IN "Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany," Mr. M. A. De Wolfe Howe has built quite the best war memorial that I have ever seen—better than cannon and monuments in parks, better than crossed swords and flags in museums and armories, better than the yards of inscribed brass plates which are crowding the epitaphs of deans and bishops from the walls of English cathedrals, better than groves and chimes of bells, better than flowers and the flickering flame which quicken emotion by the grave of the Unknown Soldier lying under the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, emblazoned with the victories of Napoleon and the names of his famous marshals.
I call this the best form of war memorial because it is intimately personal and holds us in lively remembrance of the young lives that are gone. It does not allow the mind to relax and rove among vague grandiose conceptions of military glory and embattled nations and warring machines and angels and horsemen of the Apocalypse, but keeps it closely fixed upon the spirited, lovable, gentlemanly boys from Groton and St. Paul's and the Roxbury Latin School, with a Harvard finishing, who, so far as Harvard is concerned, seemed necessary for conducting the most dangerous parts of the dirty and bloody business of bringing peace on earth and good will to men by the sword.
I am well aware that an increasing number of people nowadays resent all reference to dead soldiers which gives any satisfaction to the survivors. They will not admit that there are any good war memorials, except such narratives as those of Latzko, Duhamel, and Barbusse, such dramas as "What Price Glory?", such poems as Sandburg's "Unknown Soldier," such novels as the "Three Soldiers" of John Dos Passos and Thomas Boyd's "Through the Wheat," which expose the futility, horror, and degradation of war and bitterly and scornfully asperse every one responsible for sending men into battle. There are even extremists who hold that dead soldiers should be asked to make one more sacrifice for the living and consent to oblivion. I do not hold with them. But their presence and the diffusion among us of mordant skepticism regarding "military glory" render it difficult to write or even to feel quite simply and happily any longer about those who gave "the last full measure of devotion."
Mr. Howe himself has recognized this difficulty. His thin volume of verse, almost privately distributed, "The Known Soldier," from which I have borrowed my title, shows him to have been through the war decade a supporter of the war President, a militant pacifist, who swallowed in good faith the slogan "the war to end war." When in 1918 he undertook these truly monumental memoirs, it was not generally considered an index of subnormal intelligence to believe that benign consequences would flow from the World War. In the preface to his first volume, which appeared in 1920 and dealt with the thirty men who eagerly ran to meet their death before the United States consented to enter the struggle, it was still possible for Mr. Howe to write with fervent simplicity of the vanguard, ever to be remembered with gratitude—"the men who sealed with their blood the pledge of that overwhelming sentiment in favor of the Allies which was to make our country an active participant in the fight."
But in the preface of his fifth and final volume, which appeared in 1924, Mr. Howe's ardor for fighting along the path to peace has been sicklied o'er with the pale cast of current thought. "In the ten years since the World War began," he observes, "and especially since it ended, the very theme of war has taken on a new aspect, both for those who read and for those who write about it." He suspects, has had occasion to suspect, that the fruits of victory have been devoured by "the damned politicians"—Mr. Howe quotes the phrase.
As a biographer and as a citizen he begins to surmise that he will have to take his satisfaction less in what these young heroes actually achieved than in the fine gallantry and unselfishness which they exhibited. He indulges in little glorification of the abstract fighting spirit. He can't make himself happy any longer by murmuring "It is the cause, my soul." More and more he finds the cause which moves his heart in the individual. He bends over the known soldier, studies him as a son, as a school boy, in college among his clubs and "activities," as a sportsman, as a young man in business, in law, medicine, dentistry, as a comrade and friend in desperate enterprises and in the agony of death. The individual stands the test. He rejoices to think that the three hundred and seventy-three men whose memoirs he and his associates have written are but specimen Americans—are, indeed, but a thirtieth part of the Harvard men who were in the war.
My predominant desire is to emphasize the fact that the best way to regard these memoirs is not as obituaries, but as lives of the American educated class, edited by a capital biographer, the first three volumes wholly written by him—lives of all sorts of American college men drawn into one tragic story by their relation to one college and to the war, but even more profoundly unified and linked with all of us by their relation to one country, its culture, and its ideals. Every American university has materials for a record similar to this. This record happens to be—no, such things, alas! don't happen—this record is extraordinarily rich, and it has been handsomely made. I should like to persuade skeptics that they had better not pass it by as designed for a special audience or for respectful repose amid the dust of university archives. I wish to assure readers who feel no special interest in Harvard men as such, and who wish to forget the dead and to "study war no more," that here is an astonishing collection of materials for study of the great human qualities available for American life and the tasks of peace.
If, however, you are not in the skeptical class, which requires conciliation, you may be assured that Mr. Howe and his associates have brought out in these memoirs everything that can be said in honor of heroic virtues and fighting men and to the glory of Harvard and America militant. If your belief in the World War is unabated, if you instinctively honor young men who die at the behest of their country, if a relative of yours is commemorated here, if you feel an unmodified traditonal satisfaction in the military exploits of the sons of Harvard, you will read these volumes from first to last with intense interest and proud emotion, and you will be astonished that such a magnificent library of adventure has received so little attention from the press.
Here you will learn of one dead hero that he came of a long line of Harvard scholars; of another that he was sprung from excellent fighting stock; of another that his grandfather fought in the Civil War; of still another that his ancestors distinguished themselves in the Revolution and in the French and Indian wars. This young officer's father was a Mayor; that one's a President of the United States; the sire of this one was a famous New York clergyman; the grandfather of this one was Lincoln's Secretary of War; this boy was of the tenth generation from Elder Brewster; this "ace of aces" was descended from the colonel who crawled into the den after the wolf. They bred true, these fine old stocks. There are memoirs here which read like Pindaric odes, pouring a splendor of death and glory upon ten generations.
Here you will find, on the part of soldiers and their fathers and mothers, expressions of faith, of dedication, and of solemn sacrifice—sometimes even of joyous sacrifice. So great a hope, so clear a sense of duty, animated most of these volunteers that they felt bitterness only when the influenza or the pneumonia, more deadly than the bullet, made their free-will offering unavailing. "For many of them," says Mr. Howe, "Howard Rogers Clapp spoke when he wrote:
'It is much more than patria that we are fighting for now; it is the ending of such horrible pain and sorrow for all the generations that are to come after us. It is a religious war, greater far than any of the old Crusades in its principles—principles that are greater and larger than Christianity itself.'
This is not a speech from the sidelines but from the firing line, and it may be set against that of the realistic politician who insists that "we merely went in to strafe the Hun."
Some of these men went into battle in mortal fear. Of one it is said: "He had a horror of war and was always very nervous when he went to the front, and yet he always volunteered for any dangerous mission." Others developed the sang-froid of Mercutio, fighting and taking their own death with a jest on their lips. Happiest of the dead, probably, were the first thirty—sportsmen, many of them, football and polo players and big game hunters, eager for the thick of the scrimmage.
For Victor Chapman, entrance into American aviation, declares his father, was "like being made a knight. It transformed—one might almost say transfigured—him. That the universe should have supplied this spirit with the consummation which it had sought from infancy and should have given in a few weeks complete happiness and complete fulfillment—the crown of life to which one can imagine no other perfect ending—is one of the mysteries of this divine age."
Of the same Hotspur breed were Hamilton Coolidge, Quentin Roosevelt, Norman Prince and young David Endicott Putnam, a boy of twenty, who had had some difficulty entering aviation on account of his youth, yet brought down five German planes in a day and gayly wrote to his mother on the evening of June 30, 1918:
"Dearest Mother: I wrote to you this morning and said that I would try to 'get' another boche in the evening. I did!"
Others there were, but, so far as these records show, few, like Alan Seeger, of brooding poetic temperament, with a fiery thirst for experience, snatching at death as if it were the last untasted cup of intoxication, and luxuriating in danger for the fuller, intenser sense of life that it gave in the allotted interval. After a year and a half of war, knowing well where of he spoke, Seeger wrote that he saw all life revolving about the twin poles of Love and Strife, in the macrocosm, and in the microcosm of his own emotions. Love was good, he held,
as far as it goes, but it goes only half way, and my aspiration was to go all the gamut, to "drink life to the lees." My interest in life was passion, my object to experience it in all rare and refined, in all intense and violent forms. The war having broken out, then, it was natural that I should have staked my life on learning what it alone could teach me. How could I have let millions of other men know an emotion that I remained ignorant of?
Doubtless there were a few men in this company with blood so hot or heart so fully satiated with ordinary experience that death in battle was, indeed, to them, as Mr. John Jay Chapman puts it, "the crown of life to which one can imagine no other perfect ending"; but the total impression that one gathers from a war memorial in which three hundred and seventy-three intelligent men are allowed to speak is very different from that.
The crown of Life? They imagined many other crowns!
Says André Cheronnet-Champollion, enlisted as a private in the French Army, and the third Harvard man to die in the war:
I often feel like a fool instead of like an honest man trying to do his duty. . . . I often wonder if I will ever come back to see René grow up, to be his first guide in the park and to watch his progress through St. Paul School and Harvard. When I compare my attractive New Hampshire home to the terrible gloom of the barracks and cantonments and I see the park in all its splendor and loveliness, even New York, which I used to curse at a good deal, now seems like a paradise that is out of reach. Never has America seemed so beautiful.
Writes Francis Reed Austin a couple of months before he got death and his Distinguished Service Cross for "extraordinary heroism in action near Haumont, France, November 11, 1918," at the age of twenty-one:
By candlelight in an old French fort. Oh, it is lovely here in a little living room for the officers, made just as homelike as any place I have ever been in. . . . You forget everything except home as you listen to the piano with the two big candles on each side of it, and then dark all around. The wonderful old tunes resound up into the towers and down the dark corridors. They are playing "Memories." It is wonderful, and I think of my childhood, and my family gave me the very happiest. Wouldn't it be great if I could give them just as happy an old age. Believe me, this war makes you really appreciate everybody and everything. . . . Thank God, they know naught of war down here. . . . I don't know why I have written all this stuff, but the music has just guided my pencil, and after battered towns, dead bodies, suffering families and devastated fields all you most think of is love and beauty.
Says Captain Roger Fulton Goss, who died of influenza at Camp Greene, in North Carolina:
You feel that you are getting a good deal out of yourself—your physical organism and your mental and moral capacities—but you are sacrificing, nevertheless, the imaginative possibilities of unregimented "individual life," where a man is the focus of many demands and is the agent of many enterprises—and can play "the great lover."
In the last memoir to which I shall call attention, a rather ordinary or "average" boy is commemorated—so I infer from an introductory paragraph in which, with inveterate Harvard condescension, the author reminds us that a certain number of undergraduates come from the "central states," with nothing but "the local high school" behind them, and yet have a "wholesome" influence in Cambridge.
Osric Mills Watkins, an Indiana boy in the American aviation section, aged twenty-one, who died of pneumonia at Bar-le-Duc in 1918, wrote three letters from France which constitute the body of his six-page life in the "Memoirs." In the first, in which he announces to his parents his decison to enter the air service, he says: "I promise you that I will do well in this; that I will face all things unafraid, both physical and abstract, as I have always tried to do in the past." The other two letters were prepared to be sent in case of his death. To his mother he begins: "This isn't to be mailed until I've gone where all the good aviators go, honey. You are so wise and brave and cheerful that I know you can be as proud as you are sad at my death." But I can quote no more of this. It will be found in the fifth volume. The letter for his father I will quote in full, with no other comment than this: It has suggested to me more poignantly than any other page in these five volumes, packed with poignant suggestions, the incalculable costs of war:
Dearest Dad: When you get this I shall have gotten into a spin too close to the ground or something else equally foolish. I can faintly conceive of your grief, as I, too, have dreamed of sons that might one day have been mine. But if a man has lived well he dies well, as I believe; then know that I shall have held my head high before the Judgment Seat. I have committed my sins, but I am deeply ashamed of them, and I know that God will forgive them. I regret that I might not have lived to lighten your old age, father dear, and that I might not have given you a grandson; but it was not to be.
We have not written each other much, dad, but it has been somewhat unnecessary. We understand each other sufficiently well that we may leave things unsaid.
You have been a good father to me, dad. You'll never know how much I have loved and respected you. Even as I write I think of a hundred little ways in which you guided my faltering steps and molded my character. "I before E, except after C." I doubt whether I could ever have become as good a man as you. Evil desires followed me much. That was one reason I wanted to live.
They are just passing the window with the dead body of a boy who fell while I was writing the first page of this. The poor boy never got his chance at the Huns. I hope I do. Whether I do or not, I shall be proud to have died for America.
I'll be with you in spirit, father, in the days to come. I hope it will be in my power to make you happy.
It was very obliging for these boys to die for us. But after a careful study of these three hundred and seventy-three personal records, I must say that it strikes me as rather a florid figure of speech on our part to declare that death was "the crown of life"—for them.