I apologize for making you more worried than you seem to already be. I would have written, I hope you know me well enough by now that I would have written the first time you wrote to me. I was indisposed when the letters first came, and then as I awoke, I was questioned of my mission status and the doctor's questions of where my body ached the most. It wasn't until later that evening that a commanding officer came to my bedside and asked if I knew a Blake. I thought I was dead until I realized that your brother Joseph must have come back to France.
Your brother found me. I think he may have wrung my neck if he didn't see that I could barely sit up by myself. He yelled at me, loud enough for the doctors to shush him and threaten to have him removed if he couldn't keep quiet. He yelled about you and about how you barely slept when I didn't respond. I'll be honest, I barely heard what else he was yelling about because I barely could keep my eyes open, but I understood that he wanted me to write, or that he'd be the cause of my death and not the war.
I also must apologize because I've yet to read your letters. My head is aching and even this is making my vision darken, but Joseph told me to write to you, even if it was a line just to tell you I was alive, but you deserve more than just the words of a soldier. I was caught in a city where the Germans were trying to occupy and the townspeople were refusing to cooperate. The people helped me, stitched me up the best they could and took care of me until my battalion came through the town.
I failed my mission. I failed and men died because of me. Not just one or two, but hundreds of men died because I failed to deliver a simple message from one colonel to the other. I knew I would fail, but I never thought I'd live to see my failure. My men look at me differently and the sergeant won't even speak to me. They blame me as much as I blame myself. This time there isn't a German soldier that I can pass the blame to for their deaths. This was my mission and mine alone. I was to save those men's lives and I couldn't.
I can't even bring myself to write to my family that I'm alive. I doubt they even think anything is wrong since I hardly write to them, but writing to them, telling them that I failed, is something I can't do. So, I sit in the medical tent, listening to the men's screams who are worse off than I ever will be, asking for their loved ones while I barely can stomach the thought of hearing from my loved ones. So, as you write to me, Mary, know that you're writing to the man who failed not only those soldiers, but his country as a whole.
