Evening Star Newspaper, November 10, 1929, Page 91

Fiction PART Sl VLN The %unflay Magasine \VASHI\'CTON 5 g ok SUNDAY NOVLMP.LR .10, 1929. Shat D 24 PAGES.' Sz‘z'// Missing iz Action Letter Written by a German Soldier During the W orld War to Editor of a New York' Paper Led to the Location of a Doughboy’s Body “Nine Years After” and Is but One of Many Curious Leads” in the Greatest Orgamzed Search for Missing Soldiers N September, 1918,” the let- ter reads, “I was a non- commissioned officer of a German infantry regi- ment. We were stationed fn the front lines of the St. Mihicl salient in France.” The writer is ex-Corpl. Paul Schreiber of the German Army. The letter was written from a small town in Lithuania in January, 1927. Writ- ten in German, it was sent to the editor of a New York paper, “expect- ing that perhaps you can do me and an American family a great favor.” That' is how the letter—and the trail back over more than eight years—began. Ex-Corpl. and ex- Heinie Paul Schreiber thinking back to a certain September night of 1918 in the front-line trenches at 8t. Mihiel. “For the time being we were very short on rifles,” he recalls. “We marched about eight kilos to the right under cover of night to the place where the Americans were far- thest advanced and where they had dug in. That same night we counter- attacked and drove the Americans back about one kilometer. Many of our own troops and many Americans fell here. We were stationed, about 20 men and 1 officer, in a dugout which was not completed and from which we had driven the Americans. “Here lay a dead American. He had received a bullet through the chest and a head wound. He wore two small identification tags which were marked ‘Geo. Stefenson, 15 May, 1917. One tag was left on the body, the other one the officer took to. send back to regimental Head- quarters. The American also carried a wallet, in which were photographs of his father and mother, many snapshots, a calling card and a let- ter from his mother. “The card bore the name ‘Geo. Stefenson, N. Y., Broadway.” I've forgotten the house and street num- ber. One of the snapshots was of the dead American himself standing by an auto. The letter from his mother said that she was glad he would soon come home on a furlough. The German officer read us the let- ter, translating it into German. He kept the wallet, together with the identification tag. Also the photos of his father and mother. He gave me the snapshots and calling card as souvenirs. - We buried the American on that spot. The next day we were relieved and sent to a different part of the front. “The dead American named ‘Geo. Stefenson’ was buried on the 13th of September, 1918, ::‘f was killed the night before, during our at- “During the march to the front my officer came to me during a halt and told me to de- stroy the snapshots that had belonged to the American, for if I fell into the hands of the French and they found them on me, it would go hard with me. So I tore them up. I stayed with my regiment until the armistice and came home, not quite healthy, but happy, to my mother. My brother did not come home from France. He is buried there. “Now to my wish to the editor. If the rela- tives of George Stefenson could be found it would afford me great pleasure to transmit to them (and they would also perhaps be happy to hear) where and when their brother died. I know how much I am interested in my dead brother, and no doubt they would be just as interested. “Now comes a matter wholly concerning my- self. America is a rich land and there is much work there. Is there not in great America some person who could help me, give me credit or help me find work? I have suffered much since the war. For a long time since my dis- charge I was out of work and now am tem- porarily engaged as a painter in a foreign land. It'is awful hard to make a living. * * * ” (X3 UCH is Paul Schreiber’s letter. Although he may not have realized it, the letter in reality contains two stories—one of the Ameri- cah who didn't come back, the other of the German who did. The translation is taken from a copy now & part of the Army records. Just how it got there I do not know. Some fellow with a heart in him must have got hold of Schreiber’s letter in the editorial depart- ment of the New York newspaper., Eventually it found its way to the War Department and to the Quartermaster Corps in Washington. At “On, October 6, I took a detail back, located the bodies and buried both in ¢ common grave.” By Leland Stone. any rate, on June 17, 1927, a translation of ex-Corpl. Schreiber’s letter was sent to the American Graves Registration Service head- quarters in' the Rue Molitor, Paris. It is the “A. G. R, 8” which has superintended and conducted the search for our missing soldiers ever since 1919. Here was an entirely new lead, supplied by a German ex-corporal from a village in Lithuania. The quartermaster general’s accompayning notation was: “It is thought that the dead American re- ferred to is Pvt. George West Stevenson, 79th Company, 6th United States Marines, who en- listed May 15, 1917. This marine was missing in the early part of the St. Mihiel drive and was later presumed to have been killed. The date of his death is on the records as September 15, instead of September 12. That same month the Q. M. C. secured from Pvt. Stevenson’s mother, out in Utah, her son’'s dental chart. She expressed her happy surprise that there was still & possibility that her boy's body would be found and she expressed what hundreds of other American mothers have felt when she added: “We appreciate the efforts of the Government service to clear up all such cases as our son’s and we feel grateful for what has been done.” Thus, in July, 1927—almost a full nine years after—the search was launched for the body of Pvt. Stevenson. It had been started years be- fore, like so many others, but there had been not a single definite clew. Now the American Graves investigator in the St. Mihiel sector was supplied with the above correspondence, with the dental chart, with maps of the St. Mihiel salient showing the German and American posi- tions near Thiaucourt on the days and nights of September 12, 13 and 14, 1918. By checking up on the locations and distances mentioned by Schreiber, the partially completed dugout which his letter mentions was found. No bedy could be lecated there nor for 50 meters on any side of the dugout. Nor, so the investi- gator reported, could the missing identity tag be discovered in a minute search of the terrain. Meanwhile, further possibilities had been opened up by another dispatch from Washing- ton. “Your attention is called to unidentified United States soldier U-3261, exhumed May 3, 1919, from near Xammes, Meuse et Moselle, E. 363.6, north 244.6, and reburied in grave 160, section 16, plot 4, St. Mihiel American Cemetery. The present grave location is grave 19, row 28, block B, in the same cemetery. It will be noted that the dental chart for this unidentified soldier checks in many respects with that of Pvt. Stevenson.” The co-ordinates or Army map localities men- tioned above for unknown soldier U-3261 proved to coincide very closely with the frontline spot where Schreiber reported the American “George Stefenson” had been buried. The investigator found that “U-3261" was the only unidentified American soldier who had been discovered in that particular spot. In accordance with in- structions the body of “U-3261" was exhumed from St. Mihiel Cemetery and a report sent back to Paris. N November 3, 1927—approximately nine months from the day Paul Schreiber wrote his letter in Lithuania and only five months after it came to the Government's attention— Capt. E. J. Heller of the American Graves Reg- istration Service wrote to the superintendent of St. Mihiel Cemetery: “Unknown United States soldier U-3261, now buried in grave 19, row 28, block B of your cemetery, has been identified as Pvt. George West Stevenson, 79th Company, 6th United States Marines. You are directed to change all records and the inscription on the grave marker to read accordingly.” By comparison of the teeth of “U-3261” and the dental chart of * Pvt. Stevenson positive identification had been made—as had been done literally in hundreds of other cases in the search for America’s lost sol= diers since the war ended. At the same time these instruce tions were sent to France another letter from Washington went west to Utah. It told Pvt. Stevenson’s mother that her boy’s body had been found, that it rests in an American cemetery in France and that soon his name would replace the now un- necessary letters “U-3261" on the white marble cross above his grave. That is the story of one missing American soldier who never came back. And the story of Paul Schrei- ber, the German ex-corporal, who did go back home? The Army rec- ords do not show whether some one in “great America” helped him fto find work or even whether he has ever been told that his letter w8 chiefly responsible in bringing back one more from the nimbus of the missing and unknown to the roll eall of the identified known. Here is but one of hundreds of stories which the Graves Registration Service has written into the official ~ Army records during the last nine years. In that time at least 1,000 ° American soldiers, either missing or unknown, have been found and identified as a result of what is un- _ doubtedly the greatest organized search for missing soldiers that the - world has ever known. And it fole lows a war which made their discove ery a thousand times more difficult and discouraging a task than any previous war had done. But the work has gone on and still goes on, in every battlefield in France, while very few Americans are acquainted with its scope and its unique service to American homes and families. It is a task filled with mystery, with wonder, with harsh reality. and with a heroism of its own. And, curious as it may seem, the majority of investigators have been doughboys themselves. Old Army men who were with the A. E. F., fellows who know Army methods, habits amd clothes; who knew trench life under fire and what awful apologies were sometimes dignified by the name dugout. Perhaps that, more than anything else, explains why the A. G. R. 8. has found scores of men who on logical grounds were hopelessly lost. I have talked with several veteran investigme tors, each loaded with stories if you can shake them up and pry them loose. One of them gave me this prescription for finding lost soldiers: “I go into the woods with the Army and comé out with the Army,” he said. “First of all, I'm going to find the equipment belonging to the outfit of the man I'm after. When an outfit goes in, it's going to leave its equipment behind. Once you locate its equipment you've got a starting point. They you line up the enemy® front and follow your company right through Any Americans killed from that company during that push ought to be buried there somewhere. Of course, sometimes they ain’t—but the chances are they ought to be. It's mostly a question of elimination. “I remember one day Jim McGourty and I were up in the Bois de Haumont in the Meuse- Argonne. We had a new case to work on and we found the body right to the blueprint. You don’t often get them that easy. “We needed water for the truck’s radiator, so I decided to wander down into the woods where there'd be some rainwater in a shellhole or something. I took a pail and, just by force of habit, my shovel. You get so on this inves- tigatin’® job that you almost take a shovel to bed with you. “Well, on the way down through the woods it came to me all of a sudden that this same chaplain who had tipped us off on the chap we'd just found had never made a mistake, Wherever he reported that he'd buried a body, soonor or later we'd always found it right in that locality. And I remembered that this same chaplain had reported long before how he'd buried an American at the end of a trench in this same Bois du Haumont. ‘That’s funny,’ I thought to myself. ‘Different ones have been down that trench and they all reported nobody but Germans was buried there. But this chap- plain has always been right.’ “So I wandered over there to take a look myself. The Germans were buried there all right. A hundred or more, lying head to fooly