A Soldier's Love

11. Recipient Unknown

To say that I was panicked, would not have done my feeling justice. Panic was for grenades and bomb drills-- this was something deeper. Something slower, but far more cataclysmic. Panic indicated an impulse in the body to ensure survival. But a letter sent to Dani returned to me "Recipient Unknown" implied things which I could never survive. It was not panic, but a death-knell.

Recipient unknown? What in the hell did that mean? Every letter I had sent over the past two years had reached him in due course, so why did this one return to me marked as if Dani no longer occupied the little loft in Liverpool?

At first, I tried to convince myself that there was some mistake. The men who I knew intimately, that is to say, those who knew my secret, told me stories of themselves and others who received similar rejections from their belles back home. But I refused to believe that Dani was rejecting me. For one thing, I had just seen him. We spent several beautiful months together, and we were happy. Not a whiff of trouble about it the whole time. Dani was even sober for most of it. For another thing, I knew Dani well enough to know that he would never, ever send back a piece of jewelry like this, and that if he found the promise and premise attached to it unacceptable, he would keep the bauble and wait until my return to tell me so.

If I did not believe he was rejecting me, there were two other possibilities: That he had moved, or that he had died.

Just as I refused to believe he would reject me, I believed, however irrationally, that Dani would never die without me. I was the one at war, I was the one in danger. Dani was safe at home in Liverpool, singing and drinking gin and writing letters to me, preparing for my eventual return, when we would settle down and make a life together. Dani wasn't allowed to die. He wasn't allowed to move, either. I needed Dani always to be right where I had left him.

If I had Dani, I knew that I could and I would survive anything. If I did not have Dani, I knew I could not survive anything. Truly, if I did not have my sweet little blond mockingbird to rely upon, I felt that I would be undone if I so much as stubbed my toe. And many, many worse things than stubbed toes happened on the Front before breakfast every day, and so my survival, you see, depended on my deluding myself.

Perhaps he had moved. That was the only logical explanation which did not involve catastrophe, hence it was the only one I could accept. Perhaps he had gotten tired of the flat in Liverpool and had gone somewhere else. Surely he had moved, and he had written me, notifying me of his change of address, and his letter to me was delayed, or lost in the mail, or had got diverted to the wrong destination.

One day, during a lull in combat, the Captain of our division-- Carraway, I'll call him-- called me to his bunker.

The bunker was empty except for the two of us, which was strange. The trenches were necessarily tight quarters-- you stayed down or you risked a bullet to the head. The bunker ought to have been full. It was always full.

But not that day.

"Sit down, Sergeant Harrington," said the Captain, gesturing at an upturned crate which served as a seat.

"Thank you, sir," said I, sitting as he'd indicated.

Captain Carraway steepled his fingers and paced in front of me, the silence between us static and broken by occasional gunfire in the distance. The bunkers were very dim, even during the day, and I could not rightly make out his expression in the gloom, but I was unnerved. The empty bunker, the Captain's reticence-- something terrible was about to happen. I could not imagine what could be more terrible than being stationed on the Western Front, but Carraway had my heart beating faster than it had during any battle that month.