"Where Thou Lodgest..."

Hans George Hornbostel and Gertrude Costenoble took their marriage vows in Guam in 1913. The groom, 32, had spent ten years in the Army, was then a Marine top kick and in top condition. His bride had just shown her fitness by swimming half a mile from the house of her disapproving father to the wedding.

World War I did not separate the couple; neither did Hornbostel's postwar years, spent in antiquarian and ethnological research among the Pacific islands. Where he went, she went. When war came to the Pacific in 1941, the Hornbostels and three grown children were in the Philippines. Hans, at 60, was too old for the Marines, but his experience as a mining engineer commended him to the Army, and he was sworn in as a captain.

He went into action on Bataan with a combat engineers outfit known as "Casey's Dynamiters," was captured, subjected to the rigors of the "March of Death," and eventually confined at Cabanatuan. Gertrude Hornbostel might have escaped internment. She spurned the chance and spent three years in the filthy hell of Santo Tomas. In February 1945 they were reunited. Her health had been impaired by malnutrition and beriberi. But the Hornbostels feared something worse.

Last week their fears had been confirmed. Mrs. Hornbostel was confined in San Francisco Hospital, a victim of leprosy, and scheduled to be isolated at the National Leprosarium, Carville, La.*

Promptly Major Hornbostel decided that he would go too. Said he: "I don't consider myself a martyr. I'd be unhappy without her and she'd be unhappy without me, and that's all there is to it."

There was no precedent for the request. But U.S. Public Health Service officials thought that the Major might be given employment at Carville, thus see his wife daily. From Tokyo General Douglas MacArthur cabled his onetime captain of engineers: "I heartily endorse your desire to be with your wife."

* Where leprosy is referred to as "Hansen's disease," named for Norway's Dr. G. Armauer Hansen, who isolated the leprosy bacillus in 1873.

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