[Two Letters on the Death of Underage WWI Soldier Wainwright A. Merrill, an American from Cambridge, Massachusetts who served under an Assumed Identity in the Canadian Field Artillery—one of the First Servicemen from the U.S. Killed in the War].

“He was the first of the Cambridge boys to enlist, and to give his life for the allied cause.”

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War-date letters on the death of Wainwright A. Merrill, the first soldier to enlist from Cambridge, Massachusetts and one of the first Americans to die in the conflict.

At 17, as a Dartmouth College undergraduate, Wainwright A. Merrill joined a college military battalion preparing for the United States’ possible entrance into World War One. Turning 18, he transferred to Harvard in Fall 1916 to be with his family in Cambridge and joined the school’s Officer Training Corps program. An Anglophile, Merrill was eager to do more to support England’s cause against the Germans.

Merrill did not wait for the U.S. to enter the war. He left school that November and traveled to Kingston, Canada and volunteered as a gunner in the 6th Siege Battery of Canadian Garrison Artillery. Considered a minor in Canada, and without his father’s consent to volunteer, Merrill assumed a new name: Arthur A. Stanley.

In these two letters, Mrs. May Cranford Clark of Cambridge, a roundabout neighbor of Merrill’s family, discusses “Gunner Stanley’s” enlistment, battlefield death at the front at Ypres, Flanders in 1917, and his love for England. Clark addresses her letters to a Mrs. Tayler, an Englishwoman volunteering to help soldiers stationed there. Clark quotes a letter she received from “Gunner Stanley” who wrote of Rudyard Kipling:

“Perhaps you have heard that Gunner Arthur A. Stanley whom I asked you to be a friend died on November 6 from wounds caused by the enemies shell. ... Gr. Stanley was so fond of your England! May I quote just a passage from one of his letters. ‘Lately I’ve been pretty well confined to camp and Horsham [England] and haven’t gotten far. Three weeks ago I visited Mr. Kipling‘s home village, Burwash, about a quarter mile north of Hastings, where he has lived for a dozen years and more. It was a great trip by train and bicycle. I stopped the night at the ‘Rose and Crown,’ a model old English inn. I saw him too – but unfortunately had no opportunity to speak with him. Shelly‘s birthplace is but 2 miles west of here. I went there last week. This is the region which inspired his best poems of nature. I’ve heard what may be a descendants of the very sky lack which he apostrophized so sublimely. One can well appreciate his lose of the wild things, the blue fleecy clouded heaven, the May wind in the trees; and this fair green wood and hill and meadow land that is England. ... This beauty of the English countryside surely has approximated the ideal surroundings and pulsed with the best aspirations of countless men down the years., it is indeed a wonderful thing to know and feel. No one is more thankful for, or realises better than I, the splendid chance I am having to be here in my youth, which does not return to one.’  Poor child—only nineteen, and he heard and heeded the call of humanity months before his own country was awake to it. He is the first in our little circle to fall, in fact the first from our city of Cambridge.”

In a second letter to Tayler, Clark writes at length on Merrill’s death and the special bond between America and England:

“So many weeks have elapsed since your very kind note to me bearing the message of sympathy because of Gunner Stanley‘s death, that I must seem to lack appreciation. The truth is that I am deeply touched by your interest, and I shall never cease to admire the efficiency of the British League, nor cease to wonder how you and your associates can do the work of the soldiers’ correspondence so methodically, so thoroughly, and yet put so much warmth of heart into it. At one of our Post Office Mission Committee Meetings (First Church, Cambridge, Dr. Crothers minister) I spoke of the letters I had receive it from you. Our chairman was so impressed that she…incorporated most of their contents in her annual report. She ended by commending the relationship existing between British and American Alliance Women and said ‘you see Gunner Stanley was not allowed to drift beyond their love and care.’ Gunner Stanley’s true name was Wainwright Merrill. He had long been studying the cause of our allies, and long before we declared war felt that he must in honor, do his bit. On November 9, 1916, just after Roumania had been so mercilessly annihilated, he left for Montreal. He was the first of the Cambridge boys to enlist, and to give his life for the allied cause. He had many hardships and trials. At Montreal he was twice refused on account of over-height. In despair he went to Kingston Ontario, they were not anxious for American boys eighteen years old so he felt it necessary to be known as Arthur Ashton Stanley a clerk from Cheapside, London, and as such was received into the Canadian Field Artillery. His letters to friends have been remarkable, so much so that his English instructor at Dartmouth College, is even now arranging them for publication in the early fall.¹ You are right in your recollection that the boy had no mother, nor sister. He has an older brother in the service, and his father lives near us. He is a gentleman whom I have never seen, but since Wainwright’s death I have had several kind letters from him. He was greatly opposed to his son’s departure from home, but became reconciled to it so that frequent and affectionate letters passed between the two, after a few months of silence. If you do send the booklet ‘For Those Who Mourn’ may i’ll reserve the right to either keep it myself, or pass it on to this lonely father, who perhaps did not understand his talented son, but who is justly proud of his record both in academic and military life? ... I wish that Wainwright might’ve known of all your kind efforts in his behalf, no one would have been more appreciative, he was a darling, responsive child.”

Correspondence from a Cambridge, Massachusetts women who had a personal connection with one of the first U.S. casualties of the war, and sheds light on his untimely death.

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