Marjorie Gibbon’s handwriting is not easy to read. It takes several tries to make out some of the words, even after one gets acquainted with her hand. One cannot examine in detail each person or place or event mentioned in every letter, unless one is doing an editing project of the letters themselves, or else no book using archival sources would ever get written. But in this excerpt, I looked more closely at some of the details. The excerpt reads:
But 25000 British prisoners seems hard to understand. The correlary[sic] that the Germans suffered terribly in killed is of some brutal comfort – How hideous it all is – The Archbishop says he talked recently with Sir D. H. & that he declares the German soldiery must literally be wiped out – before victory is ours – One lives from day to day – hoping – fearing – praying – A year ago tonight we were a happy crew at the Peppers – the Franklin Peppers. How preposterous it would have seemed had anyone forecast the future – dear Harold’s doom – Tom in a little village in the north of England – you in another little walled town somewhere in France – a tool in the hands of the Army –
The image is of the fifth page of a ten-page letter. The great German offensive has started, and the British are reeling from the onslaught. German casualties at this time were lower than the British, despite what Mrs. Gibbon writes; official dispatches, which form the basis of many newspaper stories, tended–as seems to happen in all wars–to exaggerate enemy losses. The home front is worried and wary, and weary of the war. Mrs. Gibbon has been active in the Red Cross, raising her family, keeping her social circle going, even in the midst of tragedy for many.
The Archbishop mentioned in her letter is Cosmo Gordon Lang, who visited Philadelphia. He had in November 1914 controversially criticized extreme anti-German propaganda, which in the atmosphere of war-time damaged his reputation, but he did not waiver in support of the Allied effort. His visit to the United States was widely praised. “Sir D. H.” is Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force.
The war has affected her circle, not just her. Dr. Gibbon is of course the “tool in the hands of the Army.” Tom is Thomas McCrae, of Jefferson Medical College. Born in Canada, educated at Johns Hopkins, he was a friend and colleague of the great clinician Sir William Osler, with whom he wrote the multi-volume “Osler’s Modern Medicine.” He was the brother of Dr. John McCrae, killed in January 1918, author of the most famous poem of the war, “In Flanders Field.” It is not clear what Thomas McCrae’s duty is in England. Lawyer Benjamin Franklin Pepper, known as Franklin, is serving in France. In September the 39-year-old will be killed in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
As if the war did not bring tragedy enough, the Gibbon’s good friend Harold Yarnall was murdered in March 1917 when he surprised a burglar in his house.
When I examined the Gibbon Family Correspondence, the collection had not been cataloged and, indeed, many of the letters were still in their envelopes. The extensive correspondence of the Gibbon family contains many details of what it was like to live through the war in Philadelphia.