The Last Night Before the War

Ma chère Colette,

The world is ending, but the crickets don’t know it.

I am sitting in a field east of Meaux, and the night is so clear I can see every star. The crickets are singing the same song they sang when I was a boy, lying in the grass behind the barn. I used to count the stars then. I would make wishes on them. I wished for a horse, a knife, a strong back. I never wished for this.

There are forty thousand men within the sound of my voice. They are cooking their dinners, cleaning their rifles, writing letters like this one. Some of them are singing. A man from Brittany is singing a song about the sea. I have never seen the sea. I thought I would have time.

I never thought I would see a battlefield. I am a man who knows how to read the weather, how to plant wheat, how to hold a plow. I do not know how to kill. But they have given me a gun and told me to point it at men I have never met. I do not hate them. How can I hate men I have never met?

I hold your face in my mind like a prayer. I am not a religious man — you know that better than anyone — but these past weeks I have learned to pray. Not to God, I think. To you. I pray that you are safe. I pray that the roof does not leak. I pray that the harvest will be good. I pray that you know how much I loved you.

Do you remember the morning after our wedding? We woke late, and the sun was already hot, and I said we should get up and work, and you pulled me back into bed and said, “The wheat can wait. I cannot.” That was the moment I knew my life was no longer my own. It was yours.

Tomorrow I am told we will advance. The Germans are somewhere ahead, beyond the river. I will do what I am told. I will try to be brave. But if I fall — if I do not come home — I want you to know that I was thinking of the farm. Of the gate that needs fixing. Of the walnut tree by the well. Of you, in our bed, pulling me back from the edge of the world.

When you walk through our fields, know that I am there. In the wheat. In the wind. In the soil that will hold me soon.

I am not afraid, Colette. I am only sorry that I will not see the harvest.

Your Antoine

P.S. — If a son is born, name him after your father. If a daughter, name her after your mother. And tell them — tell them their father loved the earth, and their mother more.