TEXT OF LETTER FROM THE CLASS OF 1917

The newspapers have made a flurry over reports of a document circulated among you declaring distaste for ever serving in the armed forces of your country. What truth may be in these reports we do not know. As we remember such things, the press was always quick to attribute to Harvard responsibility for the antics of its least representative students. But since a respected member of the faculty has thought is worth while to comment upon the document, we take it that the matter of a citizen's responsibility in arms is being discussed among Harvard men.

To the critics of the declaration against arms, its signers are said to have retorted that no one has a right to be heard in these matters unless he has reason personally to fear it--by inference only the undergraduate.

But in this inference they forget us.

Know What War Is Like

For we are Harvard men who know what war is like, because we were in one. More, we are men not too old to bear a man's part in another if it comes. We fear war, not only as you may very properly fear it--with the shrinking of the flesh which we know from experience, and you only from Imagination--but with that greater dread which you will come to know when you, in turn, have sons.

Yet, knowing and fearing war, we believe as we did in 1917, that if war comes it is a man's part to help finish it. Knowing war as men-at-arms, we know that there are times when a country's safety depends on men who have made themselves ready, spiritually and technically, for leadership in its armed forces. And knowing it as Harvard men, we believe it is particularly the honor and privilege of Harvard to be foremost in that leadership.

Theirs A War Class

Ours was the War Class. More properly speaking, it was a war class, for those before and after went, as we did, almost to a man. Some 90% of our class --or practically every man not rejected as physically unfit--served in our army or navy or in those of allied powers. The great majority volunteered while in college or immediately afterward. Of all who enlisted, more than half saw service in France or at sea in the face of the enemy--a proportion far larger than that of the army and navy as a whole. In proportion to members, too, there were far more decorations for valor awarded to our classmates. Many of us were wounded. Some were taken prisoner. And twenty-eight of our class died of wounds or disease or accident--or outright in the blast of action.

Men Killed In Prime Of Youth

Let us talk about them, and not about ourselves who seem, as you look at us today, intolerably aged, Let us speak of the young men whose pictures you may see on the chapel walls--for they were and are and always will be kids like yourselves, strong. We knew them as you know your roommates and teammates--bright-eyed and smooth-checked and better perhaps, for they were our companions-in-arms in the camps and] the ships and on the roads leading to the flickering horizon in the east, where the sky jumped in the night and there was a noise like the far-off slamming of doors. We knew what they thought and how they looked at things, for we talked as you talk, only sometimes a little more gravely when it looked as though we might not have long to talk.

These Man "The Suckers"

These are the men your objectors-to-service apparently think of as having been nothing but suckers for propaganda, and unwilling victims of a slaughter. That wouldn't trouble them. They have had a whirl, since 1917, at being considered pretty much everything as the cycle of fashion in thought revolved. First, of course they were Heroes. Then the debunking-novel period arrived and they were alleged to have been ruffians, bullies, and blackguards. Then for a while everybody was so busy that gold stars grew tarnished and were forgotten. And now, forsooth, the boys in the oak picture-frames are suckers!

It would give them a laugh if they were alive, because they were none of these things. They were not taken in by propaganda. They had only scorn for the Sisters' Sodality for Spitting on Slackers. As long as they were on this side, they were the friend of every German tailor hounded by the spy-hunters, and when they crossed the water they were the friend even of Jerry himself, all muddy and lousy and scared, out of the shell-holes, and they give him olgarettes.

Believed All the Way

But they happened to think that if you believe in anything you ought to believe in it All The Way. And because they believed--as some people still do-that the job they had taken in hand was worth doing, they went about it in a workmanlike way. They were first-class men-at-arms--grand shots who knew enough to keep their heads down and lay off their canteens. They had hard feet and a hard and very simple faith: :The country is in a war. Anybody can start a war. But it takes us to finish it."

And in the finishing of it, they were Called Out of Ranks (as they well knew they might be) to take station where they would watch the march of the world and not be in it any more. they wouldn't--we feel sure--think of themselves as heroes for that. Everybody gets called out of the march sooner or later and maybe (they thought) it isn't so had to be called out in the full flush of satisfaction with doing a good job well.

Our Job May Be Bigger

There may well be a bigger job to do--for all of us--within the measurable future. The general nature and extent of our country's policy are, of course, proper matters for the thought and discussion of every citizen, now and up to the time when unanimity of action may become a sheer necessity of self-preservation.

But the ultimate personal obligation of a citizen admits of no debate; still less of debate founded upon anxiety for one's own skin; least of all of irresponsible, highly publicized debate by a minority of men of that University on whose doorstep the arms of Washington came into being; whose sons were foremost among the resolute, skilled and fire-hardened men who turned the tide at Gettysburg; whose undergraduates and graduates when out by thousands in 1917 saying, in the words of President Lowell's Baccalaureate Sermon to our class, "There is a sound of a going in the tops of the trees, and we must bestir ourselves ... believing that it is a call to us."

Signed by the following members of the Class of 1917:

Harrison G. Reynolds, John M. Connolly, Clement K. Stodder, Gerald S. Pratt, Robert M. Benjamin, George W. Cobb, Jr., H. Wm. Radovsky, Philip Klein, D. C. Robinson, Thomas White, F. B. Foster, Homer L. Sweetser, George Eliot Leighton, Blodgett Sage, Robert Keith Leavitt, Harold S. Anderson, Frank J. Heinz, Edward P. Freedman, James F. Foster, John George Heinz, Jose A. Machado, J. Milton French, R. H. Davison, Amos R. Bancroft, George F. Baker, James C. McMullin, Graham B. Blaine, Kern Moyse, F. C. Rieker, George Burnham, III, W. Willcox, Jr., Charles A. Coolidge, Richard Harte, Amory Coolidge.