By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The century-old New York Times headline- “Marry in Haste in War”- jolted me out of the daze of a late night online genealogy research session. The article discussed my great uncle Charles Alphonsus Duffy, a forgotten Irish American hero from World War I, a forgotten American war. The headline captured the last year of his young life.
Charles was born in 1890 in New York City and grew up in the Kips Bay neighborhood, within steps of Bellevue Hospital and the East River. His Catholic family was large, with nine siblings, including his younger sister (and my grandmother) Florence Duffy O’Brien. All four of his grandparents were poor immigrant laborers from Ireland.
By the early 1900s, Charles’ father (Charles Henry) and uncles had significantly improved the family’s prospects and established a successful building materials business called J.P. Duffy Company. Eventually, Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley would invest in it, and several of Charles’ other sisters would marry prominent New York businessmen, one a close friend of Babe Ruth.
Charles was tall with a medium build, gray eyes and dark hair. He graduated from Manhattan College and afterwards worked as a clerk in the family business. As with so many other young men of his era, the onset of World War I changed his life trajectory forever.
After America entered the war in the summer of 1917, Charles sought a U.S. Army commission at the Madison Barracks near Lake Ontario, a hundred year old military installation named after President James Madison. He failed because of an injury, but soon afterwards was drafted when Congress passed the Selective Service Act. Charles entered basic training at Camp Upton on Long Island and quickly rose in the ranks.
In the Spring of 1918, Charles received notice of his deployment to France. It was the eve of the Hundred Days Offensive, the decisive Allied maneuver designed to end the five-year bloody stalemate in Europe. Charles made his own decisive moves on the domestic front before he left.
Charles was dating Guenn McCarthy, the twenty-three year old daughter of Thomas and Augusta “Gussie” McCarthy. Thomas was the treasurer of Austin, Nichols & Co., a large wholesale grocery business. Family lore says Gussie named Guenn after her favorite 1884 novel, “Guenn: A Wave on the Breton Coast” by New York writer Blanche Willis Howard.
Word of the pending deployment to Europe greatly accelerated the young couple’s courtship. Charles proposed. Guenn accepted.
As reported by The New York Times, arrangements for the “war-hastened wedding” were made on a Friday and the ceremony held the next day, Saturday, March 16, 1918, at New York’s Church of the Blessed Sacrament on Broadway and 71st Street. Thanks to the invention and growing popularity of the telephone, “verbal invitations were extended to the relatives.”
Soon after the wedding, Charles shipped out to Europe to join the Hundred Days Offensive. Although Charles and Guenn were now separated by the Atlantic Ocean, their affection was infectious. Within a few months, Charles’ younger brother Richard, a carpenters mate stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, married Guenn’s sister, Augusta Mona McCarthy.
At about the same time, and perhaps an omen of future sad tidings, Charles’ father died unexpectedly. Still, the future seemed bright for the newlyweds. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper reported Charles’ passion to serve despite having inherited “a fortune” from his father.
In the Fall of 1918 in northeastern France, Charles was swept up into the Meuse-Argonne Offensive along with over one million other American soldiers. Meuse-Argonne claimed 28,000 German lives, 26,277 American lives, and an unknown number of French lives. Led by legendary General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, it was one of the largest and deadliest campaigns in American military history.
Ultimately, of course, all history is personal. On October 14, 1918, newly-promoted Lieutenant Charles A. Duffy, Company K, 11th infantry, was defending the Madeleine Farm near the front at Verdun, France. Just days before, the American Expeditionary Forces had captured the strategic farm site, but thereafter endured withering machine gun and artillery fire as the German forces tried to take it back.
Uncle Charles was wounded in action at the farm and transported to Army field hospital 29. He died there on the same day, just 28 years old and with his whole life before him. A few weeks later, leaders of the warring nations signed the November 11, 1918 armistice ending the conflict.
Charles was buried, alongside 15,000 fellow soldiers, in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, France. They all rest together beneath a blanket of soft green grass in eight large, carefully tended rectangular plots. Hundreds of sentinel trees stand eternal watch.
One day after Christmas 1918, another New York Times article reported the sad news to Charles’ hometown. The grieving Duffy and McCarthy families held a memorial service on December 28, in the same church that had hosted Charles’ and Guenn’s wedding just before St. Patrick’s Day nine months earlier.
Because of war, Charles married Guenn in haste and left her behind in haste. In 1911 in the Illustrated London News, G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
It must have been quite a love. Guenn lived for another fifty years. She never remarried.
(A condensed version of this story was published in The Salt Lake Tribune on October 14, 2018, see: https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2018/10/14/commentary-war-people/ )
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
