By Lynne Hasselman

Special to The Oregonian/OregonLive

On a sunny September 1917 day, Rebecca Deetz's two boys boarded a train in the Willamette Valley, bound for Camp Greene, North Carolina. At a 10-minute stop in Woodburn, they and other soldiers exchanged last handshakes and kisses with loved ones through open train windows.

Lunch boxes filled with fried chicken, homemade cake, and fruit were passed up for the journey. What Deetz, a Mennonite, said to her sons in those few moments wasn't known, but it was reported later that she had a premonition they wouldn't return.

Edwin, age 20, and Jonas, age 18, were raised in a faith that opposed participating in armed conflict, but once World War I was declared they faced excruciating pressure. Should they enlist and choose their branch of the military, wait to be drafted or to apply for conscientious objector status?

Like many from the area around their hometown of Needy, near Aurora, the Deetzs were pacifist Mennonites. Their mother, Rebecca, feared if her sons became conscientious objectors, they might be lynched by vigilantes. Throughout the Willamette Valley, there were reports of barns being striped with yellow paint, shots fired through windows, churches vandalized, and businesses run out of town.

Many agreed with former President Theodore Roosevelt that conscientious objectors were "slackers, pure and simple or else traitorous pro-Germans."

After weighing the demands of country and faith, Edwin convinced Jonas to enlist in the Oregon National Guard's Third Infantry Regiment. Four days after war was declared, they had joined the ranks of the 44,166 Oregonians who would serve overseas and stateside in World War I.

Edwin and Jonas arrived at Camp Greene for trench warfare training, and from there, were sent to Camp Mills on Long Island, New York, to await their embarkation orders to Europe. At 4:30 a.m. on Dec. 12, they left for the Hoboken Port of Embarkation in New Jersey.

While the Red Cross handed out corned beef sandwiches and hot chocolate, they waited in dimly lit sheds to board the SS Tuscania. In a fateful twist, after it delivered the Oregon boys, that ship was doomed to fall victim to German torpedoes.

On Christmas Day, Edwin and Jonas safely debarked at Liverpool and crossed the English Channel to snowy Le Havre, France. In Brest, the lice-infested troops took much needed showers as they hadn't bathed since leaving New York. They also had received a new designation — they were now part of the 41st Division, 162nd Infantry Regiment.

As their troop train moved slowly past Paris to northeast France, they saw the true devastation of war. Burnt fields were peppered with shell craters, skeletons of houses with blown out windows and doors, rotting horse carcasses to be buried, piles of used shell casings, and roads lined with abandoned equipment. Hundreds of graves dotted the landscape, and almost most French women wore black in mourning.

"There are scarcely any young men except those who have returned minus some part of their anatomy or else in such a physical condition that they are almost helpless," an Oregon soldier wrote home.

As the troops moved closer to the front, they heard the dull, unbroken sound of cannon fire. Despite the grim reality, they remained reassuring in their letters home. Canby High classmate Joe Schaubel said that Edwin, Jonas, and the other local men were in "fine spirits and form, and awaiting their chance at the Kaiser's" armies.

The truth was more complicated, and the brothers would not face battle together. Edwin was reassigned to the 126th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Division, and Jonas to the 23rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Division.

Edwin received a terrifying introduction to battle. "I was sitting down on a bank to eat when the shells began coming over," he wrote. "They began dropping closer so I went into a nearby dugout. I had just gotten into it when a big shell struck right in front. Another made a hole within four feet of where I had been eating my supper."

He added, "If we get 'kicked off', you'll be notified. Don't believe rumors that run around loose. I am okay."

At night when the bombardments began, flares illuminated the sky like it was daylight, and the air filled with black and gray smoke. The sounds were deafening — the thunderous detonations of exploding munitions, the loud staccato bursts of machine gun fire, the shriek of whistles as German chlorine and phosgene gas were unleashed, and the screams of the wounded.

Jonas was near Belleau Wood, northeast of Paris, where his regiment was deployed to halt the German advance to the city. The wood, with its tangled undergrowth and hidden German machine gun nests, was the stuff of nightmares.

Under heavy fire, Jonas's regiment advanced without artillery support, rest or food. While defending in and around the village of Bouresches, they fought from inside houses and behind stone walls. On June 13, Jonas was hit by an explosive shell that burst into hot, sharp splinters at high velocity.

He died two hours later and was buried in a cemetery known only as #241, his gravestone a white wooden cross stenciled with his name and hung with his helmet.

Eight days later on a warm summer evening near Aurora, the telegram from the Army Adjunct General was delivered to the Deetz farm.

When Rebecca saw the Western Union messenger holding the cream colored envelope, she asked, "Which one is it?"

Knowing nothing of his brother's fate, Edwin was now fighting near Château-Thierry, less than five miles from where Jonas had died. His division took a sector north of Soissons, a battle one soldier remembered as "hell on earth." By late-September, they seized the heights north and west of the town of Romange-sons-Montfancon.

A friend of the brothers, Jay Coyle, told this story. He was passing a cemetery near Belleau Wood, when he saw Jonas's grave. He found Edwin and they returned to the cemetery, hoping fervently it was a different soldier. But when they compared Jonas's identification number with the one on the grave, it matched.

Weeks later, on Oct. 9, 1918, Edwin was killed by a German sharpshooter. On Nov. 18, another Western Union telegram arrived at the Deetz home.

In keeping with their parents' wishes, Edwin and Jonas's remains were disinterred, returned to the United States on an Army funeral ship and sent by train to Portland's Union Station. There the caskets were accompanied to Aurora by a Vancouver Barracks guard and the brothers were buried in the Willamette Valley town of Hubbard.

Grave of Edwin and Jonas Deetz at the Zion Mennonite Cemetery in Hubbard. (Michael Burley, Special to The Oregonian/OregonLive)

Their heartbroken mother never spoke of it again. Rebecca Deetz's obituary said that her Mennonite faith helped her through many "trying times when things seemed very dark," including the loss of Edwin, Jonas, another son who died of rheumatic fever, and her husband, Henry.

The deeply devout mother who believed in peace lost two sons to war. A scratched and faded photograph shows Edwin and Jonas in their infantry uniforms and wool felt campaign hats, smiling broadly with their arms around each other's shoulders and gripping hands. Perhaps that's how they would want to be remembered.

On Memorial Day 2018, a weathered headstone carved with a World War I star on a laurel wreath crown sits in the Zion Mennonite Cemetery. Inscribed upon it are the names Edwin H. Deetz and Jonas L. Deetz, and simply, "Died in France."

Lynne Hasselman is a freelance writer from Ashland, Oregon.