In 1915, Private Walter Butler scribbled a hasty note to his fiancée from the trenches in Flanders. If she had been waiting with bated breath, she would have been disappointed. The message has just been delivered.

Walter and Amy Hicks, the sweetheart he went on to marry, are both dead, but the card was put through the letter-box of their 86-year-old daughter, who still lives in the village where they grew up and spent most of their married life.

The whereabouts of the card, from the time that it left the Western Front to its arrival at Joyce Hulbert’s home in Colerne, Wiltshire, will never be known. But last week it turned up in the sack of Martin Kay, the village postman. It had come from the large sorting office in Swindon.

Mr Kay turned to the Colerne History Group to try to track down any living relative of the addressee, little expecting to find the couple’s daughter still living in the village.

“She was over the moon about it,” he said. “It’s absolutely amazing that this has turned up and we can only imagine that it may have been lost in an army barracks somewhere.”

John Titchener, manager of the Royal Mail at Chippenham, said: “The card turned up in our normal post.”

Mr Butler, who was serving with the Dorsetshire Regiment, sent the army-issue field postcard to Miss Hicks to let her know that he was alive and well. Mrs Hulbert, a grandmother of three, said: “To say it was a bit of a shock is an understatement. I would love to know where it has been all this time. To think it survived a trip across battlefields all those years ago and has probably just been stuck down the back of a cupboard for 90 years.”

The card was franked July 28, 1915, but, mysteriously, Mr Butler dated it November 5, 1917. Mrs Hulbert believes that the earlier date is correct because she has an identical card sent a month later.

“Soldiers couldn’t send much back to their families when they were fighting, so all the card would have told my mother was that he was OK.

“My father lived into his eighties. He always told me he survived the war because he could run fast and hit hard.”

Mr Butler and Miss Hicks married in 1919 and moved to London, where Mrs Hulbert was born. After the Second World War broke out, she returned to Colerne with her mother. Her parents separated and Mr Butler remarried. Mrs Butler died, aged 81, in 1978, and Mr Butler the next year.

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