The crown of Life? They imagined many other crowns!
Says André Cheronnet-Champollion, enlisted as a private in the French Army, and the third Harvard man to die in the war:
I often feel like a fool instead of like an honest man trying to do his duty. . . . I often wonder if I will ever come back to see René grow up, to be his first guide in the park and to watch his progress through St. Paul School and Harvard. When I compare my attractive New Hampshire home to the terrible gloom of the barracks and cantonments and I see the park in all its splendor and loveliness, even New York, which I used to curse at a good deal, now seems like a paradise that is out of reach. Never has America seemed so beautiful.
Writes Francis Reed Austin a couple of months before he got death and his Distinguished Service Cross for "extraordinary heroism in action near Haumont, France, November 11, 1918," at the age of twenty-one:
