Recalling Harvard's Greatest Sacrifice

Where were you yesterday, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month? Eighty years ago, in a private railroad car in forests north of Paris, French commanders signed an armistice with the Germans that officially ended the Great War.

Fifteen minutes before the guns of the Western Front fell silent, Lieutenant Larry Austin '20 of the U.S. 28th Division and 109th Infantry Regiment commandeered a charge on a German machine-gun nest and was killed shielding his men from crossfire.

Austin was the final Harvard soldier lost in the Great War, adding to the 372 others, ranging from Robert Bacon, Class of 1880 who entered the war when he was 54 and a member of the Harvard Corporation, to Herbert Dickson '22, who had barely enrolled in the College.

All these names rested in quiet solitude yesterday in the serene alcove of the Memorial Room tucked away in Memorial Church. Nine mammoth stone panels grace three walls of the room, listing the names, ringed by the words of President A. Lawrence Lowell: "While a bright future beckoned, they freely gave their lives and fondest hopes for us and our allies that we might learn from them."

President Lowell dedicated this room and Memorial Church in 1932 on Armistice Day, in one of his last major acts as president to remind students that there was more to life than winning athletic games and dancing the night away.

These words seem distant today to our Harvard world, merely part of the lengthy history of the institution that Crimson Key guides rattle off to tourists. We are slowly fading from a connection to the Harvard lives that were lost for this country and the people behind the engraved names.

For our generation, Veterans Day has become a mere break in the work-week, and even perhaps a scheduling annoyance because it does not allow us to get away for a three-day weekend. Yet, as Veterans Day slowly becomes another retail holiday with little significance, we risk losing any sense of not only the Harvard soldiers that fell, but also of any connection to the duties of service and sacrifice for our country.

Even if you never set foot in Memorial Church, you most likely have scurried past the names of Harvard's casualties in the Civil War in Memorial Hall on your way to lecture in Sanders. As a student you are of the prime age not only for imbibing, but for military service, a message that alumni tried to impart.

While the Memorial Room was quiet yesterday, the sidewalks of the Anderson Bridge were pounded by athletes headed to practice and spectators headed to the womens soccer game.

The bridge was donated by Larz Anderson, Class of 1888, in memory of his father, Nicholas Anderson, Class of 1858, a major general of volunteers in the Civil War. The bridge reminds Harvard students in one of its inscriptions of their call to country:

"May this bridge built in memory of a scholar and a soldier, connecting the college yard and playing fields of Harvard, be an ever-present reminder to students passing over it of loyalty to country and alma mater and a last suggestion that they should devote their manhood developed by study and play on the banks of this river to the nation and its needs."

Today, Anderson's preachy tone seems quaint in Harvard's world. Even ignoring the gendered language, military service is hardly a top career aspiration among seniors. Even the ROTC program, not recognized on Harvard's campus since the late sixties, advertises its financial benefits more than its patriotic component.

Living Harvard alumni talk more about the 1969 University Hall takeover and the anti-war fervor of the Vietnam era than about World Wars or Harvard's students who fought and died in Vietnam.

The only military activity that any of us recall was the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which was portrayed more as a Defense Department special effects show than a protracted military conflict. Our generation seems blessed by the post-Cold War era where the United States acts as a global superpower unchallenged by adversaries.

As Harvard returns to its hustle and bustle, as seniors return to the recruiting battle field and students hit the front-lines of papers and problem sets, we must remember the names listed in Memorial Church. Behind each name was a wide-eyed freshman or a senior with a world awaiting. Forgotten by time and space and from a Harvard much different than it is now, they held the same promise and dreams in the beginning of the twentieth century as we do now at century's end.

Their deaths in foreign French fields scattered from Verdun to Ypres remind us that we are ultimately responsible to a higher calling than just formals and final papers.

As we approach the end of the "Great American Century," it is inevitable that memories will fade and familial links will pass from this earth. In times of a calm global political environment, complacency will be accepted and isolationism will be embraced even as defense budgets remain cushy.

However, it is foolish to believe that war has been completely transformed from the bloody battles of the trenches to surgical smart-bombs and Tomahawk missiles.

We might be fortunate enough to live in a relatively peaceful world, but sometime deep in the next century or maybe sooner, Harvard students will be called upon once again to serve their country. One only needs to read one of the other inscriptions on Anderson Bridge to recall that peace is never easily won and must always be treasured: "On either side of the river there was a tree of life which bore twelve manner of fruits and yielded her fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations."

The bridge, along with the inscription, was built in 1913, a few scant months before an assassination of a dignitary in a foreign land would call Harvard students from their books to battle in the Great War.

M. Douglas O'Malley '01 is a history concentrator in Eliot House. He is a Crimson editor.