Topic 42 
OUR SOLDIER DEAD IN FRANCE

EARLY in 1918 Colonel Roosevelt anticipated propaganda after the war might cease for the return of the bodies of American soldiers who died in France.  The idea did not appeal to him, any more than did the policy of the quartermaster's department of the army in using valuable cargo space to send coffins abroad to the exclusion of other articles.

"They are," said he, "sending coffins over, though they are short of shoes.  They have sent twenty thousand over.  It is all very well to show respect for the dead, but it would be far better to care for the boys while they are alive.  This cargo space should have been used for shoes and other supplies.  I know they are short of shoes for I have helped provide fifteen hundred pair myself, for men who have had no shoes issued to them since August.

"This shipping of coffins is part of a general scheme to send all our dead home, paving a way for a demand after the war that this be done.  It will not be practical, but there probably will be an attempt to play on the heart strings of relatives.  This is probably not in the minds of whoever is responsible for sending these boxes over now — somebody is probably following some musty rule in the department — but that will be the effect.

" If any of mine are killed over there, I shall oppose disturbing their graves when peace comes.  They should rest, and if I have anything to say about it, they will rest, where they may fall."

Months after, Quentin, the Eagle, fell.  Not long after his death — about three months — I was asked to give my associates a letter the Colonel had addressed to Major General Crowder requesting in the name of Mrs.  Roosevelt and himself that the body not be sent home.  It was in this letter, prompted by a Washington despatch to the effect that all bodies were to be returned, that he quoted the line: "Where the tree falls, there let it lie."

The correspondence attracted a great deal of attention.  Most of it that came to my notice was favorable to the position he had taken, and I told him so.

"It is the course I believe sensible people generally will approve of," he said.  "To me it is painful to think that long after death the poor broken body would be taken from what should be its resting place, and moved thousands of miles.  To me it does not seem fitting.  Nor does it seem desirable to reopen old wounds of the living.  These will never fully heal, they will always hurt, but they should not be torn open.  "I know that many good people who have lost sons and brothers and husbands will not agree with Mrs.  Roosevelt and me.  I understand their position and respect their feelings.  But I am very much afraid others will not, and will try to play upon those feelings for profit in one form or another.

" It was to help these good people and others who may be wavering that I asked you to make public my wishes in so far as our boy's body is concerned.  I had thought my example might have some influence in the matter, just as I feel that had Mrs.  Roosevelt and I taken an opposite position, others would have very properly demanded like action in their own cases.

"Personally, I am more concerned in the living than in the dead.  We cannot forget our dead, but we must live for the living.  We should insist on proper respect for our dead — France will see to that — and if we have any energy to expend, use it caring for the soldier who comes back maimed or for the dependents of those who do not come back at all.

"Where the bodies are returned, if they are returned, there will be a lot of attention paid to the first returned.  There will be public funerals.  There will be calls on the purses of relatives, too poor to spare the money, for more elaborate stones than the Government will provide.  Then for a time, while parents or wife lives, their graves will be well taken care of.  After that — comparative neglect.  You and I have seen that in the graves of soldiers of other wars — a little attention one day in the year, and no more.  It is bound to work out that way as families die out and move away.  How different in the national cemeteries or in the soldiers' lots in our larger city cemeteries!

"Crowder's letter shows what I expected, that in planning as it has the department is following rules laid down at the time of our war with Spain.  In that war, and in the Philippine insurrection that followed, we lost fewer men than we have lost in a single day in this war.

"I recall one after tragedy of the Philippines I was told about in a Western town.  It was a small place, and one of the town boys was killed somewhere in Luzon.  His body was brought home and the townspeople spent several hundred dollars to erect a monument over his grave.  When I was in the town I met his mother, whose support he had been.  She was earning her living sewing.  How much better it would have been if that boy's body were left where he fell, and the money spent on his monument spent on his mother!

"It will be far better to leave our dead in great cemeteries over there, places like beautiful Arlington or our other national cemeteries at home.  There the graves will be well cared for, our dead will sleep, as I believe they would prefer, among their comrades, and these shrines will be, if I might use the expression, not a link, but rivets in the chain that binds us to our allies, and our allies to us.

"Rupert Brooke, you will remember, wrote that wherever his body might rest would forever be a bit of England.  Just so, wherever our boys sleep will be forever American soil.  They willed it so."