Private words strip away romanticism of war

Andrew Carroll gingerly opened the FedEx box that arrived at his Washington apartment on a recent morning and carefully pulled out a letter, written in beautiful cursive script on paper browned by nearly a century of age.
“Chère Madame,” begins the letter, which is in French. “It is a mother who is writing to you, a mother who has been with your dear child in his last days; and it had seemed to me that to tell you a little of his last acts and gestures may soften the bitterness of your grief.”
A French woman had written the letter in 1919 to the mother of Carl Saunders, a 22-year-old from upstate New York who died in France during service with the American Expeditionary Forces after the end of World War I.
For 15 years, Carroll has been collecting war letters as part of the Legacy Project, an effort to preserve the correspondence of Americans serving during war. Some of the letters have been published in anthologies or featured in documentaries, but the great majority of them have been sitting in a nondescript storage facility on Washington’s U Street.
Now Carroll is giving the collection, numbering around 100,000 letters, to Chapman University in California to establish the Center for American War Letters, which will be officially launched on Veterans Day.
Carroll believes the transfer is the largest donation of war letters in the nation’s history.
The collection includes letters from every American war, starting with the Revolution. One is a Civil War letter from Gen. William T. Sherman, warning that the South had “laid open her fair country to the tread of devastating war.” Another is from a doughboy in France, writing of village church bells “ringing out the news of Peace, Peace, Peace” upon the armistice ending World War I.
A third is from a GI in Berlin who wrote a letter on Adolf Hitler’s stationery and included a sliver of wood from the Fuhrer’s desk. A fourth was written in 2004 by a mother to her son, a Marine killed in Fallujah, Iraq. “There are so many things that spark a memory of you — a song, a boy in a baseball cap and baggy pants, a skateboarder.”
Carroll and Chapman officials say the center is intended to be a resource for students, scholars and the general public.