"From prison to prison. . ."
----Harry Crosby's diarySaint Mark's School was founded in 1865 to educate young gentlemen sufficiently in Greek and Latin and mathematics and rhetoric to get them into Harvard College or, in the infrequent instance of a boy's lesser ambition, Yale or Princeton. Beyond this, the school instructed its boys in good manners and manliness, and above all sought to lead them toward such grace and piety as might be required to secure their admission into a Protestant Heaven. The catalogue assured parents that Southborough (or Southboro, as it is also called) was "singularly free from objectionable features," and that the "school's order and management are in conformity with the principles and spirit of the Episcopal Church." Prayers were said daily, under the charge of the headmaster, Rev. William Greenough Thayer.
Father Thayer had become headmaster of St. Mark's in 1894, while Harry's father was president of the Alumni Association. During the ripest era for boarding schools---from before World War I till the decade before World War Il---he was one of a patriarchal group of Great Headmasters (Frank Boyden of Deerfield, Endicott Peabody of Groton, Father Sill of Kent, George St. John of Choate, one or two others) who believed that the nation's best interest was served by the cultivation of a Christian elite. To Dr. Thayer, "distinction of brain and physique, opportunity and personality" were what made "this world worth living in." The distinction he had in mind must have been between social class and social class rather than between one of his students and another, because personal quirks and singularities were not encouraged at his school, which embraced as a principal virtue the repression of peculiarities, the smoothing of rough edges, the correction of eccentricities.[...]
So St. Mark's students would often gather during Harry's time at the school to hear lectures from graduates recently returned from the war zones of Europe, or to see moving pictures of the American Flying Corps or the American Field Service Ambulance Corps. They would also assemble to listen to ghost stories told by one or another of the masters, and on an evening early in 1916 they sat at Robert Frost's feet in the library while he read "Mending Wall," "The Road Not Taken" and "The Death of the Hired Man."[...]
Stephen Galatti, a graduate of St. Mark's with the class of 1906 and second in command of the American Ambulance Corps in France, appealed in the spring of 1916 to the school for a donation of a Ford ambulance, costing a thousand dollars. He noted in his letter to The Vindex that such ambulances, emblazoned with the name of the donating school, had already been given by Pomfret, St. Paul's, Middlesex and Andover. The students of St. Mark's immediately drummed up two thousand five hundred dollars and sent it to the Field Service of the American Ambulance, care of the Boston banking house Lee, Higginson & Co., for the purchase of two ambulances.
The head of the Ambulance Corps (familiarly called simply the Ambulance), A. Piatt Andrew, was a friend of Harry's mother and father, and when he wrote to thank the school he gave a teasing hint to the boys of high adventure waiting at the Front:
Gifts of this kind are particularly welcome at the moment as a considerable number of our cars have been destroyed during the past few weeks. At the very moment, when we are hoping to enlarge our service in response to the invitation of the French Army, we've had 125 cars working in the vicinity of Verdun during the great battle, running up very close to the lines, and over roads pitted with shell holes and much encumbered by motor trucks and the whole paraphernalia of war, running for the most part in the obscurity of the night. This work has told heavily on our equipment.)
Mrs. Crosby was active in the American Field Service, which sponsored the Ambulance Corps, and her husband, feeling as he did about the Emperor Napoleon, and clamor, and manhood, sympathized with Harry's ambition to test himself under the gun. There had been talk for a couple of years by Teddy Roosevelt about raising his own private regiment, so Mr. Crosby wrote him on behalf of his son and Gardner Monks. Though he received an encouraging reply, the plan to take a club of gentlemen warriors into battle against The Hun washed out when President Wilson forbade the organization of private regiments.
[...]At graduation most of Harry's class, upon the urging of teachers and headmasters and parents and deans, entered Harvard. Harry hung around Manchester for a few weeks, practicing at the wheel of his Studebaker and his father's Lancia, managing to worry his mother about drink and excess, looking through fated, doomed eyes into the eyes of quite a few young ladies, kissing most of them, flying high on dreams of high deeds. On July 6, with Tote Fearing and another classmate, Charles Merrill Chapin, Jr., he sailed from New York aboard the Espagne for Bordeaux, from monastery to combat, "from prison to prison," as he liked to say.
[...]A newsclipping from a Boston paper reported that Harry would be the youngest ambulance driver in France, but this was not true: at nineteen he was a year older than the minimum age required for enlistment in the Corps. Volunteers were expected to know how to drive and repair cars; they were obliged to buy their own uniforms and to pay for their transportation to Bordeaux and Paris, eighty-five dollars going and, with luck, eighty-five coming home.
[...]To this day Edward Weeks, who later became editor of The Atlantic Monthly, can recall his first sight of Harry: tall, with light hair which he did not part in the middle, according to the fashion of the day, but cut short in some streamlined manner singular to him, perfectly fitting him. Weeks remembers Harry's skin, how clean it looked, its luster and quick blush. And Harry's mouth, curling quickly from a pout to a winning smile, and back if something displeased him. He was struck by Harry's Boston accent, and his French, almost as fluent as Fearing's, which he used to joke with waiters or with French officers returning to the war from promotional missions in Washington and New York.
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