"To banish war, he must a warrior be" ~ Remembering Sgt. Joyce Kilmer on Veteran's Day

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In honor of Veteran's Day, let us remember a soul so brave and so brilliant whose brief life-course flared too briefly across the early 20th century firmament before he met his merciful Maker. To this day, he is best known for his familiar poem entitled Trees which begins: “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree…”

Joyce Kilmer was of a breed of men that seems practically extinct today. He was a New Jersey Catholic husband and father of an artistic and literary bent who, nonetheless, was able to summon courage and charity in the superlative as enunciated by Our Lord in John 15:13.

Though married with four children and widely regarded as one of the outstanding poets of his generation, Kilmer enlisted in the U.S. Army when war was declared between the United States and the Central Powers in 1917. He requested to be assigned to the infantry and though he was recommended for promotion to officer status, he refused and was deployed at the front in France as a sergeant. He was given dangerous duty, often acting as a scout operating in no-man’s land.

His division, the Fighting 69th, was immortalized after the war in a film of the same name starring James Cagney. Kilmer was portrayed in the movie by Jeffrey Lynn, and his poem, The Rouge Bouquet, is featured in this poignant scene, based on an actual event:


Kilmer wrote numerous charming letters from the front to his wife, Aline, which may be found collected here. Writing in one such letter on May 18, 1918, Kilmer draws a distinction between pacifism and peacemaking as follows:

P. C. ought to know the distinction between peacemakers and pacifists. I wonder he didn’t include St. Michael in his catalogue of pacifists. We are peace-makers, the soldiers of the 69th, we are risking our lives to bring peace to the simple, generous, gay, pious people of France, who anyone (knowing them as I have come to know them in the last six months) must pity and admire and love. They are an invaded people—and invaded people always are right….

Here are nice old ladies, fat babies, jovial humorous men, and little girls just making their First Communions. They’ve been driven out of their pretty sleepy little villages. They want to get back and mend the shell holes in the roof and go to school and take their place drinking red wine of an evening according to their tastes and ages. Well, we men of the 69th are helping to give these people back their homes—and perhaps to prevent our homes from one day being taken from us by the same Power—of whom nothing at all worse need be said than that it is an invader. And St. Patrick, and St. Bridgid, and St. Columkill and all the other Saints are with us—they are no more pacifists than they are Roycrofters! [an arts and crafts guild in New York around the turn of the 20th century founded by self-styled anarchist, Elbert Hubbard] ~ Taken from Joyce Kilmer: Prose Works

Perhaps not coincidentally, Kilmer's last poem was entitled The Peacemaker which I present here in full:

The Peacemaker by Sergeant Joyce Kilmer

Upon his will he binds a radiant chain,
For Freedom’s sake he is no longer free.
It is his task, the slave of Liberty,
With his own blood to wipe away a stain.
That pain may cease, he yields his flesh to pain.
To banish war, he must a warrior be.
He dwells in Night, eternal Dawn to see,
And gladly dies, abundant life to gain.

What matters Death, if Freedom be not dead?
No flags are fair, if Freedom’s flag be furled.
Who fights for Freedom, goes with joyful tread
To meet the fires of Hell against him hurled,
And has for captain Him whose thorn-wreathed head
Smiles from the Cross upon a conquered world.

[Taken from Joyce Kilmer: Memoir and Poems]

While on a scouting mission in no-man's land on July 30, 1918, Joyce Kilmer was shot and killed by a German sniper.

For more about Joyce Kilmer, click here.