I picture myself at sixty, with a long white moustache, a pale gray tweed suit, a very large panama hat, I can see my gnarled but beautifully groomed hands as they tremblingly pour out the glass of dry sherry which belongs to every old man’s breakfast. I cannot think of myself at seventy or eighty—I grow hysterical with applause—I am lost in a delirium of massive ebony canes, golden snuff-boxes, and dainty silk hats.
“When we first met over here,” wrote Kilmer’s friend Charles L. O’Donnell, Chaplain 332d Infantry, in a letter to Thomas Walsh which should be written into the record, “he was in the personnel department of his regiment, having had his time of service in the field and done some particularly good work in the intelligence line. He was then about to go into the intelligence permanently and so avid of it was he as to be ready to relinquish his hard-earned sergeant’s chevrons. In the event, however, that sacrifice was not demanded. After this change in his work he was much more agreeably placed, in particular he had more freedom and more time to see his friends. He was worshipped by the men about him. I have heard them speak with awe of his coolness and his nerve in scouting patrols in No Man’s Land. As an intelligence man he made personally a few very valuable discoveries: this was when I was with him in our comparatively quiet sector. I can only conceive that he distinguished himself later in the larger opportunities that came his way.” The letter continues:
We were both in the army but he was also of it. I was amazed to find him so quickly become a soldier with the soldier’s point of view. But he had seen so much more than I, even then, and each day in this war is equivalent to long campaigns of other times. I felt, and was a rookie beside him. He had got a perspective on his life at home that made him smile with indulgent pity on some literary aspects of it. I spoke of what must have been his earlier views, the good he was doing and the need of doing it. But he was not ready to relinquish a position he had bought at the price of suffering, cold, hunger, fatigue, with the hourly self denials that military discipline means. Not that he spoke of these things in this way, but I knew they had gone into the creation of his new stand and I knew in my heart it was higher ground.
A closer witness is Sergeant-Major Lemist Esler, who served side by side with Kilmer in the Marne advance. Shortly afterward returned to the United States for service as an instructor at an army cantonment, he said in an interview in the New York Times: “The front was his goal and no sooner had the regiment reached France than he made every possible effort to be transferred.”
He finally had himself moved to the Intelligence Department. It was in that department that he was elevated to the rank of Sergeant. I was supply sergeant at the time and Joyce Kilmer was a perfect trial to me. He would always be doing more than his orders called for—that is, getting much nearer to the enemy’s positions than any officer would ever be inclined to send him. Night after night he would lie out in No Man’s Land, crawling through barbed wires, in an effort to locate enemy positions, and enemy guns, and tearing his clothes to shreds. On the following day he would come to me for a new uniform.
“There was something of what the Scots call ‘fey’ about him as a soldier,” is the testimony of the chaplain of the 165th Infantry, Father Duffy. “He was absolutely the coolest and most indifferent man in the face of danger I have ever seen. It was not for lack of love of life, for he enjoyed his life as a soldier—his only cross was distance from home. It was partly from his inborn courage and devotion—he would not stint his sacrifice—partly his deep and real belief that what God wills is best.”
Once Marshal Foch’s advance began, Kilmer seems to have been constantly in the thick of the fighting. In the New York Evening Sun of August 8 a correspondent told how a party composed of Major Donovan, Joyce Kilmer and John Kayes advanced to the edge of a wood and captured a German dressed in an American uniform.
“Joyce was one of those soldiers who had a romantic love of death in battle,” Father Duffy has added, “and it could not have missed him in time.” No, the stars move in their appointed courses; and there are certain things written aforetime. While he had life there was a defiant hope among us who knew his great gift for triumph that somehow this would see him through, that even over the inevitable he would prevail. But Destiny would not have been her immemorial self had she stayed her tragic hand from this shining figure, type and symbol in his taking of her unscrutable ways with man. And, somehow, in his death his life was all of a piece, and one cannot but admire the poetic justice of his end.
Sergeant Kilmer was killed in action near the Ourcq, July 30, 1918. “He had,” runs the report in The Stars and Stripes, the newspaper of the American Expeditionary Force, “volunteered his services to the major of the foremost battalion because his own battalion would not be in the lead that day.” From the report of Sergeant Esler and a letter (printed in the New York Times) to a friend in New York by Alexander Woollcott, dramatic critic of the Times before his service abroad, the facts are established.
At the dawn of a misty Sunday, July 28, the 165th had made a gallant and irresistible charge across the river and up the hill. In the height of the great five days battle for the mastery of the heights which followed Kilmer was killed. It so happened that he was close to the Major when the battalion adjutant fell and, in the emergency of the battle, without commission or appointment, he was serving as a sort of aid to the battalion commander. Discovering that the woods ahead harboured some machine guns, he had reported this fact, and was sent in the lead of a patrol to establish their exact location. When a couple of hours later the battalion advanced into the woods to clear the spot of the enemy, several of Kilmer’s comrades caught sight of him lying, as if still scouting, with his eyes bent over a little ridge. So like his living self he was, they called to him, then ran up—to find him dead with a bullet through his brain. He lies buried, we read, beside Lieutenant Oliver Ames at the edge of a little copse that is known as the Wood of the Burned Bridge, so close to the purling Ourcq that, standing by the graveside, one could throw a pebble into its waters. Perhaps ten minutes walk to the north lies the half obliterated village Seringes, captured by American troops the night before Kilmer was killed. Eloquent of affection in the making of it, the grave is of course, marked by a wooden cross, on which is written, “Sergeant Joyce Kilmer.” Then, after the inscription of his company and regiment, is the line: “Killed in Action—July 30, 1918.”
It is not a rule to bury enlisted men with officers, but Kilmer had won so much admiration and respect not only from the enlisted men in his company but also from the officers, that the commander of the regiment authorised that his grave be dug on the spot and that he be buried next to the grave of the heroic Lieutenant who had just lost his life.
Sergeant Woollcott was with the regiment in the woods the day they came out of the line to catch their breaths, and the news of Kilmer’s death, he says, “greeted me on every turn. The Captain under whom he had been serving for several months, the Major at whose side he fell, stray cooks, doughboys, runners—all shook their heads sorrowfully and talked among themselves of what a good soldier he had been and what an infinite pity it was that the bullet had had to single him out. And in such days as these, there are no platitudes of polite regret. When men, good men and close pals, are falling about you by hundreds, when every man in the regiment has come out of the fight the poorer for the loss of not one but many friends, there is no time to say pretty things about a man just because he exists no longer. Death is too common to distinguish anyone. So the glowing praise and admiration I heard for Joyce was real—every word of it.”
It is, I think, fitting to preserve in a form more durable than its newspaper publication more of this letter. It continues:
I gathered that his stock among men of all ranks had been climbing steadily from the first days when many of them, including myself, felt that he was out of his own element in a rip-roaring regiment. As the regiment’s laureate, they all knew him and they knew, too, that he was at work on a history of the regiment. He had become quite an institution, with his arms full of maps as they used to be full of minor poetry, and his mouth full of that imperishable pipe.
They all knew his verse. I found any number of men who had only to fish around in their tattered blouses to bring out the copy of a poem Kilmer wrote in memory of some of their number who were killed by a shell in March. You see that there is a refrain which calls for bugle notes, and I am told that at the funeral services, where the lines were first read, the desperately sad notes of “Taps” sounded faintly from a distant grave when the refrain invoked them. The lines were read by Joyce’s own beloved Father Duffy, and those who were there told me the tears streamed down the face of every boy in the regiment. They just blubbered.
VIII
Indeed, such was the power of his spirit over other men that even now he has become a legend, his excellence a popular heritage, benefiting and enriching human life. Writing with the pen of all those who knew him in his overcoat of glory and debonair hat, his friend Charles Willis Thompson says: “I had a great affection and a deep admiration and respect for him, different from that which I had for anybody else I knew.” And expressing, I think, the heart of innumerable ones who did not chance his way, Booth Tarkington says: “But I had a sense of him as of something fine and of fine promise. I haven’t read much that he wrote; but it was like knowing that there was a good picture somewhere in a gallery that I hadn’t visited, but might, some day.”
The full beauty of his life is known only to God. As religion was the first thing in his life let it be the last thing said of him. In one of his last letters, he wrote to Sister M. Emerentia of St. Joseph’s College, Toronto, Ontario: “Pray that I may love God more. It seems to me that if I can learn to love God more passionately, more constantly, without distractions, that absolutely nothing else can matter. Except while we are in the trenches I receive Holy Communion every morning, so it ought to be all the easier for me to attain this object of my prayers. I got Faith, you know, by praying for it. I hope to get Love the same way.”