The first Wednesday Chapel of the year at Middlesex is the annual Memorial Chapel, during which the community remembers the 43 Middlesex graduates who were killed in the two World Wars and in whose memory the Chapel is dedicated.
Longtime faculty member Mark Foster P'90, '01, '04, holder of the Nathanael Vining Davis ’33 Chair for Distinguished Teaching, spoke eloquently before Senior Master Ron Banay read the names of the 43 young men. Mr. Foster quoted the Homeric obituary, which he characterized as being "as honest as it is brief," adding, "It makes the point that a soldier is a distinct personality whose life and loved ones, whose skill or accomplishments, are valuable and dear to him. In the end, however, not his parents, not all his skill, nor his love of life can save him – he is utterly vulnerable and mortal."
Foster recounted the story of G. Pliny Allen '41, a 21-year-old staff sergeant with the 328 Bomber Squadron of the 93 Heavy Bomber Group, who was killed when his plane went down somewhere over Europe. He described Pliny's plaque - a mark left by every Middlesex graduate - as being "touchingly naive," for it "crudely depicts a scene in which a brave soldier, rifle in one hand and grenade in the other, exposes himself to enemy fire while his fellow soldiers take cover in a trench." Foster commented, "His father thought that the drawing on which the plaque was based was 'prophetic'– certainly it depicts a somewhat adolescent and romanticized notion of heroism."
In reflection, Foster believes the best way we can pay our respects to Pliny and the 42 other young men is "to acknowledge the facts of all their lives." As he elaborated, "They were young, just out of this school, or college; they loved baseball or football or theater or choral singing or the novels of Charles Dickens; they had families, sweethearts or new spouses – a few of them had very young children; they had aspirations; they went to war, and they died. Perhaps death is the state of ultimate indifference, and they are long past any sense of pride or shame at the way they performed in their lives or in that war, but I want to respect their intelligence, the intelligence I believe they gathered and put to use here, to tell you what I think they would say to us.
They say that the world is complicated: it is big, unpredictable, capricious, mysterious, and at times very dangerous. Of course, it’s beautiful and wonderful as well – Robert Frost said that 'Earth’s the right place for love,' that there can be no place better than this one, but in the same poem, he acknowledges that it’s a place that can make you feel lost, feel despair, shed tears.
You are being educated to find your way in a world that seems – if anything – less equitable, less forgiving, more politically divided, more climatically unstable, more angry, and at least as dangerous as the world has ever been, and what those young men are saying to you from their silent portraits is this: when you go out into that world, your only true strength is in yourself – in your sense of decency, of justice, of humor, of fair play, your sense of yourself – this, and these, are what you have to confront that big, complex, beautiful, unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous world.
If those young men could speak, they would tell you to make the very most of your time here, in doing so to make the very most of yourself, and to go out into the world equipped with the same intelligence, compassion, honesty, and poise they surely acquired here by going here. 'What they dreamed be yours to do*.' So do it."
*"What they dreamed be ours to do, / hope their hopes, and seal them true" are the closing lines of Middlesex School's official hymn, "Rank by Rank."