SERJEANT LOWRY LEES
LONDON SCOTTISH
14TH OCTOBER 1918 AGE 22
BURIED: DERRY HOUSE CEMETERY NO. 2, WIJTSCHATE, BELGIUM
Serjeant Lees' inscription combines a line from Rudyard Kipling's very famous poem, Recessional, with some lines from a very obscure poem, Tombe des Anglais, so obscure that there only seem to be about three mentions of it on the Internet. It was written by Hagar Paul, about whom there is even less information.
Sleep, in this forest plot,
Unknown for ever.
Though France forgetteth not
Your last endeavour,
Your own shall find the spot
Never, ah, never!
Sun on the forest wide,
But not for your seeing,
Nor how down each green ride
Red deer go fleeing.
Bright youth, a martyr, died,
France, in thy freeing.
Boyhood's scarce conscious breath
Cheerfully given -
None to record each death,
How each had striven -
Greater love no man hath
This side of Heaven.
The poem references the Guards Grave in the Foret de Retz where the 4th Guards Brigade fought a fierce rearguard action on 1 September 1914. After the battle, many of the soldiers were buried by the people of the nearby village of Villers-Cotterets. The soldiers now lie in a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery, which makes me wonder whether the poem was written quite soon after the battle, whilst the graves were still only known to the French villagers.
Unlike the guardsman, Lowry Lees was killed in the final months of the war. A Protestant Irishman from Antrim, he served with the 2nd/14th Battalion London Scottish. If Lees had joined the regiment in 1915, when he was 19, his first deployment (April 1916) would have been to southern Ireland to help police the troubles there. In fact the 2nd/14th didn't stay long and by June 1916 it was in France from where it was sent to Salonika, arriving on 25 December 1916. In May 1917 it was sent to Palestine and then in May 1918 returned to France. Lees was killed on 14 August near Wijtschate in Belgium.
The line from Recessional - Lest we forget - has become associated with military remembrance, lest we forget the sacrifice of our soldiers. But that was not what Kipling meant. Written in 1897, at the end of the celebrations to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Kipling was warning against triumphalism, all Empires are transient and in our pride of the moment we should never forget the human values we should have learnt from God.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Ninevah and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget.