I haven't written before for quite a while because I ain't got no pep. The old limbs are coming along fine. My left leg is all healed up and I can bend it finally and I now get around my room and this floor of the hospital on crutches but I can go only a little bit at a time because I'm awfully weak yet. My right leg was taken out of the cast a couple of days ago and it's still as stiff as a board and awfully sore from so much carving around the knee joint and foot. But the surgeon whose name is Sammarelli—he is the best in Milan and knows Beck of New York, now dead, and one of the Mayos— says that eventually it will be all right. The joint gets better every day and I'll be moving it soon. I'm enclosing a picture of me in bed. It looks like my left leg is a stump, but it really isn't. Just bent so it looks that way…
Now Mom you may not believe it but I can speak Italian like a born Veronese. You see up in the trenches I had to talk it, there being nothing else spoken, so I learned an awful lot and talked with the officers by the hour in Italian. I suppose I'm shy on grammar but I'm long on vocabulary. Lots of times I've acted as interpreter for the hospital. Somebody comes in and they can't understand what they want and the nurse brings them to my bed and I straighten it all out. All the nurses are Americans.
This war makes us a bit less fools than we were. For instance, Poles and Italians. I think t