Chapter VII

It was “the pleasantest war he had ever attended,” so he wrote back from France. “Nice war, nice people, nice country, nice everything,” he said on the back of a postcard. To the Reverend James J. Daly he wrote, “When I next visit Campion, I’ll teach you (in addition to ‘The Boston Burglar’) an admirable song called ‘Down in the Heart of the Gas-House District.’ I sing it beautifully.” And “as a common soldier, I have the privilege of intimacy with the French peasants--and I find them edifyingly good Catholics.” But his pleasures in war he has told, as none but the author of “Trees” and “Main Street” could tell them, in his letters. What he never told must be read between the lines. When the war was over, he said, he never wanted again to go far away from Browne’s Chop House and Shanley’s Bar. Though it is firmly held in the background, there is in all that he wrote from France, it seems to me, a reflection that his life was, so to say, somewhat in disarray. And clearly enough, though proudly, too, in the few poems that he sent back he spoke his body’s pain:

Upon his will he binds a radiant chain,
For Freedom’s sake he is no longer free.
It is his task, the slave of liberty,
With his own blood to wipe away a stain.
That pain may cease, he yields his flesh to pain,
To banish war, he must a warrior be;
He dwells in Night, eternal Dawn to see,
And gladly dies, abundant life to gain.

And:

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).

I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy feet, upon my heart).

Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).

I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.

(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy Agony of Bloody Sweat?)

My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).

And in the closing lines of this poem certainly is given, as fully as anything can be told in this world, the answer to the question, How did the war most affect Joyce Kilmer?--

Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.

So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.

Though he said, “I have very little chance to read contemporary poetry out here,” he did read, as he says, “what do you suppose? The ‘Oxford Book of English Verse.’” And he hoped that contemporary poetry was

reflecting the virtues which are blossoming on the blood-soaked
soil of this land--courage, and self-abnegation, and love, and
faith--this last not faith in some abstract goodness, but faith
which God Himself founded and still rules. France has turned
to her ancient faith with more passionate devotion than she
has shown for centuries. I believe that America is learning
the same lesson from war, and is cleansing herself of cynicism
and pessimism and materialism and the lust for novelty which
has hampered our national development. I hope that our poets
already see this tendency and rejoice in it--if they do not
they are unworthy of their craft.

“Just what effect the war would have had on Kilmer had he been spared is of course an entirely elusive topic,” has said one very able and on the whole most valuable commentator, speaking from the testimony then in hand, and voicing, I fancy, an idea still rather general. It is not now, I think, an elusive topic at all, but a matter as plain as a pikestaff. And the matter is, by the way, the second of the two most indispensable pages in Kilmer’s story. It is a page in which his character underwent another metamorphosis as consequential in its effect on his talent even, if that could be possible, as his conversion to the Catholic faith.

Kilmer left the United States a professional writer from his twenty-third year, and one of the most accomplished, prolific and industrious journalists of his day. Writing with him had become a habit almost as natural as speech. It was his intention when he left New York to write a war book. He discussed this project with his publishers even so definitely as to have settled upon a title: “Here and There With the Fighting Sixty-Ninth.” As time passed it became puzzling why no “copy” of any kind came from him. And as still more time passed this matter assumed for me an element of more than considerable mystery. It was incomprehensible because none of the reasons which would ordinarily apply in such a situation explained Kilmer’s case to me. If it had been anyone else I should have concluded that he was unable to find time to write anything. But precisely the point about Kilmer was that he did the impossible: it was quite his habit to, in the racy phrase, “get away with” situations which would have floored anyone else. It was to my mind an illogical hypothesis that he could be frustrated by obstacles. And I felt that, inexplicable as it was for Kilmer to fail in anything or to neglect any opportunity, he was here failing in justice to his career. How was it in fact? As it had always been. He was receiving the light opened to him. There could not be, I submit, any more telling proof that he had genius, the capacity to become an absolutely great writer, than this: that in this war which has prompted more people to write, and has produced more “copy” than nearly all the other events of history put together, he ceased altogether to be a journalist of any kind; that is, even the instinct of the journalist dropped from him, when he touched it.

He had had no thought, he says, of attempting to report the war: “If I had, I’d have come over as a correspondent instead of as a soldier.” All his days he had been trying to get closer and closer to the heart of life. In the war his profound instinct for humanity found fulfilment. Of his close comrades he writes: “Say a prayer for them all, they’re brave men and good, and splendid company. Danger shared together and hardships mutually borne develops in us a sort of friendship I never knew in civilian life, a friendship clean of jealousy and gossip and envy and suspicion--a fine, hearty, roaring, mirthful sort of thing, like an open fire of whole pine-trees in a giant’s castle.”

He was at present “a poet trying to be a soldier.” “To tell the truth, I am not at all interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful. And I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory.”

“My days of hack writing are over, for a time at least.” Upon his return to civilian life his civilian work “may be straight reporting.” As for “that mob of war writers (thank God--let me pharisaically say--that I am not one of them).” The book? “The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over--a century after it is over!”

Kilmer’s “Holy Ireland,” a sketch of a lodging for the night enjoyed by a little group of Irish-American soldiers at a farmhouse in France, is the only piece of prose writing of any extent at all that came from him overseas. He himself wrote of it to his publishers: “I sent you a prose sketch ‘Holy Ireland,’ which represents the best prose writing I can do nowadays.” It is unmistakably a piece of literature, that is to say, though slight enough in substance, a work of firm and exquisite and enduring art.

In a letter to the Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S.J., one of the last he wrote, the following paragraphs occur:

I have written very little--two prose sketches and two
poems--since I left the States, but I have a rich store of
memories. Not that what I write matters--I have discovered,
since some unforgettable experiences, that writing is not the
tremendously important thing I once considered it. You will
find me less a bookman when you next see me, and more, I hope,
a man.

And he ends with these words: “Pray for me, my dear Father, that I may love God more and that I may be unceasingly conscious of Him--that is the greatest desire I have.”

Though he gloried in being a private soldier, it is quite evident, too, that he was charmed with his promotion. “I am now a sergeant,” appears on the back of every copy of the well-known “tin-hat” post-card, and in every letter near this date. In more than one intimate letter he says: “I’ll never be anything higher. To get a commission I’d have to go away for three months to school, and then whether or not I was made an officer--I’d be sent to some outfit other than this, and I don’t want to leave this crowd. I’d rather be a sergeant in the 69th than a lieutenant in any other regiment in the world.” “A volunteer regiment, the bravest and best regiment in the army.” “I have a new stripe--an inverted chevron of bright gold on the left cuff for six months’ service ... let my children be proud of it.” And, “a long moustache I have.”

For a while he had worked in the Adjutant’s Office, having special charge of recording and reporting statistics. Then he was no longer (“thank God!”) doing statistics. Someone over here had said that he had “a bullet-proof job.” “I had one, but succeeded, after two months intriguing, in getting rid of it.” “At that time I was just an office hack--now I am a soldier, in the most fascinating branch of the service there is--sheer romance, night and day--especially night.” He had become attached to the Regimental Intelligence Section, working as an observer--“very amusing work,” “wonderful life!”--“the finest job in the army!” But “I don’t know what I’ll be able to do in civilian life--unless I become a fireman!” “I am having a delightful time, but it won’t break my heart for the war to end.”

“Rouge Bouquet” was his “first attempt at versification in a dug-out.” He had lived in “billets, dug-outs, trenches, observatories and all sorts of queer places.” And at length, he was “(after a most violent and amusing month) resting (six hours out of every twenty-four!) in a beautiful place, among the firs and pines on a lovely mountain top, from which I can see strange things.” “I sleep on a couch made soft with deftly laid young spruce boughs and eat at a table set under good, kind trees.” And with that inimitable, irrepressible and incomparable Kilmerian pleasure he contemplated what he called “my senility”:

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.

Never fear but in the skies
Saints and angels stand
Smiling with their holy eyes
On this new-come band

* * * * *

Your souls shall be where the heroes are
And your memory shine like the morning-star.

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.