ARMED FORCES: A Stillness at Arlington

A warm, late-autumn sun shone down on the cemetery. The last notes of the Star-Spangled Banner floated up from the tomb, mingling with the faint purr of a jet airplane, invisible in the sky above. Facing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the panorama of Washington beyond it stood a white-haired old man in a black Chesterfield coat. His face was pink, and in his right hand he held a black felt hat over his heart. As the anthem ended, Herbert Hoover, 81, stepped forward to meet an Army sergeant holding a large wreath of yellow chrysanthemums. He took the flowers and firmly laid them against the tomb, directly under the inscription: HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER

KNOWN BUT TO GOD. As the former President (substituting at the annual Veterans’ Day ceremonies for the homeward-bound President Eisenhower) turned and resumed his place, a soldier with a gleaming bugle sounded taps.

When Hoover and 2,500 other citizens left the tomb* after the annual ceremony, stillness descended on the scene, broken only by the precise footfalls of the ramrod-stiff sentry on his everlasting guard: he took 29 paces before the tomb, halted, about-faced, and resumed his march.

The Solemn Record. Behind the Unknown Soldier and his solitary guard lay the gently rolling countryside of northern Virginia and the 408 carefully tended acres of Arlington National Cemetery. In the cemetery lie the remains of 87,000, most of them military men and women, and on the headstones of their graves is carved a solemn record of history. The names themselves ring with historic significance : William Howard Taft, the only President to exercise his prerogative as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and select Arlington as his burial site; Admiral Robert (North Pole) Peary; Robert Todd Lincoln, James Garfield’s Secretary of War, and the only one of Abraham Lincoln’s sons to live to manhood ; General Phil Sheridan; Air General Henry (“Hap”) Arnold and Admiral Marc (“Turn on the Lights”) Mitscher; William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s World War I Secretary of the Treasury; Pianist and Polish Patriot Ignace Jan Paderewski, who rests in Arlington until Poland is free again; Navy Lieut, (j.g.) James V. Forrestal, later the first Secretary of Defense; Pierre L’Enfant, the French-born engineer who designed the city of Washington, also served as a peacetime major in the Army engineers; Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, sometime lieutenant-colonel in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteers during the Civil War; General Jonathan Wainwright of Corregidor. On a brooding hillock General John J. Pershing lies in lonely aloofness. Another small knoll is occupied by the grave of Lieut. General Arthur MacArthur; near by, a plot is reserved for his son. Humbler graves reflect the grimness of war and the greatness of American history: “James Parks, born a slave,” or, simply, “Unknown.”

Arlington was originally part of a 1,100-acre estate that John Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s son, purchased in 1778. His son, George Washington Parke Custis, built Arlington House (now a yellowing museum in the midst of the cemetery), modeled after a Greek temple, on a plateau overlooking the Potomac River. The estate was inherited by Mrs. Robert E. Lee, Custis’ daughter, and was the Lee home until Cavalry Colonel Lee resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and went off to Richmond on April 22, 1861 to take his place as a general officer in the Confederate Army.

The Urgent Problem. During the Civil War, the estate was occupied by Union troops; after the Battle of Bull Run, McDowell’s forces retreated to Arlington, where Abraham Lincoln visited the troops. As the war progressed, Washington was turned into an armed camp, its hospitals filled with wounded and dying soldiers. The available cemeteries filled up rapidly, and burial became an urgent problem that weighed heavily upon Major General Montgomery C. Meigs, the Army’s Quartermaster General, who was responsible for the military dead. One day, while he was walking in Washington, Meigs encountered Lincoln. The President noted that Meigs was distraught, asked him to go for a ride in his carriage.

The two crossed the Potomac to Arlington. Meigs was impressed by the beauty of the estate and the mansion, but his burial problems and bitterness against Lee suddenly overwhelmed him. Turning to Lincoln, he said: “Lee shall never return to Arlington.” A few minutes later, as the two men strolled around the grounds of the estate, they came upon a detail of soldiers carrying the bodies of several of their comrades. Meigs halted the soldiers and asked them where they were going. They were going to the burial ground at Soldiers’ Home in Washington. Meigs then turned to an Army captain and said, “Order out a burial squad and see that all the bodies in Arlington are buried on the place at once.” He turned to a small terrace bordering the garden beside the mansion. “Bury them here,” he ordered. Eventually, the bodies of General Sheridan and Admiral David Dixon Porter, as well as 2,111 unknown soldiers from Bull Run and the route to the Rappahannock River, were buried within a few yards of the mansion—on the theory that the Lees would never again live in a house surrounded by Union graves. They never did, although Robert E. Lee’s son, George Washington Custis Lee, successfully sued for recovery of the estate after the Civil War, and then sold it back for $150,000.

The Strange Wind. Shortly after the war, according to a popular story, some Washington women asked permission to put flowers and wreaths on the graves in Arlington. They had heard that such a custom had grown up among women in the South during the war. The War Department granted permission, the story goes, and designated May 30 as the decoration day, but attached a stern order: no flowers were to be placed on the graves of Arlington’s 300 Confederate troops, who were buried in a segregated area. The ladies brought their floral offerings to the cemetery and obediently left the Confederate headstones bare. Then, on the night of May 30, an unusually high wind arose and blew virtually all of the flowers from the Union graves onto the Rebel area. On May 30, 1868, Memorial Day was observed officially for the first time at Arlington, with General James A. Garfield as the principal speaker.

Today, Arlington is maintained by a crew of 90 ground keepers, who carefully tend the grounds, repair crumbling headstones and monuments, and dig graves with huge mechanical diggers that can scoop out a regulation 5-by-3-by-8-ft. hole in eight minutes. One man has the sole duty of patrolling the cemetery endlessly to remove withered wreaths and fading flowers from the markers. From neighboring Fort Myer, 60-odd husky, white-gloved soldiers act as pallbearers, buglers, riflemen (to fire a farewell volley into the air at every military burial) and 24-hour-a-day sentries at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Arlington’s population is growing at the rate of 75 funerals a week, and by 1969 or 1970, the cemetery will be filled with the nation’s honored dead. Before that time, presumably, an Unknown Soldier of World War II will be interred beside his older brother-in-arms. Congress has authorized such a burial, but last week, ten years after the war, no unknown warrior had been selected, and the Army Quartermaster’s Office was still “coordinating” its plans.

-The simple tomb at Arlington, of white Colorado marble, encloses the body of an un identified American soldier who fell in France during World War I. The body was selected from four unknown soldiers in the city hall at Chalons-sur-Marne by Army Sergeant Edward F. Younger, a twice-wounded veteran, who marched past the four caskets, dropped a spray of roses onto the second. “I passed the first one … the second. Then something made me stop,” said Sergeant Younger (who is him self now buried at Arlington). “And a voice seemed to say, ‘This is a pal of yours.’ I don’t know how long I stood there. But finally I put the roses on the second casket and went back into the sunlight.”