Fiske, Charles Henry, 3rd

Born December 3, 1896, in Boston, Massachusetts. Son of Charles Henry Fiske, Jr., and Mary Thorndike Fiske. Educated Noble and Greenough and Country Day School. Trinity College, Cambridge, England, and Harvard University, Class of 1919. Plattsburg Camp, 1916. Joined American Field Service, August 13, 1916; attached Section Three in France and Balkans to June 30, 1917. Volunteer chauffeur with Major Palmer to September, 1917. Returned to America, enlisted U. S. Infantry, Camp Upton, January, 1918, 77th Division. Sailed April, as Sergeant. Commissioned Second Lieutenant; attached 111th Infantry, 28th Division, July, 1918. Died at Red Cross Hospital No. 3, Paris, August 24, 1918, of wounds received in action near Fismes, Marne, August 12th. Buried American Cemetery, Suresnes, Seine.

CHARLES HENRY FISKE, 3D, left Harvard at the end of his Freshman year to join the Field Service. He was immediately sent out to Section Three, then stationed near Pont-à-Mousson, on the Lorraine front. A month or so later, when this Section was offered the chance to go with the French troops to the Balkans, "Charley" volunteered to go with it, and for the next eight months he drove his ambulance along the front in Albania and northern Greece.

" Fiske was one of the youngest members of the Section," wrote an older man who was thrown much with him at the time, "but he made many friends among his fellow drivers. He was modest and unassuming and always showed the keenest and most dependable sense of duty."

When he returned to France from the Balkans in June, the United States had joined the Allies, and Fiske sought a chance to enter his country's army. At that time, however, enlistment was impossible in France, so for several months Fiske served as a volunteer driver for Major Frederick Palmer then in charge of the war correspondents attached to the American army. "Fiske had the gift," wrote Major Palmer, "of making a good first impression and improving it upon acquaintance. He was as dear to me as if he were my own son."

In September, 1917, he returned to America and, finding himself too young to be accepted at any officers' training camp, re-entered Harvard where he became a member of the Harvard Regiment. But his eager heart was overseas and, as soon as he became of age, he enlisted at Camp Upton, graduating early in April as an officer candidate.

From Camp Upton, Fiske was ordered to France with the 77th Division. He served with this division as a sergeant until July when he was promoted to the rank of Second Lieutenant and assigned to the 111th Infantry of the 28th Division.

Six days after joining the 28th Division, while on duty near the village of Fismettes, he was struck in the shoulder by the fragment of a shell. After an emergency operation had been performed in a field hospital he was sent back by a canal boat to Paris where he died, August 24th, in Red Cross Hospital No. 3, while undergoing a second operation. The funeral was held in the hospital on August 27th and his body was interred in the American Military Cemetery at Suresnes.

A friend, who knew and loved Fiske and who returned to America with him in 1917, wrote at the time of his death: "I think his first quality was his modesty. He never realized that everyone on shipboard watched him with admiration. Everyone I talked to asked me who that glorious boy was and what he had been doing. He, on the other hand, said to me more than once, 'It is foolish to think that anything you do or are is your own self. It is all the result of what some one else has done for you."'

Harvard University awarded him posthumously the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Two scholarships in his honor have also been established by his parents. One is to be given to a French student desirous of studying at Harvard and the other will be tenable at Trinity College, Cambridge, by an American nominated by the President and Fellows of Harvard University.

• Tribute from Memorial Volume of the American Field Service, 1921