U.S. Army Cpl. Arthur Briggs Church, 32, was killed on a French battlefield during an attack on Germany’s fortified Hindenburg Line on Sept. 28, 1918.
Marine Lt. Carleton Burr, 26, was leading his men in an advance on the battlefields of Picardie, France, when he was struck and killed by shrapnel on Sept. 20, 1918.
And in the skies over Chamery, France, on Bastille Day 1918, Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, the 20-year-old son of President Theodore Roosevelt, was shot down and killed in a dogfight with a flock of German planes.
Church, Burr, and Roosevelt, who all died in the final months of World War I, are just three of the 372 students, alumni and faculty whose names are engraved on the granite walls of the Memorial Room in Harvard’s Memorial Church.
The Great War left an enduring legacy on the Harvard campus. The Memorial Church, its bell, and the Memorial Room are all testaments to the sense of loss the University community felt in its wake.
“The Memorial Room commemorates the Harvard men who died in World War I, and to whom the church is dedicated,” said Edward Elwyn Jones, Gund University organist and choirmaster. “The Memorial Church holds such a prominent place on Harvard’s campus, and it is first a church dedicated to peace, but also to sacrifice. I think it is wonderful for us, especially this year, to be mindful of that sacrifice.”