THAT WAS THE END OF MY SOJOURN IN WHAT A FEW AROUND me here still call “the ol’ kawntree,” though it is no country for which I long or somehow miss in my old age, when memory is supposed to ease and there comes a forgiveness with forgetting. It will always be a mourning land, a place longing for redemption, for there is no end to the memory of it, no chance of forgetting, and so I knew that day that I would have to go home, though I wondered what would await me there in the country in which I was born but had never belonged. If I would be welcomed after my time away. If I might begin again in a manner befitting one who is no longer a soldier or even a son, just a man, with so much lost behind me, and so much left yet to be done.
The gangplank backed away, and the Mount Clay gave one prolonged blast from her pilothouse. Smokestacks puffed black diesel fumes that hung low and heavy on the harbor in the rain, and we seemed the last to leave a place decimated by plague. The ship slipped her lines and a tug nudged her into midriver, where she stalled briefly, waiting to see that everything that lay before her on the course below was clear. Then Hamburg, and Europe, and all her empires, all I had ever known — the only ground that up until then had fed me, the only well from which I had drunk — receded in slow swaths of wash and sky as we surrendered to the outgoing tide on the Elbe.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank the following for their generous help in the writing of this story: Lt. Col. Guy Bartle-Jones, Warren Cook, Paul Cornish (firearms curator, Imperial War Museum, London), Jared Crawford, Royal Hansen, Faith Johnson, Matthew Meyer, Renata Meyer, Gianluigi Panozzo, Virág Sárdí, Michael Silitch, and Claudio Siniscalco. Special thanks to Erika Goldman, Betsy Lerner, and as always, Amelia Dunlop, for her unwavering support.
Also, a debt of gratitude is due to the following writers and their work: George H. Cassar, The Forgotten Front: The British Campaign in Italy 1917–1918; Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey; Martin Pegler, Out of Nowhere: A History of the Military Sniper; John R. Schindler, Isonzo: The Forgotten Sacrifice of the Great War; Peter R. Senich, The German Sniper 1914–1945; and Jan F. Triska, The Great War’s Forgotten Front.