“Time to die many times”: Negotiating Time in Letters between Couples during the First World War

For young couples separated during the First World War, letters would become the primary means of maintaining their relationship. The narrative of time, both the subjective experience of time and the constant awareness of clock time, is strikingly visible throughout a range of correspondence and is central to how these writers negotiate their relationship through years of separation. This paper explores how the pain of separation was measured through time, as writers express the tensions between present separation, where letters construct the intimacy that was denied the couples in actuality, an idealized past togetherness, and a future time when war, and their separation, would be over. Yet these correspondents were not naïve enough to assume a future. Their lives were suspended: any future was conditional and precarious. Narrating their time together on a past leave, or fantasizing about a future, or using clock time as a point of intimate contact when they agreed on a particular time of the evening when each would think of the other, offered ways to contend with the precarity they are forced to face. Written to defy time, these letters are a legacy that allow us to enter the painful immediacy of that wartime experience.