The pain of wartime loss expressed in an Ernest Hemingway poem still resonated with U.S. soldiers visiting an Italian war memorial near Treviso this week, more than a century after the American volunteer who inspired it was killed.
Inscribed on a bronze plaque hanging on the marble walls of the shrine at Fagare della Battaglia, the poem titled “Killed—San Dona di Piave. June 15, 1918” honors Lt. Edward M. McKey, the first member of the American Red Cross killed in Italy during World War I and the lone American buried there.
