Baker’s resistance crumbled under the growing weight of newspaper editorials, lobbying from the American Legion, importuning from war mothers, and support from popular military leaders such as Gen. John J. Pershing and Marine Commandant John A. Lejeune, both of whom stepped forward to speak for the Unknown Solider.67
“I favor the idea,” Pershing told the House Committee on Military Affairs on February 2, 1921. “It is a fitting tribute for the nation to pay, not only to its unknown dead, but to all who gave their lives or risked their lives in France. There has been no national expression since the war ended to give the people an opportunity to show their appreciation.” Yielding to the inevitable, Nelson Baker reversed course, backed the proposal, and even predicted that the unknown’s grave would become “the Westminster Abbey of America’s heroic dead.”68
Once it was clear that Congress intended to adopt legislation, there was a flurry of discussion about where the Unknown Soldier should be buried. One group of legislators proposed placing him in a crypt—originally designed for but never occupied by George Washington—under the Capitol Rotunda.69 The New York Times, abandoning its earlier argument for Arlington, heartily endorsed this new suggestion. “All America finds its way to the Capitol, many Americans never go to Arlington, which, being a military cemetery … can hardly be the ‘Westminster Abbey of America’s heroic dead.’”70 Rodman Wanamaker, philanthropist and department store magnate, urged Congress to bury the Unknown in Central Park. “Those privileged to leave us to fight for the freedom of the world embarked from the harbor of New York,” Wanamaker wrote to the House military committee. “Those who had the privilege of living returned home through this harbor. It was in New York City … that the nation’s welcome was given to the returning victorious troops, and it is the place above all others hallowed as the shrine for the spirit that never returned … Millions and millions of people will constantly be desirous of paying tribute to this hallowed ground who never will be able to visit any other city.”71
Unimpressed by Wanamaker’s logic, and perhaps concerned about converting the Capitol Rotunda into a mausoleum, Congress determined that Arlington was the proper place for the Unknown Soldier, who would rest among thousands of his comrades in the Virginia hills. Legislation authorizing the warrior’s enshrinment at Arlington passed on February 4, 1921. By this time, President Woodrow Wilson, enfeebled by a stroke, humbled by the Republican electoral sweep of 1920, and humiliated by the Senate’s rejection of his Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations Covenant, had barely a month left in the White House. In his last hours there on March 4, 1921, the president who had so grudgingly sent so many young Americans into battle put his rickety signature to Public Resolution 67, which would bring one of them back to Arlington. Thus began the Unknown Soldier’s long journey home.72
Clearing Europe’s battlefields after the war, the Army had gone to extraordinary lengths to identify dead Americans, reducing the percentage of unknowns to a fraction of their number from any previous conflict. Now the War Department reversed course, issuing orders for the Quartermaster Corps to find an unknown solider who was a combat fatality, buried in France, positively known to be American, and selected “so as to preclude the remotest possibility of future identification as to his name, rank, organization, service or the battlefield on which he fell,” according to orders from Brig. Gen. William Lassiter, assistant army chief of staff.73
Receiving these instructions in September 1921, a special quartermaster’s team in France had just over a month to locate the Unknown Solider, who was to be the honored guest for Armistice Day at Arlington on November 11. While preparations went forward on the home front, officers pored over burial records in Paris, where the Graves Registration Service had prepared extensive files for each of the American dead. Even unknown servicemen were assigned an individual grave number, which appeared in their file, along with particulars of their burial, and in many instances, postmortem dental records. From this archive, the army selected four candidates and four alternates for whom no identifying details were evident in the record.74 The goal was to ensure the anonymity of the Unknown Soldier, precluding later identification and allowing every grieving family to believe that the repatriated soldier might be a missing loved one.
Lt. Col. G. V. S. Quackenbush, supervising the recovery operation, assigned four specialty teams to unearth a pool of candidates for Unknown Soldier from American cemeteries at Aisne-Marne, Meuse-Argonne, Somme, and St. Mihiel. Each venue had been the scene of fierce fighting during the war. Arriving at these cemeteries, each disinterment detail found a gray steel casket and a wooden shipping crate waiting for them, with all identifying markings removed from the boxes. Each casket was “thoroughly cleaned and polished and put in absolutely first-class condition in every particular,” according to orders from Quackenbush, who left nothing to chance.75
“Should there be anything found on the body or in the coffin which will tend to identify this particular body, an alternate body, for which the required forms have been prepared, will be then exhumed and similarly searched,” Quackenbush directed.“The body will be prepared according to regulations—wrapped in a blanket and placed in a special casket provided for this purpose. No marks whatsoever will be placed on the body, casket or shipping case. The metallic lining will be screwed down but no asphaltum paint will be used on the rubber gasket. The casket top will then be placed on the casket and the shipping case lid attached by only six (6) screws, which will allow the ready opening of the shipping case when the body arrives at its destination.” All four teams did their work, loaded their dead comrades onto trucks, draped each shipping case with an American flag, and converged upon the village square of Châlons-sur-Marne at three p.m. on October 23. Here the final selection of the Unknown was to be made.76
With solemn ceremony, the flag-draped shipping boxes were conveyed into the Hôtel de Ville, or City Hall. Flags were drawn from each case, caskets were taken out, and each case turned over to serve as a bier. Recovery teams surrendered the original cemetery files and exhumation forms to an officer who burned the records on the spot to prevent any possibility of later identification. After these preliminaries were completed, the doors to City Hall were opened to receive local officials and townspeople, who streamed in with flowers, lingered before the caskets, murmured blessings, crossed themselves, wept openly, and moved slowly away. When darkness fell that night, guards closed the room and, acting on orders, rearranged the caskets so that it would be impossible to tell their cemeteries of origin. The doors were reopened; a combined detail of French and American sentinels marched in and stood watch until the morning of October 24.
The town square of Châlons filled with dignitaries, curious citizens, and soberly dressed neighbors who came to offer their respects. One of these townsmen, Brasseur Bruffer, who had lost two sons in the war, appeared with a bouquet of white roses. He presented these to Maj. Robert B. Harbold, chief of quartermaster operations in the field, who passed the flowers to Sgt. Edward F. Younger, a twice-wounded veteran of every major American offensive of the war. Younger was given the honor of choosing the Unknown from among the four candidates in the holding room. A French military band struck up a hymn in the courtyard, while Younger entered the room to make his choice. Still clutching the roses, he slowly walked among the caskets. “I passed the first one … the second,” he recalled. “Then something made me stop. And a voice seemed to say, ‘This is a pal of yours.’ I don’t know how long I stood there. But finally I put the roses on the second casket and went back into the sunlight.” The choice was made.77
Officers lifted the newly designated Unknown Soldier and carried him into the main hall where a catafalque had been set up, and with the help of a mortician, they transferred the serviceman’s remains to a new casket, made of ebony and decorated with silver. The coffin was then sealed and locked.78 Monsieur Bruffer’s roses were placed on the lid, where an engraved plaque described the occupant: “An Unknown American Soldier Who Gav
e His Life in the Great War.”79
The Unknown’s old casket was returned to the holding room, where bodies were shuffled once more to confound any chance of identification. One of the three remaining candidates was removed from his coffin and put into the one just vacated by the Unknown. As soon as this was done, the three bodies in the holding room were secured in their caskets, returned to their shipping crates, covered with flags, and driven to the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery. There, as the familiar strains of Taps sounded in the waning light, they were buried in Graves No. 1, 2, and 3, Row 1, Block G of the American cemetery, where they remain today.80
By caisson and train, through silent throngs and deepening autumn, the Unknown Solider made his slow progress across France, through champagne country and blood-soaked battlefields, around sleeping Paris, and finally down to the great port of Le Havre, where well-wishers crowded the pier, bands played “The Star Spangled Banner,” and the cruiser U.S.S. Olympia, which had been Admiral Dewey’s flagship at the Battle of Manila, waited to receive the Unknown. From the knot of officials crowded at quayside, one Frenchman stepped out, limped across the paving stones on a war-shattered leg, and paused before the Unknown’s casket.81
“The whole of France bows down with me before your coffin,” said André Maginot, minister of pensions and later war minister of France.82 “Brother from America,” he said, “they can take you back to the great land from which you came, but your French family will always piously preserve your memory and the land of France will not forget that it was to it you entrusted your last dreams.” Maginot knelt to place his country’s highest tribute, the Cross of the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, on the Unknown’s casket, the first of many awards he would receive.83
As the afternoon shadows lengthened on October 25, 1921, the Army’s body bearers lifted their comrade, marched him up the gangway of Olympia, and entrusted him to the care of six sailors and two marines, who took the Unknown aboard and settled him on the stern, where schoolchildren blanketed his casket with flowers. By three twenty p.m., it was time to go. Olympia nosed into the harbor and, escorted by the destroyer Reuben James and eight French vessels, turned for home. One of the French destroyers boomed a farewell salute of seventeen guns, fired with sober deliberation and answered by Olympia in exact order. It might have been a punctuation mark denoting the end of Europe’s long trial and the beginning of hope that some good might come of it.84
While Olympia and her escort steamed across the Atlantic, teams frantically prepared for the Unknown’s homecoming at Arlington. Working against the clock, laborers burrowed twenty feet under one of the plantation’s most prominent hills to excavate a vault to the south of the old Lee mansion. Set on massive concrete footings, the chamber opened by way of a connecting shaft to the white marble plaza of the new Memorial Amphitheater, completed in 1920. Here on a broad terrace facing east across the Potomac River, the Unknown’s sarcophagus, carved from the same Colorado stone as the Greek-inspired amphitheater, was erected over the hillside vault. The tomb on the hill was simple to the point of austerity, consisting of a rectangular plinth a few feet high, surmounted by a smaller rectangular collar, and crowned with a capstone with curved edges. It was considered a temporary structure until something grander could be built, which would take another decade to accomplish.85
Meanwhile, there was the matter of a fitting epitaph. Caught up in the patriotic spirit of the times, the public flooded the War Department with suggestions for an inscription for the new tomb. In the manner of those days, most of these literary offerings were syrupy concoctions, such as the one served up by Anais O’C. Pugh in “The Silent Soldier”:
Oh! Mothers! Daughters! Sweethearts! Wives!
Greave not, but wipe thy tear!
Your boy has won, who sleeping lies
On Yonder sacred bier!86
Lucia R. Maxwell, describing herself as a Daughter of the Confederacy, confirmed with her poem that sectional feelings had improved:
Lift up your head, Columbia
And fling your banner high;
For its starry fold and stripes so old
Your soldiers will fight and die.87
Arthur Pew, consulting engineer for waterworks and sewerage in Atlanta, submitted an original work entitled “A Requiem for the Boys who went to France, and were brought Home only to be re-interred,” which was of epic length and reminded readers that,
Bright tho the field of France, Homeland is best.
Here midst thy loving friends, Rest, soldier, rest.88
This contribution landed in the adjutant general’s office on November 4, 1921—regrettably too late, Brig. Gen. Peter C. Harris informed Mr. Pew, to be considered for Armistice Day ceremonies. His verse was filed away with that of other literary aspirants and mercifully forgotten.89 The tomb’s final inscription would not be unveiled for more than a decade.
As the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month drew closer, soldiers at Fort Myer drilled for the forthcoming ceremonies, fretted over the inevitable peacetime force reductions, and helped to fill new rows at Arlington with a steady stream of dead comrades who had been repatriated from Europe that autumn.
Any casual observer might have noticed a small but significant change in graveside ceremonies at Arlington, where those in uniform no longer removed their hats to honor to a dead soldier, sailor, or marine. Instead, servicemen kept their hats on, or in military parlance, “remained covered,” thanks to an eminently practical suggestion from H. Allen Griffith, an Army chaplain who tired of seeing his friends and colleagues die from their gallant behavior at funerals.
“Having for the last eighteen years officiated at a larger number of military funerals,” the Rev. Mr. Griffith reported to Secretary of War Nelson D. Baker, “I have become more and more impressed with the danger incurred by the men standing with bared heads during the services. Large numbers of men, especially in the Soldiers Home, are afflicted with thin locks and bald heads, and in the cold rainy weather, there can be no question but that large numbers have contracted colds that have led to chronic sickness or speedy death. There is nothing military in this old custom of ‘hats off,’” he reported, perhaps remembering the late Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s fatal gesture of respect for Gen. William T. Sherman a few years before.
Griffith suggested that instead of “uncovering” at funerals, those servicemen in attendance might simply salute. In a surprise move for a service known for resisting innovation, Gen. Peyton C. March issued Army Circular No. 286 on March 24, 1920, with new rules for military funerals. From that time, men in uniform were directed to “stand at attention covered,” according to March. “During prayer they will bow the head. While the casket is being carried to the grave, and while ‘Taps’ is being sounded they will stand at the salute. They will salute the passing of the casket in any military funeral at any time or place.”90
Officers at Fort Myer, eager to acquit themselves at forthcoming ceremonies for the Unknown, began to worry that Arlington’s regularly scheduled funerals might throw off their preparations for the big day. Of particular concern, Brig. Gen. William Lassiter warned, was the flood of other dead servicemen being repatriated at the rate of seventy-five to a hundred per week. Each of the returning dead required an individual escort who had to be detached from Fort Myer and sent to the receiving port at Hoboken, New Jersey, to accompany the remains to Washington, where the deceased warrior would be buried at Arlington or returned to his family.91
“A shipment is due here on October 21 … requiring 69 men as escorts,” Lassiter warned the War Department on October 9. “There will be two other shipments that would ordinarily arrive here between that date and November 11, 1921. The Quartermaster General states that the relatives of these last two shipments have not been notified and that the bodies could be held at Hoboken until after November 11.” Lassiter proposed that these dead servicemen be detained at Hoboken so that men at Fort Myer could concentrate on training “in order to present a cred
itable appearance on November 11.” His request was granted. The dead piled up in New Jersey without the knowledge of their loved ones, who had already endured years of waiting for their return. In deference to the Unknown Solider, they would have to wait a few weeks more.92
Long before Olympia reached Washington on the drizzling afternoon of November 9, 1921, her approach could be marked by the dull, distant thud of artillery, as forts and posts down the river saluted her passage and she answered, gun for gun, sailing the same course so many hospital ships had followed in the dark days of Civil War. The salutes grew louder until suddenly Olympia broke into view, a gray ship ghosting out of a gray mist and turning slowly upstream for the Navy Yard. At her rails stood silent, dripping bluejackets in rigid lines; at her stern, an honor guard of marines and sailors kept vigil over the flag-draped casket protected by a canvas awning; on shore, a mounted band formed ranks on restless horses; beside them, a regiment of cavalry drew their sabers and stiffened, eyes forward, caps streaming rain. The great ship slid into place at precisely eight bells, announced by the vessel’s double chime. Olympia’s marine guard filed solemnly down the gangway, turned to face the cavalry, and stood to attention as the boatswain piped the Unknown over the side, his casket borne down the ramp, and back to American soil with all the honors due an Admiral of the Fleet.93
The band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Monsieur Brasseur’s white roses, shriveled and dried from their Atlantic crossing, stayed with the Unknown as he passed from the care of the Navy into the hands of Army bearers, who slow-walked the casket over slick cobblestones and strapped it onto a waiting caisson. The cavalry escort moved into place, six black horses strained in their harness, and to the tune of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” the caisson clattered down a winding drive lined by marine guards standing like statues in the rain.94
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