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.
It was late in the afternoon when a comforting telegram came through to those left behind; it told us that H. had been run to earth; that the wound was indeed favourable; that he was well in health, and that we might expect him here to be nursed in a couple of days.
Very glad the Villino was to have him, very proud of its own soldier, deeply thankful to be granted the care of him!
The Signorina immediately instituted herself Red Cross nurse, the local lectures having borne fruit after all. The wound was for us and for him a very lucky one, but the doctor called it dreadful, and, indeed, one could have put one’s hand into it; and Juvenal, summoned to assist at the first dressing, fainted at the sight. But it had not touched any vital point, and though the muscle under the shoulder-blade was torn in two, it has left no weakness in the arm.
Like all soldiers we have met, he will not hear of the suggestion that it was inflicted by a dum-dum bullet. Nevertheless, it is a singular fact that where the bullet went in the hole is the ordinary size of the missile, and where it came out it is the size of a man’s fist. Something abnormal about that German projectile there must have been. But we were ready to go down on our knees and thank God fasting for a good man’s life; and it was clear that it would take a long time to heal!
Anyone who knows our soldiers knows the perfectly simple attitude of their minds as far as their own share in the great struggle is concerned. Further, they have an everyday, common-sense, unexaggerated manner of speaking of their terrible experiences which helps us stay-at-homes very much--we who are apt to regard the front as a nightmare, hell and shambles mixed.