Known But to God: The Unknown Soldier Comes Home

On November 11, 1921 — three years to the day after the guns fell silent — America buried a soldier nobody knew.

He was one of four unidentified American dead, exhumed from four World War I cemeteries in France. In October 1921, at the city hall in Châlons-en-Champagne, Army Sergeant Edward F. Younger — himself a decorated combat veteran — was given the solemn honor of choosing which one would represent them all. He placed a spray of white roses on the second casket from the right.

That unknown soldier came home aboard the cruiser USS Olympia, Admiral Dewey's old flagship. Arriving at the Washington Navy Yard on November 9, the casket lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, where some 90,000 mourners filed past. Then, on Armistice Day, a horse-drawn caisson carried him in a great procession across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery.

At the new Memorial Amphitheater, President Warren G. Harding officiated the state funeral. He placed the Medal of Honor — the nation's highest decoration — and the Distinguished Service Cross on the casket, telling the crowd that the soldier's death marked him "within everlasting glory of an American who died for his country." Dignitaries from Britain, France, and other Allied nations bestowed their own highest honors, including Britain's Victoria Cross. Across America, the nation observed two minutes of silence. Then the Unknown was lowered into his grave, the soil around him mixed with earth brought from France.

The idea had come from Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., who in December 1920 proposed bringing home "the body of an unknown American warrior who in himself represents no section, creed, or race... and who typifies, moreover, the soul of America and the supreme sacrifice of her heroic dead."

A plain marble slab first marked the grave; the grand white sarcophagus visitors know today was dedicated in 1932. A military guard began standing watch in 1926, and since 1937 the Tomb has been guarded around the clock — today by soldiers of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, "The Old Guard."

The soldier's name is known but to God. His tomb belongs to everyone.

The simple slab that first covered the grave bore the inscription now famous around the world: 'Here Rests in Honored Glory a Comrade in Arms Known but to God.' Later conflicts added their own unknowns beside him — soldiers from World War II and Korea in 1958, and from Vietnam in 1984. The Vietnam unknown was later identified through DNA testing and returned to his family in 1998, and that crypt now honors all missing service members from that war.

Photo: National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).