Alan Seeger

A Rendezvous with Death

John McCrae  

In Flanders Field 

A PBS Newshour print article about thousands of US war burials outside of the cemeteries of the American Battle Monuments Commission,

Commemorating Those who Died on Foreign Soil

The Forgotten History of Those who  came North to Fight in the Great War

An American Legion in the CEF

The African-American Gold Star Mothers of World War I had a Different Experience

The War Dogs of the Battle for Guam were so Valued that Twenty-Five were Buried in a Dedicated Cemetery. The Cemetery was Lost, then Rediscovered and Rededicated.

American poet and member of the French Foreign Legion Alan Seeger was killed in the Battle of the Somme on July 4, 1916. The royalties from his two posthumous books helped to  fund the creation of the American Library in Paris in 1920. Read that history here.  

For Alan Seeger, the nightwatch was the opportunity to look into the sky and consider his place in the cosmos while awaiting the first light of dawn on the Western Front.

Captured by the British in the Revolutionary and 1812 wars, the prisoner of war could only pray that he would be taken to one of the hard time land-bound prisons of the Empire. The alternative prison hulks of the harbors could be dreadful beyond scale.

In 1804, he was the first American naval hero to be buried abroad, and his remains remain beneath a park or parking lot in Tripoli, Libya. There are people in Somers Point, New Jersey who want him back, but the U.S. Navy is not interested.