May 6, 2016. Somewhere in Maine

Sunday

My darling Sminx,

It is just one week today since we said goodbye but it seems much longer than that.  I miss you so much that the time has dragged terribly.  When we are together time is so fleet-footed that the hours seem like seconds and the days seem like hours.  But now that we are apart every hour is a week.

* * * *

This morning I went to church and prayed for you and Billy and the child who is coming [Griff].  Were you in church too or did you stay home with Billy?  The chaplain made a very good sermon on the value of prayer and its especial value for soldiers - I am so glad we were able to go to church together on Easter Sunday and take communion together.  That meant a great deal to me and I shall not forget it.

In my spare time I have been reading Charles Lamb’s Essays.  Some of them are very good and are pertinent even today.  I also enjoy the nightly bridge game and I have been winning consistently probably because we do not play for money.

* * *

Your devoted husband,

Bill

       And so it begins.  Major William Fenton, “Dad”, age 31, has left his beautiful wife, age 27, three months pregnant and with a 1 1/2 year old, to embark on the greatest and most dangerous adventure of his life.  He wrote this letter on Sunday, April 30, 1944, just five weeks before D-Day.  He will shortly be on his way across the Atlantic to England where he, with tens of thousands of other Allied troops, will wait for the word to launch the largest amphibious invasion in history.

And Sugar and I, with copies of Dad’s letters to Mom in my backpack, are off today to follow his tracks of 72 years ago onto Omaha Beach and across northern France into Belgium and maybe into Holland, a march that took Dad and the XIXth Army Corps three months.  We see from this first letter traits that are familiar to me and my siblings for sure - his use of the term “Sminx” for Mom, a term they never would explain but obviously a term of endearment; his love of Mom expressed in fervent tones in every letter; his deep faith in God and his belief in the power of communion and the resurrection of Christ on Easter; his love of reading and of bridge; and his competitiveness.  We will see many of his other traits in these letters, familiar to us but perhaps not to you - his love of languages, especially French, German and Greek, evidenced by his subscriptions all his life to Paris Match, Science et Vie, and Der Spiegel, and his constant reading of “Teach Yourself Greek”; his love of strawberries; eating boiled eggs out of the shell; always carrying a pocket knife in his pocket; his frugality at times; his physical fitness; his love and loyalty to his country and his fellow soldiers.  Dad led the Memorial Day parade in his Army uniform for decades after he returned home, and he likewise dressed up in his uniform on Veteran’s Day and attended the salute to the veterans on the pier.  I’m not sure he ever missed a Veteran’s Day celebration.  If it was November 11 at 11 am, you knew he was in his uniform on the Bar Harbor Pier, standing at attention, right hand to his forehead in a salute, remembering his comrades-in -arms as the rifle shots echoed across the harbor past the Porcupines.

Armed with his letters, a map of the route of the XIXth Army Corps, and guidebooks, we look forward to our trip and thank you, Dad and Mom, for saving your letters and giving us, your children and grandchildren, this opportunity to share this experience with you.

Love, Nat