Teddy Roosevelt Hailed "Gallant" Joyce Kilmer in World War I

   MAHWAH, NJ -- Near the end of the fighting in World War I, former President Theodore Roosevelt dashed off a letter to the grieving mother of poet patriot Joyce Kilmer in New Brunswick, NJ.

 “There is small need of your making any excuse to me for talking with pride about your gallant son,” said the onetime “Rough Rider” in the November 25, 1918 letter.

  “I am proud to have the name of my son Quentin mentioned together with the names of your son and Allen Segar (poet Alan Seeger).”

 The letter was recently located by the Joyce Kilmer Society of Mahwah in the special collections section of Alexander Library at Rutgers University.

  Born in New Brunswick, Kilmer established literary fame during the five years he lived in Mahwah, NJ. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet during a scouting mission near the Ourcq River in France serving as an aide to the legendary Maj. William (Wild Bill) Donovan, leader of the famed “Fighting 69th” regiment and later head of the agency that evolved into the CIA .

 In a skirmish on the night before his final act of courage, Kilmer helped Donovan and a detachment capture a German spy dressed in an American uniform.

 “In the five days of fighhting Sergeant Kilmer was with me throughout ... I watched him. I saw the way he went about his duty; his earnestness; his devotion to duty, his skill in gathering ... signs of the enemy,” Donovan wrote in post-war letters.

 The day after the spy capture, Kilmer led a patrol in search of a machine gun nest in the pivotal advance in the Second Battle of the Marne that became the turning point of the war.

 Kilmer crept ahead of his men...and out of sight. When they found him later, they thought he was peering over the edge of a  hill for a better view. They ran to him and found him shot dead by a sniper. He was 31. France awarded him the Croix de Guerre posthumously for courage under fire.

 Army Chaplain Charles L. O’Donnell, who knew Kilmer in the war and would become president of the University of Notre Dame, recalled:

 “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.”

 Kilmer was the most distinguished American to die in the Great War. He had already won international acclaim for his writing of “Trees” in his Mahwah house on February 2, 1913, and built a remarkable career as a journalist for The New York Times.

 A recent poll of Google “reads” placed “Trees”  No. 26 among the Top 50 poems of all time.

 Kilmer also penned two wartime classics, “The White Ships and the Red” (after the sinking of the Luisitania in 1915) and “Rouge Bouquet” (about an exploding shell that entombed 15 of his regiment in a dugout).

 “His fame as a writer of verse was country-wide,” wrote the Times after his death.

 Contemporary author Christopher Morley said: “Some of his poems will go in ink a long time, for they carry a genuine life and emotion that touches intimate human concerns.”

Roosevelt’s youngest son, Quentin, 20, a pursuit pilot, was shot down and killed on July 14 (Bastille Day), 1918 in an air battle with three German planes. Well-known as the President’s son, Quentin’s fame rose with his death in the war.

Seeger, author of the stirring poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” fought  as a volunteer with the French Foreign Legion and was killed in the Battle of Somme on Independence Day, July 4, 1916

He gained recognition after his death because  his poetry was not published until 1917.

 Countless parks and schools and streets pay tribute to Kilmer’s life.

 Some towns scattered across America still lay claim to the inspiration for Kilmer’s “Trees,” although a letter, unearthed last year in the Georgetown University library by the Joyce Kilmer Society of Mahwah, written by his widow, Aline, unequivocally stated the poem was written in their Mahwah house in an upstairs room with a desk at a window “looking down a wooded hill.”

 The Society also located a letter by Kilmer’s father, Frederick, at the  Alexander Library, that further established the roots of “Trees.” The letter stated the poem was “the exaltation of a commonplace tree in his (Joyce’s) backyard.”

 The actual notebook in which the poem was written and dated also was located at Georgetown by the Society.

 The precise date of Kilmer’s death has never been exactly established – the death certificate stated August 1, 1918 as was the “killed in action” telegram to his widow; but the Certificate of Valor listed July 30, 1918.

 There was never a doubt about Kilmer’s bravery and literary accomplishments. In fact, America so reverred him that, at the urging of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Congress estabalished the 3,840-acre Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in western North Carolina.

The 1936 dedication drew an eloquent tribute from another Roosevelt.

 “It is fitting that a poet who will always be remembered for the tribute he embodied in ‘Trees’ should find this living monument,” said then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Thus is his beloved memory forever honored. ”

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