Fancher Nicoll

Captain Fancher Nicoll, son of another Century member, James Craig Nicoll, whose death preceded his own by barely two months, had served in the Seventh Regiment since 1900, achieving distinction with his company on the Mexican border during 1916. Last May he sailed with his men for France, in one of the early convoys of those Twentieth Century crusaders who were destined finally to turn the fortunes of war when the barbarian of our day was for the second time almost at the gates of Paris. He fell in September, leading his men in an attack on the retreating enemy from which only twenty-nine of his company survived— one of those charges of American infantry which, shattering by its nerve and its daring and its cool individual fighting all the preconceptions of the German military schools, did so much to hasten the end. Perhaps he realized then, as we know now, that the American reinforcements had already won the war.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1919 Century Association Yearbook