O resistless, restless race! O beloved race in all! O, my breast
Aches with tender love for all!
O, I mourn and yet exult. I am rapt with love for all!”
Walt Whitman.
The master of the Villino got the telegram when he was shaving, that morning of October 26.
“Slightly wounded. Going London.—H.”
He came straight in to the Signora, who instantly read all kinds of sinister meanings into the reticent lines.
Slightly wounded! H. would be sure to say that whatever had happened. Even if he had lost an arm or a leg he might very well try and break it to us in some such phrase. There were certainly grounds for consolation in the fact that he should be “going London,” but were not the papers full of accounts of the felicitous manner in which the transport of very serious cases was being daily accomplished?
The only brother and very precious! Always in the Signora’s mind—stalwart, middle-aged man as he is—doubled by and impossible to dissociate from a little fair-haired boy, the youngest of the family, endeared by a thousand quaint, childish ways. That he should be wounded, suffering Heaven knew what unknown horror of discomfort and pain, was absurdly, but unconquerably to her heart, the hurting of the child. Alas! if an elder sister feels this, what must the agony of the mothers be all through the world to-day!
We telephoned to the clearing station at Southampton, and found that the ambulance train had already started. Then the master of the Villino, and the sister whose home is with us, determined to leave for London themselves and endeavour to trace our soldier.