Verona, Italy.
——— Hospital, Ward 11.
December 2, 1917.
Dear Little Jeannette:
To children like you nothing is unexpected. You believe witches are abroad on dark nights, while fairies dance in the moonlight; and that angels protect you from evil spirits.
When you grow older experience plucks these pinions of fancy; you can no longer soar but become an earth stained materialist, surprised if your plans of the morrow miscarry and you find yourself in New York when you expected to be in Washington.
A year ago today I was defending a suit against the Lexington Railway Company; had become reconciled to law and expected to continue in that comparatively thrill-less profession. I might have thought by now I [pg 23] would be married—but I certainly did not think that I would occupy a bed in Ward 11 of an army hospital at Verona; so far away that it is impossible to send you even a book for Christmas.
Looking backward, it is easy enough to explain why I am here. Not understanding what war was; not appreciating what a government undertakes that declares war, I grew impatient at our country’s apparent criminal slowness in getting into the war; and in February, 1917, went to Montreal and enlisted. In March 1,500 of us were loaded aboard the Burmah and that transport steamed a thousand miles down the St. Lawrence to the ocean and at the end of a two weeks’ voyage by the northern passage, over a gray fog-burdened ocean by day, a phosphorescent billowy one by night, we landed at Liverpool.
At a cantonment, a few miles from London, we were subjected to four months’ strenuous training; and presumedly because I had attended a military school for a year, I was commissioned a lieutenant in the British army. At the end of the four months our regiment was loaded aboard a transport and many of us did not learn our destination until we were landed at ——, Italy. (We are not allowed to name the port.)
We reported to General, the Earl of Cavan, commanding the British forces in Italy; and after several weeks’ training were ordered to the Piave front.
On the 24th of October at the battle of Caporetto, I experienced the same sensation as though I had been struck in the chest by a brick, when it was but a small calibre, soft nosed bullet; and remember having been loaded into, and it seemed riding for days in, an overfilled ambulance, just enough alive to have a dull sense of pain and to feel the concussion of the great guns, though the reports seemed muffled and far away.
[pg 24] I lost consciousness; was no longer near the battlefield, but at your home in the mountains of Kentucky. I heard no sounds save the murmur of running water and the song of a wood thrush. All about was the implacable serenity of the blue sky and the everlasting hills. The face of nature was unscarred; there were no shell holes, no splintered trees, no pools of blood, no dead and dying.