Local soldiers graves grim reminder of WWI
Some 300 feet from Coolspring Street in North Union Township, directly across from the old high school, are the weedy graves of two World War I soldiers killed in the Great War one-hundred years ago.
Beneath one headstone with two chiseled U.S. Army rifles lies the mortal remains of Private Edward O. McLaughlin, the first man in his company — D Company, 110th Infantry — to die at the hands of the German enemy.
The second, less elaborate headstone is that of Corporal Delbert Fike, who lost his life in a “surprise night attack” a little more than a month before the November 11 Armistice ended the war. Delbert bore arms in E Company, the 110th Infantry.
McLaughlin hailed from Gray’s Landing. Fike was from Uniontown.
Another Uniontown member of the 110th Infantry, Raymond Renninger, is also buried in the cemetery now known as Park Memorial Cemetery but called Park Place back when the three men were brought home from France and laid to rest.
It’s not certain amidst the cemetery’s tangle of weeds and overgrown grass and fallen trees where Renninger lies.
It’s enough to note the McLauglin and Fike gravesites, within feet of one another, are sorry reminders that time is both fleeting and cruel.
The historian G.M. Trevelyn wrote: “The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today. Yet they once were as real as we are, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them.”
In mourning the fallen of World War I we mourn, in a sense, for ourselves. The whole idea of memorials, like the one staged several weeks ago in Paris marking the centennial end of World War I, is both remembrance and reminder. Only the willfully ignorant don’t get the point.
The bodies of Renninger, McLaughlin, and Fike were returned to the United States in July 1921. Their journey from living soldiers to corpses was short but not very sweet.
McLaughlin was the first to go, on July 29 “in the frontline … near the town of Ciergas,” France, the result of German shelling.
Renninger was next. In woods southwest of Le Charmel, France, a nighttime attack by German aircraft in early August killed 22 and wounded 80, including large numbers of Fayette County and Philadelphia men.
Now it was Fike’s turn. Wounded in the great Meuse-Argonne Offensive, he died five days later, on Oct. 11, 1918.
The war was not kind to the 110th Infantry. D Company was mobilized in Connellsville on July 15, 1917, with 151 men. Of the 108 men who went overseas with the company, 17 were killed. Another 53 were wounded. One man died of disease.
Only 53 men of the original 108 returned home with the outfit.
The bodies of Renninger and Fike were borne to Park Place Cemetery on a caisson “draped with the colors” and pulled by “four dapple grey horses,” the papers reported.
A band played the National Anthem. Three rifle volleys resounded across the countryside. A bugler blew Taps. Former brothers-in-arms stood at attention.
In retrospect, the First World War was a disaster, not just for the dead and wounded but for succeeding generations. Dictatorship and authoritarianism, economic fragmentation, racial hatred, and an even more terrible war trailed in its wake.
By the early ’20s, by most accounts, disillusionment had settled in, the high hopes of the war years dashed against the rock of “normalcy.”
Yet the significance of the sacrifice made by men like Fike, Renninger, and McLaughlin could not, and can not, be measured by ordinary standards.
Standing under a hot sun in the new American military cemetery at Suresnes, France, in May 1919, the president of the United States commended the fallen to the living.
“If they were here, what would they say?” asked Woodrow Wilson. “They would remember the terrible field of battle. They would remember … what they had come for …”
And what was that? America was born, Wilson said, “to show mankind the way to liberty. She was born to make this great gift a common gift. … Make yourselves soldiers … in this common cause. … Let us go away hearing this unspoken mandate of our dead comrades.”
Grandiose? Wilson was that kind of president. But it sure beats what we’re hearing today, 100 years later.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbibs@gmail.com.