in the days to come.



CHAPTER X

A CEMETERY AT VERSA

I was at Versa, as I have already said, from the 2nd to the 10th of
August, to supervise a party working on the hospital. I walked one
evening down the village street, where in the light of the sunset an
Italian military band was playing to a mixed crowd of soldiers and
civilians. Just outside the village I came to the gates of a cemetery,
where six tall cypresses stand like sentinels on guard over the graves
of many hundreds of Italian dead. This was at first a civilian
graveyard, but all the dead have Italian names, except one Kirschner,
and even he was called Giuseppe and has an Italian inscription on his
tombstone. For this is Italia Redenta, in this one little corner of
which a great company of Italian youth have already laid down their
lives. And now the graves, in long straight rows, have filled one newly
added field, and begun to flow across a second, and soon from the Field
Hospitals in the village more dead will come.

Here, as in our war graveyards in France, no religious dogma or
supernatural hope intrudes upon the little wooden crosses. On these, for
the most part, you can read only the bare conventional attributes of
each little handful of dust, which has passed through its quivering
agony into the still sleep of decay,--its name and regiment, its
civilian home, the place and date of its death. A few have more than
this. Here lie the two brothers Bellina in one grave, with a cross at