fame, Madan Mohan's music, Kaifi Azmi's words. Everything in the song cried for it to be filmed on Balraj Sahni or Dharmendra or Vijay Anand, all starring in that Chetan Anand movie, but it featured a much lesser known face of actor Sudhir.

In that darkened cinema hall, my little childish mind struggled to keep up with the plot. The scenes mesmerising; the words so magical that they had an effect much beyond my understanding of those emotions at the time.
Immediately after the song ended, the mail man arrives. Soldiers talk about letters from home, and of a particular soldier whose much awaited letter never arrives.

Having just tiptoed my way into teens, I had little idea about the 1962 Sino-Indian encounter, or about the exploits of the Ahir Company of 13 Kumaon, led by Major Shaitan Singh, my lifelong war hero. Years passed. I watched so many war movies, read so many war novels, talked to friends about so many battles, and understood what a letter could mean to the boy on the front, or the girl back home. All India Radio kept playing those songs every time they thought it was day to flaunt some patriotism on the airwaves.

‘होके मजबूर मुझे उसने भुलाया होगा / ज़हर चुपके से दवा जानके खाया होगा ‘

Somehow, even after the onslaught of the multiplexes, Preet Palace still stands today, and kids still go watch movies there. Every time I drive by that cinema hall, I think of that Class VII kid in that darkened cinema hall, listening to the words – ‘बन्द कमरे में जो खत मेरे जलाए होंगे / एक इक हर्फ़ जबीं पर उभर आया होगा’. I had cried then. I still wipe off a tear as I think of the soldiers, waiting in those trenches for letters from home.

मेज़ से जब मेरी तस्वीर हटाई होगी / हर तरफ़ मुझको तड़पता हुआ पाया होगा

नाम पर मेरे जब आँसू निकल आए होंगे / सर न काँधे से सहेली के उठाया होगा

It takes me far less to cry. I must have cried rivers in that theatre. Did that soldier forever waiting for the mailman finally receive his much anticipated letter? Go watch Haqeeqat again, and read about my hero. When they found Major Shaitan Singh, he was frozen, a rifle in his hand, but no ammunition. Was there a letter in his pocket, next to his heart?

Haqeeqat did not end properly for that Class VII kid. I wanted our guys to win. I wanted the soldier to receive his letter. Of course, some letter-stories of soldiers do not end properly. What if the boy writes, and the girl never responds?

It happened with Leslie L. Upcraft. He met a beautiful Barbara Russo in Boston around Christmas of 1943. We know from his letters that they sang, and that he played guitar at her house, and that they shared a kiss he said he would never forget. He didn't.

For an entire year, he wrote to her letters dripping with passion. Then he got serious. He promised marriage and undying love.

Read this soldier's letter of December 1944 vintage: ‘If only we could be together soon dear, I’d give anything to be back to you.’

But friends told him Ms Russo had become engaged to someone else. Mr. Upcraft eventually married another woman. We don't know much else. But I really wanted to know what was Ms Russo writing back? Where are her letters? Did anyone ever ask her what happened?

Mr Upcraft’s letters are on display at a museum in New Orleans that has a vast collection of letters from soldiers, sailors and the women who loved them. To mark the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, the museum highlighted thousands of these love letters from and to the war front. Among these were the letters by Mr. Upcraft. It broke my heart to know that the museum does not have letters Ms. Russo wrote.

This is the kind of stuff that slips out of the cracks when we talk of war history.

These letters are a close up of the unpredictability and horror of war. Both, Europeans and Americans, have made immense efforts to collect letters from war veterans. We in India indulge in so much chest beating but can't preserve a couple of postcards properly.

Many of the letters in the New Orleans museum are of Dear John variety, a majority from women.

And sometimes, a soldier at the battlefront would remember a girl and wonder why the hell did he not see her earlier? Absence brings you closer, particularly if you are in a shell hole and there are bayonets flashing at an arm's length.

‘Dear, dear, dearest Elizabeth, what are you doing to me, what are we doing to each other? How did I not see you, why was I blind, what can I do?’

Chris Barker was writing to Bessie Moore in August 1944. It was slow burning romance, and the two exchanged 500 letters. They both worked together in the Post Office but then WWII began, and Chris went to the front. It's there that he realised he loved the girl.

I came across the letter in To the Letter, Simon Garfield's so-very-readable history of letter-writing.

In one letter, Chris apparently received Moore's pictures. ‘You can imagine how I felt today to get your photographs … How lovely you are! How really nice! How much to be admired!’ It reminded me of that picture in the French soldier's pocket. I suddenly felt grateful that Paul Bäumer's dagger hadn't pierced through that photograph.

After the war, Chris and Moore married each other, but their son, Bernard Barker, discovered the letters only after his father's death. Many had been destroyed, but sample this one: ‘Well, I am glad you have 4 blankets to keep you warm – if I was there you wouldn't want any.’

Want to read further? ‘Here am I, a blooming iceberg of a maiden waiting to be roused into a fire, not just melted but changed into a fire, and there are you, miles and miles away, needing an extra blanket.’

Want to read further? I know you do. You can read all of Chris and Moore's correspondence in My Dear Bessie: A Love Story in Letters.

But any furtive love letters exchanged behind the back of a fauji can lead to disastrous results, as every student of law in India studies very early in legal history 101. If Naval Commander Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati had not found some letters written to Sylvia, he would not have murdered his close friend, Prem Bhagwandas Ahuja, and India might still possibly had retained the jury system.

For a fauji receiving a letter at his place of posting, whether in war times or in times of peace, used to be the most immediate breath of life, just as a letter from him meant life, literally. It meant he was alive, breathing, and writing. As our faujis now text their girlfriends or wives or kids, or connect with them on Facebook, or make calls from a cell phone, some of that romance might be playing out differently, but there still are a lot of letters from the fauji days of our war veterans that still remain to be read, reread; and some that still need to be responded to.

Here is a proxy letter to the fauji’s wife, sent by one of four Little Women, Beth March: ‘Dear Mother, I read every morning, try to be good all day, and sing myself to sleep with Father's tune. I can't sing “LAND OF THE LEAL” now, it makes me cry. Everyone is very kind, and we are as happy as we can be without you....Kiss dear Father on the cheek he calls mine. Oh, do come soon to your loving...’

I am sure the mother would have duly kissed him on the right cheek, but just to be sure, he would have gotten one on the other, too.

Louisa May Alcott tells us the father also wrote back in the same vein: ‘Give them all my dear love and a kiss. Tell them I think of them by day, pray for them by night and find my best comfort in their affection at all times.’ In case you are wondering, Beth was the shy musician.

Both, Charles Lester Brown, the B-17 pilot of the US airforce’s Ye Olde Pub, and Franz Stigler, the Luftwaffe fighter pilot of Messerschmitt Bf 109, met in the sky on December 20, 1943. They were in separate bombers, so couldn't understand each other much, or shake hands. What is important is that they didn’t shoot each other down — something that the job demanded. One of them had listened to The Higher Call.

Charles told his superiors what had happened in the sky; he was instructed not to whisper a word of it. Franz decided not to tell anyone, lest he’s court martialled. Voltaire was right: It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

They finally met in 1990, and became close friends, and remained so till they died within months of each other in 2008. Surf the net, find their story and imagine what would they have told each other – about war, about the interregnum, and about not shooting a crippled plane? I want to read their letters.

To slightly adapt a sentence from a letter Kafka wrote in 1904 to his classmate Czech art historian Oskar Pollak, for a soldier or from a soldier, a letter must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

In 2013, Suzanne Kesler Rumsey read for the first time the hundreds of letters her grandparents, Miriam and Benjamin Kesler, wrote to each other between 1941 and 1946. He never went to war; in fact, that is why they were separated. But those letters are dripping with talk of war, love, longing, anguish, and what it means to refuse to go to the war front and fight. I agree with her: Blessed Are the Peacemakers (2021).

So many went to war for us. So many did good by refusing to go to war. Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do, Voltaire whispers in our ear.

Albert and Frank were both born in 1914, when WWI was about to begin. They had shared a womb, were nursed together, slept together, learnt to walk together, to talk together, to play together. They went to school together and eventually earned master's degrees in social work together from the University of Pittsburgh.

They had attended operas, plays, symphonies, lectures, religious discussions together, and, thanks to their mother, also inherited together a lifelong love for reading, music and culture.

As WWII began, the twins did not make a choice together. Albert refused to go and fight; turned out to be an articulate conscientious objector. Frank went to the war, becoming what cartoonist Dave Breger described to the world as a GI. Both wrote to each other, the elder describing his experiences of working in the fields and on many civil service projects, the younger describing what it meant to be in the army.

Albert wrote: ‘How can intelligent, thinking people support this sort of thing? How can we who have always had a humanitarian, planetary viewpoint support this sort of narrow bigotry? If ever there was a need for integrity in men, it is now.’

Three weeks later, Frank responded: ‘I feel coldly sober about the whole thing - (I am) neither hysterically for nor hysterically against it (i.e., war). It’s nasty business, naturally, but I have to accept it as a plain reality and nothing more.’

Sometimes, in my mind and in my few saner moments when the dimension of time takes leave of my senses, I dream of Remarque's two men, the German and the French in that shell hole in WWI, reading together Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Correspondence of Frank Dietrich and Albert Dietrich, comprising the 243 handwritten letters that the twins exchanged.
At other times, I visualise them reading the Conscientious Objector's Wife: Letters Between Frank and Lucy Sunderland, 1916-1919, a compelling account of a woman struggling to keep the home going and take care of her three children when her husband was sentenced to prison as a conscientious objector. In that shell hole where time stands so still that death takes an eternity to arrive, the pair can also flip through the pages of Dear Dods: Letters From A Conscientious Objector as Art Bryant tells her loving Dods of the struggle men experienced in WWII while seeking to serve conscience and country after they were conscripted into often conflicting circumstances.

But perhaps they did not need to read any of those. They already knew.

Remarque's book has Paul Bäumer talking to himself, and the corpse lying next to him, in that shell hole: ‘Comrade, I did not want to kill you...you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony... If we threw away these rifles and this uniform, you could be my brother...’

This is a man's love letter to himself, conceived in that shell hole, as an enemy-brother soldier lay dying, blood gurgling, mud stuffed in his mouth, his wife's picture slipping out of his pocket.

For me, this remarkable connection running through wars, battle fronts, the girl at home, the wife waiting half a world away, the boy in a shell/fox hole and the pile of soldiers' mail in a sack and finally turning up in history, novels, books, movies or collection of letters, has remained a phenomenon of interest for decades now. Too many blurry images of random letters stained by blood or tears or lipstick marks cling to the fragments of my memory from the days when I first read Erich Maria Remarque's remarkable book.

As I grow old, watch yet another remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, and still feel disturbed that the wife of the French soldier, killed at the hands of Paul Bäumer, never heard from the German, or wonder if the soldier always waiting for that letter in Haqeeqat was finally brought one by the mailman, or if Ms. Russo had retained some love for Mr Upcraft – after all, she did retain the letters for 70 years before gifting these to the museum – I am resolved to find time to write to all those who don't get a response to their missive.

I know how it feels like. I still have that comic strip, clipped from a newspaper in my high school days, that made me fall in love with Charles Shultz’s Charlie Brown: ‘There must be millions of people all over the world who never get any love letters … I could be their leader.’

I hereby declare myself as their leader.

I want to write to all those who wait for the letter. I would write to the colonel, I will tell him his decision to safeguard his dignity, not sell his rifle, nurse the dream of getting a rooster, and always caring for his wife, helped save my soul. I know he deserved his pension; I also know he deserved our letters.

Here’s mine:

‘Dear Colonel, I am sorry. The soldier must always have a letter waiting for him when he walks down to the post-office on Friday to check on his pension.’

Mine must be classified as a love letter.