Dvr. H.Adler
No 30765
179 GEN TNPT Coy
R.A.S.C
M.E.F

2 October 1942

Darling,

I have had no news from you for more than a week. I was deeply troubled by this long silence when yesterday at last the mail brought me a sweet letter from you, your invitation for a journey.

Yvette, my dear little one, I ask you to do the impossible and write me at least once a week, even if it’s only to let me know that you are alive, that you are still there and also – oh what happiness- that you are thinking a tiny bit about me. I tell you that because all this week life has seemed so ugly without a note from you that makes me want to say horrid things to anyone who comes near me. Nothing extraordinary about that, since I am so very much in love with you. It is curious, it seems to me at this moment that it is the first time in my life that I use this simple phrase: in love with. It’s as though I had invented it. I am proud and pleased about that and a wave of bliss sweeps over me now when I write to you. So much in love! At last, after long torments I can see all the beauty of these simple words.

So, my little wife, you will write to me often wont you? Don’t be afraid of promising too much. It is only two or three lines that I ask of you. “Henri, I breathe. A little for you too. I wait for you.”  You see, darling, it is not much work that I ask of you. A line, just a short line about life and love. You can do such big things with few words. You can lift from a tormented man, a little of his heavy sadness; you can cause him to be a little more sociable towards his comrades who need him to resolve various problems; you can give him moments of childish, naive joy; you can plant perfumed flowers and trees with large shady branches in a painful desert.

You see, darling, all that with so little.

Little one, I beg you not to leave me again for such a long week pining for your comforting words, for letters which give me back a little of that gay hope in my heart, longing to hold itself so strongly against yours. It’s a promise, Yvette, isn’t it?

Such profound and curious things are happening inside me. All concern you. If I could express myself with scientific precision I would be able to say calmly that I feel myself to be a function of you. Or rather that your life gives me life; your joy makes me joyous, your depression makes me depressed etc. This without any other consideration and without any limit. I feel that the reactions of your body and spirit must necessarily – as a natural law- refer themselves sooner or later to my body, to my spirit. For example, you love the countryside. Now I, who have never taken much notice of it, begin to feel a genuine nostalgia for the “furrows that lead nowhere”. Fonction. But what is remarkable is that this state of affairs represents a value quite positive. That is to say as long as I can be a function of you – I will feel myself enlarged, ennobled. Because, and it is this that creates the harmonious life between two beings- my independence is not lessened by the evolution which is produced in my body under your influence – it is the association of our two souls.

Little Yvette, love me and don’t pay too much attention to my chattering.  Love me darling, I want so much to keep you always for myself and for myself alone. Only me and no one else can what ardour I desire you. (Can one say: very in love?)

I remember, Yvette, that near the barbed wire you asked me in a whisper if I was sure I wasn’t deceiving myself. It seems to me that I smartly shook my head and said “Oh no, Yvette, but no! I am not deceiving myself.” Well now, my beauty of the barbed wire, I am sure of my love for you as I am sure at this moment that I am a living creature and as I am sure that without you, darling, I will no longer be living and everything active in me will die.

I know that we love each other as we have never before loved. But I have a horrible fear, darling, of not deceiving you. I refuse categorically the idea that this is an inferiority complex. I have never suffered from that malady, even when I was in the presence of beings that were far and away above me. Only you see you are for me the personification of beauty and goodness, vivacity and of deeply humane intelligence and it is I who ask myself ceaselessly what it is you see in me that can attach yourself to me for life. That is my fear of deceiving you. You are about to take great leaps in the evolution of your spirit. Me, I will make them too, or have I already reached the limit? That is a question. The future will tell.  But I will do all that I can so that you will love me forever as you love me now. You will help me, darling, wont you? Because what can I do without you?

The letter that I received yesterday filled with a joy I can only express by silence, sighs or tears. So then, very soon, we will have a whole week together. Oh my darling! Even if you wanted me to say tender words to you about that subject, I wouldn’t know any beautiful enough to reflect in the least bit the beauty of that happening. Let us then speak of concrete matters and leave the rest for our eyes when they meet each other again. Again, or rather, for the first time. For it will be perhaps for the first time Yvette that you will give me for a long long time the look that I saw for only one minute, there by the barbed wire.  And the flash of those eyes will shine eternally, for evidently it is a beautiful dream. (By the way Yvette you are hard to compare in the Yvette of the barbed wire and the Yvette of the photo. Barbed wire Yvette is an image engraved forever on my heart and I love it very well, you see!)

Listen, if all goes well, I will get my holidays (11 days) around the 27^th or 28^th October or perhaps around the 7^th or 8^th November. In 15 days I will be able to tell you exactly the date of my departure. I will telegraph you. For all sorts of reasons you can more easily than me arrange your holidays so that they coincide with mine. And you will do it. And we will spend the most beautiful days of our former life but we will have better ones in the future. This will be only the beginning of a loving journey, which will last all our life. Write quickly to say that all this is OK.

I am sending you this letter by my very good friend Paul. He is a charming boy (he is not 100% Jewish, which is already saying a lot!) who I like very much and who you will like too. He is leaving – lucky fellow! – our unit and is going to a country close to the country of his well beloved. He will convey to you a warm hello from me as well as some roses. Think, or rather, imagine that these roses come to you from a desert and from a man who loves you as you have never before been loved.

Goodbye, see you soon,

Your Henri.