[A sealed envelope addressed in Philip Westbrook's hand to "Mr. J. Leland Gray, Princeton Club of New York, 15 West 43rd Street, New York City," no postmark, no stamp. Inside the envelope, a four-page letter. Both envelope and letter kept in the bottom drawer of Philip's writing desk at the Westbrook house on The Crescent, the drawer locked, the key in his dresser-top.]
The Crescent, Port Hume, the 14th of February, 1919, three o'clock of the morning.
Gray —
I write this and I will not send it. You will read this paragraph and know I will not. I am sorry. I would send it if I could, and you would understand. I am writing to write it down, and writing to you because you are the man who was next to me at Sheffield and who is, still, the only man who has seen both the best and the worst I have been. What a short list that makes.
I killed a private of my own company on the morning of the 13th of September, 1918, in a wood outside Saint-Mihiel.
He was not a deserter. I have told myself for five months that he was a deserter because that is the word my captain used, and because the word is clean and has a procedure attached to it, and because if the man was a deserter then the shot was a shot the Army ordered. He was not a deserter. He was a boy from Kentucky who had become unable to proceed. He was sitting in a shell-hole with his rifle between his knees and his hands around the rifle and he was weeping. He had not eaten in thirty hours. He had not slept in more than that. He had been, for the preceding two hours, under the heaviest barrage I have heard or will ever hear, and he had come out of it alive, and some portion of him had understood that he was alive and the larger portion had understood that he was not going to be alive for much longer, and the arithmetic had defeated him.
My captain came up behind me. He looked at the boy. He said, "Westbrook, this one's finished. Fix it." He said it softly. He did not raise his voice. The captain was a decent man. He has a child born in January. He and I have not spoken of the morning of the 13th since.
I said, to my captain, "Sir, he is —" — I was going to say, I think, "he is shocked, he needs an hour," or something of that kind. My captain looked at me. My captain did not repeat his order. I understood that if I did not fix it my captain would fix me. I drew my pistol. The boy did not look up. He did not notice. I shot him once in the back of the head. He fell forward. I made my pistol safe. I walked the thirty yards to where my company was reforming. My sergeant said "Well done, lieutenant." I said "Very well, sergeant." We went on. We took the next objective within the hour. I was mentioned in the dispatch for steadiness under fire.
I came home in October. I was promoted in November. I was given Uncle Edmund's vice-presidency on the first of December. Mother gave a dinner to which she had invited twenty-seven people. I sat at the head of the table. I did not eat. I drank a bottle of the claret my father had been saving, without asking him, because I could not stop my hand. I have been drinking since.
Harriet knows something is the matter. Harriet knows the shape of the matter without the particulars. Harriet has not asked me for the particulars. I am glad. She is the only person in this house who might have the capacity to hear them, and I cannot yet speak them, and I have come to rely upon her not asking in the way one relies upon the staircase being in the place it was yesterday.
Uncle Edmund I do not speak to of any of this. Uncle Edmund has his own war, fought without being there, which I have begun to understand this winter and which I will not attempt to describe to you here.
I killed a private of my own company, Gray. He was nineteen years old, I think; I did not look at his face for long. I did not learn his name. The company records would have the name. I have never wanted to look.
I am telling you this, in a letter I will not send, because something in me is still enough like the boy at Sheffield that wants you, specifically, to be the person who knows. I trust you to do nothing with it. I trust you to not have to.
I will put this in the drawer and I will go to bed and I will get up in the morning and I will go to the office and I will review the quarterly report on the company's eastern routes and I will have lunch with Uncle Edmund at his club. I will do this for as long as I can do it. I do not know how long that will be.
I remain, as I was at Sheffield and as I have not entirely ceased to be,
Your friend,
Philip
[The letter remains in the drawer. Philip has not opened the drawer since the night he wrote it. He has not forgotten it is there.]