Remembering Thacher's Fallen

In April of 2008, Mr. Manson said this in his TOAD Talk:

What we choose to call "The Thacher School" is actually something we create every September only then to dismantle each June. In a very real sense, there have been 119 separate Thacher Schools since Sherman Day Thacher founded his school in 1889.... One year is the actual life span of each school we create, embrace, celebrate, and then vacate in this annual cycle.

So here we are, by tradition, once again eager to “create, embrace, and celebrate” a fresh, vibrant new community. And the most productive way we will do this is by making new connections with new students, new connections with old students, and stronger bonds with those we already know.

Mr. Mulligan asked me to share a few comments on my ongoing, four-summer sabbatical, and specifically to share my most recent adventure, one which allowed me to connect uniquely with a small but significant number of students from our school’s past.

In each of the past three summers, I’ve enjoyed meeting Thacher students and alumni where they live or where they were traveling: in East Africa, England, Ecuador, and just this summer in Japan, Korea, and France. In each of these settings I’ve enjoyed meeting past and present Toads and their families in their hometowns or in their adopted countries or cities. Sustaining these relationships abroad, it seems to me, is one way of keeping our community strong. 

Perhaps my most enlightening and inspiring moments in this period took place in late July and early August in France. I had planned for several years to visit the battlefields of World War One, or The Great War, as they know it in Europe, long a subject of interest for me. And after our traditional gathering at the Memorial Pergola at Vespers last May (when Mr. Mulligan once again read the names and salient details of our deceased veterans), I realized that I would soon be touring the sites where seven of them had died. I can remember a palpable sense of excitement when I thought that I might be able to locate their grave sites, and after some basic research I was able to do that. Through the records of the American Battle Monuments Commission and a few other sources—including the projects that many of you had completed in your history classes—I began to develop an itinerary that would ultimately include Paris, Belgium, and the regions of Lorraine and Picardy in France. A little more than two months later, on the afternoon of August 4, I had completed this very fulfilling quest.

On July 22, the gorgeous countryside north of Nancy in Lorraine was in full bloom: ready for the harvest, the wheat, potato, and cornfields stretched before me as I steered my rental car off the main road into the tiny village of Murville. But was I in the right place? Philip Newbold Rhinelander CdeP 1914 of Lawrence, New York, had, according to a few sources, been buried in the cemetery of this tiny village; but other accounts had him interred in Marville, forty miles to the north. But within ten minutes I knew I had located him, for I found the village monument to their Great War dead (every French village has one), and his name was inscribed, simply but poignantly, on the back of the obelisk—along with a relief scene representing the crash of his airplane. I learned that his name had been added to this monument while reading a paragraph in the 1920 edition of El Archivero, Thacher’s yearbook, which had commemorated the lives of those alumni killed in war. Rhinelander had left Harvard to enlist in the Army’s 20th Aero Squadron. On September 26, 1918, he had been shot down in an engagement just outside the village. According to both allied and German eyewitness accounts, he had fought bravely before succumbing to the superior German numbers. So with help from a local resident, I found the small cemetery, and within those walls was his grave. Alone, I stayed for a half hour, taking pictures and imagining his life and death in France, then placed a small American flag and attached Thacher banner in a ceramic flower affixed to the stone.

About 70 kilometers to the west of Murville lies The Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, and I was soon walking amongst the graves of over 14,000 American soldiers and airmen who died in the Argonne campaign which marked the eventual defeat of the German Army. This, the largest American cemetery in Europe, contains the grave of James Ackley McBride, Thacher Class of ’06. Twelve years after struggling through a rather awkward and unhappy career at Thacher, he had apparently matured into a confident and competent adult, for he became a flight instructor in Italy and France before being transferred to the Ninth Aero Squadron in the Argonne, and before he, like Rhinelander, was shot down and killed he had made a brilliant record there. The simple white marble cross with his name inscribed, like so many thousands I would see in France, stood out in brilliant contrast with the bright green lawns of the cemetery and the sharp blue sky above. There might have been only five other visitors to the site that morning, so I had ample opportunity to absorb the scene, to walk amongst the crosses alone, to feel the presence of selfless duty.

The next day, at Saint Mihiel American Cemetery, I planted a flag in front of the grave of Albert Edgar Angier, who at Thacher was a scholar of languages, a prefect, and School Chair. Angier had also left Harvard to enlist in the Army as a private. Promoted to 1st Lieutenant five days before his death at Revillon, his heroism earned him the Distinguished Service Cross.

I would repeat this process four more times in the weeks ahead. At Suresnes American Cemetery outside Paris, my wife Susan and I, the only visitors, found the grave of James Palache CdeP 1913 of Farmington, CT and Berkeley, CA, who was mortally wounded by a high-explosive shell while actively commanding his men in relief of French positions at Cantigny. Palache is the great uncle of recent graduate John Carey’s mother, Lisa Palache Carey. A few rows away stands the cross over the grave of Goodwin Warner CdeP 1899, of Boston. Though Warner had struggled with severe asthma all his life, he joined the American Army Field Service Motor Transport Corps, and died of pneumonia while serving near Jouaignes in France on June 30, 1918. His descendants include three Thacher graduates—siblings Johanna, Megan, and Sean Harding--whose father “Goody” is named after Goodwin Warner. In Bedford House cemetery, outside the city of Ypres, in Belgium, the scene of unimaginable carnage throughout the war (the area saw over a million casualties), rests Philip Comfort Starr CdeP 1907 of Winnetka, IL,  who sneaked away from his parents’ home one weekend in 1916 and enlisted in the Canadian Field Artillery. Starr became a British citizen and ultimately joined the Royal Engineers. On the night of February 20, 1918, while inspecting the fortifications of the trench for which he was responsible, he was killed by German rifle fire. His grave lies within magnificent flower gardens that connect each headstone to the next, and again is adjacent to the verdant fields of Flanders, which through the last hundred years have been reclaimed from the wasteland of war but which each year during the plowing and planting season continue to expose fragments of bombs, rifles, and even bones.

Toward the end of the day on August 4, we paid our respects to McKee Morrison, who attended Thacher in the year 1904-1905 and died on September 29, 1918, the last of our School’s seven Great War veterans to fall on the Western Front. We first stopped at the American battle monument in Bony, on the edge of the Somme valley and the site of the last great engagement of the war, when the combined allied forces finally overran the supposedly impregnable Hindenbergh Line. As we looked over the rolling fields stretching out before us, our guide, Monsieur Bresson, a passionate historian, asked me if I knew Morrison’s fighting unit. I told him that he had been part of the 107th Infantry, and that he had been killed while performing his duties as an orderly. Monsieur Bresson nodded and told us that the site of Morrison’s death almost certainly lay immediately before us, on the gently sloping plain. It was almost impossible to imagine that the tranquility of this landscape, like most of the battlefields we had visited, now some of the most productive and picturesque farmland in the world, had a century before been a nightmare of the worse kind. After we found McKee Morrison’s grave and planted the last of our flags before it, the French superintendent of the cemetery expressed his appreciation for America and thanked us for coming, as he seldom sees many visitors. As “Taps” began to play over the cemetery’s P. A. system, he asked us to help him lower and fold the flag, an unplanned but poignant conclusion to our journey.

I’m admittedly a sentimental person, but I have to say that at each of the grave sites I visited, I did feel a sense of connection with those Thacher men who had given “the last full measure of devotion.” I felt so fortunate to be there, to be in a small way a representative of a community that honors its veterans and values its traditions even as it regenerates itself every fall. It was one of the most rewarding projects I have ever undertaken, and if you ever find yourself at one of those sites, I urge you to go and feel that connection too.

So our community is in some ways a small one, but it runs wide and it runs deep. And as we consider the year ahead, perhaps we can find our own simple ways to expand that community, to cultivate it, and to celebrate it.

Thank you for listening, and let’s have a great year.