Richard Stevens Conover, 2nd

Richard Stevens Conover, 2nd, the son of the Rev. and Mrs. James Potter Conover, left the school in his Sixth Form year, April 23, 1917, to join the American Field Service in France. In the autumn he enlisted in the army and was made a corporal in a machine gun company. He was killed May 27, 1918, while repulsing a German raid at Cantigny. His father, who had left St. Paul's in the summer of 1915 after having served for thirty-three years as a master, visited the scene of his son's death months afterwards. He recorded this extraordinary experience: "In France, after many visits to the battlefield where he fell, I finally stood on the very spot of his fall, according to a drawing given to me by one of his companions whom I found in the hospital, and there I picked out of the mud my last letter to him, which closed with the words: In spite of all the turmoil and death in which you are living, you can be at perfect peace in the arms of your Heavenly Father."