Somewhere in France
World War I and the Complicated History of Memorial Day
The first “Memorial Day,” initially known as Decoration Day1, took place in May 1868. General John A. Logan,2 commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization of Union veterans of the recent Civil War (April 12, 1861 – April 9, 1865), called for a national holiday to remember the Civil War dead.3
The 30th Day of May, 1868 is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in the defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.4
In some instances, white Southerners used Memorial Day to substantiate their Lost Cause mythology, the assertion that the South’s attempted secession was in defense of states’ rights, effectively erasing slavery from the conversation.5 Today, three states — Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina — have their own dedicated Confederate Memorial Day during which government offices and many businesses are closed.6
Over time, Memorial Day expanded to include all American troops who had fallen in subsequent conflicts while serving their country.
World War I, aka the Great War, began April 1914, but the U.S. did not join the fighting until three years later. Officially, the U.S. government maintained a position of neutrality. Unofficially, Congress and the Wilson White House supported the Allies, especially Great Britain, by shipping munitions and horses overseas. The 1915 German torpedoing of the RMS Lusitania, a British oceanliner with 123 Americans on board, Germany’s continued submarine attacks on passenger and merchant ships (mind, those armaments and horses we were sending over), and the January 1917 Zimmerman Telegram7 collectively turned the tide of public opinion toward taking a more active role in the war.
On April 6, 1917, in response to President Woodrow Wilson’s appeal for “a war to end all wars,” Congress voted to declare war on Germany. By May 1918, thousands of American troops were fighting “Somewhere in France.”8 As with the Civil War, the remains of many of the fallen never made it back home to their families.
The U.S. Army held Memorial Day ceremonies in the temporary cemeteries throughout the country. The following year, President Woodrow Wilson gave a Memorial Day address in Suresnes American Cemetery outside of Paris, which became one of eight permanent overseas World War I military cemeteries administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission.9
In my historical novel, IRISH EYES, releasing this December 2023, my heroine, Rose’s son, Joey, is one of the approximately 2 million young men who volunteered for service.10 Below is a passage from the book from Rose’s point of view.
On the 25th of October 1917, Joey and the 42nd Division quit Camp Mills and traveled by train and then ferry to the Port of Hoboken where they boarded a troop ship bound for “Somewhere in France.” Much later we’d learn he’d landed at Brest.
Thanksgiving and then Christmas came and went. Though we did our best to keep the season, Joey’s empty seat at supper was impossible to overlook. How could we tuck into our roast turkey with any real relish knowing he and his fellows were making do with potted meat eaten from the tin?
Not that my darling was one to complain. Be he encamped, entrenched, or in route to the front, he swore he was “swell,” “in the pink,” and “fit as a fiddle.” His army-issued postcards presented an unflaggingly cheerful picture of soldiering life: waiting in the “chow line” for “slum,” a stew concocted of whatever the camp cooks had on hand mixed with the previous meal’s leavings; playing cards in the YMCA hut; and listening to music from the officers’ gramophones, carried into the dugouts to lighten the mood. Trench foot, “cooties,” and dysentery were brought up but briefly and always with humor, the death and carnage not at all. But what he left out, or the military censors blacked out, the newspapers covered in lurid detail.
The calendar turned to 1918 and still the war wore on. Every day, the death toll and casualties climbed. The Army Medical Department took over the hospital on Ellis Island to treat wounded servicemen, men and boys left limbless from the landmines, faceless from exploded bombs or with lungs so scarred from mustard gas that they coughed and wheezed and fought for breath like old men.
The country pulled together as never before. Women on both sides of the suffrage issue led the relief efforts for the widows and orphans of occupied Belgium and Northern France. Both the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts organized Liberty Loan drives. The boys trawled the streets in their army green woolens touting “Every Scout to Save a Soldier.” The girls tended victory gardens, drove ambulances for The Red Cross and sold their first ever Girl Scout cookies.
Film stars brought their glamour to bear on the war effort. Martha Mansfield walked the Manhattan streets peddling dollar doughnuts for the Salvation Army. Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and British-born Charlie Chaplin all hosted bond rallies in cities around the country, including New York.
Needing to do something, I threw myself into the war effort, buying a small fortune in Liberty bonds and putting up posters encouraging our customers to do the same…
Copyright 2023, Hope C. Tarr
Wishing everyone a peaceful Memorial Day weekend.
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IRISH EYES (releasing December 2023) spans twenty-five years of Gilded Age through the Jazz Age Manhattan, as seen through the eyes of spirited Irish-born Rose O’Neill. Read more here.
https://www.abmc.gov/news-events/news/decoration-day-memorial-day-american-tradition-nearly-150-years
Logan was a citizen soldier. Enlisting as a private in a Michigan regiment, he fought in the first great battle of Bull Run in 1861. While rich families like the Rockefellers, the Morgans, and the Carnegies were buying substitutes to bleed in their stead, Logan was wounded at Fort Donelson. By ’62, he was a Major General, and in ’63 he was “Marching Through Georgia” at the head of a division of anti-slavery troops. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/real-history-memorial-day-was-born-from-in-struggle-against-the-klan/
https://www.nytimes.com/article/memorial-day-history.html
https://www.abmc.gov/news-events/news/decoration-day-memorial-day-american-tradition-nearly-150-years
https://www.nytimes.com/article/memorial-day-history.html
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/23/17271408/confederate-memorial-day-racism-civil-war-slavery
In January 1917, British intelligence intercepted a coded telegram from German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann to Germany’s ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhardt. Should America enter the war against Germany, Mexico was to invade the border states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, miring our forces and munitions at home.
To prevent military positions from being leaked to the enemy, U.S. military censors marked all outgoing troop mail as “Somewhere in France.”
https://www.abmc.gov/news-events/news/decoration-day-memorial-day-american-tradition-nearly-150-years
Another 2.8 men were drafted. For the first time in U.S. history, “substitution” i.e., paying someone to take your place in the draft, was disallowed.
While we've been taught Decoration Day was the first observance, it's come to light in recent years that may not be true.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/05/26/memorial-day-meaning-why-celebrate/70243835007/