A century later, Hemingway’s words on wartime loss resonate with US soldiers in Italy

A verse at an Italian war memorial here near Treviso honors the first member of the American Red Cross killed in Italy during World War I. Maj. Blayne Rankin, center, and fellow soldiers from the Army clinic in Vicenza speak with Italian veterans in front of a marble relief by sculptor Marcello Mascherini depicting the defense of Italy from Austria at the Piave River, at the military memorial cemetery in Fagare della Battaglia, near Treviso, Nov. 4, 2026. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes) FAGARE, Italy — 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. Army Maj. Blayne Rankin, a combat veteran and deputy commander for administration at the U.S. Army Garrison Italy clinic on Caserma Ederle in Vicenza, was moved by Hemingway’s description of grief as a “dull, cold, rigid bayonet / On my hot-swollen, throbbing soul.” “You