HEROES: Half Staff

On an old battlefield of Flanders, long years before certain armies met there to settle modern differences, a Dutch soldier was commended by his king. “Sire,” he replied modestly, “I break before I bend.” The King pondered a moment to confer the correct name on this excellent, albeit proud and slightly stubborn servant. He called him “stiff-necked” which being translated into Dutch is “Goethals.”

George William Goethals, son of a Dutch emigrant, attracted the roving notice of a Manhattan public school teacher. This percipient pedagogue besought a politician, and presently George W. Goethals was registered at West Point. A harassed and instinctively American registrar concluded that anyone inscribed as George W. must have been baptised George Washington. Hence an able Dutchman was graduated, second in his class, George Washington Goethals, and lived to become the second most eminent George Washington of the U. S. Army.

He taught a little at West Point. Then he went to Cincinnati, helped adjust some harnesses to the Ohio River. Similar river work on the Tennessee (Muscle Shoals Canal) and a canal near Chattanooga helped him make friends with dams, sluices, locks. Through the Spanish War he served as Chief Engineer in the Porto Rican Army. After planning forts near Newport he joined the General Staff in Washington, where his abilities caught the tiny, twinkling eyes of William Howard Taft. Mr. Taft spoke of him to President Roosevelt. President Roosevelt ordered him to Panama to cut a waterway from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Col. Goethals built the Panama Canal.

First Civil Governor of the Canal Zone, acting Quartermaster General during the World War, a member of the War Industries Board, Major Gen. Goethals retired in 1919. He sat in a Wall Street Office and remodeled strange, stubborn places of the earth as a distinguished consulting engineer.

In Panama, last week, a reunion was in progress. Workers on the great Panama Canal had convened from distant places to recall the days when “The Colonel” moved mountains; to recall how he heard their complaints, helped marry them, fathered them for seven sweating years. From Manhattan came a telegram that “The Colonel,” whose ill health had prohibited his passage to the reunion, had died.

In Panama remembrance went into mourning. Flags hung at half staff. “Geetles,”* as his name had been popularly mispronounced, was returning to West Point. He took his place, as always near the head, of the great Class which lies in the army cemetery, hearing no reveille.

*The original Dutch pronunciation was Hootals; the Anglicized version is Go-tols.