'I Was as Grieved and Shocked as Any Man Could Be'

In 2018, a century after his grandmother's beloved older brother was killed in France during the closing days of World War I, Joby Warrick wrote about his efforts to find out what had happened to Marine Pvt. Foster Stevens. Warrick says he received a "powerful response" from readers—but he wasn't expecting to hear a detailed account of his great-uncle's death in the voice of a man who was there. He says he received a letter from Ohio man Byron Scarbrough, saying, "My grandfather was Private James Scarbrough, 83rd Company 3/6, and he considered Foster one of his very best friends."

In what Warrick calls a "jaw-dropping series of coincidences," James Scarbrough, who had long been silent about his wartime experiences, opened up to his grandson in the years before his death, recounting memories including his friendship with Stevens, who was assigned to his rifle company in June 1918, two months after he arrived in France. "We both liked to raise hell, hunt, and fish," Scarbrough said. "We were like two peas in a pod." Byron Scarbrough taped many of the conversations, including the one in which his grandfather, who died in 1989, finally spoke about Stevens' death after a 1985 visit to a war cemetery in France.

• Scarbrough said Stevens, who had been by his side in many battles, was killed by shrapnel during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which historians consider the biggest battle US troops have ever been involved in. Stevens was one of more than 26,000 American soldiers killed in the offensive.

• Scarbrough said Stevens was thrown from his foxhole by a German shell that landed moments before the trench whistle gave the signal to attack. "A piece of shrapnel the size of a silver dollar had gone in his mouth and out the back of his neck," he said. "I was as grieved and shocked as a man could be."
• Scarbrough said he returned to the site that night. "I scooped him up. I sat there with him all night, trying to find the words, not knowing what to say, as if he could hear me," he said. "It was the longest night of the war for me."
• He said he buried his friend at sunrise. "I dug him a grave, stepped down and laid my friend there," he said. "Throwing that first shovel of dirt on him hurt me more than throwing dirt on my own father's face." Stevens was later reburied in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in northeast France. More than 14,000 Americans are buried there, including almost 500 doughboys who were never identified.

story continues below

Stevens died on Nov. 2, 1918, but his family didn't get the telegram until Nov. 30 that year, weeks after the Nov. 11 armistice, Warrick writes at the Washington Post. His family had celebrated the end of the war, believing the 25-year-old would soon return. More than a century later, relatives were "initially awestruck" by the story Byron Scarbrough shared and "later came to see it as a gift and to see the storyteller as a long-lost family friend," Stevens writes. "For the first time, the Stevens family knew what had happened on Nov. 2, 1918. More important, we knew that someone was with Foster Stevens at the end and saw to his burial." Click for the full piece. (More World War I stories.)