PRIVATE HARLEY RANDOLPH SLOGGETT
AUSTRALIAN INFANTRY
21ST OCTOBER 1917 AGE 20
BURIED: TYNE COT CEMETERY, BELGIUM
"An honest man's the noblest work of God" according to Alexander Pope (1688-1744) who wrote in Epistle IV of An Essay on Man:
A wit's a feather, and a chief a rod;
An honest man's the noblest work of God.
Fiftly years later, Robert Burns quoted Pope in his own poem, The Cotter's Saturday Night:
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
"An honest man's the noblest work of God;"
Private Sloggett, a draper and mercer from Manildra New South Wales, was killed by shellfire whilst making breakfast in his dugout:
"He was a signaller attached to A Co. at the time of his death. I was in the Intelligence Section. We were at Co. HQ at Broodseinde Ridge, in a dug out, on 21st Oct. when he was blown up by a shell and killed outright. I saw his body and buried it right there. I put a little cross on the grave".
Private Dabell to the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau January 1918.
Both Sloggett's fate and the location of the grave were lost in the subsequent fighting, hence the Red Cross enquiry. However, it was redicovered in 1919 once the war was over and the task of recovering bodies from isolated and unidentified graves was begun. Sloggett was identified by his identity disc and reburied in Tyne Cot Cemetery.