Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner
The outbreak of the First World War marked the moment an entire generation began to lose its hope and innocence. The assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, on June 28, 1914, by Bosnian Serb nationalists created a domino effect that, due to various treaties that entangled most European nations with one another, resulted in the entire continent being engulfed by war.
This war unfolded at such an unfathomable scale, during an age of rapidly advancing technology and weaponry. In the beginning, they marched into battle with wide, optimistic eyes, eager to face the heroic battles that awaited them. By the time the fighting stopped with an armistice on November 11, 1918, the generation who eagerly marched off to war was now a generation completely disillusioned and lost.
They lost faith in the purpose of their fight and in the institutions that were supposed to support them. They lost direction in their own lives, struggling to find a way to move on or open up in civilian life. Many turned to the written word to express themselves, having now witnessed both extraordinary sacrifice and continental destruction. Some of history’s greatest writers and poets became prominent as a result of their post-war writings, such as T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Another figure whose work became a posthumous sensation was Alan Seeger.
On June 22, 1888, Alan Seeger was born into a well-off, cosmopolitan household in New York City. His father, Charles Seeger, Sr., was a successful businessman involved in international commerce. This allowed Alan to travel at a young age with his father to places like Mexico, providing the inspiration for some of his later poems. Seeger went to school at Harvard, where he interacted with fellow writers like Walter Lippmann and John Reed. After his graduation in 1910, he immersed himself in literary culture as he settled in New York’s Greenwich Village. In 1912, he moved again, this time to Paris, France—a city that embodied his love of culture and beauty.
When the war began in 1914, Seeger, still in Paris, had a front-row seat to the conflict. While America was still three years away from joining the war, he wasted no time joining the war efforts through the French Foreign Legion. Seeger embraced chivalric ideas of honor and sacrifice and saw service in the war as a means to live out those virtues.
Seeger volunteered to join the French Foreign Legion on August 24, 1914—just three weeks after Germany declared war on France. In a poem he wrote entitled “A Message to America,” Seeger offered a glimpse into his desire to fight while criticizing his native country for not yet joining him. “I have been too long from my country’s shores to reckon what state of mind is yours,” he wrote, “but as for myself, I know right well I would go through fire and shot and shell.”
Over the next two years, Seeger fought in the trenches and in open combat. In the fall of 1915, he participated in the Second Champagne Offensive, attempting to break through the German line in northeastern France. When not fighting, he wrote poetry on war, death, and honor, sending it back to America for publication. As the war progressed, the carnage and brutality of trench warfare began to wear on Seeger, as it had so many soldiers, but he still maintained his romantic belief in the glory and honor of battlefield fighting.
This romantic belief would ultimately be tested in July 1916, when Seeger took part in the massive Battle of the Somme. The battle lasted four months and produced over a million casualties. Just days into the offensive, Seeger was shot through the stomach while rallying troops to fight. He died on July 4th—American Independence Day. Before the battle, he had seemed to anticipate his own death in a poem entitled “I Have A Rendezvous with Death.” In it, he writes, “I have a rendezvous with Death, on some scarred slope of battered hill, when Spring comes round again this year and the first meadow-flowers appear.”
Seeger died before his work was widely known, but his poems were collected and published after the war, taking on a new life. Whereas so many in the Lost Generation processed the war through disillusionment, Seeger’s poems confronted death as an inevitability in life. Because he maintained a certain sense of romantic idealism, it became an important contribution to the post-war conversation, helping many former soldiers maintain a sense of hope and clarity in a time of despair and confusion. In this way, Seeger embodied an American tradition of answering the call of conscience and finding honor through sacrifice.
Caleb Franz has served as Program Manager at Young Voices since 2021 and is a scholar with the Bluegrass Institute. He’s also the author of THE CONDUCTOR: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father, released on October 15, 2024 through Post Hill Press. He’s currently working on a forthcoming biography about the early years of Ulysses S. Grant, set for release in 2028. Caleb’s work has been featured in various outlets including TIME, RealClear History, the Washington Examiner, the Independent, Religion and Liberty, and the Louisville Courier Journal, among others. Before this work, Caleb served in the U.S. Army through the Ohio National Guard for six years, which included one tour in Kuwait.
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