On July 15, 1918, 23 divisions of the German First and Third armies launched what was to become the last major German offensive of World War One along the Western Front. Attached to the French Fourth Army who prepared to receive the brunt of the German assault were American forces of the 42nd Division. The 42nd had arrived in Europe some eight months previously as one of the first divisions to reach France (part of the American Expeditionary Force [AEF] under command of General John Joseph “Blackjack” Pershing). As the German infantry and supporting tanks slammed into the miles of French and American trenches, one member of the 42nd, Sergeant Alfred Joyce Kilmer, must have surveyed the mud and metal about him, committed his soul to God, and prayed for a return to the trees and natural world he enjoyed and eulogized so well in his poetic verse.
Joyce Kilmer was born on December 06, 1886 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The fourth and final child of Dr. Frederick Barnett Kilmer (a pharmacist and analytical chemist for Johnson and Johnson Company, and creator of baby powder), Kilmer was perhaps destined to a life of corporate board meetings and science rather than one of spirituality, commentary, and rhyme. The latter seemed to come natural to him throughout his formative years. Whether at Rutgers Preparatory School, Rutgers College, or Columbia University, Kilmer proved to be a man of letters and words. At each stage of his formal education, Kilmer achieved a measure of literary and oratorical notoriety, whether as an editor of various campus newspapers, an officer within literary societies, a literary critic, or as a skilled orator.
In 1908 following his graduation from Columbia University, Kilmer married Miss Aline Murray, also a poet he met while a student at Rutgers. The couple moved to New York to pursue literary careers. While in New York, Kilmer’s family and faith flourished alongside his career in words. In addition to his full-time work preparing reference works for Funk and Wagnalls Publishing Company, he also served as a special writer for the New York Times Review of Books and New York Times Sunday Magazine. By 1911, Kilmer began a publishing career with the launch of his first book of poems entitled Summer of Love. Other books of poems followed. Kilmer’s most recognizable collection went to print in 1914, titled Trees and Other Poems. Within these pages was penned his best remembered and perhaps most celebrated lyric poem, “Trees.” “Trees” proved to be quite emblematic of Kilmer’s apparent love for all things natural and his strong religious faith—both of which he would come to use when he answered his country’s call in 1917.
When the United States entered World War One in April, 1917, Kilmer immediately volunteered to fight. He enlisted in the New York National Guard and by August found himself re-assigned to the U. S. 69th Infantry Regiment. The famed “Fighting Sixty-Ninth,” (a name quite possibly given to the unit by Confederate General Robert E. Lee during the American Civil War while watching the charge of the Irish Brigade at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December, 1862), traced its roots to Irish revolutionaries who had long before sought to topple the order of kings in Great Britain and across Europe during the uprisings of 1848. The unit’s Irish and Catholic heritage seemed a Providential fit for Kilmer as he championed causes of the common man while concomitantly displaying a grit long-associated with the Irish. While not of Irish descent, Robert Cortes Holliday later referred to Kilmer as “a much more ardent Irishman than many an Irishman born.” So honored was Kilmer to have been associated with the 69th, that he refused a promotion to the rank of officer with another unit because it would have required his transfer out of the unit. The regiment, part of the U.S. 42nd Division, set sail for France on October 31, 1917, barely one month after the loss of his first daughter Rose, 12 days before the birth of his final child, Christopher, and nine months before he would meet his own fate during the Second Battle of the Marne near the River Ourcq (a tributary of the Marne River in France located northeast of Paris).
Having previously transferred to the military intelligence section of the 69th (renamed the 165th Infantry Regiment of the U. S. 42nd Division), a position Kilmer referred to as “a double share of glory and thrills,” he often found himself in the vanguard, especially when attacking. On July 30, 1918, as French and American forces began to counterattack the stalled German offensive in earnest, Kilmer volunteered to lead a scouting party to find the position of a German machine gun nest that had slowed the advance of his sector. Having failed to return in a suitable amount of time to report his findings, comrades from the unit were sent out to scout his whereabouts. Working their way through the shell craters, shattered trees, and twisted wire of “No Man’s Land,” they eventually came upon his lifeless, 31-year-old body near the Muercy Farm beside the Ourcq River (close to the village of Seringes-et-Nesles). True to the spirit of the “Fighting Sixty Ninth’s” battle cry of Faugh a Ballagh (“clear the way”), Kilmer, too, had attempted to clear the way for his men until he was felled by a German sniper. His remains, still in France today, are interred in the 36.5 acre, tree-lined and tree-filled Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, located between Paris and Reims.
Alfred Joyce Kilmer is remembered as one of America’s foremost Roman Catholic poets and lecturers. Because his poetry had garnered much attention prior to the war, his loss in France impacted many Americans, especially veterans and members of the literary community. In the years following the war, groups placed pressure on elected officials to find a way to appropriately commemorate his life and sacrifice. Their work was finally realized on July 30, 1936 when the U. S. Forest Service officially dedicated 3,800 acres of forest land in his honor. The Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, located in western North Carolina, remains one of America’s largest tracts of contiguous old growth forest. In 1975, the U. S. Department of the Interior joined the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest with the Nantahala National Forest (also in western North Carolina) and the Cherokee National Forest (in eastern Tennessee) to create the 17,000 acre Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness. The Wilderness today continues to protect one of America’s few remaining old growth forests. It is a fitting salute to the author of “Trees”—a poet soldier who died in “No Man’s Land,” an area devoid of trees, so that today all are able to experience a living memorial of over 100 different species of them (with some elders more than 400 years old) as a place of peace.
DID YOU KNOW:
Aline Murray Kilmer, a native Virginian and wife of Alfred Joyce Kilmer, was also an accomplished essayist. Following the death of her husband, Aline went on to publish her own poetry and authored both essays and children’s books (mostly published between 1919 and 1929). Aline would pass away on October 1, 1941 at the age of 53. Perhaps fittingly and humanely, her death came just two months and six days prior to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor: an event that would again see young Americans like her husband called on for service in yet another world war. Aline Kilmer is buried in Saint Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery in Newton, New Jersey.
