To Her, who, as a bride of only eighteen months, stood broken-hearted on the depot platform and bade me a tearful farewell as our train of soldier boys started to war; who later, while I was Ten Thousand miles away from home on soldier duty in the Philippine Islands, became a Mother; and who, unfortunately, three months thereafter, was called upon to lay our first-born, Oliver D. Coursey, into his snow-lined baby tomb amid the bleak silence of a cold winter’s night, with no strong arm to bear her up in those awful hours of anguish and despair, My Soldier Wife, Julia, this book is most affectionately dedicated. “Only a baby’s grave, Yet often we go and sit By the little stone, And thank God to own, We are nearer heaven for it.” —O. W. Coursey. |