[Letter on standard US Army letterhead, written in the field in France. Matteo's hand, careful, with the small irregularities of a man writing from a field tent. Postmark: Bordeaux, 3 August 1918. Received at the Crescent residence, Port Hume, 14 September 1918. Folded into Augusta's correspondence drawer.]

1st Lt. Matteo R. Cadenza A Co., 2nd Bn, 109th Infantry Regt. A.E.F., France, 22 July, 1918.

My dear Augusta,

I write you from a rest area at the back of the lines. I have the time to write, and you have the right to read, a fuller account of Bennet's death than the cable the Army sent you ten days ago was able to carry.

We had come up into the Bois de Belleau on the 1st of June from a position some miles south. Bennet was my bunkmate in the reserve trench for three nights before we went forward. I had known Bennet since the spring of 1917 at Camp Lee, which you will remember from his letters home. He was my friend as well as my lieutenant's comrade. I loved him. I write this not as a formality. I loved him. I write it because you deserve to have it said in writing from a man who knew him at the end, and who was not of your family, and who therefore may be permitted to say what your family may not be permitted to say of itself.

On the 2nd of June we went up to the Bois and took, in the course of a long afternoon, a position at the edge of the wheatfield. On the 3rd we went into the wood itself. I will not describe the wood. Your imagination will serve you, and what your imagination will not serve I would not wish it to. On the 3rd of June Bennet was killed.

He was killed quickly. I want you to have that. He did not suffer. He was, in the moments before, making a small joke about the quality of the French bread in the village we had passed through on the 1st — a bread he claimed was "a step above the usual and a step below the excellent, which is the French way of baking." He said this to me. I laughed. He walked ten paces ahead of me with his rifle. Within the minute he fell. He was dead before I reached him.

He was hit once, cleanly, in the upper chest. He did not speak again. He was — I want you to have this also — he was standing upright as a soldier at the moment he was hit. He went down backwards. I closed his eyes myself. I took from him a small thing you gave him — a folded paper, perhaps a prayer, that he kept in his breast pocket, which I have enclosed with this letter for your keeping — and I gave it to the chaplain who came up with the stretcher bearers. It went home in his effects. You will have received it with the cable. Bennet died gallantly in action, as the cable said he did.

It was the third hill, Augusta — the one we did not take. I have written this because you asked me, in the small note you sent me through your mother in the spring when you had news there might be fighting, to tell you where he died if I was with him when he did. It was the third hill. The hill we went up and held for six hours and then, on the 3rd, at around four in the afternoon, were ordered to leave and reposition. It is the one we did not take.

Augusta, I want to say something else now that may matter less to you, but which I wish to say for my own conscience. I do not have a great facility in writing of the things I have seen in this war. I write plainly because I know no other style. If ever I come home alive and you should wish to speak with me about your brother, I shall be ready to speak. I shall speak with as much truth as I possess. I will not speak more than you wish to hear. I think many things about the war and about what we have been sent here to do; I keep most of those things to myself. But I will not, when I come home, ever tell you a different story about Bennet than the one I have told you in this letter.

I send you, with such respect as a man in the field can offer a woman in grief, my friendship. I write to your mother by the same post. I shall write to you, if you wish, whenever the next pause in the fighting permits. The mail takes longer than any of us would prefer.

I remain, most sincerely,

Your brother's friend and comrade,

Matteo Cadenza

[postscript, in smaller hand, at the foot:]

P.S. Amélie at the café in Port Hume — she was his friend too, from before the war. Please give her the news in person when you are able. She will want to hear it from someone who was there. She would forgive me if I could not write to her as well; I have written this letter three times. — M.