University of Virginia Library

LXIV. The World War—Youthful Martyrs

Among the other alumni who were killed in the World
War, it is difficult to choose without appearing to be invidiously
partial; but the space at our disposal will not
allow of our paying them all the encomium which they
all deserve. A tribute that will embrace the entire number
must be left to some future historian, who shall write
a special volume descriptive, like Johnson's Confederate
Memorial, of every one who perished in the service.
It is only possible for us here to refer briefly to a few
who seem to us, in spirit and action, to represent very
faithfully the noble disposition which, under all circumstances,
they and their youthful comrades displayed in
the great cause for which they sacrificed their lives.

William Alexander Fleet was a descendant of the rebel,
Sir Thomas Wyatt, who marshalled a Protestant army
against Bloody Queen Mary, and also the nephew of
another rebel, so called, James Alexander Seddon, the
Confederate Secretary of War. His ancestry of his
own name went back to Captain Henry Fleet, who played
an adventurous part in the history of Jamestown.

In 1904, he was chosen as a Rhodes Scholar,—the
first to be appointed to that position from Virginia.
"He was our first real Rhodes Scholar," said the head
of Magdalen College after his death. "No man was
more generally known or liked in his generation.
America could have had no better representative to start
her traditions here. He both gave and received in the
richest measure."

On his return to America, Fleet became at first a
preceptor at Princeton, and afterwards, an officer of the
Culver Military Academy. When he saw England
plunging deeper and deeper into the World War, he exhibited
an almost passionate desire to prove his gratitude
for all the intellectual and social advantages which he had
enjoyed during his stay at Oxford, by assisting that country
in some way, however small. His original plan
was to join the British Red Cross; but on arriving in
England, he found that all his college-mates were in
the army proper, and he promptly decided to go to
them.

"They gave me such a good time at Oxford," he
wrote, in explanation of his action, "and were such good
fellows, that, now that they are fighting and dying, I
must fight with them." He was commissioned a second
lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards in January, 1917, and
in the following August arrived in France with his regiment,
which almost at once began to take part in the
desperate battles then being fought in Flanders. He
was gassed at Langemarck in September. After recovering,
he returned to his place in his regiment, participated
in the continuous encounters of the spring of
1918, and in the end, perished near Arras, when a German
bomb fell upon his tent, at the moment occupied by
four other officers and himself. Only a few months before

this fatal event, he had married the daughter of
Sir Charles Lyall.

"He always did his duty most loyally, and with the
most conscientious care," testified Lord Gort, his commander,
after his death. "Anything I asked him to do
was accomplished by him with a total disregard to his
own personal safety; and he always set a most magnificent
example to us all." "He has fallen with his
British comrades," said his old headmaster at Oxford,
"and I feel sure, that, notwithstanding all his hearty
enjoyment of life and the great happiness of his marriage,
could he have chosen again, he would never have
done or wished otherwise." And his old instructor at
the Culver Military Academy said, "We who knew and
loved him, remember him not for his fine mental and
physical endowment. Rather, we recall his unusual
qualities of heart, his unselfish, clean, and wholesome
life. The call of war has been answered by some from
ambition, and by some from inborn love of change or of
conflict. To Captain Fleet, the call of war was the
call of duty. His interests were all of peace, the peace
of sustained effort. The three words, peace, service,
sacrifice, now seem to describe the man we have known
and loved."

The name of William Alexander Fleet enjoys the
noble distinction that it is inscribed upon the memorial
tablets which shine upon the walls of three famous and
widely separated seats of learning: Oxford, Princeton,
and the University of Virginia. He was one of the two
hundred and five members of Magdalen College who
perished in the World War, and the legend engraved
above the roll of their glorious names, in one of the most
beautiful buildings in the world, has a poignantly
pathetic meaning as bearing upon his unselfish motives

in entering the British army: "Greater love hath no man
than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Vivian Slaughter was sprung directly from fighting
stock,—three of his ancestors of his own name, a father,
son, and grandson, participated in the Battle of Great
Bridge, of the Revolution. His grandfather served as
surgeon in all the encounters that swayed backwards
and forwards along the banks of the Rapidan during
the War of Secession, while his father was one of seven
brothers who were marshalled in the Confederate armies.
That father had been sent off to school to remove him
from the temptation of running away to join the Confederate
ranks; but this turned out to be ineffective,—
he became a member of the Orange Artillery, and as an
officer fought in every campaign from the Peninsular to
Early's dash down the Valley.

Even as a child, Vivian Slaughter was keenly interested
in books. There was one sentence in Pilgrim's Progress
which he was often heard to repeat, drawn to do so,
perhaps, under the influence of the foreshadowed fate
which was to overtake him, as it has overtaken so many
other soldiers, "And so he passed over the river, and
all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."
"These early years," says one who knew him then,
"were full of the glorious visions of a happy childhood,
with its joyous twilight hours, when stories were told
in the starlight and firelight of home."

Deciding to adopt the calling of medicine, Slaughter,
after leaving the University of Virginia, spent several
years in Vienna and Berlin. He returned home in 1914;
but instead of pursuing his profession, he was so much
wrought up by his sympathy for the Servians that he
decided to go back to Europe and join the American
Red Cross, as the only practical means in his power of

giving assistance. He sailed in January, 1915, and
after passing twelve months in the Balkans, he came to
the same conclusion as McConnell in the like situation;
namely, that his eagerness to aid the Allied Cause would
be better satisfied by a share in actual warfare. In July,
1916, he was gazetted as a second lieutenant in the
Twentieth London Regiment, which apparently, at that
time, was posted in Saloniki. He accompanied this regiment
first to Egypt, and then to France, and was a participant
in every one of the numerous actions in which that
gallant force was engaged in these different regions.

He was about to resign and enter the American army,
which was now encamped in Europe, when he was killed.
His battalion had been held up, for a short while, near
Marconing by a nest of German machine guns. At the
head of two platoons, he hurried forward to sweep away
the obstruction and fell at the moment of success. The
history of this last scene confirms the truth of the tribute
which his commander paid to his memory: "Though
perfectly unassuming, whatever job was given him to do
was always done; and he was so much beloved by his
men that they would follow him anywhere." His body
found its last repose in the British cemetery at Grande
Rapide, where it lies surrounded by the bodies of his
brave English comrades, who perished in the same great
series of battles.

Robert H. Wood, Jr., of Charlottesville, had made up
his mind to matriculate as a medical student at the
University of Virginia; but just so soon as the first military
training began, he apparently had no thought, as
was said of him at the time, "but to put his whole life
at the disposal of his country." He promptly reported
at Fort Meyer, but failed to be admitted because his age
would be still short of his majority in the year when he

would be expected to graduate. Owing to a weakness
in his arm,—resulting from a fracture received during
a game of baseball,—and also to some infirmity of
the hip, he was turned down, when, on two occasions, he
volunteered to serve in the University of Virginia contingent.
His father suggested that, perhaps, the Government
would prefer him to continue his medical studies
as a preparation for the duties of the Medical Corps in
the future; but his only reply to this was, "No, I am
determined to get in now."

Very soon afterwards he enlisted; and having been
ordered to the Georgia Technological School at Atlanta,
he pursued the work of his classes there so ardently and
so successfully that he graduated as one of the five honor
men who were permitted to complete the special course
in the United States, France, or Italy, just as they should
elect. He decided in favor of France. The only complaint
which he was heard to make of the training which
he received there was that it dragged on too slowly to
satisfy his eager temper. He aspired to enter the aviation
corps, and was harassed by the thought that the
weakness of his hip might stand in the way of his appointment.
But he obtained his commission in May,
1918, and was then licensed as a pilot in the observation
corps. "He was not one of those," wrote a close comrade
after his death, "who joined the army merely to
wear a uniform, or to escape the draft. He came in for
the honor of his home. The United States had been
outraged. His memory will be an ideal which we will
strive to reach, and which will bind us more firmly together
for the common purpose, which is to inflict such
a blow on the demon who started this reign of suffering
as will always prevent its recurring."

Farrell D. Minor, Jr., also was a scion of an honorable

family long settled in Albemarle county, though
his parents resided in Texas. He was a graduate of
the University Law School, and while a member of that
school had won the reputation of being a model student,
not only in his power of successful application, but also
in the high principles which always governed his conduct.
He obtained his commission as second lieutenant at the
earliest moment possible after the United States entered
the War. "What would you have done," he was asked,
"had you failed to pass the examination?" "I would
have enlisted at once as a private," was the reply.

He volunteered to join the famous Rainbow Division,
then awaiting embarkation at Camp Mills; it was with
this division that he served in France; and he was with
it when the Germans made their last desperate offensive
east of Rheims at midnight of July 4, 1918. His
platoon participated, three weeks later, along with his
battalion and regiment, in the great encounter at Red
Cross Farm, which will go down in history as one of the
most glorious, and not the least sanguinary, in the second
Battle of the Marne. This regiment came out of that
awful conflict with only five hundred and eighty-five
effective men in an original enrolment of three thousand;
nine officers had been killed outright, and forty wounded;
and one half of his own company had perished in a
shorter interval than forty minutes. He himself fell.
A corporal who saw him rigidly straighten himself up
as if hit by a bullet, and then suddenly collapse, ran forward
to assist him. "Don't worry about me," was the
reply of the stricken soldier to the eager offer of help.
"Go and do the best you can with the men." The advance
which he had been heading had been over an open
wheat field; and there had been no support from the artillery
because the heavy rains had made the terrain impassable.

But the order had been given that the ground
was to be occupied at all costs, and occupied it was.

Minor had still strength enough to allow of his removal
to the hospital. While lying desperately
wounded, he treated his attendants with such unfailing
consideration that it seems as if they, and not he, were
entitled to special solicitude and service. "He was
surely one of the finest men here," remarked one of these
attendants after his death. "I was on night duty in his
ward, and he was one of the kind that would always say,
when he asked for anything, 'When you have the time.'
All the patients who could walk came to his side more
than once through the day to inquire, and those who
could not, never failed to ask after him or call to him a
pleasant greeting." "When the time comes to go on
the line," he had written his parents after his arrival in
France, "I will be quite satisfied, and you can rest assured
that I will do my best and give to the limit."
"And he did live up to the confidence that we had in
him," said his stricken but justly proud father after his
death. "His parents rest in the confident assurance that
not on the line only, but in the camp, on the march, in
the trenches, in No Man's Land, in the hospital, everywhere,
he did his best, and gave to the limit."

Randolph Mason, the son of a Confederate veteran,
was attached to the 148th Machine Gun Battalion as
second lieutenant. After his arrival in France, he was
offered an official position that would have withdrawn
him entirely from exposure to fire. "No," said he emphatically,
in declining; "no, I have come here for active
service." In his first engagement, he exhibited such
perfect equanimity that his captain declared that his
bearing had been, not that of a raw soldier, but of one
already seasoned by a long experience of danger. It

was affirmed of him that, by his cheerfulness and self-possession,
he held his men steady in the most perilous
situations. From July 7 to July 23, he took part in the
terrific conflict in the Bois de Belleau. During three
days of this interval, his platoon was cut off altogether
from food and water, and were unable to sleep, in consequence
of the unbroken bombardment. All this while,
he, at the head of his soldiers, was reconnoitering from
time to time in the face of the fire, and was constantly
leading out volunteers to pick up the wounded. Death
overtook him when he had gone forward alone to observe
the enemy's movements. "I found him shortly afterwards,"
said his captain, "and I folded his hands and
laid him out for his long rest." He was buried near the
spot where he was killed, which was situated in a
beautiful grove overlooking the ground that he and his
men had assisted in capturing only a few hours before.
Over his grave, his platoon, pausing in the fight, placed
a wooden cross, rudely put together, and then sadly returned
to their guns. Said one of these comrades after
his death, "His cheerfulness was the salvation of us all,
for even the strongest of us was breaking under the
strain." And another said, "I do not think a native son
of France could have been more willing to die for her
than he was. He loved her and her people almost as
much as he did his native soil; and often I have heard
him remark that no man can have a better epitaph than
'Mort pour Ia patrie.' He has made the supreme sacrifice,
and we who knew him in France know that he was
proud and happy to make it. We who are left are the
better for having known him. A true soldier and a
splendid officer, he died a soldier's death."

"God bless you," he wrote his father. "Pray for me
to be a good soldier in this good cause." That prayer

was heard in the chancellery of Heaven. The parent
blood that had confronted the hosts of the North, with
unfaltering courage and staunchness, did not fail when, in
Randolph Mason, in the next generation, it was called
upon to aid in resisting the invasion of another soil,
which was as dear to him as the one which his father had
defended. The Southern soldier of the War of Secession
had blossomed out into the soldier of the War of all
Mankind.