On the Wall of Missing, Panels 78 to 83.

Cenotaph

An inscription on a light brown wall at a Commonwealth Grave Commission Cemetery.

The inscription remembers the life of Private John Prentiss “Johnny” Poe Jr.  Johnny Poe was a legendary American Football player; US veteran of the Spanish-American War (5^th Maryland Infantry); Philippine-American War (23^rd Infantry Regiment, where he was on the staff of General J.C. Bates); Mercenary in the Central American Wars in the early 1900s; and, British Army in World War 1.  Poe was born in 1874 in Baltimore Maryland and was a second cousin to the author Edgar Allen Poe.   Poe played football with Princeton College.

At the outbreak or World War 1, he immediately traveled to Britain where he enlisted in the 1st Battalion of the Black Watch Regiment (Royal Highlanders).  He was killed while delivering shells to the front line on the first day of the Battle of Loos in September 1915.  He body was never recovered.

He is remembered on the Wall of Missing along with 20,000 other British Army missing at the Loos Memorial in France. 

His name is also inscribed on the Black Watch Roll of Honor at Edinburgh Castle.

Legacy: Johnny’s name was inscribed on the Black Watch roll of honor at Edinburgh Castle. Princeton named an athletic field in his honor and commissioned a portrait of him in his tartan. The John Prentiss Poe Jr. Football Cup, now known as the Poe-Kazmaier Trophy, is awarded annually to the team’s most valuable player.

A poem about Poe published in the New York Herald Tribune in 1925:

“When hearts were searched and troth was tried,

And death was yes or no;

When “Hit the line!” meant bayonets fixed

And one more trench to go,

You rode your mud-caked shoes right on,

Just as you used to; though

No honest tackle brought you down:

They killed you, Johnny Poe.”

Source:  Best of PAW Website (Princeton Weekly)

About the Loos Memorial From the Commonwealth Grave Commission: The Loos Memorial commemorates over 20,000 officers and men who have no known grave, who fell in the area from the River Lys to the old southern boundary of the First Army, east and west of Grenay, from the first day of the Battle of Loos to the end of the war. On either side of the cemetery is a wall 15 feet high, to which are fixed tablets on which are carved the names of those commemorated. At the back are four small circular courts, open to the sky, in which the lines of tablets are continued, and between these courts are three semicircular walls or apses, two of which carry tablets, while on the centre apse is erected the Cross of Sacrifice.

Poe, J.P.