On Hallowed Ground (21 page)

The attack on the
Lusitania
sparked a sharp response in the United States, especially in northeastern cities reliant on shipping. In New York, thousands
poured into Times Square to call for a declaration of war, while newspapers across the country goaded Wilson to retaliate.
“The nation which remembered the sailors of the
Maine
will not forget the civilians of the
Lusitania
,” the
New York Tribune
promised. The
New York Times
assailed Germany for making war “like savages drunk with blood.” Former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had refrained from
publicly criticizing President Wilson in the first years of war, broke his silence. The sinking of the British liner, he declared,
“was not only an act of simple piracy, but … piracy accompanied by murder on a vaster scale than any old-time pirate had
ever practiced before being hung for his misdeeds.” Roosevelt called on the government to exact punishment. “It seems inconceivable
to me that we can refrain from taking action in this matter, for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect,”
he told reporters in Syracuse, New York.
¹⁹
In private Roosevelt thundered over Wilson’s “cowardice and weakness” while he excoriated William Jennings Bryan, the pacifist
secretary of state. “I am sick at heart over the way Wilson and Bryan have acted toward Germany,” he confided to his sister
Anna Roosevelt Cowles.
²⁰

In the face of such criticism, Wilson remained above the fray, maintaining the nation’s neutrality. He sent a stiff note to
the Germans, from whom he requested reparations and an apology. He warned against further U-boat assaults. But he stopped
short of breaking off relations or going to war.
²¹
“There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” Wilson famously told a crowd in Philadelphia within days of the
Lusitania
disaster. “There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is
right.”
²²

Wilson resisted any move toward war, as well as any effort to prepare for a future conflict. On the home front, meanwhile,
he floated vague hints that America might run out of patience if pushed too far. “We are not only ready to cooperate, but
we are ready to fight against any aggression,” he said during Memorial Day exercises at Arlington in 1916. “But we must guard
ourselves against the sort of aggression which would be unworthy of America … She does not want any selfish advantage
over any other nation of the world, but she does wish every nation in the world to understand what she stands for and to respect
what she stands for.”
²³
Wilson maintained this judicious balance, dreaming of peace while hinting at war, through the presidential election of 1916.
He was narrowly returned to the White House that November, largely on the strength of returns from the Midwest and West, where
isolationist sentiment ran strong and Wilson’s campaign slogan, “He has kept us out of war,” carried the day.

War fever, which had spiked with the
Lusitania
’s sinking, remained low as 1917 began. This was about to change. Boxed in by continued fighting on two fronts and an effective
British blockade on the North Sea, Germany began to starve as 1916 ran its course. Food riots broke out, morale flagged, and
Germany moved to crack the naval cordon by resuming unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. Wilson severed diplomatic
relations in reaction, but he still held back from war, which was finally thrust upon the United States a few days later.
On March 1, the American public learned of a German plot, detailed in an intercepted telegram from Foreign Minister Arthur
S. Zimmermann, to launch an attack on the United States with Mexico and Japan. This was followed on March 18 by U-boat attacks
on three American merchant ships without warning. After almost three years of war and millions of deaths, Wilson was ready
to choose sides.
²⁴

“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 soldiers 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