Picked up a copy of this speech at Cantigny Park near Chicago Illinois, the estate of Colonel Robert McCormick who served in the First Division during his military career and also ran the Chicago Tribune for years afterward.
General Pershing: General De Chambrun - Whom I remember so well at the Battle of Cantigny, with your sage advice, your calm assurance, and your pipe; and you men of the two republics who laid down your lives in brotherly heroism. Over the years, we shall remember you, sleeping together on the battlefields, peacefully, like children in a nursery surely your spirits are with us today as we commemorate the first division. Our soldiers came from every state and of the races which make the American nation. The senior officers were picked men from the regular army - men devoted to the principles of duty, honor, country. The juniors were chosen ones from that flowering of our people. The first officers training camp - young men who rushed to hardship and death without thought of material or military reward. Battle hardened in the division, many of its officers were promoted to lead the troops arriving from America - Colonels, Brigadiers, two Chiefs of staff of Army Corps, one Chief of Corps Artillery, seven Division Commanders, three Corps Commanders, and the Commander of an Army. The American expeditionary force was in large part led and leavened by the men of the First Division. We trained in the summer and maneuvered in the cold fall and winter of the French Comte. Our communications were cut by the Armies reinforcing Italy, and supplies failing, men suffered and horses starved. This was the period of greatest hardship experienced by American soldiers since Valley Forge. But no one complained. And one bitter day in January, the order of battle showed "The American Division" in the line. Occupying a position which afforded no view of the enemy, but in full sight of his observation post on Montsec, without aviation against a foe richly supplied with airplanes, exposed to enemy air raids and to enemy aerial observation, The First Division underwent its baptism of fire. Here that iron Division was forged to steel in shell fire and tempered in the blood of its dead. It learned to receive fire to which it could not reply, to bury comrades to which it could not avenge. Not until the first night of March, when, under the protection of barrage and mortar fire, the enemy raided our lines for prisoners - to take none, but to leave his troops prisoners in our hands and his dead for us to bury - did it taste of victory. After the British catastrophe in Picardy, the First Division was among the troops chosen to restore the lines. Here it fought for forty bloody days and suffered five thousand casualties, and here at Cantigny score a small, but desperate, victory at a moment when victory was indispensable to the allied cause after the French rout on the Chemin Des Dames. Had the American Division failed that day, the last hope of the allies would have waned. But it did not fail. From here it went to fight in the decisive battle of Soissons; to victory of St. Mihiel, to the blood-bath of the Argonne,; to Sedan; and at last to plant its banners on the walls of Ehrenbreitstein, and to water its horses in the Rhine. In all these battles the First Division never failed to take an objective; it never lost a position taken; it never left a dead commander unburied. The officers march forward on foot with the men. Only those who went to the rear in battle rode - and they in ambulances. Its victories were won at bitter cost. Its lost in dead, wounded, and broken by hardship three times more men than it numbered on its mustering day. Every officer who served here at Cantigny was killed or promoted before the Armistice. Their great work done, the men of the Division returned to the people from whom they had sprung. You will not find our soldiers among the leaders in commerce and industry, nor seeking the spoils of political office. Well they know that they can never again serve their country so gloriously as they served in the war, nor receive any material reward equal to that of duty done. They do not talk of their triumphs of sufferings. But from their faces their neighbors know the ordeal they have survived. Quietly they await the day when they will camp once more with their comrades at the Vibouac of the dead. But the First Division will never die in the memory of gallant people. For them it will march forever. March on then, First Division! March over the sunny hills of France; March through the flaming towns of Picardy; up the shell-swept slopes of the Lorraine; through the gas-filled forest of the Argonne; on into the everlasting glory!
Cantigny, France
August 9, 1937
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