By Stephen Smoot
Among the last works of the great Marcus Tullius Cicero was De Officiis, or “On Duties.” In the last year of his life, with his career work of strengthening the old Republic burning down around him, Cicero addressed this treatise to his son to explain duty.
His words’ impact carried his message over the centuries and shaped the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers. In a sense, Cicero’s ideal of duty is the American ideal of duty going back to the beginning.
Towards the opening of his work, Cicero shares the basic human instinct, that of each individual’s own survival, stating that “Nature has endowed every species of living creature with the instinct of self-preservation, of avoiding what seems likely to cause injury to life or limb.”
Cicero then relates later in that paragraph that departure from instinct separates man from the beasts, and it is right that he remove himself from that basic instinct as much as possible. “Man—because he is endowed with reason, by which he comprehends the chain of consequences, perceives the causes of things, understands the relation of cause to effect and of effect to cause, draws analogies, and connects and associates the present and the future—easily surveys the course of his whole life and makes the necessary preparations for its conduct.”
In other terms, man has the capacity to measure basic instinct against higher values and morality. He can act against his individual instinct, but in the cause of duty, virtue, and honor.
“Nature likewise by the power of reason”, as Cicero explains, gives mankind a path by which he may set aside the notion of what is best for him to serve what his best for his spouse, his children, his family, friends, community, even the nation at large.
Humanity also brings a “search for truth” about “the wonders of Creation”, a “feeling for . . . propriety.” Cicero notes that “It from these elements that is forged and fashioned that moral goodness which is the subject of this inquiry—something that, even though it be not generally ennobled, is still worthy of all honour; and by its own nature, we correctly maintain, it merits praise, even though it be praised by none.”
And sometimes, that moral goodness is intentionally hidden from public view until truth demands its revelation.
In the Year of Our Lord 1941, after the Empire of Japan launched a destructive surprise attack on United States forces at Pearl Harbor, Aubrey Stewart of Piedmont, West Virginia, chose to do his duty for his country.
Stewart had a good-paying job at West Virginia Pulp and Paper, the respect of his friends and the community, and had aged beyond the years in which the United States military would have drafted him. Yet he felt the call of duty, enlisted in the United States Army, and was processed into service not long after in Clarksburg.
His service, and his powerful sense of duty, would end during the Battle of the Bulge alongside his comrades-in-arms, only months before war in Europe would come to a close.
Duty, especially based in moral goodness, can even rise higher than volunteering to serve, and perhaps the sacrifice for, one’s country. Cicero stated that “all that is morally right rises from some one of four sources: it is concerned either (1) with the full perception and intelligent development of the true; or (2) with the conservation of organized society, with rendering to every man his due, and with the faithful discharge of obligations assumed; or (3) with the greatness and strength of a noble and invincible spirit; or (4) with the orderliness and moderation of everything that is said and done, wherein consist temperance and self-control.”
By the winter of 1944 and 45, Stewart had risen to the rank of Staff Sergeant and served in the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion. Their job lay in working the 155 mm howitzers in support of advancing Allied infantry. The 333rd was a segregated black unit, as President Harry Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces lay in the future.
By this point, the walls of Allied forces had closed in on the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler. His armies remained in full retreat for almost a year and he calculated that one last effort could break his enemies and win the day for himself and his twisted idealistic visions.
German armies in the West took the offensive and drove United States and British forces into temporary disarray. All this came during one of the most frigid and unforgiving winters in living memory there.
Stewart and 10 other soldiers in the 333rd got separated in the confusion and made their way to the village of Wereth in Belgium.
Cicero explained the relationship between duty and its establishment of the “common bonds” connecting people “Of this again there are two divisions—justice, in which is the crowning glory of the virtues and on the basis of which men are called “good men”; and, close akin to justice, charity, which may also be called kindness or generosity.”
He added also that “the first office of justice is to keep one man from doing harm to another, unless provoked by wrong.”
Stewart and the other men quickly were offered shelter by a family in Wereth. The family had every intention of providing a safe haven for the men until the danger had passed.
The danger then came almost to the family’s doorstep. The nearby SS unit had received word that American soldiers had found refuge in the town and they came with the intention to kill instead of capture. All knew that black soldiers would endure the worst possible treatment at their hands.
Stewart and the others then made a decision against every instinct of survival, but in line with every morally good sense of duty. They left the home to ensure the safety of those strangers who cared for them, unwilling to risk the lives of Belgians they had never known before.
When next Sergeant Stewart and the others were found, it was months later. Those who found him experienced the full horror of what the SS did to each man. Each were brutally tortured and left to die in the ice and snow. A storm covered their remains until spring.
Their sacrifice was covered as well. Cold War priorities quickly replaced those of World War II. As the Spencer Tracy film Judgement At Nuremberg suggested, it was seen as more important to recruit West Germany as an ally than bring to justice all who had committed atrocities in the war.
Cicero lists two types of injustices in the overt wrong that one can do to another. The SS troops who tortured and killed soldiers with no capacity to defend themselves perpetuated that. Cicero also noted another “on the part of those who, when they can, do not shield from wrong those upon whom it is being inflicted.”
The intentional shelving of the story of what happened to those soldiers represented an injustice perpetrated on them, but a small group of men’s tireless efforts reversed that. Kip Price of Piedmont, then Marion County, and Paul Frederick McCue of Clarksburg, a World War II veteran who just turned a century old, took up the cause of the Wereth 11 to share their virtue with the world.
These men brought the story of the Wereth 11 to United States Senator Joe Manchin, who honored their virtuous dedication to duty in Senate Resolution 99 in the 115th Congress, which was passed unanimously.
Price and McCue have one more goal to achieve in the service of ensuring that the story of sacrifice, virtue, and those notions of virtue, duty, and honor have passed from fashion. Many have a hard time imagining themselves rising above convention without models of duty, honor, and virtue. Passing a commemorative day not only honors their heroism, but will help instruct future generations in those values our nation’s Founding Fathers held most dear.
And what better lesson could children learn than that, especially on Memorial Day?
The West Virginia State Legislature needs to pass this measure to honor these common men and their uncommon sacrifice in the name of duty, honor, and virtue.
