A century later, a taped message solves the mystery of a WWI doughboy’s death
Published: 18 November 2024
By Joby Warrick
via the Washington Post newspaper (DC) website
portrait of PVT Foster Stevens
This portrait of Pvt. Foster Stevens in his Marine uniform belongs to Post reporter Joby Warrick, Stevens’s grandnephew. Stevens was killed in France during the waning days of World War I. (Warrick family photo)
Two Marines forged a friendship on the battlefields of World War I. One died in combat. Decades later, the survivor’s recorded memories bring a long-delayed closure.
Through five months of combat, they had been the survivors: the 83rd Company’s “old men,” though still in their 20s. Along the way, Marine Pvts. Jim Scarbrough and Foster Stevens had gone from being squad mates and comrades to best friends.
“We’ll just soldier through this, me and you,” Stevens had said in his mild North Carolina drawl as he put an arm around Scarbrough after a fierce nighttime skirmish with German defenders in June 1918. “I’ll be right here.”
That family was mine.
Stevens poses in his uniform in this family snapshot taken in 1918. (Warrick family photo)
Marine Pvt. Jim Scarbrough near his stateside training camp before his deployment to France in 1918. (Family photo)
As the morning unfolded, the two friends had taken their positions in neighboring foxholes, close enough to keep an eye on each other. There was a last-minute scurrying as the company lieutenant made adjustments to the lines. Scarbrough scampered to a new spot a few yards away, brushing past his friend as the rows of men in olive-drab uniforms waited for the trench whistles to signal the start of the attack.
Then came the shriek of incoming artillery fire. Scarbrough, a lanky factory worker from Ohio, jumped into another foxhole and hugged the dirt.
One of the German rounds landed so close that it violently shook the ground. According to his detailed account years later, Scarbrough poked his head up to see how his friend was doing. In the smoke and dust, he could see that Stevens had been thrown out of his foxhole by the explosion. He was lying with his arms and legs oddly twisted, like those of a discarded doll.
“When I got up,” Scarbrough said, “I saw the saddest thing I saw the whole war.”
The awful scene that Scarbrough witnessed was one that Stevens’s kin would know only in their imaginations. A tragedy had struck the family in the waning days of World War I, but the circumstances were unknown. It was an unsettling mystery that was handed down through three generations, and eventually to me. Marine Pvt. Foster Stevens was my great-uncle, my paternal grandmother’s beloved older brother.
One of the few tangible legacies of his life and service was a military portrait that my grandmother kept on display in her living room in a hamlet outside Goldsboro, North Carolina. She grieved over her brother throughout her life and rarely spoke about him. His personal effects were destroyed when a fire ravaged the family homestead in the 1940s.
For the children and grandchildren of Ina Stevens Warrick, most of what was known about her brother was summed up in two lines engraved in brass on a plaque beneath his portrait. They read: “83rd Co. US Marines, Killed in Action 1918.”
We also knew that the date of his death carried a particular poignancy: It had happened just nine days before the war ended.
After my grandmother died, the portrait came to occupy a spot in my office. For years, every workday began with an encounter with the young Marine, his somber gaze and folded hands gently reminding me of the questions I had never been able to answer.
In the summer of 2018, I traveled across France in an attempt to reconstruct what had happened. I consulted books and military historians, and I searched through military archives filled with maps and handwritten notes from a century ago. In the rolling farmland of eastern France, I traced the path of his unit — the 83rd Company, 3rd Battalion of the 6th Marine Regiment — through now-serene villages where men had fought on Stevens’s last day.
The research uncovered new clues and led to a long Washington Post article describing my search. But as the centennial of World War I’s final battle came and went, I convinced myself that the details of Foster Stevens’s final day were forever lost to time.
Until, suddenly, they weren’t.
Read the entire article on the Washington Post website.
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