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One hundred years ago, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, my Great-Uncle Ralph E. Cummings (according to what I remember hearing from Ralph’s sister Alice, my Gramma Grossmann) was dead. I am not certain of the precise date or circumstances of Uncle Ralph’s death, but I always understood that he served honorably in the United States Army and died in France, of the flu, at age nineteen or twenty in the year 1918. I have in my possession, however, a postal card addressed to my grandmother and bearing a postmark of October 16, 1918, San Antonio, Texas. The other side of the card contains a neatly penciled message of just about one hundred words, including a mention of “the Spanish influenza,” which raises, perhaps, a number of questions, none of which, to the best of my belief, would have much mattered a month after the postmark was inked onto that card or would much matter now, one hundred years and many, many wars and many, many, many, many wartime deaths since Ralph’s brief life was ended and since the date on which an armistice was signed to end The War to End All Wars.
Unanswered questions aside, I hope you might possibly find something that does matter in Uncle Ralph’s message to Gramma, and so I have transcribed it for you:
Dear Sister: I just got your letter and as I
am writing home, will dropt you a card. I am
in the hospital now, had the Spanish influenza
but am up and around now, and hope to be back
in my company soon. I wish I were to be
home also Thanksgiving, for we havnt been to-
gether on a thanks giving day for a long while
But next year at this time I expect to be
home. Well I must close now for I shall
run out of writing space directly. add the
same as always. Bye Bye for now. Ralph.
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In Wyocena Cemetery,
Wyocena, Wisconsin,
a granite stone
is inscribed:
RALPH E
CUMMINGS
1898 — 1918
Co F 312TH
MOTOR TRUCK Co
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