clarice wrote him letters, and he carried them all the way down the western front.
"you see i have no one to write to, and then i saw the scars from your stitches as you frowned and i thought maybe, just maybe, if you had something to read someone...
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The 1st of July 1916 was the single bloodiest day in British Army history and it was also the day that Clarice Wallace looked down at her hands and found no matter how hard she tried they would not stop shaking.
They shook as she forced men down with all her weight to stop them from moving as amputations occurred, they shook as she delicately tried to remove shrapnel from every place imaginable and they shook as she took dead men's letters from their hands.
They stopped trembling on the seventh day of the battle when a lance corporal, of only twenty seventy years but with the weight of a lifetime of war on his shoulders, with his right eye sealed shut from blood trickling down his face held her hands tight and did not let go.
That was the day that Clarice met William Schofield. She wouldn't see him again until February 1917.
Between those two fateful times Clarice watched the other nurses meet with soldiers behind tents and wrote to lovers back home as the smell of chocolate gifts lingered in the hospital and she watched their fingers trace words of letters that had travelled hundred of miles to be read by bloodstained hands.
Clarice hadn't a person to write to that would read and sitting by with unused parchment she felt the chill of thirty five years of age creep up on her as she watched the other nurses turn twenty one.
When she moved stations to within a shooting distance of the trenches rather than the field hospital she saw a ghost on a dank and foggy February morning; William almost managed to smile at her and she almost smiled at him and so she begins her first letter of the war;
"Smiles are never appropriate at a time like this,
but I hope to one day see yours."
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CAITRIONA BALFE as Nurse Clarice Wallace
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GEORGE MACKAY as Lance Corporal William Schofield
a preface
1917 is no exaggeration one of the best films i have ever seen, so i knew just putting my own character into it and changing nothing of real big note wouldn't cut it, it would be (at least if i did it) saying that sam mendes masterpiece is missing something.
1917 is an epic war thriller and i want to keep it that way. sincerely yours looks at schofields character in a different light. i am not a writer that could convey the amount of emotion this scale of film deserves in prose and therefore i won't try.
here he is a man still haunted by the somme and clarice is the physical manifestation of that and the emotions he holds towards the war. here is my interpretation of what schofield could have been, a bit like how james bond is always slightly different no matter who plays him but its still him, still his blood runnng through his veins.
i write this preface because never have i so strongly felt like i was adding my own interpretation on the source material i am writing on, and never have i felt like the source material itself is so whole and complete in its own themes that anything just added on top would not do itself and the film justice.
thus sincerely yours and clarice wallace are another take on war, it's not epic like 1917, its small and its personal - its words from the heart not sprawling landscapes and singular heartbeats not explosions.
