Letter of October 31, 1922 from Bayard Dodge of the American University of Beirut to Mrs. Wright, mother of NER worker Lester James Wright, who had just been murdered by brigands in Syria while serving NER among Greek children in the Anatolian interior. Dodge frames Wright’s death as that of a hero caught “between two millstones” — Turkish hatred of the Greeks Wright was protecting, and the United States’ withdrawal from “the field of diplomacy” — and praises Wright’s vigilance and devotion under conditions where “the romance and glamour of heroism” were absent. He describes the funeral attended by a large delegation of Beirut Greeks in tribute to Wright’s devotion to Greek children and by native teachers who had nursed him through illness, with Wright buried in the newly opened Anglo-American cemetery beside an Englishman who had given his life to printing the Bible in the languages of the land and Dr. Graham, a longtime American Board physician and AUB teacher. Dodge ends with a tribute he had used at one of the opening meetings of the AUB term, framing Wright’s life as exemplifying constructive Christian service in the Near East.
