Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Unknown then, unforgotten now
This week the nation observes the 100th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Veterans Day. But a century ago, when the tomb received its first occupant, the day was called Armistice Day.
Nov. 11, 1921, was the fourth Armistice Day, marking the end of the Great War — World War I. A massive cortege of military members and dignitaries accompanied a casket bearing the remains of one unidentified American soldier from the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol five miles to Arlington National Cemetery. He was interred at noon. And silence fell across the nation.
When I was little, my dad the Navy hero worked in the Pentagon, and our family lived in a suburb of Washington, D.C. He took me to Arlington more than once. To a 5-year-old — with eyes about 3 feet off the ground — the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier seemed like acres of solid stone.
I remember my father reading aloud, “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.”
I also recall asking the sister who was a bit more than twice my age — let’s call her “Mary” — why there was such a big grave for one soldier and how did they know that nobody knew him and how did they get his body in there past all the stone?
She said there was more than one soldier in the tomb. There were lots, she said, and nobody knew who they were because they lost their dogtags. That is why, Mary said, today we embroider soldiers’ names on their uniforms. Nice try, Mary.
As Friend Reader is well aware, in time, soldiers from World War II, Korea and Vietnam were included in the tomb, so for a while, there were four honored unknowns. Then the Vietnam hero was identified using DNA and returned to his family.
Eventually, I grew up, and along the way I read somewhere that U.S. soldiers didn’t wear “dogtags” in World War I. They wore two little discs on ribbons around their
necks with information like name, rank, serial number, corps unit, religion. ID varied between the Army and Navy; some Navy discs included an etched fingerprint.
One disc stayed with the body, the other was taken for recordkeeping.
After the armistice that ended the Great War, France and Britain had suffered such an overwhelming number of causalities that both set policies against repatriating soldiers’ remains (see arkansasonline.com/1108hist). Instead, each decided to take home one unnamed soldier who could be buried with great honors and represent all the others. On Armistice Day 1920, Great Britain placed its hero inside Westminster Abbey in London, and meanwhile France used the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
The United States had lost far fewer people — “only” about 116,000 — and so the War Department agreed to transport bodies home to families that requested loved ones’ remains. But about 2,000 had not been identified before they were buried in France.
Stirred by the Allies’ memorials, editors and other thought leaders called for the U.S. to create a similar monument. Outgoing President Woodrow Wilson backed the proposal, and Congress approved it. Here’s a quote from an editorial in the May 11, 1921, Arkansas Democrat:
“It seems unfortunate that we should be so far behind our allies in this peculiarly appropriate recognition of our citizen soldier, but it is gratifying, at any rate, that we are finally getting it.
“It is a new custom, this burial of an unknown, with all the honors of potentate or statesman, but it signalizes the new order of this world, the democracy in which the man in the ranks means as much as the general on his motor car or the king in his palace.”
Last week, as I read the 1921 Democrat and Arkansas Gazette, old news reports answered another question for 5-year-old me: How was the body chosen?
In October 1921, four cemeteries in France — at Romagne, Triacourt, Bony and Belleau Wood — each disinterred one set of unidentified remains of an American soldier who had died there. An American Army truck took four coffins to Chalonssur-Marne, France, where a French honor guard carried them into City Hall.
Thousands of residents of Chalons watched them arrive in silence, hats off. An American flag covered each plain wooden box, and the room was draped in red, white and blue. Residents heaped flowers at their feet and, as The Associated Press reported, “there were sad scenes when the French war widows came to pay final tribute to the American dead.”
About 10 a.m. Oct. 24, a soldier with a good service record — Sgt. Edward S. Younger, 2nd Battalion, 50th Infantry — was handed a bouquet of flowers by Maj. Gen. Henry T. Allen, commander of the U.S. forces on the Rhine River. Allen ordered Younger to enter the room and place the flowers on one of the coffins.
And that is how the Unknown Soldier was picked for transport to the United States.
The other three bodies were re-interred in Romagne cemetery Oct. 25.
The selected Unknown Soldier lay in state in that French city hall as residents filed past until 5 p.m. Oct. 24, when an escort of 24 American noncommissioned officers took him to a train that carried him to Paris. The next day, Younger was one of six pallbearers who accompanied him to Havre, France, where a French ceremony conferred upon this unknown American the Legion of Honor.
The pallbearers loaded the coffin aboard the USS Olympia. Olympia crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Havre to the Washington Navy Yard on the Potomac River. Battleships and forts along the way fired guns in salute.
Reports about the ceremony are dense with details and names of people selected for public roles — much too much information for my space today. For instance, Gov. Thomas McRae named three Arkansans to march at the head of the funeral cortege among a column comprising representatives from each state: Frank W. Letzig, 1908 Marshall St., Little Rock; the Rev. Malcolm W. Lockhart of Fort Smith; and Kenneth Rayner of Blytheville.
The Gazette reported Nov. 10, 1921, that the column would march eight abreast with the states in alphabetical order, which meant one of our guys didn’t get to be in the first row: Alabama and Arizona, with a full representation, took up six of the spaces in the first line, leaving two for Arkansas.
But in Arkansas as all across the nation, stores closed and there were parades, funeral ceremonies, wreath layings. At noon, everything stopped, and Arkansans observed two minutes of silence. This silence fell during a parade at Little Rock. The description in the Gazette was beautiful. So you can see it, I’ve added it to a gallery at arkansasonline. com/1108honor.
But my favorite detail is that after the solemn Armistice Day parade through Little Rock, everybody kept driving — straight to the Arkansas State Fair, which opened at 1:45 p.m.