officer's commission, Kilmer refused all offered promotions, saying that he would rather be a sergeant in the Fighting 69th than an officer in any other regiment. Shortly before his deployment to Europe, Kilmer's daughter Rose died, and twelve days later, his son Christopher was born. Before his departure, Kilmer had contracted with publishers to write a book about the war, deciding upon the title Here and There with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth. Kilmer never completed the book; however, toward the end of the year, he did find time to write prose sketches and war poetry. The most famous of Kilmer's war poems is "Rouge Bouquet" (1918) which commemorates the victims of a German artillery barrage against American trenches in the Rouge Bouquet forest, near Baccarat, on the afternoon of 7 March 1918. 21 Doughboys from Kilmer's Regiment were buried alive by the barrage and 19 were killed (of whom 14 remain entombed). On 30 July 1918, Sgt. Kilmer, whose coolness under enemy fire was legendary in the regiment, volunteered for a military intelligence mission led by Major William J. Donovan, the future head of the Office of Strategic Services, behind enemy lines during the Second Battle of the Marne. While leading a patrol that was attempting to locate a concealed German machine gun nest, Sgt. Kilmer was shot through the head by a German sniper at the Muercy Farm, beside the Ourcq River and near the village of Seringes-et-Nesles. Sgt. Joyce Kilmer was only 31-years old and was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre by the Government of the Third French Republic. Sgt. Joyce Kilmer lies buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, near Fere-en-Tardenois, Aisne, Picardy, which is located just across the road and stream from where he was killed. A Tridentine Requiem Mass was offered for the repose of his soul at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City on 14 October 1918. According to Dana Gioia, however, "None of Kilmer's wartime verses are read today; his reputation survives on poems written before he enlisted." In 1928, American poet and World War I veteran of the A.E.F. John Allan Wyeth published This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets. B.J. Omanson recalls of his first encounter with the collection, "Wyeth's sequence... was over fifty sonnets long and, reading through just a few of them at random, indicated that not only were they highly skilled, but unusually innovative as