Letters of a World War I Soldier

            To my dear family and friends,

            I am writing this to you as me and my men are about to head into battle. Sadly, my captain told me that I cannot tell you where we are for fear that the enemy may intercept our letters and locate us. How this matters to us, I do not know. We are in trenches at the bottom of a hill. Our enemies are dug in on the top of the hill and can see our every movement. What is the point of this secrecy to our own families if our enemies can see who sneezes at any moment of the day? What is worse is that the rain, when it rains, runs down into our trenches and fills up almost to our knees at some points. A massive soup of sweat, mud, water and at some points, blood. A soup so foul that it must have come from the deepest part of Hell to have ever existed. With this soup brings disease, most infamous among our troops is the dreaded “trench foot”. Your foot swells up so much that even if you stepped on it, you would not feel a thing. The lucky ones have them cut off and sent home. The unlucky ones, however, must deal with the pain of the swelling going down. At nights, men can be heard screaming from this part of the disease and all night it goes on. Many die have died from this ailment, and when the bodies are not moved, the rats will take care of them. There seem to be millions of them, everywhere I look, I see them. In battle, I can see them eating away at the flesh of fallen soldiers, even attacking wounded ones that cannot defend themselves.

            I do not mean to spill all of these horrifying details to you all and make you fear for me. I only wish the fighting will end soon and I can come home to some freshly cooked, warm meals. Sadly, on the front, they promise us much food for each man, but we only receive a fraction of what is promised. Also, the food is never warm and is always cold. How I miss the Christmas dinners and Sunday morning breakfast. But, I have also seen many new fascinating things during the war. The reason we cannot move and easily take over our enemy’s trenches is because of the new machine gun, a gun that can fire up to 10 rounds a second I have heard. They fire this across no man’s land and mow down any man in the line of fire. Also, to try to get each other from the safety of our bunkers, we have brought in heavy artillery, firing a variety of shells at our enemies trying to kill them or flush them out of our bunkers. And above us, planes fly to watch the enemies and the occasionally dog fight against other enemy planes. And these new contraptions, called a tank, are huge machines of metal that no bullet can penetrate. We occasionally use them to hide behind when crossing no man’s land and kill the troops ahead of us.

            I hope to return to you all so enough. My captain is now telling me we must prepare for battle. I miss and love you all.

Yours truly,

Jimmy