Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 124, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 June 1918 — HE GAVE HIS SHIRT OFF HIS BACK [ARTICLE]

HE GAVE HIS SHIRT OFF HIS BACK

How an Italian Officer Traveling on. Trap Helped a New Bom Baby.

One of the ways to say that a man to good hearted 1* to descend to expressive Amerlcanese slang and say “he’d give you his shirt.” A young Italian officer did exactly that —gave the shirt off his back to a be by just born. It was during a flight of the Italian refugees just after the Italian army had been tricked by the Austrians. Here’s the story: An Italian officer, who had been a volunteer worker at the station when the crush came through, walked into the American Bed Cross office at Bologna, Italy, and told of a poor young woman who had given birth to a baby on the train In which he was riding a few night’s previously. They had been riding for over 16 hours, and the

wretchedly poor and disheartened mother had been jammed in with tho hundreds of other frightened Italians on the same train. Hungry, tired and miserable and in a frightfully weakened condition, she had scarcely sufficient clothes for herself, not to speak of properly caring for a newborn babe. The young officer stripped himself of his shirt, and there among this frightened, half starved, forlorn crowd the poor Italian Infant was wrapped in its first body covering. •Mother and babe were afterwards nursed back to health, clothed and looked after by the American Red Cross. And this is only one small, isolated Incident among thousands that come under the working of the Red Cross.