Hello again my dears! So many of you loved Edward's letter so much! sigh... where are those men these days?!
Well time is going to speed away here a little- some of you have asked when are they gonna meet already?! LOL, let me just say war is hell and we'll just have to see. Edward and the boys have some important battles to get through first...
But unlike those blank pages in New Moon, we'll see how they get through it...
~~oo~~
Time passes too quickly when you are living in the moment.
When life is great, it steels away from you. When life is immeasurably painful or tense, time slows down as if to make you suffer through every agonizing second.
The summer seemed just flew by.
Perhaps because I was in love and my mailbox seemed inundated with letters from my corporal.
Almost every day, one of us received a letter from the front. With the boys training once more in England, we seemed to never pine away for a letter. The dates seemed to get closer and closer to when they had sent off their letters, and once or twice it almost felt as if we were answering letters immediately, the lag in responses a little over a week instead of weeks at a time.
Since that first letter from Edward confessing his feelings, I received many more as the days and weeks followed. Just as I had written to him every day, he seemed dedicated to do the same, offering me so many personal bits of information about him I found myself smiling even on the most trying of days.
And every letter, Edward signed it the same.
Yours forever,
Edward
I fell in love with Edward Masen with every word he wrote.
Edward's family had owned a small printing business just outside of Chicago.
No brothers or sisters, he was the only one left in his family.
He had started playing piano at the age of four. He was a prodigy with dreams of playing professionally, at least before his mother and father had died. He never explained how they died, always moving onto other things about himself.
He enjoyed Chopin, but Bach was his favorite.
He read every chance he could growing up, liking the Greek classics and British poetry and literature.
Edward never owned a pet.
Edward despised the snow in winter.
He enjoyed sunrises over the Great Lakes. He liked thunderstorms, but not getting wet in the rain.
He missed the smell of his mother's roses in the yard.
Every letter he offered more of himself.
And with each one of my own, I did the same.
I didn't like the rain much, but liked reading in my picture window back home when it did rain.
I liked Chopin, but could never manage to coordinate my fingers to play well.
Washington and New York were the only places I had lived in.
I was also an only child.
Back and forth we told one another everything.
He had a scar on his knee from falling from a tree. I had a scar on my knee from tripping down the porch stairs.
He liked to swim, I liked the sand.
His eyes were green, mine were brown.
His hair- undeterminable reddish brown he had claimed.
I laughed at that and thought of the photograph we had framed on our table. There was no way to tell what his hair color was in that unfocused shot.
He told me very little about what they had seen, except that he was amazed by how fast the ground comes to meet a paratrooper in the dark of night. He explained his terror briefly, but never mentioned specifically what he had encountered.
Only that he was safe and ready to end the war.
Always that he was safe with the thought of me waiting at home.
Home.
The more we skirted around the issue of what he would do when he came home, the more I realized I would go wherever he landed.
He spoke of travelling, and I saved more money in my war bonds. I was determined to have something for when he returned. I never mentioned how I saved, but I was sure he saved as well. Paratroopers made extra money because of the danger they faced.
And he rarely spent unnecessarily.
He rarely left the base, even on leave. I had learned from Rose's letters from Emmett that they had tried to bring Edward along to London for a weekend, but he had refused, knowing that most men who did often went looking for girls. Rose was sure to let Emmett know that she enjoyed the USO dances as much as he enjoyed Piccadilly Circus.
Rose later told me that Picadilly was where the whores lingered for the servicemen, a lesson she had learned from Royce.
I was instantly relieved that Edward did stay on base.
While we had not officially made claims to one another besides offering our feelings, I didn't want to think about him with girls over there. It disturbed me that Rose played it so cool with Emmett. Alice had to explain that Rose was simply protecting her heart.
My heart was already taken.
So I hoped Edward would stay on base as long as he could.
August sped past with work and letters, Rose convincing us to go for the first weekend of September up the coast for a beach weekend. I had trouble enjoying it, knowing I was away from my post and that Edward didn't have the luxury of sunning on the beach. But it was the nights that were the most nerve-wracking.
At night, the residents of the town we stayed in enforced a blackout. No electrical lamps were allowed in case of invading forces. Those nights sitting under the stars, listening to the water and wondering if a German sub was in the water made me nervous beyond belief.
It made me feel perhaps a small inkling of what Edward must have felt some nights in those fields in France.
Not nearly as frightening as he had lived through I was sure. But still scary nonetheless.
I never asked him about what he had seen, both for his own sanity and the censor's.
I heard enough from the men coming into the hospital in a daily rush to know, this war was harsh, and wouldn't be over as soon as we had hoped. And with every tale I heard from the men in my ward, and with every letter we received, I wondered when the day would come that would tell me that Edward and the boys would be going into the fray.
I learned about it by chance, listening to the radio beside one of the men one night.
Sometimes I just wished I could avoid the news on the radio and in the papers.
I sat there beside a young army infantry man, listening to the news of paratroopers jumping in a daring mid day jump into part of the Netherlands and Germany. The soldier in the bed beside me listened in rapt attention over the numbers of men, the city taken, the complexity of the battle there, and more.
My mind simply stopped at paratroopers jumping.
My heart stalled, knowing the inevitable had come to pass.
There was something about largest deployment of Airborne, taking of bridges, suffering casualties.
I sighed and closed my eyes, knowing what was being told to me on the radio.
I wouldn't be hearing from Edward again for some time to come.
AN: It's lovely what lovers might say in letters. What we take for granted with online dating, awkward first dates and perhaps that shy conversation the the train, they could do in letters. Letters were forever.
A couple things here in the history blurb:
Picadilly Circus was a haven for troops looking for some relief from the stress of their war. On leave, they might come for a few beers, to laugh and carry on and play darts (new to those American GI's) but it was also a place where the prostitutes could be guaranteed some good wages. Men were lonely- living like it was their last day, and many probably cheated on their girls back home to blow off some steam. Picadilly was the place to go.
And so we get into mid September with the end of this chapter... Paratroopers made their next big jump into the Netherlands in hopes to capture bridges into Northern Germany, allowing ground troops to get in and surround the industrial forces of the Germans. Airborne units (code named Operation Market) jumped in full force into the towns in broad daylight on Sept. 17th. Ground troops (code named Operation Garden) were to provide support to those airborne troops as soon as the bridges were secured. Operation Market Garden initially was a success, freeing some towns that had been under Nazi oppression for months. Bridges had been secured, but the failings of ground troops unable to cross some of the bridges that had been blown out ultimately forced the Allied forces to give up some of the advance that they had succeeded in. Combined troops fought for nine days before retreats were made. 101st Airborne stayed to keep what they could with ground troops, remaining well into November to hold what little ground they could.
It was a hope that Market Garden would speed up the advancement of Allied forces into Germany, with plans to end the war by Christmas. With Market Garden failing to give Allied forces that hold, the war would continue into the next year.
the 502 and other regiments of the 101st Airborne would not return to England after this. They would remain for some of the worst fighting in the history of the war in Germany.
but that's coming up.
more soon!
MWAH!
steph