This is not a typical Valentine’s Day message. The letter from Dart is sometimes grim, sometimes majestic, always powerful. They only way to do it justice is to quote most of it verbatim.
“This year, like last, there can be no stereotyped Valentine’s day message, No printed card to proclaim my love for you. I prefer the more personal approach of a letter, but the cards would be a welcome supplement. But this year, there can be no poem, either. All that poetry that was in me has been pushed aside by the realities at hand. One doesn’t often write poetry when he realizes that every word he writes, every word he speaks, every thought and action may be his last. Morbid, yes, but so is the business in which I’m engaged at present.
None of us knows for sure if the words we’re writing now will ever reach the intended sweethearts, wives, children, families. They may be written in vain, only to repose in, and be obliterated by, salt water. Let us hope and pray that the words will arrive at their destination, undisturbed and dry, and that other words will follow in due course of time.
I really should not be writing this letter. It’s so hard to keep it from becoming apprehensive. I should have been writing daily, as I wanted to, but will resort, instead, to an excuse or two for not doing so.”
He continues with an explanation that he suffered a recurrence of terrible seasickness for several days. By the time he recovered, he was standing watch several times a day and trying to find time to wash his clothes and his body. The tasks were made especially difficult by the fact that his gear is stowed in four different locations around the ship, due to lack of space.
“This business of fighting a war demands that we be at our posts many hours a day, ready for all that may come. Then too, there are the incessant tasks of maintaining the equipment, of keeping abreast of the eternal battle against salt water spray.”
It has now been nearly a month since his last mail call, and that was the only one since the day before they left Shoemaker. “Oh Dot, how I long for a letter or two addressed in the familiar block lettering! They are the only link between me and the girl I love so dearly. Those letters are my bread and butter.”
Having said that the war has suppressed whatever poetry was within him, he nonetheless writes in lyrical prose of his growing affection for his little ship, the love he has for the beauty of the sea. Of the ship, he writes, “She’s rough and wet and rugged, a busy little gal in a big blue ocean. She wallows sedately, (if it’s possible to wallow sedately) in the huge swells, then takes out like a dog hunting for a trail, scouting here and there, now fast, now slow, now going as if all the searing flames of a roaring hell were reaching out for her little fantail.” Of the sea, he tells of water so calm and smooth that it seems a shame to run a ship through it and disturb its unruffled loveliness. He writes of being enchanted by the phosphorescent waves, the brilliance of a nighttime sky, the splendor of the rising and the setting sun. “When I mentioned a few letters ago that there’d be so much to talk about after this war was over, I was making a vast understatement.”
“Darling, if (the ‘if’ element looms terribly large out here) we come out of this unharmed, I want only to spend the rest of my days making you happy in that little house with a big fireplace. Would that we could forget forever that all this adventure were connected with war.”
He beseeches her to never forget that he loves her until the end of time.
A pretty good Valentine, after all.
