Newlin, John Verplanck

Born May 16, 1898, in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Son of Richard M. and Alice Eisenbrey Newlin. Home, Whitford, Pennsylvania. Educated Haverford School, Pennsylvania, and Princeton University, Class of 1919. Plattsburg Camp, 1916. Joined American Field Service, May 26, 1917; attached Section Twenty-nine. Wounded August 3rd, Montzéville. Died of wounds, night of August 5, 1917. Croix de Guerre, Médaille Militaire. Buried Fleury-sur-Aire, Meuse. Body transferred to American Military Cemetery, Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, Meuse.

JOHN VERPLANCK NEWLIN met death while still but a lad of nineteen, yet there is compensation in the thought that what he gave was a life still fresh with the dreams of youth and untouched by any disillusionments. As one of his friends at Princeton said. " He had such a sense of getting the most out of life." And it is exactly this quality which stands out so clearly in Jack's letters written during the brief month he spent at the front. Ten days before his death and just as the section was beginning work in the Verdun sector where he was hit, he wrote: "The atmosphere and daily routine of the life up here is so entirely different from our life in back of the lines that I feel I am living in a dream. But the dream is so horribly delightful and weird that I don't want to wake up. I can't say that I love it,----that, my straight-laced countrymen might consider sacrilege,---but I am fascinated by it and love the excitement of it."

That this is not the mere exuberance of youth, unbacked by the sterner qualities which work at the front demanded, the following from a letter by his section leader, who was wounded by the same shell, will show: "Jack was in every way the best man in the section, always ready to do more than his share, always cheerful, never tiring. He was my best friend out there as well as the man I could always count on. It was always upon him that I called for a little more when it seemed that the men were tiring, and he never failed me. He met his end in the same spirit, smiling and brave. We were brought down together to the base hospital and never in that long drive did he make a sign that he was suffering."

"Jack" Newlin's military career was short. A member of the class of 1919 at Princeton, where he had been art editor on the "Tiger" and an editor of the "Litt" magazine, he attended Plattsburg during the summer of 1916 and in May of the following year left college to enlist in the American Field Service. His section, S. S. U. 29, left Paris on June 30, 1917, spent about three weeks in the vicinity of Bar-le-Duc, and on July 23rd started work at the front a little to the west of Verdun. It was at the poste of Montzéville on the night of August 3rd, that a shell, landing near the entrance of the dug-out, wounded him severely just as he was on the point of starting his car. He was rushed to the hospital at Fleury where he was operated on the following evening. The next day he rallied sufficiently to see some of his comrades and to receive his citation and Croix de Guerre, but died about midnight.

Madame Jacquemaire, the daughter of M. Clemenceau, who was a nurse in the hospital in which he died wrote in a very touching letter to his mother:

"Malgré les efforts de tous, le brave enfant s'est éteint doucement et sans souffrance entre nos bras. Le Commandant Militaire lui avait fait remettre pour sa bravoure les plus hautes récompenses, la Médaille Militaire et la Croix de Guerre. Il a contemplé ces belles récompenses avec une joie profonde. . . . . Je suis fière d'avoir connu votre admirable enfant."

And a final tribute from a friend in the Ambulance Service cannot be omitted: "I knew Jack at Princeton. I as well as every one who was associated with him at College felt his attraction, his keenness, and his fineness. We felt that he was someone whom it was not only an opportunity but a privilege to know . . . . . You may mourn him as a son but you can never forget that he met death as fairly as any man has ever done."

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