Abstract
For the first time, in 1921, the body of an unidentified soldier was buried at Arlington National Cemetery amid great pomp and designated as the “Unknown Soldier.” Many American soldiers went missing in World War I. Many collections of letters from soldier sons trail off with unsatisfying replies from Red Cross officials, company commanders, YMCA workers, and liaison officers. The officials answer with brave optimism, with sympathy or formality, the pleas of parents for information about a son from whom no letter had come in over a month, or whom the War Department had announced wounded by telegram and then seemed to forget.
I’ve got a grave diggin’ feelin’ in my heart —
I’ve got a grave diggin’ feelin’ in my heart —
Everybody died in de A.E.F.,
Only one burial squad wuz left’ —
I’ve got a grave-diggin’ feelin’ in my heart.
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Notes
“I’ve Got a Grave-diggin’ Feeling in my Heart,” in John Niles, Singing Soldiers (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1927) 131–2. Niles recorded the song as sung by African-American labor units working for the Graves Registration Service.
See Thomas W. Lacqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” in John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994) 157.
Mark Meigs, “La mort et ses enjeux: l’utilisation des corps des soldats américains lors de la première guerre mondiale,” Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains 175 (Juillet 1994): 135–46.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 63, and chapter 2, “The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues,” 60–157.
John Dos Passos, Nineteen Nineteen in USA (London: Penguin, 1966) 722. First published in the US, 1932.
US Army Quartermaster Corps, History of the American Graves Registration Service, Q.M.C. in Europe (undated, 1922?) 22. Other versions of this ceremony exist, perhaps because it has so much significance in the symbology of the country. David Kennedy described a blindfolded sergeant dropping a white carnation on the coffin of the unknown soldier, in Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) 368. John Dos Passos finished the Nineteen Nineteen section of USA. casting sardonic aspersions on the choosing and meaning of this soldier, Dos Passos, “The Body of an American,” Nineteen Nineteen, 722–7.
G. Kurt Piehler, “The War Dead and the Gold Star: American Commemoration of the First World War,” in John R. Gilles, ed, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, 175.
For the choosing of the “Unknown Soldier” for Vietnam and the medical advances made in this century for identifying even incomplete bodies, see Susan Sheehan, “A Missing Plane, Identification,” in The New Yorker, May 19 (1986): 78. For information about Arlington National Cemetery, I am indebted to Thomas Sherlock, the Historian of the Arlington National Cemetery.
Walter Benn Michaels, “The Souls of White Folks,” in Elaine Scarry, ed., Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 205. Michaels found in Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald the invention of a racism that protected itself by disguise as an American aesthetic. Jake in The Sun Also Rises establishes racial criteria to distinguish people and finds the Jewish character Cohn lacking. Nick in The Great Gatsby, seems at first to condemn the racist brutality of Tom Buchanan, but by the end escapes back to Minnesota to contemplate his version of American History that does not require Buchanan’s brutal attempts at its preservation, but neither does it include Gatsby and his boundless optimism.
Alice Fahs, “Writing the Civil War”, dissertation research, New York University, 1990.
Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, Out of My Life, quoted by John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the World War (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1931) vol. II, 162.
Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1959) 201.
John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin, 1984) 216.
Ivan S. Bloch, The Future of War (Boston, 1903), Vol. 6, xxxi. Quoted in Ropp, War in the Modern World, 201.
Ropp, War in the Modern World, 200–4; Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1984) 104–5.
Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (New York: Macmillan, 1980).
Alfred von Schlieffen, The War of the Future (Berlin, 1913), quoted in Ropp, War in the Modern World, 204.
For ideas on the strategy of attrition, see Gil Elliot, Twentieth Century Book of the Dead (New York: C. Scribner, 1972), chapter 2, “The European Soldier in the First World War.”
Ralph Williams, The Luck of a Buck (Madison, Wisconsin, 1985), US Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks.
Murvyn Burke, “Summary of the Battle of Cantigny,” read to the members of the East Bay Retired Officers Association, May 28, 1981, First Division, US Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks.
Arnold Toynbee, “Death in War,” in Robert Fulton, ed., Death and Dying Challenge and Change (Reading, Massachussets: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1978) 368.
Liddell Hart, A History of the World War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935) 585.
Daniel Halévy, Avec Les Boys Américains (Paris: Berger-Levrault, mai 1918) 55–6. Halévy took his text from General Bordeaux’s speech given at the burial service. The speech was printed in English and widely distributed. Copies are especially prevalent among the papers of First Division Veterans.
Ralph Haze, “The Care of the Fallen: A Report to the Secretary of War on American Military Dead Overseas” (Washington, D.C., 1920), US Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks.
Lt. Col. James A. O’Brien, “Loss of Effects of Deceased Officers and Soldiers, WWI,” August 1942, Army War College Historical Section, Carlisle Barracks.
Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 73–4.
Stanley French, “The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the ‘Rural Cemetery Movement,’” with Philippe Ariès et al. in David E. Stannard, ed., Death in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975) 69.
Annette Becker, “Les deux rives de 1’Atlantique. Mémoire américaine de la Grande Guerre,” Annales de l’Université de Savoie, 18 (janvier 1995): 29.
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© 1997 Mark Meigs
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Meigs, M. (1997). “A Grave Diggin’ Feelin’ in my Heart:” American War Dead of World War I. In: Optimism at Armageddon. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13934-7_6
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