Revisiting the Effort to Select the Inscriptions for the National World War I Memorial (Part I)

This is a revised and expanded version of an article originally presented on 27 May 2019.

In the late summer of 2017 at the request of the United States World War One Centennial Commission, I asked our readers to propose appropriated inscriptions for the National WWI Memorial planned for Pershing Square in Washington, DC. Subsequently, I forwarded nearly one hundred suggestions to the commission's Vice-Chairman, Edwin Fountain. Here are the final selection of five chosen by the Commission shown as they have been installed at the National Memorial. While none of our proposals made the final list, he expressed great appreciation and thanks for our efforts.  Tomorrow in Part II, I'll present a selection from our readers submissions, the quality of which I'm enormously proud.

From General Pershing

In their devotion, their valor, and in the loyal fulfillment of their obligations, the officers and men of the American Expeditionary Forces have left a heritage of which those who follow may ever be proud.

• From General Pershing's memoir, My Experiences in the World War

From  Veteran Archibald MacLeish

We leave you our deaths: give them their meaning: give them an end to the war and a true peace: give them a victory that ends war and a peace afterwards: give them their meaning. We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

• From the  poem "THE YOUNG DEAD SOLDIERS DO NOT SPEAK," written in 1941 for a memorial service for staff members of the Library of Congress who died in the war
• MacLeish served as an ambulance driver and then artillery officer in WWI. He fought in the Second Battle of the Marne.
• His brother Kenneth was a naval aviator. Shot down over Belgium in October 1918, buried at Flanders Field American Cemetery.
• Three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize (twice for poetry, once for drama)

From President Woodrow Wilson

Never before have men crossed the seas to a foreign land to fight for a cause which they did not pretend was peculiarly their own, but knew was the cause of humanity and of mankind.  

• Woodrow Wilson, Memorial Day address, 30 May 1919
• Delivered at the American cemetery at Suresnes outside Paris, during the Versailles peace negotiations

From Author Willa Cather

They were mortal, but they were unconquerable.

• From Willa Cather, One of Ours (1922, p. 453), which also won the Pulitzer Prize.
• Protagonist Claude Wheeler is partly based on Cather’s  cousin, Grosvenor Cather, who was killed at Cantigny in May 1918 and received the Distinguished Service Cross.

From Nurse Alto May Andrews

Alto May Andrew's ID Card

If it has to be that this world must be embroiled in a tremendous “War to end Wars,” I am glad that I, too, may play a part in it.

• Alta May Andrews (quoted in Andrew Carroll (ed.), My Fellow Soldiers (2017, p. 230))
• From Illinois; shipped to France in April 1918, first as an American Red Cross nurse and then in the Army Nurse Corps
• Worked the night shift at American Hospital No. 1 in Neuilly outside Paris, caring for 70 men at a time
• Served for two years; continued nursing WWI soldiers after she returned to the U.S. in April 1919—and re-enlisted during WWII at the age of 51.

Tomorrow, I'll present a selection of recommendations that came from the readers of Roads to the Great War.  MH