On Hallowed Ground

by Robert M Poole

  “Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is concerned,” he told a joint session of Congress on April 2, 1917. “The world must be made safe for democracy … It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars,” he said. “But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts.” Four days later, on April 6, 1917, Congress declared war. From then on, the peace-loving Wilson, an idealist primarily interested in domestic reform, would be known as a war-time president.25

  Some German military officers airily dismissed the threat posed by green American troops about to enter the European conflict. “They will not even come,” Adm. Eduard von Capelle told the German parliament early in 1917, “because our submarines will sink them. Thus America from a military point of view means nothing, and again nothing and for a third time, nothing.”26

  The admiral’s prophecy could not have been more mistaken. Protected by convoys, American transport ships delivered the first wave of troops in time for them to march through the streets of Paris with their new commander, Gen. John J. Pershing, on July 4, 1917. The French greeted the American Expeditionary Force with an outpouring of gratitude: a one-armed brigadier gave a welcoming speech, bands maniacally played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Marseillaise” over and over again, and women wept and dropped to their knees as surprised doughboys marched by. Citizens covered the Americans with so many blossoms that their battalion was said to look “like a moving flower garden” as it marched through the city.27 When the parade reached the grave of Lafayette, who had hurried to America’s rescue in that first war, Pershing reverently placed a wreath of roses on the Frenchman’s tomb, stepped back, and turned the oratory over to Col. Charles E. Stanton. Fluent in French, Stanton addressed an already emotional crowd and earned roars of approval with his theatrical closing line: “Lafayette, we are here!”28

  More doughboys would follow, with no interference from U-boats. The United States drafted 2.8 million men between 1917 and 1918, which brought the strength of the nation’s ground forces to some 4 million. By March of 1918, the United States had sent 318,000 troops to France, with a million in the offing. They were sorely needed to replace the ranks worn thin by casualties that spring, when the Germans, sensing their last chance for victory, came out of their trenches for a final, desperate plunge into the heart of France. Opening their offensive on March 21, 1918, the kaiser’s men pushed weary British troops back from the Somme, attacked over the Aisne River, and prodded weak spots where British lines tenuously joined those of the French. Inch by inch, the Allies yielded ground all along the Western Front. Yet they put up enough re sistance to deny the decisive blow that might have finished the war.29

  Meanwhile, fresh American troops poured into France at the rate of 250,000 per month. “Rare are the times in a great war when the fortunes of one side or the other are transformed by the sudden accretion of a disequilibrating reinforcement,” writes historian John Keegan.30 The spring of 1918 was such a time, when the accretion of new Allies tipped the balance of power in the long war.

  Among the Americans joining the fight that season was Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, a twenty-one-year-old Army pilot and the youngest of the former president’s four sons, all serving in France.31 Less prominent among the flood of new arrivals was an ordinary soldier named Francis Z. Lupo, twenty-three, of Cincinnati. The son of Sicilian immigrants, Lupo made eight dollars a week distributing The Cincinnati Times-Star before he was drafted and assigned to the Army’s 18th Infantry Regiment.32 By mid-July both Private Lupo and Lieutenant Roosevelt found themselves standing between the Germans and Paris as the Second Battle of the Marne began. That four-day action encouraged a German retreat. This opened the Allied counteroffensive leading to the armistice of November 11, 1918, and ending the greatest war the world had known.

  When the smoke finally cleared and the losses were counted that autumn, it was estimated that some 8.5 million had died in World War I. Quentin Roosevelt and Francis Lupo were among 116,516 Americans claimed by the war.33

  Roosevelt, flying his Nieuport 28 fighter near Château Thierry, was killed on July 14, brought down while trying to escape pursuing German planes. Enemy soldiers recovered his body, realized his identity, and fashioned a cross for his grave from his plane’s propeller. They turned out a thousand troops for his honors burial near Chamery, a few miles from Rheims.34

  There was no such send-off for Francis Lupo, who went into battle—his first and last—near Soissons on July 20, armed with his Enfield rifle and a Catholic prayer card. The card, bearing the image of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, read: “I will spend my Heaven in doing good on earth.” It disappeared with Lupo, who was last seen charging into the wheat fields under heavy artillery fire with the 18th Infantry.35 When the four-day battle for Soissons ended, Lupo’s 3,800-man regiment had sustained 2,609 casualties. He was one of these, his name added to the list of the missing when he failed to answer the roll on July 21.36

  Back in Cincinnati, Anna Lupo received the dreaded telegram from the War Department a few days later. Her son was missing and presumed killed. She refused to accept the loss, keeping a photograph of her handsome boy on display at home, lighting candles for him at church, and praying for his return. She even traveled to France with other Gold Star mothers to search for some trace of her son after the war, but never saw him again.37 He had simply vanished—one of 3,173 Americans missing from the Great War.38

  In the rambling Roosevelt home in Oyster Bay, New York, the former president met the news of Quentin’s death with predictable stoicism. “Quentin’s mother and I are very glad that he got to the front and had a chance to render some service to his country, and show the stuff there was in him before his fate befell him,” Roosevelt told reporters.39 It was another story behind the scenes, where a servant found a forlorn Roosevelt rocking in a chair and muttering to himself: “Poor Quinikins! Poor Quinikins!”40 Roosevelt took the blame for Quentin’s loss. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death, has a pretty serious side for a father!” he admitted to a confidant.41

  In public, though, the old lion remained indomitable. When General Pershing sent his condolences and offered to have Quentin’s body shipped home, Roosevelt declined the gesture: “Mrs. Roosevelt and I wish to enter a most respectful but most emphatic protest against the proposed course as far as our son Quentin is concerned,” he wrote.“We have always believed that ‘Where the tree falls, there let it lie.’ We know that many good persons feel differently, but to us it is painful and harrowing long after death to move the poor body from which the soul has fled. We greatly prefer that Quentin shall continue to lie on the spot where he fell in battle and where the foeman buried him.” There Quentin remained.42

  Less than a month after the fighting ended in Europe, President Wilson and other leaders began arriving in Paris to arrange permanent peace terms and, at least in Wilson’s view, to construct a new world order in which war would cease to exist. While Wilson discussed his plans for the future at Versailles, hundreds of other Americans fanned across the ruined landscape of Europe to process the war’s carnage.43 Theirs was a monumental task—to locate, identify, and reinter thousands of countrymen from the millions of hastily buried combatants, and to do so in a way that restored some dignity to each individual the conflict had claimed.

  In Washington the War Department recalled to duty Capt. Charles G. Pierce, the retired Army chaplain who had originated the idea of dog tags and pioneered the repatriation of thousands of dead Americans from the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the century. Now commissioned as a major in the Quartermaster Corps, Pierce and more than 900 men from the army’s Graves Registration Service surveyed some twenty-four hundred makeshift European cemeteries after the armistice of 1918, and identified all but 2.2 percent of the 79,351 Americans killed in combat. The paucity of unknown s
oldiers is remarkable considering the absence of embalming, the haphazard nature of battlefield burials, and the depredations wrought by intense artillery fire. Reburied and concentrated in fifteen regional cemeteries along the front lines of France, the American dead would remain there until the War Department decided whether to ship them home or leave them in Europe.44

  As 1919 opened, it became clear that General Pershing and other leaders preferred to let America’s war dead remain in Europe, as the Roosevelts had done with their son Quentin.45 Speaking through his adjutant general, Robert C. “Corky” Davis, on May 6, 1919, Pershing made his views known just as congressional committees took up the question of bringing fallen soldiers home from the war. For one thing, Pershing argued, the French opposed returning America’s soldiers for fear that their own families would expect their 4.5 million war dead repatriated to every village and town in France. With so much of the country a vast wartime graveyard, French officials feared the upheaval that disinterring millions would cause. Such a massive operation would also pose unprecedented health risks, prolong France’s suffering, and distract from the important work of reconstruction. Pershing, negotiating with the French for permanent American burial sites, conveyed these diplomatic concerns to Washington. At the same time, he and other Army officers worried about the massive expense and logistical difficulties of shipping tens of thousands of American casualties from Europe—a homecoming program that would dwarf the one following the Spanish-American War. Finally, Pershing expressed apprehension over a potential public relations concern: if relatives opened the caskets of their dead sons and husbands at home, families would be in for a shock when they realized how the war had brutalized their loved ones.46 Pershing’s adjutant put it starkly: “Viewing the remains would result in most distressing scenes in view of the fact that the bodies will be in a badly decomposed state and in many cases badly mutilated. In some cases only part of the body could be found.”47

  Back in Washington, Gen. Peyton C. March, the army’s wartime chief of staff, shared Pershing’s concerns and urged that “steps be taken to give publicity to the difficulties attendant on the return of bodies, with a view to creating a sentiment in favor of having all America’s dead left abroad.”48 A few weeks later, Maj. Gen. Frank McIntyre, March’s executive assistant, prepared a long news release enumerating the reasons that America’s war dead would be better left in Europe. Citing the Roosevelt family’s example, McIntyre argued that there was no greater honor than to bury each soldier “where he fell, fighting the foes of civilization, upon a battlefield in France … What can be a better testimonial to the valor and devotion of her dead sons … than that the Nation should secure and maintain in perpetuity vast cemeteries in France—cemeteries which, in themselves, with their thousands of graves, will arouse sentiment and emotions in pilgrims of future generations, which mere monuments can never do?”49

  This stirring rhetoric did little to soothe the grief for mothers such as Anna Lupo, who clung to the hope that her son would return, or for Mrs. L. Mantel of Fairfax, Minnesota, who simply wanted her boy’s body brought home. “He was my only son I had,” Mrs. Mantel wrote to Newton D. Baker, secretary of war, in December 1919. “I want him to rest on his home soil poor boy,” she wrote. “Pleas send his body home to us as soon as you can and tell me … how bad he was hert and if he had a chance to say enything be for he died oh if I could of bin with him … it want seem so hard on me.”50 Another mother, writing from Brooklyn, gave Robert Lansing, secretary of state, a tongue-lashing for leaving her son overseas. “You took my son from me and sent him to war … My son sacrificed his life to America’s call, and now you must as a duty of yours bring my son back to me.”51

  Many such letters poured into Washington in the months following the armistice. War widows and mothers of servicemen reprised the role women had performed after the Civil War, when they had organized memorial associations to provide civilized treatment for the war dead. They did so again, goading leaders to honor the fallen, filling the front rows at public hearings, stalking the halls of Congress—trying to clean up the mess their men had made. Less philanthropic urges also flourished in this period, as American undertakers organized the Purple Cross and lobbied for the speedy return of war dead in “a sanitary and recognizable condition.” Their professional journals shamelessly anticipated a windfall from massive repatriation of the dead.52

  These appeals, the craven with the altruistic, soon swayed deliberations in Washington, where policy makers reached a compromise on repatriations just as the first anniversary of the armistice approached: On October 29, 1919, the War Department announced that dead servicemen could be returned from Europe to any relative who requested it, with the government bearing expenses for transport and for burial in one of the national cemeteries; families also had the option of interring their loved ones in private graveyards.53 Fallen servicemen remaining in Europe would be transferred to one of eight newly established American cemeteries—Brookwood in England, Flanders Field in Belgium, and Aisne-Marne, Meuse-Argonne, Oise-Aisne, Somme, St. Mihiel, and Suresnes in France. Congress quickly approved $5 million for repatriation expenses. Most Americans requested that their loved ones—more than 46,000—be returned for burial.54 The homecoming project, begun in November 1920, continued until July 1922, when the last wave of World War I dead were put to rest.55 Some 5,800 were buried in national cemeteries, 5,241 of those at Arlington.56 Another 30,000 stayed in Europe, where they lie today in exquisitely maintained military cemeteries on lands ceded to the United States by allies.57

  Of the thousands brought home for burial, perhaps none has been more celebrated or more visited than the serviceman now enshrined on the heights of Arlington National Cemetery as the Unknown Soldier of World War I, an individual who stood for all of those lost in the twentieth century’s first great conflict. Although his tomb evolved into one of Arlington’s most revered sites, the Unknown Soldier might still be buried in Europe if Gen. Peyton C. March, the army’s chief of staff, had gotten his way.

  March discounted the idea of honoring an anonymous warrior when the suggestion was proposed to him in October 1919 by Brig. Gen. William D. Connor, commanding officer of American forces in France. Impressed by French plans to bury their poiluinconnu under the Arc de Triomphe, Connor urged a similar program for one of the American war dead. March, never one for diplomatic subtlety or imaginative gestures, dismissed Connor’s suggestion with little discussion.58 The idea languished until Armistice Day a year later, when thousands turned out for emotionally charged ceremonies in London and Paris to honor unidentified warriors from each country.59 Inspired by the European example, a New York editor named Marie M. Meloney renewed General Connor’s ill-fated proposal in November 1920.60

  “There is in this thing, the way England has done it, the essence of democracy, and the soul of a people,” Mrs. Meloney, editor of the Delineator magazine, wrote to General March.“It is the kind of thing which should have found birth in America. I want you to do the fine, big human thing that no one else in America has initiated. It is not sob-sister stuff … It is a big strong influence in the future … It brings patriotism home to men in a personal way.”61

  March rebuffed her suggestion, just as he had Connor’s a year before. “The problem of Great Britain and France in this matter is entirely different from ours,” March wrote.“I was informed on my recent trip abroad that there were still over one hundred thousand unidentified and missing British soldiers, and their unidentified soldier is the representative of a tremendous class.” By contrast, he pointed out, the number of unidentified and missing Americans (then 4,221) was “very small and constantly growing smaller.” It was probable, he wrote, that the Graves Registration Service would soon know the names of many more soldiers, making it impossible to guarantee the anonymity of anyone selected as an unknown. Finally, March wrote, even if such an unknown could be found, there was no suitable place to put him. “We have no national arch like the Arc de Triomphe, or national
building like Westminster Abbey in which has been interred countless bodies for centuries.” If Congress approved a memorial for the unknown, however, March indicated that he would support it.62

  Prodded by public sentiment, Congress did just that. Within days of Mrs. Meloney’s approach to General March, the New York Times proposed that the government select an unknown for special honors. “His tomb should be a shrine for the Americans of all the States and all the lands under the flag. And that shrine should be in the National Cemetery at Arlington, where the bravest lie, men of the South as well as men of the North, who fought for the Stars and Stripes.”63

  Rep. Hamilton Fish of New York, a distinguished army reserve major recently back from the war,64 took up the cause, introducing legislation on December 21, 1920, for the “bringing to the United States of a body of an unknown American killed on the battle fields of France, and for burial of the remains with appropriate ceremonies.”65 His bill sailed through the House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, blocked by Newton D. Baker, secretary of war. Parroting General March’s earlier objections, Baker warned that Fish’s gesture was premature. Dead servicemen were being identified daily, raising the possibility that in time, there might be no Unknown Soldier from World War I. Why bury one now, Baker argued, only to suffer the embarrassment of digging him up later?66