Mar 12, 2019 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 5 min read

More than a century has passed since the conflict once known as the War to End All Wars concluded, all of its participants and just about everyone with any memory of it deceased.

As such, today’s students might tend to view World War I as something of a footnote to what they consider to be verging on ancient history.

“We don’t do it justice, because we don’t consider it an ‘American’ war,” Peters Township Middle School social studies teacher Matthew Cheran said, and that often includes history education. “So I wanted to try to expand it in a way that wasn’t just statistics.

Estimates have as many as 20 million deaths caused by the war, including 116,708 American soldiers. Among them was a teenager named Carl Willig, whom Cheran’s students have gotten to know well during their World War I unit, thanks to a special guest.

Mt. Lebanon resident and retired Baldwin High School teacher Noretta Willig is the author of “Carl’s Story,” a book that chronicles the events surrounding the discovery of her uncle’s remains nine decades after his killing in a French forest in September 1918, just 56 days before the war’s end.

“Thirty minutes before his replacement came in, he was hit by a high-explosive shell. The whole battle moved on, because it was the method of the warfare. The Americans weren’t in trenches. They were moving,” she related between classes at the middle school.

“So his remains were left behind, and my grandparents tried desperately, desperately to find him. They even went to France in order to find him, just to bring him home.”

Henry and Anna Willig of McKeesport had no success. Neither did Walter Willig, Noretta’s father and Carl’s only brother, prior to his death in 1973.

Three-and-a-half decades later, Noretta received a call from a person who identified herself as Joan Hagan, a genealogist working for the U.S. Army, who asked a series of questions about her family. As related on the first page of “Carl’s Story,” Hagan wrapped up with the pronouncement:

“You are Carl’s next of kin. The Army will be in touch with you. I can’t tell you anything else because I don’t know any more. Probably, they found something that they want you to know about.”

What she eventually learned was that a man had tripped over something while in the woods of Saint-Mihiel, France, the site of one of the final battles of World War I. The item turned out to be an exposed heel bone belonging to an American infantryman, and the discovery led to a protracted investigative process involving doctoral-level archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and materials specialists.

“It took almost two years for that to be completely resolved, and only, coincidentally, because he had dental records because he enlisted. Conscripted men did not have dental records. They didn’t go through a dental exam,” Noretta explained.

From ‘Carl’s Story’

He was just a boy, his place in the genealogy a century before where I am now, in a cloud of distant memories. So, so long ago.

I spoke to his young, innocent face. You enlisted! You didn’t have to. The war might have been over before the draft got you. I vaguely remember hearing that you went for training to Charlotte, North Carolina, and in April 1918 you sailed to France. Quite an adventure for an 18-year-old, Carl, but only half the story.

As I study his compelling face, my recollections continue in my mind and sometimes aloud.

Why did you go, Carl? Had President Wilson convinced you that you were needed in the war to end all wars? Did you think you would make the world safe for democracy? Was it really such a lofty purpose that took your heart?

“He had a gold crown, and they made the connection of his dental records and the small part of the remains that were still available. Another coincidence: Part of the upper jaw was destroyed, but the lower jaw was intact, and that’s where the gold crown was.”

Once identified, Carl’s remains eventually were transported to McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery for burial alongside his family members.

“Everybody I told the story to said, ‘You should write a book. You should write a book.’ I feel very grateful that I am still here to write it, because I’m the last person who would be able to write it,” Noretta said. “It was an honor to write it, because it was such a remarkable story. And then to have it brought into the classroom here is really amazing.”

Cheran happened to be a student when she was teaching at Baldwin, and the two became reacquainted last year when she spoke about “Carl’s Story” at Peters Township Public Library. He later contacted her about using some of the letters published in the book as primary sources for World War I studies, then came up with the idea of having her help him teach by referencing the entire work.

“Fortunately, the school board allowed me to pilot it this year,” Cheran said. “I think the kids enjoyed it. I think it was a really great opportunity for them, especially having the author be able to be here.”