For the week of Memorial Day
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of Nineteen Eighteen. The end of the war to end all wars. The war to make the world safe for democracy. We mustn't forget. Neither the war nor the propaganda.
Three of my relatives were killed in that war: Pvt. Kay Tusing, Pvt. Charles Kayser, and Lt. Egbert Beach. All were killed in France. Pvt. Kayser is buried there still. Lt. Beach was brought home after the war and buried in the family plot. I don't know where Pvt. Tusing is buried.
Immediately above is remembrance card for Private Kay Tusing, my great-great uncle, who was killed in action in France during World War I.
The printed copy lists his date of death as October 1, 1918, but someone
has penciled in a 6. I don't know if that means he was killed on
October 6 or October 16.
Kay Tusing is one of three of my ancestors that I know of who was killed in action during World War I.
Private Charles Kayser was killed in September, 1918, on the 29th.
Lieutenant Egbert Beach was killed on April 27, 1918. He survived the sinking of his troop transport by a German U-Boat in January, 1918, (267 American troops and 10 ship's crewmen drowned) making it ashore to the Isle of Islay in the Irish Sea from which he was rescued and sent on to France where he was killed.
I don't know the circumstances of Lt. Beach's death, only that he had graduated with a degree in engineering from Cal, enlisted when America entered the war and was assigned to the 1st Engineering Battalion of the 32nd Infantry.
I know something of Pvt. Kayser's death because his sister Henrietta
wrote to his unit commander and asked what happened. Major Lucius
Salisbury, 106th Infantry Sanitary Detachment, 27th Infantry, replied:
"Following over the top with the company, your brother stopped near the
Knoll, and, exposed to heavy machine-gun and shell fire, had dressed the
wounds of one man and started to dress those of another when a shell
exploded and killed all three. Your brother offered his life for the
cause without regard to personal danger...." There followed some lines
of sympathy.
Reading a little bit of the history of the war, I found that during the
night of September 24 – 25, 1918, the 27th Division relieved the British
18th and 74th Divisions near Ronssoy, France. At 5:30 a.m., September
27, 1918, the 106th Infantry attacked as part of a major frontal assault
in what was called the Battle of St. Quentin Canal, its assigned
objective the capture of Bois de Malakoff, or as the troops called it,
the Knoll. During that battle, more than 13,000 American doughboys
became casualties. Pvt. Kayser had a lot of company.
"You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next Spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year's time you could never guess the things which had taken place there.
I repeated my thoughts to my wife, but she said it was not difficult to understand about battlefields: The blood of the men killed on the field, and the bodies buried there, fertilize the ground and stimulate the growth of vegetation. That was all quite natural she said.
But I could not agree with this, too-simple, explanation: To me it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as quickly as possible."
~ William March, Company K
March served as a sergeant in Co F, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, 4th Brigade of Marines, Second Division of the U.S. Army Expeditionary Force. He saw his first action at Verdun near Les Éparges. He fought at Belleau Wood, where he was wounded. He participated in the battles of Soissons and Saint-Mihiel. He received the French Croix de Guerre with Palm and the U.S. Army Distinguished Service Cross for valor.
