Dear father,
I hope you are well. As of last month, the entire town was evacuated by command of the Presidential council with the full support of the congressional assembly and the president. They fear a fifth column amongst the populace and with good reason as terrorist attacks from provincial forces have increased. I received your letter just yesterday, it seems you sent it five months ago so I assume the forces the president sent to the front must be doing their job already. I've taken my mother and sister with me and am now looking to claim military refuge and assistance of a high degree per your rank. I apologize for using you in such a callus manner, but food has become more stringent and hard to come by, I hope you understand.
I would attach our new locations but the army has disallowed any such thing and the Military Police have become more efficient and rigorous in their letter inspection. Letters have been limited to 500 words or less and there are only a few letters that can be sent in a month, 5 to be exact, so I again apologize for sucha short and formal letter. I hope I haven't made too many mistakes in writing this lette ras there will be no time to check everything before the deadline for letter is reached.
Mother and sister are okay, I am okay, so please focus on coming back home t us .
All the best,
You son
This letter shows two important things. One is the harsher censorship and counterintelligence methods incurred by the republic. By this time in the war, the MP was working in overdrive, so to ease the task of censoring and reviewing letters the MP ordered to army to limit the words in a letter to less than 500 letters. This helped to reduce the provincial letters that used the Republican postal service to send encrypted messages that most of the time exceeded 500 words. This made letters more formal and some scholars argue that this created the space for direct language poetry and the like.
The second important thing was the mention of a lack of food across republican territories, and in fact, food production across would continue to decline dramatically as separatist forces sabotaged Republican exporting shipments and a higher priority was given to military meals. This was one of the factors that allowed for such a sharp decline in quality of life across the quadrants.
Life would only get worse. In a few years, famine would occur in the often-neglected third quadrant, and in an attempt to appease the population the republic would commit its worst atrocity. It wears many names, The Battle of Nadia, The Thinning of Malegria, but its most recognizable name was: The long genocide.