The Last Unfinished Word

The rain had finally let up, leaving the trench a slick, stinking mess. Thomas, nineteen and already looking fifty, pressed his back against the cold, damp earth of the dugout wall. His uniform, a second skin of mud and stale sweat, clung to him. The rats, emboldened by the recent lull in shelling, skittered across the duckboards, their tiny eyes glinting in the meager candlelight. He tried not to think about them, tried not to think about the damp chill that seemed to have burrowed deep into his bones, even past his thick wool greatcoat. He just needed a moment, a sliver of quiet that felt almost stolen from the gaping maw of the Western Front.

His fingers, stiff and calloused, fumbled in his tunic pocket, retrieving the dog-eared envelope and a stub of a pencil. It was the last bit of paper he had, saved for this. For her. Eleanor. Her name felt like a prayer on his tongue, a sweet ache in his chest that nothing out here could touch. He smoothed the crinkled paper on his knee, the faint scent of mildew and gunpowder clinging to it, and began to write, the pencil scratching softly, a tiny, fragile sound against the vast, oppressive silence of the trench.

“My Dearest Eleanor,” he started, his hand shaking slightly, not from cold, but from something deeper. He wrote about the weather, a lie, pretending the sun shone sometimes. He mentioned the lads, good fellows, all of them, though half were dead or mad or both. He asked about her, about the little cottage garden, the roses she tended so carefully. Did they bloom? He pictured them, deep crimson, almost impossibly vibrant against the drab, grey canvas of his memory.

He tried to keep it light, tried to make it sound like an adventure, a grand tour, anything but the gnawing dread that clung to him like the mud. “The rations are better this week,” he scrawled, though his stomach rumbled, thin and hollow. He didn’t mention the constant, low thrum of distant artillery that had become the heartbeat of his waking and sleeping, a sound so ingrained he barely noticed it until it stopped, and then the quiet was worse.

What he really wanted to say was different. He wanted to tell her about the screams that still rang in his ears from the last push, the smell of cordite and blood and something else, something cloying and sweet. He wanted to confess the way he cried sometimes, when he thought no one was watching, deep in the night, for no good reason at all, just a raw, unyielding grief for everything he’d lost, everything he might still lose. He wanted to tell her he was scared, bone-deep, soul-wrenching scared, every single waking minute.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t burden her with that. So, he kept writing about home, about the little future they’d planned, a life together, away from all this. A quiet life, with mornings full of birdsong and the smell of her baking bread. He made himself write about it, trying to manifest it into existence on the page, willing it to be real, a bulwark against the suffocating bleakness of his present.

“Hold fast, my love,” he wrote, a lump in his throat. “I think of you always. Keep your chin up. We’ll be together soon, you’ll see.” He paused, the pencil hovering. There was more, so much more. A desperate plea for a touch, a final memory of her smile. He wanted to tell her that if he didn't come back, that she should find someone else, someone who would give her all the things he couldn't. But the words wouldn't form. Instead, he just penned, “Yours, forever. Thomas.”

A piercing whistle shrieked, slicing through the air like a knife. It was the Sergeant. “Gas! Gas! On your feet, lads!” The ground shuddered. A distant rumble grew into a crescendo, the earth groaning. Thomas fumbled, trying to push the unfinished letter into his tunic pocket, but his hand was shaking too much. It slipped from his grasp, fluttering down onto the greasy duckboard, landing face up in a fresh slick of mud, his desperate words blurring instantly.

There was no time. The stench, a cloying, sickly sweet almond, was already reaching them. Thomas scrambled for his gas mask, pulling the rubber over his face, the world narrowing to the view through its misty eyepieces. He grabbed his rifle, clumsy with the mask on, and stumbled out of the dugout, pushed forward by the surge of men, a nameless, faceless mass moving towards the impending horror. The letter lay forgotten.

Days later, perhaps weeks, when the next rotation of troops arrived, clearing the trench, a fresh-faced Private, barely out of school, nudged a piece of mud-caked paper with the toe of his boot. He picked it up, trying to make sense of the smudged, unfamiliar script. He saw a few words, “My Dearest Eleanor,” and then his name, Thomas, almost entirely obscured by a dark, rusty stain. He shrugged, the paper feeling heavy, useless. He tossed it back into the mud, where it slowly disintegrated, its unheard confession returning to the earth from which it came.