India, Feb. 11 -- The past speaks to us in many and oft-surprising ways. So it is with preserved flowers, sent many crescent moons ago by battling soldiers in letters. Those flowers were little bits of life, beauty and hope, transcending the darkness of humanity's ugliest and most unhinged hours. Soldiers faced the pervasive odour of death that incense could not mask. Some picked flowers with their little scents to retain emotional and aesthetic sanities. When families opened letters to see those flowers slipped in, it lent them hope that if there were flowers growing where men were warring, it couldn't be a place that bad. The scent of flowers evoked love of the loved one at home, affirming the permanent bonds between the front and the rear....