Letters Across the War

France, 1916.

The air smelled of rain and gunpowder when Captain Adrien Moreau wrote his first letter to Elise. He sat beneath a flickering lantern in the trench, ink trembling on the page as explosions echoed somewhere beyond the fog.

“Dear Elise,” he began, “if these words reach you, it means I am still alive.”

Elise was a nurse in a makeshift hospital far from the front, where the wounded came in waves and left in silence. She read Adrien’s letters during the few quiet hours between screams and prayers. His handwriting was messy, sometimes smudged with dirt, sometimes with blood but his words were always gentle.

He wrote about the color of the dawn over the battlefield, how it reminded him of her shawl; how he missed the sound of piano keys in her family’s old house; how he still carried the pressed violet she once gave him, now faded to gray.

In return, Elise wrote of the patients she saved, of the songs she hummed to them, of her fear that the world might never find peace again. Each letter ended the same:
*“Come back to me.”*

Months passed. The post grew irregular. Sometimes she’d receive three letters at once; sometimes none for weeks. Then, one morning, a single envelope arrived stained, torn, addressed in an unfamiliar hand.

“Mademoiselle Elise,
Captain Moreau asked that this be delivered if he could not return.
His last words were of you.”

Inside, a final note, barely legible:

“Dear Elise,
If I do not see you again, promise me you will still play the piano.
Promise me the music will not die where we could not live.
Adrien”

Elise read it beneath the soft glow of dawn. Outside, the guns had gone silent at last. She placed the letter beside her heart, sat at an abandoned piano in the corner, and began to play.

Through her tears, the melody rose not of mourning, but of memory.
And somewhere, in the quiet between two worlds, Adrien was listening.