I LIVED, I FOUGHT
AND FOR MY COUNTRY'S SAKE
I DIED

SAPPER CHARLES WILLIAM ABLIN


What to choose for the very last inscription in this project - for the person who died on the last day of the war, the day the Armistice was signed - exercised me for some time. In the end it came down to three inscriptions:

To my dear son, one of three
Who gave their lives
For the country

This is the inscription for Private Leonard Brock who died of wounds in a German prisoner of war camp on 11 November 1918. One of his brothers had died of wounds in November 1916 and the other in March 1917.
Another possible inscription was:

Ad finem fidelis

Faithful to the end. It belongs to Captain Duncan Mackay who enlisted in September 1914. He was commissioned in November 1915 before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps. On 10 November 1918 he and his observer were shot down whilst on a daylight bombing raid. Mackay died in a German hospital the next day.
And the third inscription was:

I lived, I fought
And for my country's sake
I died

Eventually I decided on this last one. The other two are included in my book, 'Epitaphs of the Great War the Last 100 Days'.
This last inscription belongs to Charles William Ablin, a telephone engineer in civilian life who joined up in September 1915 when he was 19. He served with the Royal Engineers in the 40th Air Line Section. This had nothing to do with aeroplanes. The air line sections dealt with telephone and telegraph lines that ran on poles in the air, not along on or under the ground. After three years service he died in hospital at Le Trepot of bronchial pneumonia, probably caused by influenza.
His mother, Mrs Ethel Eugenie Ablin, composed his inscription - a British mother's inscription for her British son. But, the sentiment could apply to virtually every other mother's son of whatever nationality who died in the war whether he came from France, Germany, Russia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Italy, the United States of America, Portugal, Japan, Serbia, the Ottoman Empire (which at the time embraced not just Turkey but much of the Middle East), the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which covered most of eastern Europe) and the British Empire (which included at the time New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, the West Indies, Burma, India, Egypt, the Sudan, Northern and Southern Rhodesia and South Africa). Although the British remain fixated on their own wartime activities, especially those on the Western Front, it was a global war with global consequences, which still reverberate today.
So this is the last inscription in the project, one that acknowledges the casualties on all sides. Over the past 1,561 days I have tried to give 'life' to the deaths of a tiny fraction of the many multitudes who died as a tribute to every one of them. Thank you for being my companions along the way. History tends to emulsify the past, to render it into a single voice when in fact it consists of myriads of voices. Epitaphs of the Great War has shown us 1,561 of them.


JAMIE
HE WAS A' THE WORLD
TAE ME
MOTHER

PRIVATE JAMES PRENTICE GOW


TELEGRAM to Gow, Parkhouse Lane, Duke St, Glasgow
10.10.1918
Regret 14482 Gow Cameron Highlanders reported dangerously ill gun shot wounds groin penetrating abdomen at 3 Australian Casualty Station France. Regret permission to visit him cannot be granted.

James Gow enlisted on 9 November 1914 and disembarked in France on 22 February 1915. This is such rapid training period that I wonder whether he was already a territorial soldier. He served throughout the war with the Cameron Highlanders being invalided home with cellulitis in December 1916 and hospitalised for 74 days with malaria in 1917. On recovering he was sent to France again, disembarking on 21 June 1918 and joining the 5th Battalion Cameron Highlanders. He was wounded on 5 October and died just over a month later. All this information comes from Gow's service file which is one of the few to have survived.
The families of 'dangerously ill" soldiers were regularly given permission to visit them in the base hospitals in France. The Army would even pay the fares of those who would otherwise have been unable to afford it. Why Mrs Gow should have been refused permission to visit her son cannot be known but it is unusual.
Andrew and Jemima Gow had five children, four of them sons, James was the fourth child. The family lived in Glasgow where Andrew, the father, was a prison warder. At the time of his enlistment, James was a clerk.
Jemima chose her son's inscription - plain, simple and so affecting, the Scottish dialect adding to its simple honesty. Was he her favourite child?


ENLISTED 8 AUGUST 1914
AND THEN IN HEAVEN
RECEIVE ME
MY SAVIOUR AND MY FRIEND

LANCE CORPORAL WILLIAM FLETCHER JONES


"Signaller's Fatal Wounds
Mr and Mrs J. Fletcher Jones, of 121 Mount Road, New Brighton, received official notification on Tuesday of the death from wounds of their eldest son, Lance-Corpl. William Fletcher Jones, which occurred in Flanders on November 9th. He had just turned 17 years of age when he joined the 4th West Lancashire Royal Field Artillery (Howitzer Brigade) in August 1914. He was drafted to Ypres in 1915 with the 2nd Canadian Division of which they formed part of the Artillery.
Sometime afterwards the 55th Division was formed with which they were embodied, and he was with the famous Division through the battles and hard fighting they experienced. After the battle of the Somme, he became attached to the Royal Engineers, having during the quiet periods made a special study of signalling, coming through the various examinations with the highest honours, and at the time of his death he was away on special duty in charge of the Brigade wireless.
Lance-Corpl. Jones was educated at Vaughan Road School, and for several years was a member of the 4th Wallasey (Emmanuel) Scouts, in which he took a most active and enthusiastic interest. Much sympathy has been extended to the parents in the loss of a gallant young life, just at the close of the fighting after 4 1/2 strenuous years."

William Fletcher Jones was born on 7 May 1897, the eldest child of John and Alice Jones of New Brighton, Cheshire. As his inscription records, Jones enlisted on 8 August 1914, four days after the outbreak of war. He died of wounds two days before the end. Jones was 17 and three months when he enlisted and 18 and four months when he disembarked in France on 29 September 1915. He was therefore underage. Soldiers were meant to be 19 before they could go to the front - unless they had their parents signed permission.
It's not possible to tell exactly when Jones was wounded but he is one of only six First World War soldiers buried in Chercq Churchyard. All six soldiers died on either the 8th or 9th November, casualties of the crossing of the River Escaut/Scheldt during that night when the 166th Brigade reported heavy enemy machine gun fire as they began to cross the river.
John Fletcher Jones signed for his son's inscription. The second part is a quotation from the last verse of the hymn, 'O Jesus I have promised to serve thee to the end':

Oh, let me see Thy footmarks,
And in them plant mine own;
My hope to follow duly
Is in Thy strength alone.
Oh, guide me, call me, draw me,
Uphold me to the end;
And then to rest receive me,
My Saviour and my Friend.


[Some of this information has been acquired from the excellent History of Wallasley website.]


WHEN O'ER THE SEAS
WENT HONOUR'S CRY
HE CAME TO HELP
TO FIGHT, TO DIE

AIR MECHANIC 3RD CLASS WILLIAM ARTHUR HANSEN


William Hansen came from Argentina to fight for Britain. Argentina was resolutely neutral throughout the war despite the fact that there was huge pressure on the president, Hipolyto Irigoyen, to support the Allied cause. Many British, German, French and Italian residents returned to Europe from Argentina to fight for their countries. Hansen was one of them.
He joined the RAF as an Air Mechanic Third Class and was a member of 115 Squadron, a night bombing unit based at St Ingelvert in northern France. Hansen and nine other men of 115 Squadron were killed in an accidental bomb explosion on the 8 November 1918. The accident is said to have occurred at Roville - there are no other identifying hints as to its location. All 10 casualties are buried at Charmes Communal Cemetery Extension, 215 km from St Inglevert. Hansen and five others are buried in what looks like a communal grave, their headstones standing touching each other. Whilst Hansen and Linley have individual grave references - I.F.16 and I.F.18 - the other bodies have a single reference - I.F.17. It was obviously not possible to distinguish one body from another.
Hansen was the son of Rudolph and Jane Woolven Hansen of Paseo Colon 532, Buenos Aires. Jane Hansen chose her son's inscription; Rudolph was dead. Despite its poetic ring, the inscription does not appear to be a quotation. Honour motivated her son's decision to return to Britain - to help, to fight, to die. I have not been able to find out anything about the accident but ... a night bombing unit, ten dead airmen, a mass grave ... the clues are there.


UTTERLY REGARDLESS OF FEAR
HE DIED FOR GOD
KING AND COUNTRY

CAPTAIN ARTHUR MOORE LASCELLES VC MC


Captain Arthur Moore VC MC was killed in action on 7 November 1918 when the 21st Division took the village of Limont Fontaine. The Division had crossed the Sambre the previous day and was in pursuit of the retreating Germans. However, the German rearguard made a stand at Limont Fontaine, which was "strongly garrisoned and stoutly defended", and there was some fierce hand-to-hand fighting.
Moore's obituary in The Times describes how he had been 13 years with the Cape Mounted Rifles in South Africa, joining it as a trooper and rising to the rank of sergeant, before returning to Britain in 1915 to take a commission in the Durham Light Infantry. He served originally with the 3rd Battalion and was wounded on the Somme in September 1916. On recovering he returned to the front and on 15 June 1917 led a daylight raid on the German lines at Loos with the aim of capturing some prisoners. The raid was successful and for his actions that day Lascelles was awarded a Military Cross. Six months later, on 4 December 1917, he was severely wounded in an action for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross. The 'terrible day' is very vividly described on this English Light Infantry website
Lascelles' right elbow had been smashed in the action and his right arm was useless. Nevertheless, when he recovered his strength he insisted on returning to the front. He joined his unit, this time the 15th Battalion Durham Light Infantry, on 27 October and was killed eleven days later.
Arthur Lascelles was the son of John and Mary Elizabeth Lascelles of Milford Hall, Newtown, Powys. In 1907 whilst in South Africa he married Sophia Hardiman. They had one son, Reginald George. He was named after Arthur's younger brother who had drowned in India in 1904 whilst serving out there with the Durham Light Infantry. Sophia Lascelles chose her husband's inscription.


MY BOY JACK
HE IS NOT HERE, BUT IS RISEN

PRIVATE JOHN WILLIAM KINGSLAND


John Kingsland was wounded on 28 October 1918 in the 1st/4th Seaforth Highlanders' attack on Mont Houy during the Battle of Valenciennes. He died nine days later in a Casualty Clearing Station in Cambrai.
Kingsland's father, John Padden Kingsland, a Congregational minister and an artist, chose his son's inscription. Whilst I can imagine that the family called John junior, Jack, I feel sure that the first line of the inscription is a reference to Rudyard Kipling's poem, 'My Boy Jack'. Many assumed that the poem, written in 1916, was a lament for his own son, John Kipling, but it is in fact a haunting generic lament for the thousands of dead sailors, 'Jacks', who died at the Battle of Jutland 31 May/1June 1916.
The poem may apply to sailors but the sentiment is appropriate to any grieving parent:

"Have you news of my boy Jack?"
Not this tide
"When d'you think he'll come back?"
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
[...]
"Oh dear, what comfort can I find?"
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind -
[...]
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide.

The second part of the inscription is a quotation from Luke 24:6. On the Sunday after the crucifixion the Mary, Jesus' mother, and Mary Magdalene, arrived at Christ's tomb to find that the body had gone. The distressed women found themselves addressed by two figures in shining garments who asked, "Why seek ye the living among the dead. He is not here but is risen". This evidence of the resurrection, of the fact that in Christ there is no death, brought great comfort to many mourning families.


ALSO HIS WIFE ESTHER JANE
22ND AUGUST 1984 AGE 94
REUNITED

GUNNER WILLIAM MARK DRAISEY


Esther Jane Draisey died in 1984. Her husband, William Mark Draisey, died of wounds in 1918. The mother of his three sons - Donald, Trevor and William - Mrs Draisey had been a widow for 66 years. She will not have been the only wife in 1918 who faced a long future on her own.
Mark Draisey was a gunner with 85th Battery, 11th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery who arrived in France on 24 December 1915. I do not know when he was wounded but for Draisey to have been buried in Swansea, as he was, he must have died in the UK, in other words he must have been so badly wounded that he was hospitalised in Britain.
Obviously his wife did not choose this inscription since she was dead. However, the War Graves Commission's paper records show that the inscription she chose was:

Greater love hath no man
Than to lay down his life
For his friends

This has subsequently been crossed out and replaced with the new words - with a note beside it saying, "PI added by authority". The family had therefore received permission to alter the personal inscription for this a new headstone.
I'm going to make a sweeping statement here but, based on observation, it would appear that if a man were buried in the UK his inscription could be altered so as to refer to the subsequent death of a parent, wife or child but that this is not, or has not to date, been permitted in the cemeteries abroad.


TWICE MENTIONED IN DESPATCHES
HIS TWO BROTHERS ALSO FELL
IN DEATH
"THEY WERE NOT DIVIDED"

CAPTAIN RUPERT AYRTON HAWDON


Mr and Mrs William Hawdon had five children, four sons and one daughter. Three of the sons died in the war, two in action and one of influenza five days after it ended.
The inscription belongs to Rupert who was the third son. He served with the Royal Garrison Artillery receiving his commission in September 1914 and joining his unit the following September. Rupert served throughout the war and was killed near Le Quesnoy seven days before the end by German rifle fire whilst reconnoitering for new positions for his guns. He was 24.
The eldest brother, the Revd Noel Elliot Hawdon, a chaplain in the Army Chaplains Department, died twelve days later of influenza. He was 33. Their youngest brother, Cecil, had been killed with three of his men on 27 June 1916. Delayed trying to cut the German wire prior to a trench raid, they were killed when the British artillery opened up. Cecil was 20
The remaining brother, Hugh, served throughout the war with the Durham Light Infantry.
Cecil's inscription, like Rupert's, was signed for by his father:

His two brothers also fell
In death they are not divided

The last line comes from 2 Samuel 1:23

"Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided."

William Hawdon also chose Noel's inscription:

He kept the faith
Deo dante dedi

All four sons were educated at Charterhouse where 'Deo dante dedi', God having given I give, is the Charterhouse motto. The first line is a quotation from 2 Timothy: 4/6

"The time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

Much of the information here has been taken from The Middlesborough Roll of Honour of the Great War. The Hawdon family lived at Upsall Grange, Nunthorpe Yorkshire. William Hawdon, an engineer, was the managing director of an iron works in Middlesborough.


NOW WITH TRIUMPHAL PALMS
THEY STAND
BEFORE THE THRONE ON HIGH

PRIVATE GORDON ROBINSON


Gordon Robinson's inscription comes from the third verse of the hymn: How Bright These Glorious Visions Shine. Written by Isaac Watts (1674-1748), the hymn is based on a passage from the Book of Revelation 7:13: 'And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they?' The answer was: 'These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.'
Verse three of Watts' hymn describes how:

Now with triumphal palms, they stand
Before the throne on high,
And serve the God they love, amidst
The glories of the sky.

Private Gordon Robinson served with the 1st/5th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment, part of the 75th Brigade. The brigade had been in action throughout October 1918, the battalion diary reporting on the 12th that they had either been fighting or under enemy fire for the preceding seven days during which time they had advanced 13 miles, taken three villages, captured over 300 prisoners and many enemy guns. Their casualties had been 4 officers and 76 other ranks killed, and 24 officers and 469 other ranks wounded.
The battalion were rested for several days at Serain before going back into action for an attack on enemy positions south of Le Cateau on the 17/18 October. The attack met unexpectedly high resistance in the taking of the village of Bazuel. I think this is when Robinson would have been wounded. By the 3 November, the day he died, the battalion were 13 km away further east.
Robinson is buried in Le Cateau Military Cemetery where the majority of the graves belong to soldiers killed either in August 1914 or October/November 1918.
Mr George Henry Robinson signed for the inscription for Gordon, his middle son. At the time of the 1911 census the family were living at 42 Queen Street, Derby. When George Robinson gave his address to the War Graves Commission it was: 'Le Cateau', Belper Road, Derby. The Robinsons had named their new home after the cemetery where their son was buried. It was not an unusual custom. I wonder if the house still has that name today?


AND WE IN FAITH
AND HONOUR KEEP
THAT PEACE
FOR WHICH THEY PAID

CAPTAIN JOHN FREDERICK FARRAR


On 28 October 1918 the 2nd Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment were in billets at St Armand having been withdrawn from the line on the 20th after a period of fighting. The war diary for the 28th records 'A/Capt. JF Farrar admitted hospital sick', and then for 1st November '2Lt (A/Capt) JF Farrar died at 62nd CCS from influenza'. The War Graves Commission gives his date of death as 2 November.
Farrar had originally joined the army as a private in the Cameron Highlanders. It looks as though he first entered a theatre of war, France, on 12 July 1916. A year later he was commissioned into the West Yorkshire Regiment and although still officially a Second Lieutenant at the time of his death he held the rank of acting captain.
His mother, Sarah Farrar, chose his inscription from 'Justice' a poem by Rudyard Kipling, which was published in The Times on 24 October 1918, syndicated to at least 200 other newspapers and later included in several collections of his work. For all the honourable sounding intent of these the last two lines, the poem is a vehement plea that there should not be a negotiated peace with Germany. The 'sword of justice' must be used on her, Germany, 'evil incarnate', must be made to answer for her atrocities:

For agony and spoil
Of nations beat to dust,
For poisoned air and tortured soil
And cold, commanded lust,

Germany must be made to 'relearn the law' so that her people will never again develop 'the heart of beasts'. This retribution will be the means -

Whereby our dead shall sleep
In honour, unbetrayed
And we in faith and honour keep
That peace for which they paid.


WE LIE DEAD
IN MANY LANDS
SO THAT YOU MAY LIVE HERE
IN PEACE

PRIVATE GEORGE SMART


On the 1 November 1918 the Germans decided to make a stand at Valenciennes, the last French city in German hands. Its capture was vital to the Allies' progress but the presence of a large civilian population made the attack difficult. George Smart's regiment, the 2nd South Staffordshires, were in support on the 1st but the war diary does refer to shelling by the enemy with 77 mms and 4-2s, perhaps this is when Smart was killed. His body was not discovered until April 1920, it had not been buried in a marked grave.
Smart is buried in Romeries just south of Valenciennes. There are 703 burials in the cemetery, five of them from the very earliest days of the war - the 24th, 25th and 26th August 1914, one from October 1916 and all the rest from the last month of the war. The war was returning to where it had begun.
George Smart's mother chose his inscription. It is not a common one but it was used on public war memorials in communities across the Empire. Seemingly composed in the immediate post-war era it has an echo of Simonides as reflected in 'Our British Dead' a 1917 poem by Joseph Lee which has the lines:

Here do we lie, dead but not discontent,
That which we found to do has had accomplishment.

That accomplishment? - that we, the survivors, may live in peace.


A BRAVE MAN
AND A GOOD SOLDIER

PRIVATE ALBERT VICTOR BATES


This is a lovely inscription and although there are no quotation marks it seems to me that this will have been a tribute from Albert Bates' officer. My father was an officer in the Second World War and to the end of his life the highest compliment he could pay a young man was to say, 'He would make a good soldier'.
Albert Bates was just 20 when he died. He served with the 2nd Battalion Devonshire Regiment. On the night of the 30th/31st October 1918 the battalion took part in forcing a passage across the River L'Escaut. The crossing was effected by 00.30 hours on the 31st but by the early morning 'the Boche' were reported as massing for a counter attack. Over the next few hours the battalion suffered heavy casualties, some caused by the RAF. At 08.30 the casualties were reported as '12 OR wounded (through RAF) 1 killed, probably incomplete'. By 15.10 casualties were estimated to be 'about 80'. The war may only have had eleven days to run but the Germans were still trying to defend every river crossing and strategic location.
Bates and one other soldier from the battalion, Private Montague Augustus White, are the only two to be buried in Odomez Communal Cemetery; their bodies buried on 20 November 1918. The battalion's other casualties of the day are buried about 15 km away in Valenciennes.
Mrs Laura Bates chose her son's inscription. The family lived at 45 Marsden Road, Redditch where father, Henry Bates, worked as a toolmaker in a cycle works. Albert was one of their four children.


WE TWO PARTED
IN SILENCE AND TEARS
HALF BROKEN HEARTED
TO SEVER FOR YEARS

PRIVATE HARRY EDWARD RIVERS


Harry Rivers was taken prisoner on 27 May 1918. At 9 pm the previous evening the 7th Battalion Leicestershire Regiment received information from Brigade Head Quarters that two German prisoners had warned them of an attack timed to start at 3 am the following morning, to be preceded by a bombardment that would begin at 1 am. This is what happened. It was the opening day of the Third Battle of the Aisne, what the Germans called Operation Bluecher. By the end of the day the Germans had broken through the Allied lines, in some places to the extent of 15 miles.
On 30 May the 7th Battalion war diary recorded that although only two officers and fifteen soldiers were known to have been killed, 19 officers and 431 soldiers were missing.
Rivers was one of the missing, he was taken prisoner and held with more than 1,500 Russian, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian, Serbian and British prisoners of war at Altdamm, 8 km east of Stettin on the Polish-German border. Rivers' death was recorded on the 31 October 1918 at the Register Officer in Altdamm as having taken place at 8 pm the previous day. No cause was given for his death.
Harry Rivers attested in September 1916 when he was 17 and 6 months. His mobilization in April 1917 was announced and then withdrawn, perhaps because he was only just 18 and therefore too young to be sent abroad. It was 31 March 1918 before he went to France. He had scarcely been there two months before he became a prisoner.
Rivers' mother chose his inscription, his father was dead. It comes from 'When We Two Parted', a poem by Lord Byron (1788-1824) in which the poet laments a faithless lover who betrayed him by going off with another man.


ONE OF ENGLAND'S
UNKNOWN HEROES

LANCE BOMBARDIER ALBERT WILLIAM BATES


In 1914 Albert Bates was a regular soldier serving with the 27th Brigade Royal Field Artillery. In the summer of 1914 the brigade was in Ireland. Mobilised immediately on the outbreak of war it was sent to France, arriving on 19 August just fifteen days later. Bates died of wounds received in action 0n 29 October 1918, thirteen days before the war ended
He had served throughout the war, transferring at some point to the 37th Trench Mortar Battery Royal Field Artillery, formed in May 1916. In October 1918 this was part of the 37th Brigade, 12th (Eastern) Division. By now the war was a war of movement, of pursuit, as the Allies pushed the Germans ever eastwards. On 23 October the Division crossed the River Scarpe at St Amand and four days later they had arrived at the Scheldt Canal.
It's not possible to tell when Bates was wounded but he died on 29 October, the day before the 12th Division was withdrawn for rest. The war was over before it went back into the line.
Bates' wife, Florence May Bates, chose his inscription. The couple cannot have been married long as Florence May Firman only applied for a marriage licence on 24 November 1917.
Florence Bates described her husband as 'one of England's unknown heroes'. As someone who served for 1,532 days and died just one day before he would have been safe, Albert Bates deserves to be rescued from obscurity.


DUTY CALLED HIM
HE WAS THERE
TO DO HIS BIT
AND TAKE HIS SHARE

CORPORAL GEORGE JAMES HARWOOD


On 27 October 1918 the 12th Battalion Durham Light Infantry, part of the 23rd Division, attacked across the heavily defended Piave River during the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in Northern Italy.
George Harwood was killed the next day, the 28th. He is buried in Giavera British Cemetery. Yesterday's casualty who died on 27 October 1918 is buried in Tezze British Cemetery. Giavera cemetery is for those who died on the west bank of the river, Tezze for those who died on the east bank. Many many soldiers died in the river itself, swept away by the fast flowing stream or killed by machine gun fire.
Harwood was a married man with two sons aged 4 and 2 at the time of his death. His wife, Ellaline chose his inscription. It comes from a piece of verse regularly seen in newspaper In Memoriam columns:

Duty called him he was there
To do his bit and take his share;
His heart was good, his spirit brave
His resting place a soldier's grave.

To do your bit was a colloquial way of saying that you were making a contribution to the war, playing your part in it.
In April 1919 Ellaline Harwood married William Robins; she was Mrs Robins when she chose her former husband's inscription. A week after Harwood's death the Austrians surrendered and the war in Italy was over.


OH TO HAVE CLASPT
YOUR HAND DEAR HERBERT
TO HAVE BROUGHT YOU HOME
TO REST. (MOTHER)

PRIVATE HERBERT DOWNS


Herbert Downs was killed in action during the crossing of the Piave River on 27 October 1918. He was buried in the Italian village of Tezze. It's a long way from Stockport Cheshire where his parents and brothers and sisters lived.
You can see his mother's distress in the inscription she chose. The British Army banned the repatriation of bodies early in 1915 and reinforced this ban after the war ended. It was deeply unpopular and caused much angry criticism, especially from those families who could easily have afforded to pay to repatriate the bodies of their own family members.
The ban remained in force however, the authorities determined that the war cemeteries were not going to be just for those whose families couldn't afford to repatriate their bodies. This was one of the many reasons why the Commission also did not permit private headstones since this would distinguish the rich dead from the poor dead and the Commission wanted to emphasise the equality of sacrifice of all the dead. Everyone had to accept a regulation Imperial War Graves Commission headstone, which caused more distress, but perhaps by way of compensation families were allowed to personalise the headstone with their choice of inscription.
Herbert Downs was the third of his parents five children. Father, Matthew Downs, was a builders' labourer. Herbert initially joined the 1/6th Cheshire Regiment but was transferred to the Northumberland Fusiliers and went with them to Italy in November 1917.
Eight days after HerbertDown's death the Austrians signed an armistice - the war on the Austro-Italian front was over.


I WAS GLAD TO DIE
FOR MY COUNTRY
AND FOR MY
MOST BELOVED PARENTS

LIEUTENANT DUDLEY GERALD MEIN MC


Dudley Mein's father, Colonel Alexander Lechmere Mein, chose his son's inscription. It raises an interesting question. Who is actually speaking here? The voice is obviously meant to be that of the son, Dudley Mein, but the words were chosen by the father. Do the words express the father's sentiments or the son's. We're not going to know.
All the voices in these inscriptions are the voices of the bereaved. Occasionally quotation marks indicate that the dead person is being quoted but even then the choice has been made by the next of kin, the bereaved. And whether they are grief stricken, angry, proud or loving they have had to make a decision on what to say, and they have had to limit it to 66 characters whereas there were probably a million things they could have said. Some people will have said what they thought they should say, some people will have said what people conventionally say and some people will have wanted to say something that brought them comfort. The ones I admire are the ones that say something totally original - 'He would give his dinner to a hungry dog and go without himself', Love and kisses from Mother, Yes my love the same your wife, Ethel'. I suspect I would have said something deeply conventional.
Dudley Mein was born in India in 1898 and educated at Junior King's School Canterbury and Kelly College. After school he entered the Wellington Cadet College, Madras and in April 1916 took a commission in the 31st Duke of Connaught's Lancers. He served in Egypt, Palestine and on the North West Frontier before returning to Palestine in April 1918 attached to the Mysore Lancers.
His Military Cross was awarded for an action on 23 September when he captured two guns and 110 prisoners. He was killed on 26 October in an event described in General Allenby's dispatch:

"Early on the morning of October 26th the armoured cars and the 15th Cavalry Brigade, moving round the west side of the town, followed the enemy along the Aleppo-Katma road and gained touch with him south-east of Haritan. The Turkish rearguard consisted of some 2,500 infantry, 150 cavalry, and eight guns. The Mysore Lancers and two squadrons of the Jodhpur Lancers attacked the enemy's left; covered by the fire of the armoured cars, the Machine Gun Squadron and two dismounted squadrons of the Jodhpur Lancers. The Mysore and Jodhpur Lancers charged most gallantly. A number of Turks were speared, and many threw down their arms, only to pick them up again when the cavalry had passed through, and their weakness had become apparent. The squadrons were not strong enough to complete the victory, and were withdrawn till a larger force could be assembled."

Much of this information comes from The King's School Canterbury Roll of Honour website.


WE CANNOT LORD
THY PURPOSE SEE
BUT ALL IS WELL
THAT'S DONE BY THEE

PRIVATE JOSEPH EDWARD PUGH


Private Joseph Pugh served with the 7th Battalion Royal Irish Regiment, part of the 21st Infantry Brigade, 30th Division. He died on 25 October 1918 and was buried in a Casualty Clearing Station Cemetery at Hazebrouck. It is difficult to think where he might have been wounded or killed. At the time of his death his battalion were 50 km further east near Zaandvoorde. The Casualty Clearing Stations only returned to Hazebrouck in October and even on 1 October the battalion were 30 km away in Comines. Nevertheless, Pugh, who served originally with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, died on 25 October 1918 and is buried in Hazebrouck.
Pugh was not an Irishman. He came from Tregynon a small community near Newtown in Wales where his father was a farmer. It was his wife, Sarah, who chose his inscription. Her address was Tan y Bryn, Sarn, Newtown, another small farming community not far from Tregynon.
It is a traditional inscription, one that chimes with all those relations who chose 'Thy will be done', or 'Not my will but Thine be done O Lord' or 'God knows best', an attitude of acceptance that we today find difficult to comprehend, especially perhaps for someone who was killed within two weeks of the end of the war.


AND IF I LAUGH
AT ANY MORTAL THING
TIS THAT I MAY NOT WEEP

PRIVATE ALAN YARDLEY


Alan Yardley was 19 and serving with the 3rd Machine Gun Corps (Infantry) when he was killed in action on 24 October 1918 during the Battle of the River Selle . The Germans having withdrawn from the Hindenburg Line had set up a new defensive line to the east of the Selle. On 23 October the British First, Second and Third Armies crossed the Selle and advanced six miles in two days, forcing the Germans to withdraw to a new defensive line at the Sambre-Oise Canal.
Yardley in buried in the Capelle-Beaudignies Road Cemetery where there are only 53 burials, all from a two-week period 21 October to 5 November. More than half the graves relate to the two days 23 and 24 October.
Born in King's Norton, Warwickshire, Yardley was his parents' only son, the eldest of their two children. In 1911 the father, Charles Yardley, was a 'pianoforte agent' in Sheffield. At the time of Alan's death the family were living in Plymouth, Devon and it's in the West Country that Charles Yardley died in 1959 and Bertha Yardley in 1965. This being the case - that the authorities knew where his parents were living - it's strange that Alan Yardley's medals were never delivered. His medal index card just says that they were retained, undisposed. The Service Medal and Award Rolls has the word 'Returned' beside Yardley's name. It was not unknown for next-of-kin to refuse to receive medals, scrolls and memorial plaques. They wanted nothing to do with the authorities who had 'killed' their family member. It looks as though the Yardleys could have been one such family.
Charles Yardley signed for his son's inscription. It comes from Byron's poem 'Don Juan'. However, the quotation had a life of its own apart from the poem since it was frequently used as a fatalistic acceptance of what life had thrown at you.


LORD HAVE MERCY
ON ALL PRISONERS

PRIVATE LEONARD ERNEST BENNETT


Private Bennett served in "C" Company, 10th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment. On 10 April 1918 the battalion were holding the front line between Wambeke and the Blauwepoortbeek in the Messines Sector. "C" Company with their officers Captain Kingdom, Lieutenant Jones and Second Lieutenants Avens and Fisher had been placed in three advanced picquet posts, out in front of the front line, to keep a watch for the enemy.
At 2.30 am the Germans began to shell the front line with gas and high explosive shells. Between the first entry at 2.30 am and 6.35 am there are 13 entries in the battalion war diary as the shelling gets heavier and German soldiers get closer. The rest of the day is also minutely recorded although it is difficult to get a sense of exactly what is happening, just that by the time 9.30 pm arrived Battalion HQ had been moved back at least three times.
The battalion were not relieved until the 18 April when the casualties were assessed as 13 officers and 453 other ranks killed, wounded and missing. Among the named officer casualties were Second Lieutenant Fisher, gassed, and Captain Kingdom and Lieutenant Jones missing, three of the four "C" Company officers. Private Ernest Bennett was among the 207 missing other ranks.
Bennett had been taken prisoner. The Red Cross records show that he was "taken on 10.4.18 at Messines" and had "arrived from the Front at Friedrichsfeld". The 'UK, Army Register of Soldiers' Effects' finishes the story - Bennett died on 23 October 1918 whilst a prisoner of war at Kassel of influenza (pneumonia).
He is buried in Niederzwehren Cemetery, Kassel, one of the four permanent British war cemeteries in Germany where those who died as prisoners of war are now buried having been exhumed from sites all over Germany. Bennett's father, Walter Bennett, signed for his inscription, a magnanimous and inclusive inscription for the eldest of his seven children.


HE DIED FOR ME
AND ME ONLY

PRIVATE ALBERT WILLIAM HALL


Albert William Hall was his parents' eldest son. They only had two children. He lived in Gloucester where his father was a "deal porter" someone who handled baulks of softwood, unloading them from ships and stacking them sometimes 60ft high in warehouses.
In 1911, Albert, aged 16, was a telegraph messenger, someone who delivered telegrams. His brother, Walter, aged 14, was a 'Corporation employee'.
Albert enlisted soon after the outbreak of war. He served with the 8th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment, which was raised in Bristol in September 1914. The battalion went to France on 18 July 1915, the day Albert's medal index card says he arrived in France. He died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station on 31 July 1916. The previous day the battalion war diary had recorded:

"Attacked the German intermediate line, A & B Coys in front line, C & D Coys in second line. Our attack was held up by enfilade machine gun fire and concealed snipers from the right. Our men returned to their original front line at 9.30 pm. Casualties, Officers killed 8, 3 wounded, 3 missing. The Co Major Thynne was wounded in the body while urging on the second line. Other ranks 160."

Unfortunately whoever wrote up the diary never indicated whether that was 160 other rank casualties - killed, missing and wounded - or 160 killed. Nevertheless, it had been an 'expensive' raid in term of casualties. Albert Hall was most probably one of the wounded; the battalion had not been in the front line for some considerable time before it.
Hall's mother, Henrietta Hall, chose his inscription. Whilst there were several hymns that declared Christ "died for me", there are none that say "he died for me and for me only" so it would seem that Mrs Hall was not quoting but giving a piece of her own mind.
It's rather an extraordinary inscription. There are plenty that say 'He died for us', 'He died for others', 'He died for you', 'He died for you and me' but I have not come across another one that says 'He died for me and me only'. Mrs Hall was not going to share her son with anyone else - even his father and his brother.


HE DIED FOR HIS MEN
FIGHTING TO COVER
THEIR RETIREMENT

LIEUTENANT ARTHUR THEODORE STEPHENSON


This is such a specific inscription that it is a shame I haven't been able to find out any more details.
Stephenson served with the 1/7th Battalion The King's (Liverpool Regiment) but their war diary doesn't cover June 1916, or if it does the online diary doesn't. The 1/7th were part of the 55th Division and the divisional war diary does exist. This records: "28 June 1916 Raids on German trenches". The following appendices are full of the exact detailed plans for the raids, which conclude with a "Special Order of the Day by Major General HS Jeudwine CB, Commanding 55th (West Lancashire) Division published on 29 June:

"Yesterday six raids on the enemy's trenches were carried out by the 2/5th Lancashire Fusiliers and the 1/4 Loyal North Lancashire Regiment of the 164th Brigade and by the 1/5th, 1/6th, 1/7th and 1/9th King's Liverpool Regiments of the 165th Infantry Brigade assisted by detachments of the Royal Engineers. These raids were carried out in daylight, in unaccustomed and very difficult circumstances, and in the face of very determined opposition. In spite of these obstacles the results aimed at were successfully obtained and great damage and loss inflicted on the enemy. The gallantry, devotion, and resolution shown by all ranks was beyond praise, and the Major-General Commanding is proud to be able to congratulate the West Lancashire Division on the discipline and soldierly spirit exhibited - a discipline and spirit which most seasoned troops could not have surpassed. [...] He deeply regrets the loss of those who fell, but the spirit they showed will have its effect on the enemy. When the opportunity comes of avenging their deaths the Major-General Commanding is confident that the Division will not forget them."

Arthur Stephenson was the son of the Revd Robert Stephenson and his wife Philippa. He joined the army soon after the outbreak of war and was in France in on 6 June 1915. Seven days after his death the Liverpool Post & Mercury carried the following announcement:

"Official intimation has also been received that Lieutenant Theordore Stephenson, 7th King's (Liverpool Regiment) is reported missing, believed killed. He was the son of the late Rev. Robert Stephenson, who for over 30 years was vicar of St Jame's, Birkdale. He possessed marked ability as a pianist and frequently gave classical recitals at Southport."


HE DIED FOR HUMAN LIBERTY

LIEUTENANT KENNETH IAN SOMERVILLE


Kenneth Ian Somerville was a student at Toronto University when the war broke out. He enlisted in the 33rd Canadian Infantry Battalion in October 1915 and went overseas in April 1916. In June 1916 he joined the 60th Battalion at the front and served with it at Ypres, the Somme and Vimy Ridge. He transferred to the 5th Mounted Rifles in May 1917 and served in the battles of Lens, Hill 70 and Passchendaele.
On 15 March 1918 the battalion conducted a raid on the German trenches. Somerville, another officer and four soldiers were killed in the action. Somerville was in fact originally badly wounded in the face. This blinded him. His was being taken back to the front line when he was caught in an enemy barrage and wounded a second time, this time in the left thigh. He was taken to a Casualty Clearing Station but failed to survive an operation the following day.
All this is documented on the Veterans Affairs Canada site on which there is also a letter his father, Charles Ross Somerville, wrote to a niece:

"My poor Kenneth was killed in France on the 16th March. I should have sent you word sooner but have been all broken up it is such a shock. After about 2 years in the fighting line I had hoped that he would have come through - but it was not God's purpose for my dear boy."

Charles Somerville chose his son's inscription: "He died for human liberty". Where did he get this idea from? On 8 January 1918 President Woodrow Wilson addressed both Houses of Congress. He outlined his Fourteen Points, setting out what could be the terms on which to base peace. Wilson spelt out how behind everything he proposed was the principle of justice, people's "right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak". He pledged the people of the United States to maintain this principle, "the moral climax of this, the culminating and final war for human liberty".


HE DIED
TO UPHOLD CIVILIZATION
OF THIS WORLD

PRIVATE ROBERT EMERSON NICKERSON


Robert Emerson was 21 when he was killed in action on the 2 September 1918 in the capture of the Drocourt-Queant Line. A fisherman from Clark's Harbour, Nova Scotia, he had joined up in March 1916 and been in France since February 1917. Wounded twice, once in the face and once in the arm, he also spent some time in hospital with Scarlet Fever in June 1917.
His elder brother Warren, who had been badly gassed, returned to Canada to recuperate and was about to be sent back again when the war ended. A younger brother, Frederick, wounded at Passchendaele, had his leg amputated and another brother, Minard, died of influenza.
What gave his father, who chose his inscription, the idea that his son had died to uphold world civilization? It would have been the Allied Victory Medal awarded to all the combatants of every Allied nation with the same agreed wording in the various different languages on the reverse - 'The Great War for Civilisation'.
Warren Nickerson and his wife, Jacobine, called their son, born in 1920, Robert Emerson Drocourt Emerson, Warren's brother's names with the addition of the location where he had been killed. Robert joined the Canadian Air Force on the outbreak of the Second World War. He qualified as a pilot and was killed over Cheshire flying a Hurricane which crashed due to a leak of glycol.


HE DIED FOR JUSTICE
AND FOR FREEDOM'S SAKE
FOR EMPIRE , KING AND RIGHT

LIEUTENANT RICHARD ROLAND RANNARD


"I state that Lieut Rannard was killed by a shell - wounded in the neck and died at once at Sec-Bois on April 17th 1918. He was buried there, with other members of Battalion by a Padre and a cross, a very nice one, was erected. He was a fine little chap.The ground was held.
Eye-witness: -No
Description:- Dark, thin face, grey eyes, medium height.
Home address:-
Informant: Byrne. GB. Lieut. (Entirely reliable)
2nd AIF
3rd London General Hospital
Wandsworth"

Lieutenant Bytne may not have been an eyewitness but there were plenty in this Red Cross Wounded and Missing file and unusually they all agree. Rannard was giving orders whilst a barrage was on, "I saw him killed by a piece of shrapnel, back of neck, instantly fell back dead in my arms".
Rannard's inscription is very much influenced by propaganda: recruiting posters such as - "Take up the Sword of Justice" - and the memorial plaque given to the next-of-kin of all the dead which states that whoever received it had died for 'freedom and honour', together with numerous pleas in posters and the press for Australians to fight for their King and the Empire.
Richard Rannard was born in Australia and enlisted as a private in September 1915. He was commissioned Second Lieutenant in December 1916 and promoted Lieutenant on May 1917. The son of William and Margaret Rannard of Maylands, Western Australia, it was his wife Edith, who chose his inscription.


HE DIED FOR ENGLAND

PRIVATE RALPH OSBORNE HARWOOD


As the centenary draws to an end, I thought it would be interesting to see what some next-of-kin gave as the cause for which they believed their family members had died. Yesterday's casualty, Thomas Scott Brodie, gave his life for the Empire.
Ralph Harwood, who served with the 3rd Battalion Australian Infantry and was killed in action in Gallipoli on 30 November 1915, 'died for England'. The son of Ralph Harwood and his wife Mary Frances Buckley, Ralph jnr was born in Liverpool, England and emigrated with his parents to Australia in 1898 when he was two. He enlisted in May 1915 when he was 18 and 9 months and embarked for Egypt two months later. He was killed a month before the Allied forces were withdrawn from the peninsula.
His mother chose his inscription and filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia. In this she wrote that "He was grandson of Major TNJ Buckley VC, RE (Indian Mutiny). Major Buckley obtained this for the blowing up of the magazine at Delhi,"
Ralph Harwood WAS the grandson of Thomas Newton John Buckley, and Major John Buckley WAS awarded a VC for his actions in blowing up the Delhi magazine and so saving it from falling into the hands of the rebels, but they weren't the same person.
One of the tragic aspects of John Buckley VC's life is that although he was married three times and fathered eight children, two of his wives died and all eight of his children, some from disease and some killed during the rebellion. Thomas Newton John Buckley also served in the Royal Engineers but it looks very much from this forum as though he was a deserter.
The things you find out.


BLOW SOFTLY, O, SOUTH WINDS
BLOW SOFTLY O'ER HIS GRAVE
FOR HIS LIFE FOR THE EMPIRE
HE WILLINGLY GAVE

PRIVATE THOMAS SCOTT BRODIE


Thomas Scott Brodie was a volunteer - 'his life for the Empire he willingly gave'. He joined the 1st Scottish Horse Yeomanry and went with them to Gallipoli in August 1915. On 2 September they landed at Suvla Bay and after three months were evacuated to Egypt on 28 December. In October 1916 the 1st Scottish Horse Yeomanry were merged to form the 13th (Scottish Horse Yeomanry) Battalion Black Watch. This served in Salonika until June 1918 when it was posted to France.Brodie was killed in action on 17 October in the crossing of the River Selle.
The son of John and Marie Brodie of Govan, Lanarkshire, his father was a ship builder's clerk. Marie Brodie chose her son's inscription because her husband was dead. It is a variation of an In Memoriam verse that appeared in various forms in the local newspapers during the war. This is one version:

"Somewhere in France", a brave heart beats no more,
He has finished his bit, and the tumult is o'er;
In the garb of his King, with his feet to the foe,
"Somewhere in France," how calmly he sleeps.
Blow softly O south winds blow soft o'er his grave,
His life for the Empire he willingly gave,
And sweetly he rests with the heroes of God.

Here is another:

Far away from his home and his loved ones,
Laid to rest in that far away land;
Never more shall are eyes here behold him,
Never more will we clasp his dear hand.
Somewhere in France, how calmly he sleeps,
While the songbird her singing all the day keeps;
Blow softly O south winds, blow softly o'er his grave,
His life for the Empire he willingly gave.

The south wind is traditionally the wind that brings comfort, refreshment and quietness.


DEAR LAD, GOOD BYE

LIEUTENANT NOWELL EDWIN COOPER


Nowell Cooper, who served with the 1st Huntingdon Cyclist Battalion attached to the 2nd Battalion Suffolk Regiment, died of wounds in No. 3 Casualty Clearing Station Beaulencourt on 16 October 1918.
His medal card doesn't indicate when he joined the cyclist battalion but it was formed in February 1914. Initially used exclusively for home coastal defence, eventually small groups of cyclists were transferred to the Western Front where by late 1918 they had become useful for reconnaissance work. The trench warfare was over; it was now a war of movement and bicycles had become an important means of transport. They were silent, fast and light, the latter meaning that they could be carried over difficult terrain. Bicycles were in effect a form of calvary whose 'steeds' were not so expensive to maintain.
Nowell Cooper was the middle of his parents three children. Father was a railway accountant's clerk and the family lived in Dinas Powis in Glamorganshire.
It was his father who signed for this very touching inscription - Dear lad, good bye.


GOD GAVE TO RIGHT
THE VICTORY
TRIUMPHANT OVER WRONG

PRIVATE JAMES MCINTOSH


It was all so simple once - Britain and her allies were in the right and Germany and the Central Powers were in the wrong. And in the end right had triumphed over wrong as she should. This was how Mrs Mary McIntosh saw it when she signed for this inscription for her son James. The wife of a coachman, in 1901 she, her husband and six children lived in Pitlochry.
James had served with the 8th Battalion the Black Watch. There is no date of entry into a theatre of war on his medal index card and he was not entitled to a 1914-15 Star so he was probably not a volunteer.
He was killed on 14 October 1918 when the battalion attacked towards Winkel-St Eloi. The attack began at 05.30 with D Company leading, B C and A Companies in support. At 06.00 D Coy was held up at Mogg Farm at map reference F26a. B and C companies were ordered to assist and Mogg Farm was cleared.
Almost two years later, McIntosh's body was exhumed and reburied in Dadizeele New British Cemetery. It had been discovered with three other members of the 8th battalion at map reference F26a.3.5. McIntosh had been a casualty of the hold up' at Mogg Farm.
It was 28 days before the end of the war.


IN THE ETERNAL FLANDERS
YOU FELL; WHERE FOR
ENGLAND'S FREEDOM AND GLORY
YOUR FOREFATHERS BLED

PRIVATE JAMES MCMAHON


Miss N McMahon of 3 Stacy Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, chose Private James McMahon's inscription - a sister perhaps? He is said to have been the son of William McMahon but I have not been able to identify either William or James in any of the censuses.
James McMahon was a volunteer. He first entered a theatre of war, France, on 22 October 1915 serving originally with the Northumberland Fusiliers and then with the York and Lancaster Regiment. He was killed on 13 October 1918 in the crossing of the River Selle, east of Cambrai, which had fallen on the 8th.
Whoever Miss N McMahon was she knew her history. Her 'eternal Flanders' is often known as 'the cockpit of Europe', the battleground of numerous campaigns throughout history. McMahon was killed less that 15 miles from Ramillies and Malplaquet, the sites of the Duke of Marlborough's famous victories of 1706 and 1709. Agincourt, Crecy and Waterloo were themselves only just over 70 miles away. McMahon joined the long line of Englishmen killed in the struggle to keep a strong power out of the Low Countries whether that power was France, Spain or Germany.


FIVE YEARS HAVE PASSED
OUR HEARTS ARE SORE
AS TIME GOES ON
WE MISS YOU MORE

PRIVATE EDMOND O'NEILL


Yesterday's casualty died a month later than today's but it took five years for the War Graves Commission to ask Private O'Neill's parents for an inscription as opposed to one year for Private Milner's. Constructing the cemeteries took many years, combing the battlefields, exhuming bodies where necessary, reburying them, acquiring the land, designing the cemeteries - there was no standard style - communicating with the next of kin. In fact it was 1938 before the final memorial to the missing was completed. And then of course the next year was 1939.
O'Neill was a volunteer from Ballylongford Co. Kerry. He enlisted in Listowel and went to France in December 1915 serving with the 1st Battalion Royal Munster Fusiliers. On September 2 1918 the battalion took part in the capture of the Drocourt-Queant line.A week later it went into the support trenches near Moeuvres and spent the 8th to the 12th, according to the war diary, undertaking 'various reconnaissances'. Having survived the attack on the Drocourt-Queant line it would appear that O'Neill was killed in one of the 'various reconnaissances'.
His elder brother, Patrick, serving with the 8th Battalion Royal Munster Fusiliers, was killed in action on the Somme on 9 September 1916. His body was never recovered and his is one of the 72,000 names on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing.


DAYS OF SADNESS
COME OVER US
SECRET TEARS OFTEN FLOW
THOUGH HE DIED ONE YEAR AGO

PRIVATE WILLIAM MILNER


William Milner was killed in action in Italy one hundred years ago today. His father chose his inscription. William was one of his parents' twelve children of whom five had died before 1911. Mrs Mary Milner, William's mother, died in 1915, as did his twenty-two-year-old brother Harry who died at home in Droitwich. Florence, his older sister died in 1917. Leaving five - four siblings and their father - to mourn William's death.
William Milner served with the 7th Battalion the Worcestershire Regiment, which was posted to Italy in November 1917. The battalion were part of an Allied contingent sent to help the Italians in the Trentino where it was feared the Austrians were getting the upper hand. Milner was killed on 11 October 1918 on the Asiago Plateau during a raid on the Austrian trenches.
Italy was a completely different battle front from the flat lands of France and Flanders, and from the desert heat of Palestine and Mesopotamia. It was rugged, mountainous and inhospitable and the cemetery where Milner is buried is rarely accessible between November and April due to deep snow.
For all its inhospitableness it would appear that Barenthal was one of the very first cemeteries to be built. Mr W Milner must have been asked for his choice of inscription in 1919. Next-of-kin don't seem to have been asked for this information until the War Graves Commission were ready to build the cemetery as I've seen inscriptions that refer to three, five and even eight years having passed since the soldier died.


MAY NO WANTON HAND
EVER DISTURB HIS REMAINS

PRIVATE EVAN FREDERICK JONES


There is more to this inscription than meets the eye. What sounds like a simple injunction to never disturb Jones' body is in fact a famous inscription - if you know your American literature. It comes from the grave of Natty Bumppo, the hero of James Fenimore Cooper's five American frontier novels known collectively as The Leatherstocking Tales.
Natty Bumppo, a white boy raised by Indians, is a 'good' white man, a frontiersman who helps people in trouble. At the end of 'The Prairie' (1827), Bumppo dies in the fulness of time and the Indians pay him this tribute:

"A valiant, a just, and a wise warrior has gone on the path, which will lead him to the blessed grounds of his people."

Bumppo was buried "beneath the shade of some noble oaks" and his grave "has been carefully watched to the present hour by the Pawnees of the Loop, and is often shown to the traveller and the trader as a spot where a just whiteman sleeps."
Later, a "stone was placed at its head, with the simple inscription, which the trapper had himself requested [...] "May no wanton hand ever disturb his remains!" This is the last line of the novel.
By choosing this inscription, Evan Jones' father, William Jones, associated his son with "a valiant, a just, and a wise warrior". Jones served with the first Battalion the King's Shropshire Light Infantry and was killed in action on 8 October 1918 when the battalion attacked at 5.10 am under a creeping barrage on the opening day of the Battle of Cambrai. The battalion war diary reported a 'great numbers of prisoners soon began to come back, which meant attack was going well'. The attack did go well but nevertheless the battalion suffered over 100 casualties killed and wounded.
Ten days before Evan Jones died his brother, Albert Rees Jones serving with the 2nd/4th King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, was killed in action at the Canal du Nord. However, William Jones had no opportunity to choose an inscription for his younger son because Albert's body was never found. He is commemorated on the Vis-en-Artois memorial to the missing.
William Jones was a farmer at Pantau Farm, Llanddew, Breconshire. Evan and Albert were two of his nine children all of whom worked with him on the farm. His wife, Mary died in 1912, his daughter Sarah in 1915 and two of his sons in 1918.


"WELL PLAYED SIR"

SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT STANNARD HERBERT


FLIGHT October 24 1918
"Lieutenant Robert Stannard Herbert, RAF, who died abroad on October 8th shortly after a collision in the air, was 19 years of age, and son of Mr and Mrs Leonard Herbert, of Argyll Mansions, W14. He was educated at Bedford School, had only just joined his squadron, and had been offered an instructorship in England, but made special application for active service abroad."

Lieutenant Herbert left school in December 1916. After qualifying as a pilot he went to France to serve with 108 Squadron. The squadron was based in Dunkirk and flying DH9s on daylight bombing raids. Herbert was killed whilst practicing formation flying; his plane collided in mid-air with another machine and he and his observer were both killed.
Herbert's father chose his inscription, a very masculine tribute from a father to a son but one of total admiration and approval.


THEY DIED
THAT WE MIGHT LIVE
AND LEAVE THE FUTURE WORLD
IN TRUST TO US

RIFLEMAN JOHN CHARLES THOMAS KILLICK


Rifleman John Killick died of wounds in a Casualty Station, his father also John Killick, signed for his inscription. The first two lines come from 'Hail and Farewell' by the popular poet John Oxenham.

They died that we might live,-
Hail!-and Farewell!
-All honour give
To those who, nobly striving, nobly fell,
That we might live!

That we might live they died,-
Hail!-and Farewell!
-Their courage tried,
By every mean device of treacherous hate,
Like Kings they died.

Eternal honour give,-
Hail!- and Farewell!-
-To those who died,
In that full splendour of heroic pride,
That we might live!

The second two lines of the inscription are Mr Killick's own words and reflect a popular sentiment of the time: that those who lived on had an obligation to the dead to look after the world and make it a better place, one where such a terrible event would never happen again, a world that would be worthy of the dead.
It is a relevant point today, remembrance itself is not enough. If the dead did leave the future in trust to us, that should be the subtext of 'all remembrance mantras - 'Lest we forget' the responsibility they hoped we would assume.


WHO KNOWS AT WHAT GREAT COST
OUR LIBERTY WAS WON?
A MOTHER WHO HAS LOST
HER ONLY SON

PRIVATE DAVID JOHN JONES


Private Johns was killed in action on the 29 September 1918 in the attack on the St Quentin Canal. His body was not discovered until December 1926 when it was found with five other bodies at map reference 62c.F.12.a.65.75. There was no cross on the grave so it hadn't been previously registered. The body was identified by "Clothing, boots, numerals and two paper discs". The form asks "Were any effects forwarded to base?" and the answer was "Yes. Gold cased watch guaranteed 20 years. Discs fell to powder after being exposed. See covering letter."
There is an interesting note at the bottom of the form: "Reward is not to be paid in this case as the as the remains were reported by the American Graves Services, Q.M.C. in Europe". This refers to the fact that French and Belgian farmers were paid for each body they discovered to discourage them from failing to report it and just ploughing it back in to the ground.
David Jones was the only son of Thomas and Elizabeth Jones who ran the Junction Hotel in Abercynon, Glamorganshire. In 1911 David Jones was assisting his parents in the business. By the time his body was discovered his father was dead.


ONCE MORE ON MY ADVENTURE
BRAVE AND NEW

CAPTAIN GEORGE ALAN CAMPBELL SMITH MC


George Smith left school, Rugby, at Easter 1915 with a Classical Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. He immediately took a commission in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and after training went to France in June 1916. He was promoted captain that September. In November he was awarded a Military Cross for carrying out "a daring raid against the enemy with great courage and determination".
In November 1917 he returned to England for six months home duty before returning to France in May 1918. He was killed six months later by a shell whilst leading his Company into action on 28 September 1918.
Smith's inscription, chosen by his father, George Smith Master of Dulwich College, comes from Robert Browning's poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, a philosophical poem in which Age addresses Youth and tells it, "Grow old along with me the best is yet to be". This is because in Age we acquire the wisdom and insight that Youth, too concerned with living in the moment, doesn't have. However, these are the very qualities that twenty-two-year-old Smith was admired for. As his Colonel wrote to his parents: "Though young in years, he had an old head, with much discretion. I could trust any duty to him knowing that it would be well and faithfully carried out".
The poem holds that our life on earth is but one step on the journey of our soul, which will continue after death. To his parents, George Smith was setting out "Once more on my adventure brave and new".


FROM THE UNREAL TO THE REAL
DARKNESS TO LIGHT
DEATH TO IMMORTALITY

LIEUTENANT WILLIAM ERNEST HILL


William Hill was the only son of Peter Hill, a grocery branch manager from Tyldesley in Lancashire, and his wife Mary Ellen. A volunteer, he joined up as a private and went to France in November 1915. A year later he received a commission in the 9th Battalion Royal Fusiliers. He was killed on 8 August 1918 in the capture of the village of Sailly-Laurette on the opening day of the Battle of Amiens.
His father chose his inscription. It is based on a Hindu mantra from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a treatise on the soul composed sometime around the year 700 BC.

Lead us from the unreal to the real.
Lead us from the darkness to the light.
Lead us from death to immortality.

It is a very unusual inscription from a very unusual source. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad does not appear to have been well known in Britain. It had been translated into English in 1805 but I can't see that either the book or the mantra were widely known so it would be interesting to know how Mr and Mrs Hill came across it.


SON OH SON

PRIVATE WILLIAM STEPHEN


This is such a heartbreaking inscription. It comes from a poem by Kathleen Chute-Erson (1879-1966) called Killed in Action, which was published in her 'War Stanzas and Other Poems' in November 1916. I've neither heard of Chute-Erson before nor ever seen this poem. It's the kind of sentimental verse that the twentieth century rejected but it's the type that must have expressed many a mother's feelings:

Yes, I am proud, I shall not weep, my son –
Boy of the high, brave spirit, who lies slain,
Blent with the earth grown hallowed for the stain
Of thy young life-blood. Boy, who on my breast
Has lain, so small, so dear, in infant rest;
Whose tiny, clinging hands and nestling head
Seemed God and life to me - dear son, now dead.

Son of the strong, young frame, the fearless heart,
Vibrant with life and thought, the coming man
Shadowed in graver mood, the finished plan.
My mother-love foresaw and knew content,
And when, all youthful fire and courage blent,
You said good-bye, I smiled (Oh, God! that day
Fear clutched my heart!) I would not have you stay.

Boy! you have died, as we would have you die.
Yes, I am proud, my son, I shall not weep,
But, oh! within the hours of broken sleep
I see your dear, loved form, your eyes, your hair,
And clench my arms to clasp and hold you there;
Then wake and know the glory you have won.
Yes, I am proud, indeed, but - Son, oh, Son!

Those three words - 'Son oh son'. For all that the mother has tried to convince herself that she's proud that her son has died 'as we would have you die', and that she is determined that she 'shall not weep', remembering him as a baby and and 'on the verge of manhood' is actually too much for her. William Stephen was 18 when he was killed in action on the day the 51st Highland Division took Marfaux with very heavy casualties.


WILLIE WE ARE CALLING YOU
DAD AND MAM

PRIVATE WILLIAM LONDON


"Willie we are calling you". William London's father chose his inscription. I can only imagine that he is telling his son that his mother and father have been trying to 'call' him through a spiritualist medium. And I can only imagine that they have not had any answer. It's rather a haunting inscription.
Belief in spiritualism, the belief that it was possible to make contact with the dead beyond the grave, was very popular after the First World War. There were numerous charlatans out there but some people genuinely believed that they were speaking to their dead relations. And not everyone who believed was a gullible innocent. Sir Oliver Lodge, a British physicist who played a key part in the development of radio, firmly believed that he was in touch with his son Raymond who had been killed in action on 14 September 1915.
William London was the younger of his parents' two children. He served with the 2nd Battalion Welsh Regiment and was killed in action on 20 July 1918. There is a gap in the battalion war diary between the end of June and the beginning of November so it's not possible to tell how he might have died.


A YOUNG CANADIAN SOLDIER-POET
WHO FOLLOWED THE GLEAM

SECOND LIEUTENANT HORACE EDGAR KINGSMILL BRAY


'Follow the gleam', this is a phrase that has passed out of usage; once upon a time everyone would have known what it meant. It comes from Tennyson's poem 'Merlin and the Gleam' where the gleam is a glimmer of the holy grail, that intangible quality that man should attempt to follow in his life:

Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight!
O young Mariner,
Down to the haven,
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel,
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam.

This will have been the source of the inscription but it could have been a second-hand source. In 1920 Sallie Hume Douglas and Helen Hill composed a song for a YWCA - Young Women's Christian Association - competition. The song won and became a YMCA anthem, which is still sung today. Based on Tennyson's poem the song encourages young people to follow the gleam:

To knights in the days of old,
Keeping watch on the mountain height,
Came a vision of Holy Grail
And a voice through the waiting night.

“Follow, follow, follow the Gleam,
Banners unfurled o’er all the world;
Follow, follow, follow the Gleam
Of the chalice that is the Grail.

“And we who would serve the King,
And loyally Him obey,
In the consecrate silence know,
That the challenge still holds today:

“Follow, follow, follow the Gleam,
Standards of worth o’er all the earth,
Follow, follow, follow the Gleam,
Of the Light that shall bring the dawn.

Horace Edgar Kingsmill Bray enlisted in the Canadian Mounted Rifles in January 1915. He served in France and Belgium and then, having been wounded, transferred to the Royal Air Force. He finished his flying training and was just about to be sent to France when he had a head-on collision in the air and was killed.
His father, the Revd Horace E Bray chose his inscription. His mother had died when his sister was born. Bray's patriotic poetry was included in several Canadian anthologies.
This YouTube film, They Are Not Here, feature Bray's life and death.


PEACE, THY OLIVE WAND EXTEND
AND BID WILD WAR
HIS RAVAGE END

RIFLEMAN ROBERT HERKES


This plea for peace was written by Robert Burns in 1794, more than a hundred years before David Herkes repeated it on his son's headstone. Burns' poem, 'On the Seas and Far Away' expresses a parents' yearning for peace so that their sailor son's life might be saved:

Bullets, spare my only joy!
Bullets, spare my darling boy!
Fate, do with me what you may -
Spare but him that's far away.

Robert Herkes was 18 when he died of wounds in a base hospital in France. At one time this would have meant that the soldier had his parents' signed permission to be serving abroad, but by this stage of the war more and more eighteen-year-olds were being sent to the front without this.
Although Herkes served with the London Regiment he was born and brought up in Leith, Scotland where his father was a dock porter. From the 1901 census it would appear that his mother was dead and that his grandmother, Isabella Herkes, was looking after the family of two children.
'On the Seas and Far Away' echoes the sentiment of Burn's earlier poem, 'Man was Made to Mourn' 1784, which has the famous line, 'Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn'. In this later poem he says:

Peace, thy olive wand extend,
And bid wild war his ravage end,
Man with brother man to meet,
And as a brother kindly greet:


KILLED AT ABADEH
TAKEN BY HIS COMRADES
TO SHIRAZ 3RD AUGUST
R.I.P.

CAPTAIN GILBERT DIGBY MANSEL GWYNNE-GRIFFITH


This inscription takes us far away from Western Europe to southern Persia, now Iran, where the British had formed the South Persia Rifles in an attempt to counter German influence among the region's tribes.
There was much local hostility to the British and the loyalty of many members of the Rifles had became uncertain. In June 1918 the Rifles' garrison at Abadeh mutinied and joined the enemy, laying siege to the town. A small Indian Army detachment had recently joined the fortress to take control of the supplies and ammunition in case of just such an eventuality. On 2 July the enemy succeeded in breaking the bank of the irrigation channel, diverting the water so that it flowed directly towards the mud walls of the garrison fortress. Gwynne-Griffiths went out under heavy fire to mend the breach and was killed. The breach was eventually mended but Abadeh was not relieved until the 17 July.
On 2 August a detachment of troops left Abadeh taking Gwynne-Griffiths body with them back to Shiraz, a journey of 180 miles in the scorching heat. You must be thinking what I'm thinking. How did they keep Gwynne-Griffith's body from being unspeakable. I don't know but they didn't want it left among the hostile local people.
We wouldn't have known about this if his mother hadn't told us via his inscription. His comrades' actions must have brought her great comfort.
Gwynne-Griffiths was buried in Shiraz British Cemetery but in 1963 all the burials here were concentrated in Teheran War Cemetery.


SERB VOLUNTEER
WITH BRITISH ARMY
KILLED IN BELGIUM

PRIVATE RADIVOJEM CHETKOVICH


Radivojem Chetkovich served in the 2nd Battalion Canadian Machine Gun Brigade under the name Harry Melin. Born in 1889 in Boan, Uskosi (now Uskoci), Montenegro he was living in Canada and working as a labourer when he volunteered in Sidney, British Columbia on 1 July 1916.
The battalion diary exists and shows that it was out of the line for most of June 1918. It doesn't mention suffering any casualties but it does mention that many of the men had 'three-day fever' and some of them had Spanish Flu and were very ill. Chetkovich died in Pernes, a large Casualty Clearing Station centre two years to the day after he had volunteered.
His father, who still lived in Boan Uskosi, chose his inscription, highlighting the seemingly strange fact that his Serbian son should die in Belgium fighting in the British Army.
The First World War began when a Bosnian Serb assassinated the Crown Prince of Austria on the 28 June 1914. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia mobilised against Austria-Hungary to protect Serbia, Germany declared war on France to support Austria-Hungary and Britain declared war on Germany when she invaded Belgium to attack France. Serbia and Britain were therefore on the same side, both fighting Austria-Hungary and her ally Germany.


MY HERO
HAS FALLEN IN THE FIGHT
FOR JUSTICE, FREEDOM
AND FOR RIGHT

GUNNER FREDERICK JOHN SCURLOCK


Mrs Kate Scurlock had no misgivings about the cause for which her son had died, unlike yesterday's mother who was obviously deeply against war. It's strange to think how many people passionately believed that their menfolk had died for abstract concepts like 'justice, freedom and for right' when that's not how most people think today. Yet how things are perceived is how people believe they are - and it's good to think sometimes of how people in a hundred years time might judge our present-day perceptions.
Frederick Scurlock was born in Pembroke Dock where his father was a fitter in the dockyard. He worked as a clerk in a timber yard in Haverfordwest until he was called up.
Scurlock served with "C" Bty. 102nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, part of the 23rd Division, which went to Italy late in October 1917. He was wounded in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto and died in a Casualty Clearing Station behind the lines.


WAR CANNOT BE ON ONE SIDE
17.5 DEUTERONOMY

PRIVATE LESLIE ROSE


Leslie Rose died of meningitis whilst a German prisoner of war, his body later exhumed and buried in Valenciennes (St Roch) Communal Cemetery. The War Graves Commission records this exhumation and the record includes the evidence of identity. This says, "Plate on coffin". I'm pretty sure that British soldiers were normally buried in ground sheets not coffins yet this is the second time I've come across the mention of the plate on a coffin and that too was of a soldier buried by the Germans. At this time the Germans were so short of some raw materials that shoes and boots were being made out of vegetable matter. Yet they were burying soldiers, including enemy soldiers, in coffins with coffin plates.
Rose's mother chose his inscription. It's a stern rebuke to everyone, she is not blaming the other side she's saying that it takes two to quarrel - "war cannot be on one side". She then follows this statement up with the reference to a passage in Deuteronomy. She's identified it as Deuteronomy 17:5 but most people would say 5:17. And what is the quote"? "Thou shalt not kill."


THAT THEIR DUST
MAY REBUILD A NATION
AND THEIR SOULS
RELIGHT A STAR

SECOND LIEUTENANT GEORGE HELLIWELL HARDING


George Helliwell Harding was the Red Baron's 73rd victim. He had only been with 79 Squadron since 2 March when he became von Richthofen's third kill of the day.
All the following information is taken from Mike O'Connor's excellent book 'Airfields and Airmen Somme'. Harding was attacking a German fighter when von Richthofen came from behind and shot him down. Harding's plane caught fire and broke up in the air. Two years later, Harding's sister, Ruth, an actress, was in France entertaining American troops. She wanted to identify her brother's grave - the implication being that he had been buried as an unknown airman. She identified a grave and insisted on the body being exhumed for her to identify the remains. It must have been indescribably gruesome. Her brother would have been horribly burnt and had been in the ground for a year. She did identify him and George Harding was buried in Dive Copse Cemetery.
Just under a month later Manfred von Richthofen was killed.
Harding was an American citizen from South Minneapolis, Minnesota. After America's entry into the war he tried to enlist in the American army but so many Americans were volunteering that he became impatient at the delay and crossed the border into Canada to enlist in the Flying Corps. He arrived in England in August 1917 and after further training, he went to France on 2 March. Twenty-five days later he was dead.
His father, Mr GF Harding, chose his inscription from Algernon Swinburne's poem 'The Halt Before Rome': Republican Rome, for whom the soldiers in the poem are fighting:

She, without shelter or station,
She, beyond limit or bar,
Urges to slumberless speed
Armies that famish, that bleed,
Sowing their lives for her seed,
That their dust may rebuild her a nation,
That their souls may relight her a star.


AN AMERICAN CITIZEN
WHO FOUGHT WITH
THE ENGLISH ARMY

PRIVATE HARRY SAMUEL AARON


Harry Aaron came from Newport, Rhode Island and volunteered to join the British Army in time to be in France on 15 September 1915. There's no indication as to why he volunteered, it could have been the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915 in which so many American citizens died, or perhaps the fact that there's a Star of David on his headstone. This sign of his Jewish faith might have been a significant factor. Anti-semitism was rife in certain parts of Germany and within certain sections of German society. His family could have been refugees.
Aaron was a driver in the Military Transport Section of the Army Service Corps, attached to the 94th Field Ambulance Royal Army Medical Corps. The 94th's war diary reports his death in an entry on 25 February 1918:

"Court of Inquiry held respecting death of Dvr M2/077183 P. Aaron who died at 30 CCS as the result of an accident while driving Ford Ambulance on duty on the 20.2.18. Death resulted on 22.2.18 from extensive rupture of liver."


EVER IN MY THOUGHTS
MY ONLY CHILD
MOTHER

SECOND LIEUTENANT ERNEST GEORGE DUNN


Born in Clapton, London in the first quarter of 1898 and educated at Hackney Downs School, Ernest Dunn was just 19 when, according to his medal index card, he went to France in May 1917. He was killed the following month. His parents' only child; his father had died in 1913.
Dunn enlisted originally in the Artists Rifles but in January 1916 received a commission in the 10th Battalion The King's Liverpool Regiment, the Liverpool Scottish. At the time of his death he was attached to the Machine Gun Corps. The Hackney Downs School memorial site, records that Dunn was killed by a shell.
Originally buried where he died, Dunn's body was exhumed and reburied at Orchard Dump Cemetery in March 1920. The site of the cemetery was donated to the War Graves Commission by the widow of a Captain in the French 72nd Infantry killed in action in August 1914.


EIGHT OF MY SONS
ANSWERED DUTY'S CALL
GOOD-BY, TOM
THE FIRST TO FALL. MOTHER

SERJEANT THOMAS WHELAN


Mrs Alice Whelan had thirteen children of whom nine survived to adulthood. Widowed before 1911 she and her one daughter described their occupations as ironers.
Thomas was her eldest child. She says of him in the War Graves Commission records that he had had 15 years military service. It is likely that this service had come to the end before the war and that he rejoined on the outbreak. He died of wounds in the hospital centre of St Sever on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Thomas was 'the first to fall'. Two years later James Whelan, sixteen years younger than his older brother, died of wounds close to the front line on 26 June 1918.

Eight of my sons
Answered the call
You, dear Jim, were the second
To fall - sleep on


"AND IF GOD CHOOSE
I SHALL BUT LOVE THEE BETTER
AFTER DEATH"

PRIVATE STANLEY GARFIELD JENKINS


Stanley Jenkin's inscription comes from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's beautiful, passionate love poem 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways'. It was signed for by his father.
Jenkins enlisted on 1 June 1915 and went to France with the 16th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers on 2 December 1915. The battalion was sent first to a quiet part of the line to acclimatise themselves to the trenches before being sent into the front line at Givenchy on 17 February. The next day the British artillery bombarded the German trenches from 8 to 11 pm. The war diary recorded that the enemy's retaliation was 'moderate' and that one soldier was killed. The next day, the 19th, is described as "Very quiet - nothing unusual happened. Enemy fairly active with rifle grenades &c Casualties Pte M Hughes & Ptr SG Jenkins killed".
In civilian life Jenkins had been an engine driver in a colliery in Ogmore Vale, Glamorganshire. In 1911 he was living in Ogmore with his grandmother, Anne Davies, without his parents, as he had been aged 7 in 1901. On his attestation form he named his grandmother as his next of kin and left his money to her in his will.
However, by 1920 she was dead and it was his parents, Evan and Esther Jenkins of Brodawel, Twyn, Garnant, Carmarthenshire, who received his medals, next-of-kin memorial plaque and scroll. To do this they had to fill in Army Form W. 5080 giving the names and address "of all the relatives of the above-named deceased soldier in each degree specified below that are now living". This revealed that all his grandparents were dead and that he had no brothers or sisters.


HERE HE LIES
WHERE HE LONGED TO BE
THE HUNTER
HOME FROM THE HILL

LIEUTENANT COLONEL HALFORD CLAUDE VAUGHAN HARRISON


The death has occurred "somewhere
in France," of pneumonia of Major Halford
Claude Vaughan Harrison RFA, late of
Cote Grange, Westbury-on-Trym. He was
52 years of age.
Clifton and Redland Free Press
7 April 1916

At the time of the 1911 Census, Major Halford Claude Vaughan Harrison RA described himself as on the retired list. On the outbreak of war he rejoined the army and was in France by March 1915 with the rank of Temporary Lieutenant Colonel, meaning that he would hold the rank for the duration of the war.
Harrison was commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in 1882. He came from an army family. His father had served with the Madras Native Infantry and his grand-father had been a major-general in the Royal Artillery.
In France he served with the 16th Division Ammunition Column and as the newspaper reported, died of pneumonia.
His wife, Beatrice, chose his inscription. It comes from Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem, the poem that appears on his own grave in Samoa:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Mrs Harrison has contracted the words to read as she wanted them to read. Her husband, after a long career in the army, was lying among his fellow soldiers in the battlefields of France.


EARTH'S JOYS GROW DIM
ITS GLORIES PASS AWAY

SECOND LIEUTENANT JAMES DICK MM


When relations quoted from this hymn they usually quoted the first three words of the first verse: 'Abide with me', or the last line of the last verse: 'In life in death O Lord abide with me'. James Dick's parents have quoted from the second verse:

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day;
Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not abide with me!

James Dick was a apprentice engineer in Gateshead-on-Tyne when he enlisted in the Durham Light Infantry soon after the outbreak of war. His medal card shows that he disembarked in France on 20 April 1915. He was a private. His military career shows his quality. Over the next two years he was awarded a Military Medal, promoted corporal, then acting sergeant and on 29 May 1917 he received a commission. Five months later, almost to the day, he died of wounds in one of the Casualty Clearing Stations at Proven.
He is buried in Mendinghem Military Cemetery. This was one of the humorous names the troops gave to this group of Belgian Casualty Clearing Stations, along with Bandaghem and Dozinghem.


A MUSICIAN
HIS DEATH BROUGHT SILENCE

PRIVATE WILLIAM ARTHUR JAMES LEE


The subject of my tweets, blog and books is inscriptions. They come first and the person and their story comes afterwards. What I mean is that I don't look around for a person and then see what their inscription says, it's the other way round. This has led me along some interesting byways from very under age soldiers, men serving under false names, huge family tragedies, examples of incredible fortitude, to suicide and murder. This inscription has led me nowhere; I could find out even less than I usually can about a soldier and certainly nothing about Lee as a musician. Yet the inscription is one of the most powerful I've come across.
William Arthur James Lee was born in Chingford, Essex the son of Arthur James and Sarah Ann Lee who lived at 43 Higham Station Avenue in Chingford. This much it says in the War Graves Commission Register but I can't identify him with any certainty in any census.
William AJ Lee's medal card does not indicate when he enlisted nor when he arrived in France. We know he served with the 25th Tyneside (Irish) Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers, that he died of wounds in hospital in Etaples on 3 May 1917 and that's it.
Arthur James Lee signed for his son's eloquent inscription - he did well.


"DON'T WORRY"

RIFLEMAN ROBERT GEORGE ALLEN


Robert George Allen's inscription was signed for by Mr EW Allen, I think this will be his youngest brother, Edward Wilfred Allen because his father was Ernest J Allen. The words "Don't worry" are in inverted commas, which would suggest that they are the words of the dead man and no, I don't think they mean don't worry that I'm dead because I shall now be alright. I think that brother Edward was fully conscious of the irony of his choice. His brother had gone off to war telling them all not to worry - and look what happened.
Robert Allen had gone off to war in October 1915 when he was 18. He had been out at work since he was 14 when he was a door boy in a restaurant. Ernest J Allen was a baker in Battersea and in 1901 the family had, Jacob Buss, another baker, living with them. Buss was a naturalised German citizen.
Allen served with the 1st Battalion The Rifle Brigade and died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station behind the lines in Pernes. There's no indication in the war diary when the wounds might have been received.
Edward Wilfred Allen was too young to have served in the war but if you follow up Ernest J Allen, Ernest Jones Allen, he was killed in action on 25 September 1918 whilst serving as a driver with the Royal Horse Artillery.


"NEVER THE SPIRIT WAS BORN
THE SPIRIT SHALL CEASE
TO BE NEVER"

PRIVATE ALEXANDER BAYNE MCGREGOR GRAHAM


Alexander Graham, serving with the 9th Battalion Black Watch, died of gas poisoning in a hospital in Bethune. The battalion had gone into the front line at Vermelles on 26 April 1916. The Germans launched a gas attack on the 27th but the gongs sounded the alert and the men all got their smoke helmets on in good time. Even though the gas was so dense that one could not see more than 8 to 10 feet little harm was done. However, on the 29th the Germans subjected the line to the most intense bombardment using every form of shell including gas shells and lachrymatory shells (tear gas). This time casualties were very high probably, it was concluded, because the men had been advised to remove their helmets too soon. Graham died in hospital the following day.
Isabella Graham chose her youngest son's inscription. It comes from Edwin Arnold's poem, 'The Song Celestial'. This poetic translation of the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, was very popular, especially with Theosophists who were interested in Eastern mysticism. The passage is based on Book 2

"Thou grievest where no grief should be! thou speak'st
Words lacking wisdom! for the wise in heart
Mourn not for those that live, nor those that die. [...]
He who shall say, "Lo! I have slain a man!"
He who shall think, "Lo! I am slain!" those both
Know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain!
Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not; end and beginning are dreams! Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!"


FAITHFUL, TRUE AND BOLD

PRIVATE WILLIAM JOHN LARKIN


William Larkin's sister, Edith, chose his inscription. She was his only living relation their parents having both died by 1911. She chose a line from verse 3 of the hymn 'For all the saints'.

O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold,
Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old
And win with them the victor's crown of gold,
Alleluia! Alleluia!

The siblings had not had an easy life. Father was a groomsman and domestic gardener who died in 1908. Their mother was deaf and had been since she was 25. Edith spent two years in the care of the Maidstone Poor Law Union between the ages of five and seven, and aged fourteen was living with her mother's sister. William doesn't appear in the 1901 census but by 1911 he was a grocer's assistant in Rottingdean.
William Larkin joined the 12th Battalion Sussex Regiment. The battalion were in France by March 1916 where they were heavily involved in the Somme campaign. On 8 October they relieved the 14th Battalion in the trenches at Auchonvillers. The war diary brackets the next three days with the comment:

"Our artillery & TMs (trench mortars) active in wire cutting & bombardment of enemy line. Enemy retaliated to some extent with TMs and 77 mm shells. Our trenches slightly damaged, but repaired each night. Enemy appear to have few heavy guns opposite us on this sector. 5 OR (Other Ranks) wounded, 3 OR killed."


FOR ALL TIMES
REMEMBRANCE
MY BOY, MY BOY

PRIVATE JOHN GEORGE TWEDDELL


John Tweddell, a stoker, fireman on the railways, embarked from Australia in October 1915 to serve with the Australian 1st Field Ambulance. He died of wounds - two fractured lags and laceration of his eye - in the 1st Anzac Main Dressing Station, France, on 6 November 1916.
His widowed mother chose his inscription and to me it has an echo of the Roman poet Catullus's farewell to his brother.

By ways remote and distant waters sped,
Brother, to thy sad grave-side I am come,
That I may give the last gifts to the dead,
Since she who now bestows and now denies
Hath taken thee, hapless brother, from mine eyes.
But lo! these gifts, their heirlooms of past years,
Are made sad things to grace thy coffin shell,
Take them, all drenched with a brother's tears,
And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell!

Hail and Farewell - Ave Atque Vale. Catullus had come a great distance to visit his brother's grave, to salute him and say 'for all time' good-bye'. Mrs Tweddell sent her inscription from a great distance to say 'for all time' remembrance. It sounds very much like a quotation to me but I can't find it anywhere, only as this inscription.


YOU WERE A MAN MY SON

LANCE CORPORAL GEOFFREY DAMEREL GIDLEY


This is Kipling - do you recognise it? If you can keep your head, trust yourself, dream, think ... meet with triumph and disaster, force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone ... :

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

This is Kipling's poem 'If', written in 1895. Strangely, for all its popularity, I've not come across any reference to the poem in an inscription before.
Geoffrey Gidley was the second youngest of George and Annie Gidley's seven children. Some might think he was a man already because he was out at work, as a clerk in a barrister's office, by the time he was 14 in 1911.
As it was, he joined the 9th Battalion London Regiment (Queen Victoria's Rifles) on the outbreak of war. Went with them to France on 17 August 1915 and died of wounds, aged 20 in a Casualty Clearing Station on 30 May 1916.


THERE COMES A MIST
AND A WEEPING RAIN
AND LIFE IS NEVER
THE SAME AGAIN

PRIVATE JAMES O'RORKE


James O'Rorke served with the 6th Battalion Cameron Highlanders and died on 26 July 1918. There is no individual mention of his death but the battalion war diary records that, whilst they were being relieved from the front line trenches at Missy au Bois on the 25th, they were subjected to very heavy gas shelling resulting in 9 officers and 180 other ranks being admitted to hospital. It seems likely that O'Rorke was one of these casualties.
His father chose his inscription. There's another version of it that is fairly common as a general 'In Memoriam' inscription: "There came a mist and a blinding rain and life was never the same again". Mr Edward O'Rorke, however, quoted it correctly from the poem 'Sweet Peril' written by George MacDonald (1824-1905). It's a love poem and the quotation comes from the first verse:

Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much, a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.


THE YOUNG, THE BEAUTIFUL
THE BRAVE

PRIVATE RALPH HAMILTON


Ralph Hamilton's father signed for his inscription. It comes from Lord Byron's narrative poem 'The Bride of Abydos', a story of Turkish love and revenge. Ralph Hamilton was killed in France but his battalion, the 14th (Fife and Forfar Yeomanry) Battalion Black Watch had been fighting in Palestine until their return to Europe in May 1918. They were therefore familiar with the land Byron describes: the land of cypress and myrtle of cedar and vine, 'where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine ... and all, save the spirit of man, is divine?' The actual passage George Hamilton quotes refers to the two lovers:

The winds are high on Helle's wave,
As on that night of stormy water,
When love, who sent, forget to save
The young, the beautiful, the brave,
The lonely hope of Sesto's daughter.

The quotation has an interesting after life. Byron died in 1824 and for many years afterwards an In Memoriam notice would appear in The Times and Morning Post on the anniversary of his death:

Byron - George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron, died nobly for Greece, at Missolonghi, April 19 1824.
"When love, who sent, forgot to save
The young, the beautiful, the brave

The story was that a lady bequeathed money to ensure that on the anniversary of his death a wreath of Marechel Niel roses was laid at the foot his statue in Hamilton Gardens, London W1, and the notices appeared in the papers, 'until the Authorities of Westminster Abbey shall sanction the erection of some memorial in the Poet's Corner'. The 'immorality' of his life making him unacceptable to the Abbey authorities.
I haven't looked up to see how long the notices kept appearing but it was not until May 1969 that Byron got a memorial in Westminster Abbey.
Hamilton's battalion had been brought back from Palestine to meet the German offensive. the regimental history tells of how they had to receive instruction on a different kind of warfare. They had certainly had no experience of gas but the experts sent to train them in fighting with bayonets soon found 'we had not much to learn in that line'.
Hamilton was killed on 2 September 1918. The battalion successfully attacked across the Canal du Nord when 'murderous machine-gun fire opened up from the left and their rear.

"The battalion of Londoners on our left north of Moislains had withdrawn, the village of Moislains itself was never mopped up, and the eight Bosche machine-guns holding Moislains seeing this moved quickly to the south of the village and opened on our backs. In addition to this we were being subjected to very heavy fire on our left flank, which was now completely in the air, and we could actually see their gun teams working the 77's on the crest of the ridge. The Bosche had paid us the compliment of rushing up his best troops to meet our Division, and certainly the Alpini Corps were most gallant fighters. To advance unsupported was out of the question, and our casualties were by now very heavy, so there was nothing left but to withdraw to the west side of the Canal again and reorganise the remains of the companies."



THE BEST IS YET TO BE

MAJOR CHRISTIAN GIBSON PHILLIPS


Christian Phillips was born in March 1880. His mother died in 1884 and his father in 1888 leaving him and his older sister and brother, Rachel and Edward, to be brought up by their mother's spinster sisters.
Commissioned into the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment on 5 May 1900, he served in the South African War and remained in the army until he retired in 1914. He rejoined his old regiment on the outbreak of war and was in France by 16 January 1915. Attached to the 15th Battalion Welsh Regiment, he was promoted Temporary major on 1 July 1916.
It was a rank he held for ten days. On 10 July the battalion took part in the attack on Mametz Wood and Phillips was killed.
His brother, Edward, a farmer in Ampthill Bedfordshire, chose his inscription from Robert Browning's poem Rabbi Ben Ezra.

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the fire was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole world I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid.


THAT TWILIGHT
OF ENCHANTED DAYS
THE IMPERISHABLE PAST
HIS LOVING WIFE ROSE

CORPORAL ALFRED WILLIAM WARD


Mrs Rose Ward's lovely description of the lost past comes from a poem by Frederick W Myers who is better known today as a Spiritualist. The poem, which doesn't appear to have a title, seems to describe a magical visit to the Lake District near Helvellyn, the memory of which is printed on the poet's mind:

Within, without, whate'er hath been,
In cosmic deeps the immortal scene
Is mirrored and shall last -
Live the long looks, the woodland ways.
That twilight of enchanted days -
The imperishable past.

Alfred Ward volunteered soon after the outbreak of war and joined the 61st Field Company Royal Engineers. His medal index card shows that he went with the regiment to France on 25 May 1915. They were based in Belgium - Hooge and Bellewaarde - until the summer of 1916 when they moved to the Somme. Ward was killed at Delville Wood where, among all the fighting, the sappers were laying on water supplies, creating tramway trenches, machine gun emplacements and shell-proof shelters.


SO LONG MATEY "AU REVOIR"

SAPPER WILLIAM HENRY MERRIFIELD


This has all the hallmarks of a brother's inscription: hearty, blokey and unemotional. And it is a brother's inscription, chosen by William Merrifield's younger brother, Leonard. Their parents were both dead - mother died in 1905, father in 1915 and their older sister had died in 1914.
William Merrifield died on 4 August 1920. The war had been over for nearly two years. Merrifield had served since the outbreak and been in France since 24 June 1915. He was 'disembodied' on 15 February 1919; disembodied is a military term which indicates that Merrifield had been a territorial soldier before the war. The fact that he was disembodied in February 1919 would seem to imply that he had survived it unwounded. Yet when he dies in his home town of Newton Abbot just over a year later he is entitled to a military grave. There is no indication as to the cause of Merrifield's death but, if you died before 31 August 1921 of any cause where your war service could have been a contributory factor, you were entitled to a war grave.
I said the inscription Leonard chose for his brother was unemotional, but two things: first he chose an inscription, and paid five shillings and sixpence for it, and secondly, he acknowledges his comradeship with his brother. That doesn't come from the use of the word 'Matey' but from the 'Au revoir', the French word for 'good-bye'. Leonard served with the Devonshire Regiment and had been in France since October 1915. He was discharged 'Class Z' on 12 November 1919. Class Z meant that you were discharged to the reserve and if war broke out again you would be called up.


SMILE AND WAIT

GUARDSMAN JAMES GREEN


Ada Green chose her eldest son's inscription, reflecting her own stoical acceptance of the situation. There was nothing she could do except 'smile and wait', wait until her own death when she would meet him in heaven. It was all she had been able to do through the war too. Her husband, also James, an army reservist, rejoined immediately on the outbreak and, if I'm reading his service record correctly, he was in France with the BEF on 24 August 1914. He survived the war.
The family lived in Coventry where James senior was a motor engine fitter, he served with the Army Service Corps. James Green junior, a blacksmith's striker, served with the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. Unfortunately, his medal index card has no details other than the name of his regiment and his army number; not even the fact of his death.The 1st Battalion Coldstream Guard's war diary doesn't appear to have been digitised so we know nothing of what was happening in the days around his death. We only know that Green died in a Casualty Clearing Station in Meaulte, just south of Albert, on 6 March 1917.


"HE HATH TURNED
THE SHADOW OF DEATH
INTO THE MOURNING"

LIEUTENANT GEOFFREY ROBERT FOLEY


Geoffrey Foley was an engineer's apprentice when he enlisted in September 1914. By the following August he was in France with his regiment, the Somerset Light Infantry. A former public school boy, it wasn't long before he was selected for a commission, which was gazetted in December 1915.
On 13 March 1916, he was severely wounded when he was shot in the thigh by a sniper. On recovery he returned to the front but in October was hospitalised at Etaples with shell shock. Returning again to the front he was leading his men in an attack at Roeux Wood on 3 May when in was severely wounded again in the left leg, this time by a machine gun. Taken to a Casualty Clearing Station, his leg had to be amputated. At first he appeared to be recovering but his conditioned worsened and he died.
Foley's father chose his inscription from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Christian has braved the Valley of the Shadow of Death, negotiating a narrow path in pitch darkness with a dangerous quagmire on one side and a deep ditch on the other. He has been surrounded by flame and smoke and hideous noises, seeing and hearing frightful sights and sounds - a continual howling and yelling as of a people in unutterable misery - until he reaches the other side and the day breaks, at which point Christian says: "He hath turned the shadow of death into the morning".
Christian's Valley of the Shadow of Death sounds very like the Western Front; Robert Foley had been there too.


HE DIED
AS FIRM AS SPARTA'S KING
BECAUSE HIS SOUL
WAS GREAT

LANCE CORPORAL PETER PENNINGTON


This inscription comes from the last verse of Sir Francis Doyle's (1810-1880) poem 'The Private of the Buffs', which he based on a supposed incident in China during the Second Opium War:

"Some Sikhs and a private of the Buffs, having remained behind with the grog carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning they were brought before the authorities, and commanded to perform the kow-tow. The Sikhs obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head and his body thrown on a dunghill."
The Times 1860

Never mind that if the event took place at all Moyse may have been imbibing too much from the grog carts, the event was seized on by the British press and Moyse turned into a hero.

Poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught,
Bewildered and alone.
A heart, with English instinct fraught,
He yet can call his own,
Aye, tear his body, limb from limb,
Bring cord, or axe, or flame;
He only knows that not through him
Shall England come to shame.

It is in fact a very unpleasant, jingoistic poem in which Moyse's 'brave' action is contrasted with that of the native soldiers who 'whine and kneel', unlike the 'English lad' who:

... with eyes that would not shrink,
With knee to man unbent,
Unfaltering on its dreadful brink
To his red grave he went.

The poem concludes with the warning that the mightiest fleets with all their guns are as nothing:

"Unless proud England keep untamed
The strong heart of her sons.
So, let his name through England ring -
A man of mean estate,
Who died, as firm as Sparta's King
Because his soul was great.

Peter Pennington, a miner from Golborn, was a lance-corporal in the South Lancashire Regiment. He had a been a Territorial before the war, was mobilised on the outbreak and in France on 13 February 1915. On 8 September that year he was with a working party in the trenches when he was wounded in the abdomen and died the next day. His father, also a coal miner, chose his inscription.


HE CAME & WENT
& NEVER CEASED TO SMILE

SERJEANT ARTHUR SKENE


Doomed to know not Winter, only Spring, a being
Trod the flowery April blithely for awhile,
Took his fill of music, joy of thought and seeing,
Came and stayed and went, not ever ceased to smile.

Arthur Skene's inscription comes from the second verse of Robert Louis Stevenson's 'In Memoriam F.A.S', written to commemorate an eighteen-year-old boy, Francis Albert Sitwell, who died of consumption in Davos in 1881.
Skene, who worked for the 'Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance Company', joined the Territorials in June 1914 and was called up immediately on mobilization that August. He served with the 1st/4th Gordon Highlanders and was in with them France from 19 February 1915. He was killed two years later. His Lieutenant wrote to Skene's mother, telling her:

'Whilst up reconnoitring with his officer and company sergeant major yesterday a shell burst close to them, killing the officer and company sergeant-major, and severely wounding your son. He was at once taken to a dressing station but died the same day. He will be greatly missed by officers and others of his company; his capabilities and his cheery manner caused him to be liked by all.'

Skene's youngest brother, Peter (Pat), was killed in action on 25 October 1918, seventeen days before the end of the war. His widowed mother chose the same inscription for both her sons.

Yet, O stricken heart, remember, O remember
How of human days he lived the better part.
April came to bloom and never dim December
Breathed its killing chills upon the head or heart.
[Verse 1]


IN MEMORY OF
MY SWEET IDEAL
MUMMIE

CAPTAIN DURHAM DONALD GEORGE HALL


This is a rather touchingly incongruous inscription for Captain Hall RFC, whose Military Cross was awarded for conspicuous gallantry in flying not only in the worst weather and at very low altitudes, but once at an extremely low altitude and under very heavy enemy fire in order to range the artillery's guns. But then 'mummie', who chose it, was quite an usual woman.
Born Ethel Beatrice Lloyd in Toungoo, Burma, her father died when she was two. The next time she surfaces it is as Ethel Sydney performing in a musical in New York. In the 1901 census, as Ethel B Hall, actress, she is staying in digs in Fylde, Blackpool with her three-year-old son Durham Donald George Hall. After this the records show that she divorced Sydney Donald Edward Hall in 1903 and married Samuel Robinson Oliver who divorced her in 1912 at which point she married the co-respondent, John Upston Gaskell. He left her in 1923 and the following year she married Alastair Ian Matheson who, born in 1899, was just younger than her son would have been.
You can perhaps see why her son was her 'sweet ideal'.
Durham Donald George Hall was born in 1898 and educated at Charterhouse. He left school in the summer of 1914 and was commissioned into the Yorkshire Regiment before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps. In January 1918 he went to France with the newly formed 80 Squadron. On the 26 March he failed to return from a patrol. Witnesses saw him bring his plane down near Albert. It is thought it had been damaged by enemy ground fire. Hall had been wounded and died of his wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station the next day.


HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN YET?
LOOK UP, AND SWEAR BY THE
GREEN OF THE SPRING THAT
YOU'LL NEVER FORGET

PRIVATE THOMAS HOXWORTH BOOTE


This is a really unusual inscription, unusual because I have not previously come across one that quotes the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. The quotation comes from Aftermath, which Sassoon wrote in 1919. From the reference to 'your men', it's as though Sassoon is reminiscing with a fellow officer, but his intention is to remind everyone that, however much people might now be looking back at the camaraderie of the trenches, the whole thing was appalling:

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack, -
And the anger, and blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet? ...
Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget.

Private Thomas Boote volunteered in 1914 when he can only have been 17. He served with the 5th Cheshire Regiment and went with it to France in February 1915, earning the 1915 Star. After this the trail goes cold. He died on 12 January 1917 and was buried in the cemetery of his home town, Runcorn in Cheshire. This indicates that he died in Britain but whether of wounds or illness I haven't been able to find out.
Boote's War Grave Commission headstone was not issued until 1997. If he had never had one before I believe the War Graves Commission are prepared to provide one now, with an inscription. That therefore must have been chosen by members of his family in 1997.
Sassoon was a powerful poet but a minority poet in 1919. His position was very different in 1997. His sentiments were not popular with those who were choosing inscriptions in the immediate post-war years, nor were those of Wilfred Owen, despite their popularity now. I've seen Owen quoted twice, once by his parents on his own headstone, and once on a grave at Fromelles. But again, that is a modern inscription chosen sometime in the early twenty-first century.
Thomas Boote's younger brother, James, served in the Royal Navy and went down with his ship, HMS Gloucester, when it was sunk by German bombers off the coast of Crete on 22 May 1941.


VICTORY
BUT THE PRICE WAS DEAR

PRIVATE RICHARD VIDAL


Richard Vidal, a farmer from Manitoba, was one of his parents nine children. He enlisted on 14 February 1916 and served with the Canadian Cyclists Corps. Trained as an elite to carry out intelligence work, members of the corps underwent an intensive course that included musketry, bombing, bayonet fighting and the use of Lewis guns, as well as signalling and range-finding. Despite this, cyclists tended to be used for traffic control or as trench guides, ambulance drivers or even for burying the dead. However, during the last one hundred days, as the war became a war of movement, the cyclists came into their own and were finally able to do the intelligence work for which they had been trained. They could be sent in advance of the infantry to keep in touch with the retreating enemy, they were used for reconnaissance and scouting and some of them took part in direct combat.
All this was far more dangerous than their earlier work had been and they became known as the suicide battalions. Richard Vidal was killed near Wancourt just outside Arras on 2 September 1918 during the Second Battle of Arras.
His mother chose his inscription, acknowledging that the price of victory had meant the loss of her son.


SOMEWHERE
A VOICE IS CALLING
CALLING FOR ME

PRIVATE NOEL FINUCANE


Noel Finucane's inscription comes from a popular love song written in 1911 by Eileen Newton and Arthur F Tate and recorded in 1916 by John McCormack.

Dusk and shadows falling,
O'er land and sea;
Somewhere a voice is calling
Calling for me!
Night and stars are gleaming,
Tender and true;
Dearest! my heart is dreaming,
Dreaming of you!

Finucane was with a working party on the night of 4 January 1917 when he was shot 'through the heart'. He had only been in France since 13 November the previous year. Nevertheless, although his military career may have been short his civilian life beforehand had been fairly exciting.
A steward on the transatlantic liners, he had been on board the Lusitania when she was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Ireland on 7 May 1915. Finucane had escaped from the liner just before she sank and was picked up by a boat . The People's Stories website has a detailed, and rather more colourful accountof this event than I've given - it's worth reading!
After the Lusitania, Finucane served on another Cunard ship, the Aquitania, which was being used as a hospital ship off Gallipoli. He enlisted on 12 December 1915, just before the Allies evacuated the peninsula.
Finucane's widowed mother chose his inscription for her youngest child. Sentimental postcards that feature the song usually show a pair of lovers - with any luck this link will show you an example. But a mother can yearn to hear her son's voice just as much as a wife or girlfriend.


SCHOOL, WAR, DEATH

PRIVATE ARNOLD STATHAM


Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal
Friday 14 December 1917
"Local cricketers will extend their sympathy to Mr and Mrs Statham, 90 Kedleston Rd, Derby, who have just received the sad news of the death of their son, Private Arnold Statham of the Seaforths. In a letter to the parents the chaplain states that he met his death on the 20th in the fighting before Cambrai. Joining the army soon after leaving school, he was drafted to France about March 1916, took part in the fighting in High Wood, and on the Somme. At the latter place he was wounded in the knee, and was brought over here, and sent to a hospital in Glasgow. Returning to Ripon, it was understood that he was not to be sent away until he was 19. However, at his own request, he returned to the fighting area two months before that time arrived, and met his death as stated. He lies in a corner of a foreign land which will be for ever England. His parents take this opportunity of thanking all those kind friends who have sympathised with them in their terrible loss."

Arnold Statham was born on 30 January 1899. He was therefore just 17 when he went to France 'about March 1916' and 18 and 10 months when he returned to the front two months before his nineteenth birthday. He must have been killed almost immediately in the 51st Highland Division's attack on Flesquieres.
On the second anniversary of his death, his family inserted the following announcement in the In Memorial column of the Derby Daily Telegraph:

Statham - To the Glory of God and in loving remembrance of our dear son and brother Pte Arnold Statham and his gallant comrades of the Seaforth Highlanders, who gave their lives for King and country Nov. 17 1917 at Cambrai. "Never shall their glory fade".

Statham's body was originally buried in the 51st Divisional Cemetery, but thirteen years later all the bodies here were exhumed and reburied in Orival Wood Military Cemetery. It was at this point that the families would have been asked to provide a personal inscription. Ten years after the In Memoriam announcement, it wasn't that the memory of their son had faded but Mr and Mrs Statham perhaps no longer associated his death with glory. 'School, war, death' is a bleak summary of a short life.


SAME MESSAGE

LIEUTENANT GUY KENNEDY DAVENPORT MC


Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday 14 April 1917
"A private cable message was yesterday received by Mr Frank A Davenport, stating that his youngest son, Lieut. Guy Kennedy Davenport, of the Australian Field Artillery, was killed in action in France on the 10th inst. The deceased officer, who was a member of the firm of Frank A Davenport and Son, was educated at King's College, Goulburn, and was 26 years of age. He was recently awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous bravery. Lieut. Davenport has left a widow - the daughter of Mr WR Cowper, manager of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney at West Maitland."

"7 April 1920
Dear Madam,
I am returning herewith circular (form "A") in respect re your husband, the late Lieutenant GK Davenport, MC, 4th Field Artillery Brigade, in order that the personal inscription you desire may be inserted thereon. It is noted that you have stated "same message". Evidently you sent another form at the same time, but as each one is separately dealt with it is necessary that the inscription be shown on each form.
Yours faithfully
Officer i/c Base Records"

"Sydney
April 16th
Dear Sir,
In reply to your letter of April 7th I have never sent or filled in any form to you except the one enclosed - the words I wish put on my husband's headstone are "Same message" - simply and only [underlined] those two words - I understand we can have what we wish as long as we pay the cost of the engraving. I do not want any mistake about this, all I wish are those two words [last three words all underlined]. Would you please let me know if it is clearly understood ...
Your truly
Mabel Davenport"

"14 May 1920
Dear Madam,
I have to acknowledge receipt of your letter of 16th April, which has been forwarded to this office by the Secretary, Department of Defence, and note you desire simply the two words "Same message" to appear as the personal inscription on the permanent memorial over the grave of your husband, the late Lieutenant GK Davenport MC ..."
Yours faithfully
Officer i/c Base Records"

I wonder what the same message was - 'I will always love you' perhaps?



RUHE SANFT IN FREMBER ERDE

PRIVATE JOHN MATUCHA


This inscription is in German. John Matucha was an Austro-Hungarian citizen born in Bohemia where his parents, Wenzl and Maria Matucha, lived in Manetin vei Pilsen. According to his medal index card, he joined the British Army some time after the beginning of January 1916, served with the 7th Battalion East Kent Regiment and died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station near Poperinghe on 27 September 1917. His mother signed for his inscription, Ruhe sanft in fremde erde, rest peacefully in foreign earth.
All the above is fact, this is surmise. Matucha died in a Casualty Clearing Station, he hadn't been moved back to a base hospital so his wounds were likely to have been quite recent. The 7th Battalion had not been in the trenches during September. On 29 September they were in camp at Sint Jan ter Biezen, just west of Poperinghe. At 7.20 pm a German aeroplane dropped four bombs on the camp killing one officer and 26 other ranks and wounding three officers and 63 ORs. I would suggest that this was when Matucha was wounded. A soldier only had to have arrived alive at some form of aid post for it to be said that he had died of wounds. Even if his death followed soon after the wounding. Matucha must have died before midnight.
What was an Austro-Hungarian citizen doing in the British Army? This is even more of a surmise. Bohemia, post-war Czecho-Slovakia, wanted independence from Austria-Hungary. Some Bohemians joined the Czech Legions and fought with the Allies - most however did not. Some, and perhaps Matucha was one of them, joined the Allied armies.


POOR KID

PRIVATE HARRY GRIFFITHS


Harry Griffiths died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing station at Duisans. Does the inscription his father chose refer to the fact of his death, the wounds that he suffered or the fact that he had to be involved in the war at all? We're not going to know.
Griffiths was a volunteer who served originally with the 15th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment, formed in Birmingham in September 1914. He went with it to France, landing in Boulogne on 27 November 1915. At the time of his death he was with the 1st Battalion. It's not possible to tell when he was wounded but the battalion had attempted an attack on the German lines on 31 March. They were driven back by heavy machine-gun fire, rifle grenades and artillery, suffering twenty-five Other Rank casualties killed and wounded.
His parents, Mr and Mrs Henry H Griffiths, lived at 8 Princess Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, but I haven't been able to find out anything else about him or his family.


PLAY UP, PLAY UP
& PLAY THE GAME

LIEUTENANT HERBERT HAWORTH


These words form the last line of each of the three verses of Sir Henry Newbolt's poem 'Vitai Lampada'. This is the torch of life, which each generation nurtures before passing it on to the next, its flame intact. The flame is nurtured by each person playing his part, playing the game, to the benefit the whole team, regiment or country.
Massively popular in its day, the poem has come in for much subsequent ridicule, particularly for its second verse:

The sand of the desert is sodden red, -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

The words don't mean that war is a game, they were simply a colloquial way of saying, do what you know to be right for the greater good not for yourself. As an inscription the meaning is to those still living to take up the torch the dead have dropped and carry on playing the game. Haworth's father chose it.
Haworth, the son of a Blackpool saddler, served with the 8th Battalion The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment. On 6 June 1917, the battalion took part in the attack on the Messines Ridge, which followed the explosion of several large mines.


ONLY A POSTCARD
TO SAY "QUITE WELL"
THEN A LETTER
"HE NOBLY FELL"

PRIVATE ARTHUR EDWARDS


Arthur Edwards died of wounds in a base hospital in Boulogne. His father chose his inscription, still obviously stunned by the suddenness of his son's death. It seemed to him as though one minute he'd received a post card from his son saying that he was quite well and the next a letter informing him that his son was dead.
I have a feeling that the postcard Mr William Edwards was referring was a Field Service postcard. It's likely that his son was given one to fill at some point before he was wounded or even when he was first admitted to hospital. These cards were a means by which soldiers could quickly keep in touch with home. But their use was very prescribed.
The card was printed with a number of statements that the soldiers could cross out, leaving the one that applied. There was however a fierce warning printed across the top that nothing else was to be written on it except the date and signature - "If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed". The first statement on the card was, "I am quite well".
The letter informing soldiers' families of their deaths did not mention anything about nobly falling, it just baldly stated that the soldier had either been killed in action or died of wounds. But Edwards' officer would have written a letter of condolence to his parents and someone at the hospital usually wrote one too. This is probably where the reference to nobly falling came from.


OH WHY WAS HE TAKEN
SO YOUNG AND SO FAIR
WHEN EARTH HELD SO MAY
IT COULD BETTER SPARE

PRIVATE ROBERT CURRIE


Robert Currie was killed in air raid on Etaples. I don't know whether he was a patient in one of the hospitals or whether he was in one of the camps. The Times, reporting the event on the 24 May, made much of the fact that Etaples was a hospital area, but it was also a huge training camp.

"Sunday's raids lasted from soon after 10 at night till after midnight. There was a short interval at half-past 11, and evidently two separate parties were employed, numbering between them over a score of machines, from which a great number of bombs were dropped, many of the very largest size, making craters in the ground 15 and 20 feet across ... Some of the enemy machines came down and used their machine-guns, raking the hospital tents and attendants quarters with fire from low altitudes. No circumstance of savagery seems to have been omitted."

The Etaples Base Commandant's war diary recorded:

"15/9/1918 Area attacked by enemy aircraft. Casualties 1 Officer, 1 Nursing Sister, 167 OR killed; 27 Officers, 11 Nursing Sisters, 584 OR wounded; 18 OR missing."

Currie's inscription comes from a popular piece of 'In Memoriam' verse in which the pronoun is interchangeable:

Oh why was he/she taken so young and so fair
When earth held so many it better could spare;
Hard was the blow that compelled us to part
With out loving son/daughter, so dear to our heart.




NO LIFE IS LOST
THAT'S NOBLY SPENT
NO HERO'S DEATH IS PREMATURE
MOTHER

LIEUTENANT WILFRED VIVIAN HUBERT LUTHER BIDSTRUP


Wilfred Bidstrup, an accountant from South Australia, was killed in action on 3 April 1917 leading a group of bombers in a night attack on the German trenches. Witness reports vary wildly but the fact of his death was never disputed.

He was killed "by a Boche machine gun while advancing to the attack. His platoon met a German strong-point and had a bad time".

"I saw casualty killed at Noreuil, France by a machine-gun bullet whilst on a bombing raid. He was killed under my eyes, not instantly but he died of wounds shortly afterwards."

"He was found by a search party, sent out to look for him, dead, riddled with bullets and his revolver empty".

"I found his body next day, with his revolver lying by his side. All the cartridges had been fired off. I could see no marks of a wound on his body, so he must have been killed by a bullet."

Bidstrup's mother, Minna, chose his inscription from a poem called 'To S.H. Killed in France (From his First Schoolmaster)" by W. Snow which was published in The Spectator on 15 May 1915. This is the first verse:

You, killed in action, leading men!
I hardly yet believe it true:
For me you're still the boy of ten,
Blue-eyes and curly-haired, I knew.

The poem recounts the triumphs of his schooldays, of his year at Oxford before he volunteered, forsaking the 'magic' gown' for duty. This is the last verse:

And is this all? was all in vain
The life that you so early gave?
No life is short that's nobly spent,
No hero's death is premature.

The inscription, particularly the penultimate line of the poem, is much better known than the rest of the poem and is quite regularly found on war graves.


"SALT" OF OUR ENGLISH EARTH

PRIVATE RICHARD DOUGLAS SALMON


Richard Douglas Salmon, a stockbroker's clerk from Willesden, enlisted in the 22nd Battalion London Regiment at the outbreak of war. On 15 March 1915 the regiment disembarked in France. Just over two months later Salmon was wounded in action. It was 23 May, his 21st birthday. He died the following day.
Salman's inscription comes from 'The Second Lieutenant' by 'Touchstone', the pen name of the journalist Claude Edward Cole Hamilton Burton, who was known as 'The Daily Mail' poet because his poems appeared so regularly in that newspaper.
'The Second Lieutenant' was first published in the paper in May 1915, the same month Salman was killed. It was reprinted in 'The Mystery of the Daily Mail 1896-1921', a history by FA McKenzie of the paper's first twenty-five years.
McKenzie claimed that Touchstone's poems 'are cherished by thousands as among their most familiar and treasured possessions, the best known, 'A Second Lieutenant'. It obviously made an impression on Salmon's family.
I have written the poem out in full as you are unlikely to be able to find it very easily anywhere else.

Somewhere in Flanders he lies,
The lad with the laughing eyes;
And I bade him good-bye but yesterday!
He clasped my hand in a manly grip;
I can see him now with a smiling lip,
And his chin held high in the old proud way.

Salt of our English earth,
A lad of promise and worth,
Straight and true as the blade at his side,
Instant to answer his country's call,
He leapt to the fray to fight and fall,
And there, in his youth's full flood, he died.

Victor yet, in his grave,
All that he had he gave;
Nor may we weep for the might-have-been,
For the quenchless flame of a heart aglow
Burns clear that the soul yet blind may know
The vision splendid his eyes have seen!

Weep but the wasted life
Of him who shrinks from the strife,
Shunning the path that the brave have trod;
Not for the friend whose task is done,
Who strove with his face to the morning sun,
Up and up to his God!


FORGIVE O LORD
A MOTHER'S WISH
THAT DEATH
HAD SPARED HER SON

SERGEANT THOMAS ARMSTRONG


"On the evening of 30/31st January 1916, a party of bombers in conjunction with a number of scouts made a raid on the enemy front line trench. During the raid, Sergeant Armstrong was killed instantly by rifle and machine gun fire."
Canadian Casualty Report

Thomas Armstrong was born in Ayrshire in 1890. In 1914 he was working as a carpenter in Canada when he joined the Canadian Infantry on 24 October 1914. The battalion sailed from Montreal on 29 May 1915, by which time Armstrong had already been promoted corporal. Disembarking in France on 18 September 1815, he was promoted sergeant on 4 January 1916 and killed three weeks later.
Armstrong appears to have been the youngest of his parents' seven children. His eldest sister, Janet, was twenty-three years older than him. His mother signed for his inscription, confessing to a feeling that must have been very common among all parents although seldom voiced.


DUTY CALLED HIM, HE OBEYED
HE HAD NO WISH TO ROAM
HE LOVED THE LAND HE LIVED IN
AND HIS DEAR ONES AT HOME

CAPTAIN HUGH CORNELIUS BUCKLEY


Hugh Buckley was an Australian born and bred, this was the country he loved. His wife, the mother of his two daughters, chose his inscription; these were his dear ones at home.
Buckley, who had been a member of the militia for eleven years, joined up in March 1915. He was soon promoted captain and adjutant of the 22nd Battalion, which left for Gallipoli on the 8 May. He was wounded nineteen days later. Hospitalised first in Malta and then in England, he didn't return to France until April 1916.
Having recently attended a grenade-handling course, Buckley was giving a course of instruction himself when a grenade exploded in his hand - he was killed instantly. A witness related what happened:

"He [Buckley] was at the bomb school giving instructions how to use a certain bomb, and this particular one if you hit it with your hand will go off, and poor old Buck said to them, don't hit it like this and he brings his hand down on it and hit the detonator, it exploded and killed three of them."


DRINK OF MY CUP

PRIVATE JACK EDWARD THROWER


Jack Thrower was his parents' only surviving child. He enlisted on 15 September 1914 giving his age as 19 and one month. The records tell a different story: his birth was registered in the fourth quarter of 1897 therefore in September 1914 he was still only 16. Three months after his enlistment he was discharged from the army, not because he was underage but because of defective vision, which meant he was "not likely to become an effective soldier". Nevertheless, the same Jack Thrower, or shall we say someone called Jack Thrower who lived in the same tiny village of Aspall in Suffolk, whose father had the same name and who was the same age as the Jack Thrower who had been discharged from the army, died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in France on 31 August 1916. He was 18 and if the army knew his correct age he would have needed his parent's signed permission to be at the front.
Robert Edward Thrower signed for his son's inscription - his mother had died in 1913. 'Drink of my cup'. The words come from St Matthew 20: 22-23. 'The mother of Zebedee's children' asks Christ if her sons can sit on either side of him 'in thy kingdom'. Christ replies, 'Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of ...?' In other words are you prepared to face the agonising death that I know I must face. The sons reply, 'We are able' to which Christ says: 'Ye shall drink indeed of my cup".
The inscription is one of the many that show how relations equated the death of their sons and husbands with that of God's son. As it said in Sir John Arkwright's hymn:

These were his servants; in His steps they trod
Following through death the martyr'd Son of God:
Victor He rose; Victorious too shall rise
They who have drunk His cup of Sacrifice.

If they sacrificed themselves as Christ had they to would gain a place with him in the kingdom of heaven.
The words in the King James Version are 'Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?'. The only place where I have found the words written exactly as on Jack Thrower's inscription is in the Jehovah Witness Magazine, Watch Tower, where they appear as the yeartext for 1915, "Are ye able to drink of my cup?" However, many Jehovah's Witnesses were pacifists and far from volunteering were conscientious objectors.


EVEN SO, FATHER

LANCE CORPORAL GORDON FRANCIS TURNER


'Even so, Father' might sound enigmatic to us today but in an age more familiar with the bible it would have been recognised as the equivalent of 'Thy will be done'. The words are spoken by Christ, 'Even so Father for so it seemed good in Thy sight', St Matthew 11:26. The meaning is the same as the much more popular inscription: 'We cannot Lord Thy purpose see but all is well that's done by Thee'.
Henry and Abigail Turner had two sons, Henry and Gordon, and two daughters, Muriel and Winifred. Gordon joined the London Rifle Brigade in 1912, serving first with the 1st Battalion and then with the 5th. He died of wounds in a base hospital on 7 May 1915. Henry, serving with the 23rd Battalion London Regiment was killed in action nineteen days later - 26 May.
Henry Turner had been due to marry Evelyn Worley. Her brother, Robin Worley, serving with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Gallipoli, died of wounds on 28 August. Her sister's husband, Charles Saunders had been killed in action on 28 April.
'Even so Father for so it seemed good in Thy sight.'


"OUR BABY BOY"

PRIVATE NEILSON RILEY YOUHILL YOUHILL


Neilson Youhill was 19 when he died in the Second Eastern General Hospital, Brighton on 9 December 1916. He had been in hospital, undiagnosed, since the 7th, feverish and restless when he suddenly took a turn for the worse and died at 5 am on the 9th. A post-mortem revealed cerebro-spinal fever (meningitis). From looking at his service record, it would appear that having enlisted on 15 December 1915 he arrived in Britain on 5 July 1916 but never joined his regiment in France. This is confirmed by the fact that he was only entitled to the British War Medal; to be entitled to the Victory Medal a soldier needed to have served in a war zone.
His father, Samuel Youhill, signed for his inscription: 'Our baby boy'. Youhill named his grandmother, Mrs Elizabeth Riley, as his next-of-kin. She was also described as his foster-mother on official forms. She received his memorial plaque. His step-sister, Miss E Riley, received his medals. To the three of them he was their 'baby boy'. I would imagine that his mother was dead.


A "SACRIFICE"
BUT NOT IN VAIN
IF THOSE AT HOME
WILL PLAY THE GAME

PRIVATE WALTER MONTAGUE CHICK


This was a very common feeling after the First World War, after all, according to the British Victory Medal, it had been 'The Great War for Civilization', and according to the next-of-kin memorial plaque your relation had 'died for Freedom and Honour' . In the British narrative, right had triumphed over might, culture over 'kultur', justice over tyranny in the war to end all wars. Now, therefore, it was up to those who lived on to see that the world became the better place for which the dead had died.
It's interesting to see the way Walter Chick's parents expressed this. 'Playing the game' is thought to be such a public school expression that it's unexpected coming from a family where Walter Chick, at the age of fourteen, had been a tailor's apprentice. But it was not a public-school expression. Around this time an American, Henry Grantland Rice (1880-1954), encapsulated the idea in a verse that it is still quoted today:

For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes - not that you won or lost -
But how you played the game.

Walter Chick disembarked in France on 17 April 1915. Within a month he had been hospitalised with tonsillitis and by July was back in England with pleurisy. It was 1 September 1916 before he returned to France with the 1st Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment. On the 30th he was hospitalised with a gun-shot wound that penetrated his chest. He died on 6 October.


"ROGER"
THE ROSE THAT CLIMBED
OUR GARDEN WALL
HAS BLOOMED THE OTHER SIDE

SECOND LIEUTENANT ROGER LESLIE STUART WILKINSON


Roger Wilkinson was eighteen when he died of wounds on 21 November 1916 - too young to be on active service in France without his parents signed permission.
On 13 November his regiment, the 4th Battalion Bedfordshire Regiment, took part in an attack on the German front line between Beaumont Hamel and the right bank of the River Ancre. The attack came under heavy machine-gun fire and Wilkinson received severe gun-shot wounds in his left leg and shoulder. He died just over a week later, his parents having been telegrammed permission to visit him in hospital in France on the 19th. He died on the 21st.
In his letter of condolence, Wilkinson's company commander told his parents:

'What worried him most was the possibility of not being allowed to take his platoon into action on the 13th, as I had previously sent his name as being under age. In fact he went to HQ, quite unknown to myself, and begged the C.O. to allow him to go.'

His father signed for his inscription. It comes from 'April' by the American poet Alice Cary (1821-1871), prettily expressing the belief that life continues on the other side after death:

So, even for the dead I will not bind
My soul to grief: Death cannot long divide;
For is it not as if the rose that climbed
My garden wall, had bloomed the other side?


"THE UNDONE YEARS
THE CRUELTY OF WAR"
SADLY MISSED BY
MOTHER, FATHER, SISTERS, BROS

PRIVATE CHARLES ALBERT ROLLINGS


Although the inverted commas surround the first seven words of this inscription, I'm relatively sure that it's not a quotation but an amalgamation of words and ideas from Wilfred Owen's poem 'Strange Meeting'. Probably written sometime early in 1918, the poem was first published the following year in Edith Sitwell's 'Wheels, An Anthology of Verse', and then in 'Poems by Wilfred Owen, published by Chatto and Windus in 1920 with an introduction by Siegfried Sassoon.
In his poem Owen meets the man he killed the previous day:

"Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said that other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also;

A few lines later Owen refers not to the cruelty of war but to, 'The pity of war, the pity war distilled'. I believe Rollings' father, who signed for the inscription, was referring to both these passages.
This is only the third time that I've noticed a reference to any of Wilfred Owen's poems in a headstone inscription. Owen's parents quoted, or rather slightly misquoted, 'The End', and one of the graves at Fromelles, where the inscriptions were chosen by the families during the first decade of the twenty-first century, quoted from the lines, 'Red lips are not so red/As stained stones kissed by the English dead'.
Charles Albert Rollings came from Malton in Ontario and served with the 52nd Canadian Infantry. He died at a field ambulance on 18 July 1917 and was buried in the adjacent cemetery.
The War Grave Commission limited inscriptions to sixty-six characters, not that it appears to have enforced this, Rollings' inscription comes to 65, which is presumably why the word brothers had been abbreviated to 'bros'.


"THE READINESS IS ALL"

STAFF SERJEANT JOHN MATLEY


The War Graves Commission have misread this inscription; the word is definitely readiness not 'neadeness'. It's a quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet confesses to his friend, Horatio, that he has misgivings about taking part in the forthcoming fencing match. Horatio advises him to obey his instincts and withdraw. Hamlet says no, if his time to die has come then it's come, and if it hasn't then it hasn't. To Hamlet, when you die is much less important than the fact that you are prepared for death - 'the readiness is all'.
John Matley, the son of Thomas Matley a railway engine driver in Manchester, was a fitter in a locomotive department in Farnworth. He served in the Royal Garrison Artillery, his experience with locomotives giving him a valuable skill with the heavy engines that moved the guns. At the time of his death, Matley was serving with the 106th Battery Royal Field Artillery. He died in a hospital centre in Doullens.
L Matley, 31 Gorse Road, Preston chose his inscription. This was probably John Matley's brother, Luke, who at the time of the 1911 census had been a solicitors' clerk. It's an impressive choice: apposite, original and literary.



"THE HOPELESS TANGLE
OF OUR AGE
THOU TOO HAST SCANNED IT WELL"
ARNOLD

LANCE CORPORAL JOHN OLIVER NEVILLE


NEVILLE - Lance-Corpl John Oliver Neville, Special Company, Royal Engineers, killed by shell splinter whilst leaving the line on June 4 1917, aged 22 years, the dearly beloved youngest son of F. and M.F. Neville of 57 Hayward Road, Barton Hill.

Lance-Corporal Neville served with "O" Special Company Royal Engineers, formed early in May 1915 in response to the introduction of gas warfare. "O" Company's job was to try to develop protective measures to minimise the impact of chemical warfare.
Neville was one of the two children of Frederick Neville, a railway engine driver from Bristol, and his wife Mary Frances Neville. Frederick Neville signed for his son's inscription. It comes from Matthew Arnold's 'Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 'Obermann', Etienne de Senancour (1770-1846), whose philosophical melancholy of an earlier era reflected Arnold's own.


"JUST A 'CAST-IRON' 'ARD"

RIFLEMAN LEONARD ALFRED CHARLES COPPARD


Leonard Coppard's brother, George, chose his inscription. It sounds like a brother's inscription, as though he's describing Leonard as 'rock hard'. But he isn't, he's just saying that Leonard was a member of the 6th Battalion the City of London Regiment whose nickname was the 'Cast Irons'. It is thought that the name came about because the buttons on the 6th's tunics were made of black iron rather than silver or brass.
Leonard Coppard served with the 6th Battalion City of London Regiment and was taken prisoner in the first part of 1917. His Red Cross file says that he was taken prisoner at 'Buttecourt on 20 May 1917'. There is nowhere called Buttecourt but there is somewhere called Bullecourt and although the 1st Battalion were out of the line on the 20 May, the 2nd Battalion were in the trenches at Bullecourt. On the 20th they were subjected to a very heavy enemy barrage, which 'caused some casualties'. The next day the battalion made an attack on Bovis trench: 'Our troops gained objective but were forced to withdraw by a hostile counter attack'. It could have been at this point that Coppard was taken prisoner. The battalion was relieved that evening and the war diary recorded 13 officer and 226 O/R casualties over their four day tour of the trenches.
The Red Cross file states that Coppard was wounded in the right knee and that he died in the camp hospital at Dulmen on 7 July 1917. Not that news of any of this seems to have been passed on to his family until May 1919.
After the war, the War Graves Commission exhumed the bodies of British prisoner-of-war from 180 cemeteries scattered across Germany. They were reburied in four British cemeteries within Germany of which Cologne Southern is one.


"I KNEW MY DUTY
REALISED THE PRICE
AND PAID IT WILLINGLY"

CAPTAIN HAROLD HANSON


Harold Hanson was a partner in his father's firm of Abbey & Hanson, Surveyors, Huddersfield, which is still trading today as Abbey Hanson Rowe, AHR. He was also a Territorial soldier in the 4th Battalion Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment. Hanson volunteered for foreign service immediately - his death announcement in the Yorkshire Post says that he had served since September 1914. His medal roll index card gives his date of entry into a theatre of war as 17 May 1917.
Territorial soldiers were only committed to service at home. However, come the outbreak of war they were all asked if they would be prepared to serve abroad. Many said no. Hanson must have said yes, fully aware of what it might mean and happy to pay the price. This is what his father put as his inscription.
Hanson died of wounds on 1 December 1917 but on the 3rd most of the local Yorkshire papers were still only reporting that he had been dangerously wounded. However, on the 6th came the announcement of his death.


"GOD BLESS YOU ALL!
IF I DIE FOR MY COUNTRY
I AM HAPPY"
15 MAY 1916

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN JAMES ANDREW


Second Lieutenant John James Andrew died on 29 April 1917 of wounds received twenty days earlier on the opening day of the battle of Arras. Andrew initially served as a private with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders before being commissioned into the 20th Northumberland Fusiliers. His medal index card records that he was entitled to the 1914-1915 Star having first entered a theatre of war in late May 1915. It was year later that he told his family, 'If I die for my country I am happy' - and a year after this that he did.
Born in Carluke, Lanarkshire, Andrew was the son of John Andrew an elementary school teacher who served in the First Garrison Battalion Cameron Highlanders. This was a short-lived battalion soon absorbed into the Royal Defence Corps. This was involved in either home protection or observation duties. It was John Andrew senior who signed for his son's inscription. A patriotic and affirmative choice that says as much about the father as it does about the son.


HAS DRUNK HIS CUP
A ROUND OR TWO BEFORE
AND SILENTLY STOLE TO REST

SERJEANT FRANK CARSON


For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.
[Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883) The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam XXII]

Edward Fitzgerald's translation of quatrains said to have been written in the 11th Century by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam was published in 1859 as the Rubayait of Omar Khayyam. Initially attracting little attention, by the 1880s the poems were extremely popular throughout the English speaking world, and their popularity only grew. Some of the quatrains, such as this one, perfectly capture the fleeting nature of life and the pathos of youthful death.
Frank Carson had been shipping clerk in Liverpool in civilian life and Scoutmaster of the 33rd Liverpool Scout Troop, Mossley Hill, Merseyside. His medal index card does not indicate that he was a volunteer. He served originally with the 6th Battalion The King's Liverpool Regiment before being transferred to the 6th Battalion South Wales Borderers whilst he was still a private.
He was killed in action two weeks before the end of the war. On 28 October the Battalion, in reserve, were being subjected to very heavy enemy shelling at intervals during the day, many of the shells were gas shells. There's no report of Carson's death just this bleak announcement in the Liverpool Daily Post on 21 November, ten days after the end of the war:

CARSON - Mrs and Mrs Carson and Family desire to thank all kind friends for expressions of sympathy in their great sorrow.
29 Faulkner Street, Liverpool


HALF MY SOUL

SERJEANT THOMAS FREDERICK BUTTERY


There are two possible sources for this inscription, or it could of course just be that Fred Buttery's wife plucked it out of the air. However, it might be that she had seen it written about in the popular press as a translation of the inscription the Revd Sabine Baring-Gould placed on his wife's gravestone when she died in 1916. Baring-Gould was the well-known author of Onward Christian Soldiers and both at the time of Mrs Baring-Gould's death and again in 1924 when her husband died the inscription was a topic of note.
The inscription - Dimidium animae meae - means half my soul. This in turn is a quotation from a valedictory poem Horace wrote for his friend Virgil, describing him as half my soul. Baring-Gould would have been aware of Horace but none of the newspaper writers mention this source.
There is another possible source and this too was occasionally printed in the press as a curiosity. It comes from a grave in St Peter's Churchyard Barton-on-Humber belonging to a young wife who died in 1777. It was composed by her husband:

Doom'd to receive half my soul held dear,
The other half with grief, she left me here,
Ask not her name, for she was true and just,
Once a fine woman, but now a heap of dust.

Thomas Frederick Buttery and Elizabeth Anne Hobson were married in Leeds in October 1915. Buttery, who in 1911 was a cloth finisher, served with the 8th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment. By the summer of 1918 he was a serjeant. He was killed in action on 28 July 1918 in the fighting near Jonchery-sur-Vesle and was buried on the battlefield with four other soldiers from his regiment. Their bodies were exhumed and reburied in Danzig Alley in November 1919.


YOUR MEMORY HALLOWED
IN THE LAND YOU LOVED
SOUTH AFRICA

SECOND LIEUTENANT ERROL SIDNEY PLOWES


Like yesterday's inscription, Errol Sidney Plowes' comes from the first verse of Sir John Arkwright's poem, which later became a hymn, O Valiant Hearts:

O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame;
Proudly you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.

Plowes' parents chose the last line, which is more usually quoted than the line above. However, unusually, they have identified 'the land he loved' - it was South Africa, the land where he was born and brought up and where his father, Sidney Arnold Plowes, worked for the Union Castle Shipping Line in Cape Town.
Born in Rondebosch on 22 February 1898, Plowes joined the 1st South African Infantry as a private in 1916 when he was just 18. On 8 April 1917, just after his 19th birthday, he received a commission into the Royal Field Artillery, serving with the 379th Battery, 169th Brigade. He was killed in action during the fighting for Hangard Wood, part of the German's Spring Offensive, a year and a day later when he was just 20.


YOU, YOUR KNIGHTLY
VIRTUE PROVED

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILFRED SPENCER BOWLES


Wilfred Bowles was killed in action on 10 July 1916 in the Welsh Division's attack on Mametz Wood. He was shot by a sniper. A theology student at King's College London, Bowles gave up his studies in June 1915 to join the Inns of Court OTC. Five months later he was commissioned into the 5th Battalion, Essex Regiment and three months after this he transferred to the Machine Gun Corps. He went to France on 4 June 1916 and was killed five weeks later.
William Spencer Bowles was the son of Tom and Alice Bowles of Les Rochettes, Pontac, St Clements, Jersey. His father was a house painter and his mother a school mistress who by 1911 was the head teacher of a church school on the island. This makes her one of the very few mothers in this project to have an independent career, least of all one with three children and a living husband.
Bowles' father signed for his inscription. It comes from the first verse of Sir John Arkwright's famous hymn, 'O Valiant Hearts', once a stalwart of Remembrance Day services before its sentiments went out of fashion:

O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame;
Proudly you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.


YE, THAT LIVE ON
REMEMBER US AND THINK
"WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN"

GUNNER WILLIAM ROY FOUNTAIN


Despite the fact that it has been truncated and has rather eccentric punctuation, this is still recognisably an inscription composed by J. Maxwell Edmonds, a Classics don at Cambridge:

Ye that live on 'mid English pastures green,
Remember us and think what might have been.

The inscription was originally published in The Times on 6 February 1918 under the heading: Four Epitaphs. Edmonds' original four inscriptions together with five others were included in the Victoria and Albert's booklet, 'Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials', published in 1919. The best known of these is still part of some Remembrance Day services:

When you go home, tell them of us and say
"For your tomorrows these gave their today."

Fountain, who served with 410th Battery, 96th Brigade Royal Field Artillery, was killed in action on 1 August 1918. His father, Thomas Fountain, an iron master in Stamford Lincolnshire chose his inscription.


FELLOW OF
THE ROYAL SOCIETY
OF PAINTER ETCHERS

LIEUTENANT LUKE THOMPSON TAYLOR


Put "Luke Taylor" etcher into Google and then go to 'images' and the first few rows will all show Taylor's work. Some of it will be pencil studies of trees and landscapes for his own work and some will be etchings for the reproduction of the work of artists like Constable and Turner.
Born and brought up in York where his father was a cabinet maker, Taylor was living with his widowed mother at the time of the 1901 census. He described himself as an artist living on his own account. By 1911 he was living in London at 197 Bedford Hill, Balham. He still described himself as an artist and was emplying a married couple as cook and general servant. He also had eight boys living in the house aged between 14 and 18, some still at school and some apprenticed. He has bracketed them together and written, "This is a boys' home and these boys are under my care".
At this time Taylor was teaching etching at the London County Council Central School of Arts and Crafts. In later days Ernest Blaikley remembered him as "not only a good etcher but also a man of exceptionally high ideals. He had a burning desire to serve his fellow men and at the earliest moment he was in uniform and went out to the war in the spirit of a crusader, losing his life after an all too short period of service".
Taylor joined the Inns of Court OTC on the outbreak of war before taking a commission in the 8th Battalion the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment. The battalion went to France in September 1915. Taylor lasted nine months. He was wounded during the fighting on 21 May when the Germans made a determined attack on Broadmarsh Crater. He died at No. 42 Casualty Clearing Station, Aubigny and was buried there the following day.
Both his parents being dead, his brother Arthur chose his inscription.


FOR THE ASHES OF HIS FATHERS
AND THE TEMPLES OF HIS GODS

CAPTAIN NORMAN KENNEDY STEUART


Captain Steuart's older brother, Major Charles Basil Steuart, chose his inscription. It comes from 'Horatius at the Bridge', a long narrative poem by Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), part of his Lays of Ancient Rome. The poem was a stalwart of poetry anthologies throughout the nineteenth century and this is very much the sort of heroic inscription one brother might choose for another - although most people who quote the poem quote the third and fourth lines of the verse:

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods.

In the face of overwhelming odds and with only two companions by his side, Horatius faces Lars Posena and the Tuscan horde and prevents them crossing the bridge across the Tiber and by so doing saves Rome.
The Steuarts were a military family, the father, Robert Stueart had been a captain in the Indian Army and had taken part in suppressing the Indian Rebellion in 1857. All four of the Steuart brothers served in the First World War: Alan John Steuart who served with the Canadian Engineers was killed in action on 30 April 1915.


HEEDLESS AND CARELESS
STILL THE WORLD WAGS ON
AND LEAVES ME BROKEN
OH MY SON! MY SON!

LANCE CORPORAL PERCY HARTLAND POWIS


Percy Powis's inscription comes from To You Who Have Lost by John Oxenham, pseudonym of the poet William Arthur Dunckerley (1852-1941), from his 1915 collection 'All's Well':

I know! I know!
The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe, -
The pang of loss, -
The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross,
" - Heedless and careless, still the world wags on,
And leaves me broken ... Oh, my son! my son!"

Yet - think of this! -
Yea, rather think on this! -
He died as few men get the chance to die, -
Fighting to save a world's morality.
He died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God and Right and Liberty; -
And such a death is immortality.

Powis's grandparents, John and Mary Martha Morris, are buried in Cannock Chase Town Cemetery, Staffordshire. Their gravestone includes a mention of Lance Corporal Powis, 'the dearly loved son of George and Agnes Powis and the idolized grandson of John and Mary M Morris'. This is followed by the fifth and sixth lines of the second verse of Oxenham's poem. Not only was Oxenham one of the most popular poets of the First World War but the last three lines of the second verse is a popular inscription both on headstones and on war memorials.
Percy Hartland Powis served with the 6th Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment, a territorial battalion. He was mobilised soon after the outbreak of war and crossed to France on 5 March 1915.
On 25 May 1917, the Germans subjected the South Staffordshire's line to two heavy barrages, one at 4 am and one at 11 am. They followed this up at 11.30 am with a counter-attack 'made in considerable force'. In the twenty-four hours the battalion suffered thirty-eight casualties of whom five were killed, among them Percy Powis.


TRAILING CLOUDS OF GLORY
DO WE COME

SAPPER WILLIAM HENRY NIX


This is the third day running that the man commemorated hasn't been killed in action or died of wounds. Two days ago it was Private Manaton who died of tuberculosis, yesterday Major Seton who was murdered, and today Sapper Nix who died from dysentery. But whatever the cause of death, if you died between 4 August 1914 and 31 August 1921 and were serving in any branch of the armed forces you were deemed to be a casualty of the war.
William Nix was a plumber from Nottingham who was working in Canada when he enlisted late in 1915 in the 8th Battalion Canadian Engineers. The battalion landed in France on 30 March 1916 and in September 1916 were at Flers-Corcelette on the Somme. Nix is not mentioned in the diary by name but it would seem that an unusual number of soldiers seemed to be reporting sick in the days surrounding Nix's death.
His wife chose his inscription, which is not only unusual but its relevance seems pretty obscure. The line comes from the fifth stanza of Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood'.

Our birth is a but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

When we are born some of the radiance of heaven, from which we came, still clings to us. Perhaps the inscription is an assurance that at our deaths we shall return to this glory.


UNG LOY-UNG FOY-UNG ROY

MAJOR MILES CHARLES CARISTON SETON


Well I certainly didn't expect this when I looked up this curious inscription. Mind you, it wouldn't be quite so curious if it wasn't set out like this, this is probably how it was meant to be: 'Ung loy - ung foy - ung roy'. But it would have been even clearer without the dashes. It's the Seton family motto and it's in Old French and means, 'One law, one faith, one king'.
However, that's not what I didn't expect. Major Seton died on 13 January 1919. I assumed it would be from wounds or influenza but it wasn't. Seton was murdered by a fellow officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Cecil Rutherford, as The Times reported on 15 January:

"Late on Monday night Major Miles Charles Cariston Seton, CB, Australian Army Medical Corps, was shot dead in the drawing room of the house of his cousin, Sir Malcolm Cotter Cariston Seton, CB, in Clarendon Road, Holland Park, W. Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Cecil Rutherford, DSO, RAMC, (TF), was charged at the West London Police Court yesterday morning with causing his death."

The murder caused a sensation and events were closely followed in the press. Rutherford, who had shot Seton eight times, made no attempt to escape and waited patiently for the police to arrive at which point he was arrested. Two weeks later an inquest concluded that he should be sent for trial on a charge of murder.
Rutherford came to trial in April and pleaded 'not guilty'. The jury heard that Seton had become very familiar with Mrs Rutherford and her children, and that Mrs Rutherford wanted a divorce. Throughout the trial her reputation was constantly protected, the story being that Rutherford believed that Seton was turning his children against him. Rutherford was found not guilty but insane and was sentenced to be detained at His Majesty's pleasure in Broadmoor.
Undoubtedly Rutherford's war record, both his DSO and the fact that he had been buried alive by a shell, as well as a family history of insanity, told in his favour. He was released after ten years and spent he rest of his life abroad in Canada, Vienna, Persia and South Africa where he died in 1951.
Seton was buried in Brookwood Military Cemetery and his sister, Isobel, chose his inscription. He may not have died as a result of the war but anyone serving in the armed forces of King George V, who died between 4 August 1914 the 31 August 1921 from whatever cause - including murder - was deemed to be a casualty of the war and entitled to a war grave.


WAR CORRESPONDENT
TO "THE TIMES"
IN NORTHERN FRANCE
BEFORE ENLISTING

PRIVATE GEORGE AUBREY MANATON


The Times
29 July 1918

Mr George Aubrey Manaton, who died on July 25, at the age of 26 years, was a journalist of great promise. Early in 1914 he joined the editorial staff of The Times from the London News Agency, and in the early weeks of the war he rendered good service as a Special Correspondent at the French ports. Although far from strong, he volunteered for military service and joined the Inns of Court OTC. After a few weeks of brave endeavour he broke down in training and was discharged from the Army suffering from consumption. To the deep regret of his colleagues he was unable to resume his work in Printing House Square, and, after spending some months in a sanatorium, he went home to Braunton, North Devon. There he did a great deal of journalistic work, including a series of articles in the style of the chief war correspondents, for the Newspaper World, and awaited the inevitable with the cheerful courage of a fine character. The funeral will take place in Braunton this afternoon.

George Manaton was one of the five children of William and Sarah Manaton of Bruanton, Devon. His elder brother, Frederick, had died of wounds received at Thiepval on 17 September 1916.


WE CALLED HIM "SUNBEAM"

LIEUTENANT REX PRYCE-JONES


The first thing I discovered about Rex Pryce-Jones was that Rex wasn't his real name. It was Reginald Ernest Pryce Pryce-Jones. His family called him 'Sunbeam' for the light he brought into their lives.
Born in Wales, in Kerry Montgomeryshire, 'Rex' was the grandson of Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones whose company, the Royal Welsh Warehouse in Newtown Montgomeryshire, is credited with being the first large-scale mail order business in the world. In 1910, Rex Pryce-Jones' parents moved to Canada to set up an arm of the business in Calgary, the Pryce-Jones Department Store.
Rex, who had always been a very keen cadet, enlisted in the Canadian Infantry as soon as he'd had his eighteenth birthday in October 1914. He sailed from Canada to England in October 1915, and went to France in August 1916 with the 50th Battalion Canadian Infantry. There's a published letter from a soldier in one of his trench working parties who described Pryce-Jones as, 'quite young and decidedly English'.
On the 18 November 1916, the last day of the Somme campaign, two companies of the 50th were ordered to attack the German lines in front of Regina Trench. Enfilade fire from the German machine guns forced the Canadians back to their original position with very heavy casualties. Pryce-Jones was one of ten officers and 111 other ranks who were either killed or missing believed killed that day.


SWIFT AS AN ARROW
LIGHT AS A SWALLOW
SO MAY WE FIND YOU
BOY, WHEN WE FOLLOW

PRIVATE RONALD ALEXANDER LLEWELYN GALLEN GALLEN


One year after Private Gallen's death his parents inserted the following 'In Memoriam' in the North Wales Chronicle:

Gallen - In memory of our beloved boy Alexander Llewelyn Gallen (Alex) who fell in action in France 10th April 1916, aged 21 years.
Dylassa, Bettwsycoed

Requiescat is not my bidding -
That is the weary man's right speeding;
You, O child, full of life laughter,
Joy to you now and long days hereafter.

Many a game and goal be given
To you in the playing fields of heaven,
Be, as you were, a light shape of joy,
Glad in the strength and the grace of a boy.

Dear and young, here's the prayer I pray for you -
Heaven be full of new life and play for you -
Swift as an arrow, light as a swallow,
So may we find you, boy, when we follow.

First published in The Windsor Magazine in April 1916, these are three verses from a four-verse poem, , written by the Irish poet Katharine Tynan in memory of Yvo Alan Charteris, youngest son of the Earl and Countess of Wemyss who was killed in action on the 17 October 1915. Tynan is saying that it was not her wish to write a 'requiescat', a prayer for the dead, for Yvo, that sort of 'speeding', an old fashioned word for a blessing as in 'God speed you', is meant for much older men. However, as he is dead, this is her prayer for him: may heaven be a wonderful place for you and may we find you 'swift as an arrow, light as a swallow' when we follow you there.
Alex Gallen was his parents' only child. Born and brought up in Bettwsycoed, where his father was a game keeper and his mother an artist/sculptor, he volunteered in 1914 and served with the 16th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers in France from 2 December 1915. On 10 April 1916, although the battalion were in reserve it provided a team of machine gunners for the Division in action that day. Gallen was killed by a sniper.
The War Graves Commission have Gallen's first name as Roland, the 1911 census records it as Ronald and his parents don't appear to use it all but call him Alex.


SO GOOD, SO KIND
AND HE IS GONE
AND WHY?

LIEUTENANT LESLIE ARTHUR CLIFFORD FOSTER


Leslie Foster was the eldest of his parents three sons. The family lived in Radstock near Bath in Somerset where father, Thomas Foster, was a building contractor. At the time of the 1911 census Leslie gave his occupation as 'In joiners shop and student'.
Foster served originally as a private in the Somerset Light Infantry, reaching the rank of corporal before receiving a commission in the 13th Battalion The King's (Liverpool Regiment) on 28 August 1917.
On 9 April 1918 the German's renewed their offensive in what has become known as the Battle of the Lys. At the time the 13th were out of the line but they were ordered to 'stand to' and bussed to Bethune where they were placed in reserve. During the 10th the battalion repulsed several enemy advances round Loisne. On the 11th they were involved in very heavy fighting as the Germans advanced in great numbers round Festubert and Cailloux, the regimental history reporting that 'The enemy's shell-fire on the 11th was terrific', going on to add, 'The men were now very tired and shaken, for two days they had been fighting and had had practically no sleep". Nevertheless, 'D' company of the 13th were involved in a counter-attack during the night of the 12/13 April that recaptured Route 'A' Keep, which the enemy tried to retake but were repulsed.
Foster died on the 13th. His father asks 'why?'. In military terms because the fighting was desperate and the 13th played a vital role in slowing the German advance, but then Mr Thomas Foster's question is really asking why we were at war at all and what had his son's death achieved. It's a big question.


SHED ONE ENGLISH TEAR
O'ER ENGLISH DUST

LANCE CORPORAL JOHN WOOD


John Wood was killed in action near Epehy during a trench raid on the British lines, which began with a heavy barrage at midnight on 12 July. The barrage lifted at 1.15 am when the Germans were observed in front of the British wire. The British opened up with rifle and Lewis gun fire at which, in response to two green lights sent up from the German lines, the hostile barrage recommenced. It slackened at 2 pm and finished at 2.30. By this time twenty-three members of the 15th Battalion Sherwood Foresters had become casualties, among them John Wood who was dead.
His wife, Lilian, chose his inscription. It comes from, A Jacobite's Epitaph by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859). The exiled Jacobite laments the fact that he has lost everything by his support for the Stuart kings in the 1715 and 1745 rebellions. From Italy he pines for his native land and dreams each night of home:

Till God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting-place I'd ask'd, an early grave.
O thou, whom chance leads to this nameless stone,
From that proud country which was once mine own,
By those white cliffs I never more must see,
By that dear language which I spake like thee,
Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear
O'er English dust. A broken heart lies here.


SAD, SAD WAS HIS FATE
HE THE YOUTHFUL AND BRAVE
WHO CROSSED THE WILD BILLOW
AND FOUND BUT A GRAVE

RIFLEMAN THOMAS MCDOWELL


There's a memorial in the North Road Cemetery, Carrickfergus, County Antrim to William John Anderson Johnston, "only and beloved son of William and Jane Johnston", who died of yellow fever at Rio de Janeiro on the 30 January 1873 aged 18. The verse on the stone reads:

Oh sad was his fate,
He, the youthful and brave,
Had crossed the wild billows,
And found but a grave;
Yes, with strangers a grave
On a far foreign shore,
And the land of his heart's hope
He never saw more

Thomas McDowell came from Carrickfergus; his family lived at McKeen's Row, which if it's anywhere near McKeen's Avenue is today was a short walk from the cemetery. The headstone must have been familiar to someone in the family.
McDowell enlisted in the 12th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles on the outbreak of war. Many of those who joined came from the Down Volunteers and were fiercely pro the Union with Great Britain. The battalion arrived in France on 6 October 1915. A very full website gives its history, including an account of the 1 July 1916 when McDowell was taken prisoner during the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. He was held in Dulmen prisoner-of-war camp where he died on 22 October 1918. The cause of death is unrecorded.


ONLY A BOY BUT A BRITISH
BOY, THE SON OF
A THOUSAND YEARS

GUNNER JAMES YOXALL TWAMLEY


James Twamley died of wounds on Gallipoli three days after the last Allied troops had been evacuated from Suvla and Anzac, and five days before the decision was taken to evacuate Helles, which is where Twamley died. A volunteer, he had been on active service for two months, since he had arrived in the Balkan theatre of war on 26 October.
Twamley was one of the fifteen children of Charles Twamley, a carpenter, and his wife Alice of Yoxall, Staffordshire. At the time of the 1911 census all the children were still alive: the eldest, Edith, 27 and the youngest, Ben, one.
Alice Twamley chose her son's inscription. It is proud, patriotic and original. I can't find any source for her poetic description of James as, 'the son of a thousand years', a son in a million.
Alice also had to choose another son's inscription. One of James' older brothers, John Brightland Twamley, went to Canada where he worked as a carpenter. He enlisted in the 13th Battalion Canadian Infantry on 13 September 1914, sailed for overseas on 3 October 1914 and was killed in action on 7 March 1915. Unlike the very original inscription she chose for James, John's inscription was one of the most popular:

'Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away'.


ONE CALLED FROM SALONIKA
AND HIS CALL
RANG WITH HIS BROTHER

LIEUTENANT ARNOLD LOCKHART FLETCHER


Arnold Fletcher died on 28 April 1917. Wounded by a shell on 18 April during the defence of Wancourt, he died twelve days later in hospital in Rouen with his father, who had come from Ireland, beside him. Two days earlier his younger brother, Donald, had been killed in Salonika. He was demonstrating how to throw hand grenades when one exploded prematurely and killed him.
Although Arnold was eight years older than Donald, the brothers had always been close. They both joined the army in May 1915, Donald had only recently left school but Arnold was already a respected geologist. They both initially served with the 4th Leinster Regiment but early in 1916 Donald transferred to the 6th Battalion. He went with it to Salonika in June 1916. Arnold meanwhile transferred to the 193rd Machine Gun Company and went it to France in December 1916. The brothers died within ten days of each other and both have the same inscription which their father, George Fletcher, chose, suggesting that the brother's closeness encouraged Arnold to follow Donald into death.
Arnold and Donald were the second and fourth children of George and Henrietta Fletcher. Their eldest child, Constance, became famous in later life as the cookery writer, Constance Spry.

[There is a lot of detail about the Fletcher fsmily on this Century Ireland site.


NOT TOO OLD AT 48

PRIVATE EDWARD MAXWELL DOCKRILL


Edward Dockrill's brother, Harold, chose his inscription. Although Edward was a married man and the father of three children it appears that he and his wife were estranged.
Dockrill volunteered on 3 September 1914. He was 44, a painter living with Harold and his wife. A few days earlier the embargo on news from the front had been lifted and the public learnt for the first time that the British army was in retreat having suffered huge casualties. As a result, the numbers of men volunteering to join the army went up hugely and the third of September 1914 saw 333,204 men enlist, the highest daily total of the whole war. The upper age limit for recruits at that time was 38. However, Edward Dockrill obviously felt that at 44 he was not too old to go. He must have feared that he would be considered too old though because he told the recruiting officer that he was 34.
Dockrill served with the 8th Battalion The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment and went to France on 22 September 1915. He was wounded in action on 21 May 1916 when the regiment fought a desperate action at Broadmarsh Crater on Vimy Ridge. Dockrill died in a Casualty Clearing Station eight days later from 'gsw' wounds, which meant either gun shot or shrapnel wounds, that had penetrated his right lung and spine.


PRES. O.U.B.C. 1908-1909
CAPT. LEANDER 1912
BARRISTER-AT-LAW

CAPTAIN ALISTER GRAHAM KIRBY


The Times 3 April 1917
An Oxford Rowing "Blue"
Captain Alister Graham Kirby, London Regiment (Staff Captain Divisional Artillery), who died in hospital abroad on March 29, while on active service, was one of the most famous oarsmen of the last decade. He was the younger son of the late A.R. Kirby and of Mrs Kirby of 81, Cromwell Road S.W.. and was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He secured a commission in the London Regiment in August 1914, and saw much active service. Captain Kirby started his rowing career at Eton ... [He went up to Magdalen in 1905] A stylish and powerful heavy-weight oarsman, there was never any doubt about his Blue and he rowed against Cambridge in each of the four years he was in residence. In the first three of his races, D.C.R. Stuart stroked Cambridge to Victory, but Captain Kirby had the satisfaction of winning his last race, and the unexpected victory of Oxford was largely due to the way in which he backed Bourne at stroke .... He was captain of the Leander Club in 1912, and the duty of selecting a representative eight for the Olympic Regatta at Stockholm devolved upon him. He rowed '7' in the crew, which at Henley lost the final of the Grand to Sydney (N.S.W.), but at Stockholm three weeks later turned the tables on the Australians and carried off the trophy for eight-oar rowing. A man of kindly and unassuming character he was very popular with a wide circle of rowing friends.

Alister Kirby's brother, Claude, a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, chose his inscription. Although their mother was still alive theur father was dead. Captain Kirby died in hospital at Marseilles of an unspecified illness.


MY ALF

SIGNALLER ALFRED FORFAR


'My Alf' was Mrs Emily Forfar's eldest son, Alfred Forfar. There is something infinitely touching about informal inscriptions like this. Mrs Forfar has not chosen anything religious, heroic or conventional she has just used the tender endearment - my Alf.
Forfar was a territorial soldier before the war, serving with the 9th Battalion The King's Liverpool Regiment and working as a parcels' clerk at Liverpool Central Station.
He volunteered for foreign service in October 1914 and was posted overseas in March 1915. On 20 June 1916 he was in a forward area mending the telephone wires when he was wounded, according to his Captain, by a bomb. He died of 'gun-shot wounds' in his left side two days later.
William Wilson Forfar and his wife, Emily, had six children, of whom three, all of them daughters, died before they were seven: Grace born and died in 1907, Doris and Olive in 1909 aged seven and six respectively. William Wilson Forfar does not appear in the 1911 census, it would appear that at some point he went to Australia without his family and died there. In 1911 Emily Forfar was supporting herself working as a household helper in the West Derby Union Workhouse.

[Much of this information has come from the excellent research on Forfar done by the Merseyside Roll of Honour website.]


KEEP SMILING

PRIVATE ROBERT JAMES PRIVE


'Keep smiling' was a popular expression of the time, a cheerful, stoic phrase in response to any eventuality - including in this instance the death of your son. But to be positive, not to allow pessimism to creep into your thinking was instilled into the British public during the war. It was an attitude summed up in the chorus to a popular marching song written in 1915 by George Henry Powell and set to music by his brother, Felix.

Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag,
And smile, smile, smile,
While you've a lucifer to light your fag,
Smile, boys, that's the style.
What's the use of worrying?
It never was worthwhile, so
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag,
And smile, smile, smile.

Robert James Price's service file still exists and it shows how valuable it would have been if so many hadn't been destroyed in the blitz. It's not that Price's file says anything special but that there is so much detail in it.
Price, an assistant to a wholesale cigar merchant in 1911, was a territorial in the 7th Battalion the Middlesex Regiment. He reported for duty on 6 August and on 3 September went to Gibraltar. The battalion remained there until 14 February 1915 when it returned home and after a month in England went to France.
On the 28 August 1915 Price was wounded in action - with gun shot or shrapnel wounds and a compound fracture of his left thigh and right knee. He was treated first at a Field Ambulance 'in the field'. On the same day he was admitted to No 7 Casualty Clearing Station at Merville and transferred the next day to No 5 Stationary Hospital, Dieppe. He died there six days later.
In January 1916 the army returned his personal effects: pockets case and photographs, post cards, pipe and lighter (broken), book and pencil, dictionary, belt.
Price was the only son of Frank and Sarah Ann Price of Southend on Sea. His parents had two daughters: Gertrude Sarah and Margery Sarah. Gertrude died in Rochford Essex in December 1917. I haven't been able to find out the cause of her death.


LAUGHED AND FOUGHT
STAUNCH TO THE END
FELL OPEN-EYED AND UNAFRAID

BOMBARDIER THOMAS EUGENE HUNTER


Thomas Hunter's inscription comes from a verse that Laurence Binyon wrote specially for Sir Edward Elgar's choral work Spirit of England (1917), his requiem for the war dead based on three of Binyon's poems: Fourth of August, For the Fallen and To Women. The verse is similar to one in For the Fallen:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

This is the specially written verse:

They fought, they were terrible, nought could tame them,
Hunger nor legions, nor shattering cannonade.
They laughed, they sang their melodies of England,
They fell open-eyed and unafraid.

Thomas Hunter was a soldier before the First World War. In the 1911 census he is serving with R Battery Royal Horse Artillery in Meerut, India. However, I think he had left the army and was on the reserve when the war broke out. He served with 113th Battery Royal Garrison Artillery, which went to France on 12 June 1916. This was two weeks after he'd married Beatrice Alice King in St Paul's Gloucester. He was killed three months later.
From the burial evidence, it looks as though Hunter's gun received a direct hit. He and four members of the 113th were buried at map reference 62c.A.14.b.5.4., their graves discovered, registered, exhumed and reburied in February 1920.


LEFT A WIFE &
TEN YOUNG CHILDREN
TO MOURN HIS LOSS
PEACE PERFECT PEACE

PRIVATE FREDERICK WILLIAM SAUNDERS


At the time of his death, Frederick Saunder's children were: Rose 14, Chrissie 13, Blanche 12, Florence 10, Daisy 9, Frederick 7, Cyril 6, Louisa 4, Ethel 3 and Agnes 2. A builder's labourer in Southborough near Tunbridge Wells in Kent, Saunders was in the army by September 1917.
Although a private in the 24th Battalion Manchester Regiment, Saunders joined the army as a sapper in the Royal Engineers and it's in a sapper's role that he worked for the Manchesters, digging and mending trenches and generally effecting other repairs. He served originally in Belgium before the battalion were withdrawn to Italy at the end of October 1917. Here they were based at Paderno where they spent the early months of 1918 on the Montello Hill near the River Piave constructing camouflaged areas for the artillery. It was here on 23 April, whilst he and his platoon were marching to work, that a shell burst among them. Saunders was severely wounded and died that day.
How did Mrs Saunders manage after the death of her husband? She married Lionel Skinner in the second quarter of 1919. Previously unmarried, he was 35, had lived with his parents in Southborough before the war and was a maker of cricket bat handles at Twort and Sons. The firm are known for their hand-made cricket balls but they must have made bats, or at least bat handles, too.
The last line of Saunder's inscription - Peace perfect peace - is one of the most popular of all inscriptions, and not just in war cemeteries. The words begin six out of the seven verses of a hymn written by Bishop E.H. Bickersteth, which questions how there can be peace, perfect peace in a world of sin, with our thronging duties, surging sorrows, loved ones far away, future unknown and the shadow of death hanging over us and those we love. The answer is to put our trust in Jesus,

It is enough: earth's struggles soon shall cease,
And Jesus calls us to heaven's perfect peace

Afterword:
Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser
Friday 16 September 1927
The funeral of the late Mr Lionel Skinner of 23 Edward Street, who died at the General Hospital, Tunbridge Wells last week after a painful illness patiently born, took place on Saturday at Southborough Cemetery ....

[The majority of this information comes from the Imperial War Museum's Lives of the First World site.]


LIKE YOUNG HOUNDS
STRAINING AT THE LEASH
THEY WOULD NOT BE DENIED

SAPPER ARTHUR WESTRAY TOOP


Mr Thomas Bethel Toop chose his son's inscription. The words imply that nothing could have held him back from joining the war effort. It's a image from Shakespeare's Henry V, who tells his men before the battle of Harfleur that: 'I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start'.
Arthur's brother, Thomas Westray Toop, was already in the navy when the war broke out. Arthur, a carpenter and joiner, enlisted on 6 August 1915, at the height of the Gallipoli campaign. He embarked from Australia on 14 October that year, arriving in Egypt where soldiers received further training before going into active service. But Toop died of typhoid fever the following month whilst still in Egypt.


FILANTRAPO
PREZIDANTO DE BRITA KAJ
UNIVERSALA
ASOCIOJ DE ESPERANTO

CAPTAIN HAROLD BOLINGBROKE MUDIE


This is certainly the first and, probably, the only example of an inscription written in the universal language of Esperanto but then, as the inscription says, Harold Bolingbroke Mudie was the president of the British Esperanto Association.
Mudie, the son of Alfred and Annie Mudie of the Mudie circulating library family, was a member of the London Stock Exchange. A brilliant linguist who spoke fluent French, German and Flemish, he taught himself Esperanto in 1902. In 1908 became the first president of the Universal Esperanto Association and in 1910 of the British Esperanto Association.
Despite his international associations, Mudie joined up immediately on the outbreak of war. Commissioned into the Army Service Corps, he was in charge of a Remount Depot near Forges-les-Eaux. Remount depots were where requisitioned horses were trained and redistributed for the war effort. He was killed when the car in which he was a passenger in was hit by a train on a level crossing.

Most of this information comes from the site Great War London on which there is a very detailed article about Mudie.


GOD'S IN HIS HEAVEN
ALL'S RIGHT WITH THE WORLD

LIEUTENANT ROY AGNEW MOON MC


Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal
Saturday 4 May 1918
Our readers will learn with regret that Lieut. Roy Agnew Moon, younger son of Dr G.D. Moon of Derby, died in hospital at Rouen on Saturday night from an illness following upon wounds. It was on the day of his other son's wedding at Montrose that Dr Moon received a telegram stating that Lieut. Roy Moon was seriously ill. He left Derby immediately, and arrived in Rouen on Friday evening, but his son died the following night from septic poisoning. Lieut. Moon, who was 21 years of age ...joined the Foresters in 1915, transferred to theMachine Gun Corps and was sent to France in September 1916. Soon after he contracted trench fever, and was in England till November last. He then returned to the fighting line and was wounded as stated, early in the commencement of the present German "push" [4 April]. This is the second of Dr and Mrs Moon's war bereavements, their eldest son, Surgeon George Bassett Moon R.N., having been killed in action in the battle of Jutland whilst attending to the wounded on H.H.S. Lion.

George Moon has no grave, the inscription on Roy's, which was signed for by his mother, comes from Robert Browning's verse poem 'Pippa Passes:

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven-
All's right with the world!


FEAR NO MORE
THE HEAT O' THE SUN
NOR THE FURIOUS
WINTER'S RAGES

MAJOR JOHN HUGHSTON


Johnston (John) Hughston was one of a group of a hundred newly qualified Australian doctors who were sent to Britain in 1915 to help support the New Armies being raised there. Their contract was only for twelve months, but many, like Hughston, stayed on for longer in the knowledge that they were doing vital work.
Posted to Salonika in April 1916, he was granted a few weeks leave back in Australia to recover from a bout of malaria in May 1918. On 13 August, Hughston was doing the rounds at one of two advanced dressing stations when the Bulgars fired a salvo of shells. He was hit in the back by some shrapnel. He was taken down the mountain by stretcher and driven by motor ambulance to a Casualty Clearing Station where he died in the early hours of 14 August.
His widowed mother chose his inscription from a poem in Shakespeare's Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task has done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Hughstone was educated at Scotch College in Melbourne whose website carries a biography of Hughston.


GONE
IN THE UNUTTERABLE SPLENDOUR
OF YOUR IMMORTAL YOUTH

LANCE CORPORAL THOMAS JAMES WATTERS BLYTH


Both yesterday and today's inscriptions begin with the single word 'gone' but there the similarity ends. Sergeant Woodnoth's parents have lost their only child and their inscription is bleak - 'Gone/and the light/of all our life/gone with him' - Lance Corporal Blyth's, using the high diction of John Oxenham's poem Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith) projects pride .
The poem was included in Oxenham's collection, The Fiery Cross, published in 1918 for 'all who feel the vital need for a return to God and a higher spiritual life throughout the world'. Blyth's inscription comes from the first verse:

Gone! in the unutterable splendour
Of your immortal youth!
Gone unto Him who made, and making gave you
Passion for truth;
Made you heart-bold to brave the wrath
Of this world's evil;

Thomas Blyth served with the 7th Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and was in France by 15 December 1914. He was killed in the trenches on 28 May 1916 when at "1.4 am enemy exploded a mine in front of battn on our left. Heavy bombardment followed till 2.30 am. Casualties, killed 5 OR, wounded 6 OR".
Blyth's inscription was chosen by Nurse BM Blyth, Eastern District Hospital, Duke St, Glasgow. I think this was probably one of his sisters. The family came from Crook of Devon, Kinross and on the Roll of Service in the Crook of Devon Institute a Nurse Bessie Blyth is listed as serving at Crookston War Hospital, as is Lance Corporal TJW Blyth.


GONE
AND THE LIGHT
OF ALL OUR LIFE
GONE WITH HIM

SERGEANT HARRY WOODNOTH


Harry Woodnoth was his parents only child, as you can gather from his inscription. His father, Frank, was a boot repairer in Wolverhampton and Harry was a labourer when he went to Australia in 1911 aged 22. He appears to have been back in England in January 1915 when he enlisted in the Australian Infantry.
Woodnoth served in Gallipoli from where he was evacuated with the rest of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 1 January 1916. He served with the 21st Battalion Australian Infantry, which joined the BEF in France on 26 March 1916. On 2 August that year, Woodnoth was severely wounded in the face, neck and right arm. Hospitalised in England, he returned to the front that November.
He died on 1 August 1918, the words on his record card read - 'wounded in action gassed'.
His mother, Elizabeth, signed for his inscription. She died in Wolverhampton in 1949 and her husband the following year.


LOVE OF MY LIFE
THE SUMMER DAYS ARE ENDED
DEVOTED MOTHER

PRIVATE CYRIL WINTERTON RILEY


Cyril Riley's 'devoted mother', Sarah Riley, had been a widow since before he was six. He was her only child. In both the 1901 and 1911 censuses she and Cyril are living with her parents in Hull. She earned her living as a dressmaker; in 1911 Cyril was a clerk.
On the outbreak of war Cyril joined the 7th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment and in December 1915 embarked for Egypt. Three months later the battalion returned to the Western Front. At midnight on the 3/4 June 1916 the British began a heavy bombardment of the enemy's trenches, which lasted until 1.20 am; the German retaliation lasted until 1.40 am. At 6 pm on the 4th the battalion was relieved, the war diary reporting two officers killed and two wounded, twenty other ranks killed and forty-seven wounded. Riley died ten days later in hospital in Rouen.
The 7th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment were known as the Hull Pals. Their website has a biography of Riley and a photograph of his mother standing by his grave with her hand resting on his headstone. She lived on until 1949.
I have a feeling that 'The summer days are ended' is the first line of a hymn but I haven't been able to find the words to it. I have found a poem by Frances Laughton Mace [1836-99], 'Only Waiting' that could be the source. The words aren't exactly the same but people didn't always have books to hand in which they could check the precise words. If it isn't the source I think it probably represents how Sarah Riley felt. This is the second verse:

Only waiting till the reapers
Have the last sheaf gathered home,
For the summer time is faded
And the autumn winds have come,
'Gather reapers, gather quickly,
The last ripe hours of my heart,
For the bloom of life is withered
And I hasten to depart.


FOR WHOM ALL WINDS
ARE QUIET AS THE SUN
ALL WATERS AS THE SHORE

GUNNER ALEXANDER CAMPBELL


Alexander Campbell was brought home to Shetland be buried. That's a long way from Plymouth where he died in hospital two days before the end of the war. In fact, I'm not sure that Campbell ever got to the war. He tried to join up but was rejected six times on account of his defective eyesight. However, he was eventually accepted in June 1917. He seems to have been stationed at the 'Palmerston' fort of Picklecombe, part of the naval defences of the port of Plymouth, when he became ill with influenza and died of pneumonia.
Campbell was born on Shetland, the son of Alexander Campbell the borough surveyor, and his wife Mary Ann. He was educated on the island at the Anderson Educational Institute where he was 'the dux' for 1911 - the highest academic-ranking pupil at the school. He acquired a degree from the University of Edinburgh and then taught Classics at the Hamilton Academy near Glasgow.
His inscription comes from Ave Atque Vale (Hail and Farewell) by Algernon Swinburne, Swinburne's tribute to the French poet Charles Baudelaire in which, like Shelley's Adonais, he speaks of the calm in which the dead now live, free from all cares:

Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done;
There lies not any troublous thing before,
Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
All waters as the shore.

Mrs Mary Ann Campbell signed for her son's inscription.


FOR IN THE VOICE OF BIRDS
THE SCENT OF FLOWERS
I'LL SPEAK TO YOU

LIEUTENANT WALTER ATHERTON


This inscription comes from 'To "My People" before the "Great Offensive" a poem written by Captain Eric Fitzwater Wilkinson MC on the eve of the Battle of the Somme and published in 'Soldier Poets - Songs of the Fighting Men' in September 1916. Wilkinson was killed in action on 9 October 1917.
In the poem, Wilkinson attempts to assure 'his people' - a very old fashioned way of referring to one's extended family - that if he is killed they should "mourn not for me too sadly" because he has been for months living the exalted life of a king, and if his crown is to be death they are not to begrudge it because for him it was worth it, because for "those brief months life meant more than selfish pleasures".

Grudge not then the price,
But say, "Our country in the storm of war
Has found him fit to fight and die for her,"
And lift you heads in pride for evermore.
But when the leaves the evening breezes stir
Close not the door.

The poem then moves into the section that Atherton's parents seem to have identified with. Wilkinson says that if death is followed by any form of consciousness, "then in the hush of twilight ... I shall come home",

... listen to the wind that hurries by,
To all the Song of Life for tones you knew.
For in the voice of birds, the scent of flowers,
The evening silence and the falling dew,
Through every throbbing pulse of nature's powers
I'll speak to you.

Walter Atherton was the only son of Samuel and Emma Atherton of Meole Brace, Shewsbury. Samuel Atherton was a colliery owner, Walter, at the time of the 1911 census was a trainee accountant. He served with the 1st/4th Battalion King's Shropshire Light Infantry, which would imply he was a Territorial soldier before the war. The 1st/4th served in India from December 1914, returning to the Western Front in July 1917. Atherton's medal card states that he first entered a theatre of war (France) on 27 July 1917, which would fit. He was killed in action five months later.


FAVERSHAM
GUATAMALA CITY, F.R.C.I.
FOR EVER ENGLAND
VIVE LA FRANCE

PRIVATE NATHANIEL GEORGE READ AMIES


Private Amies' mother mixes biographical information with a line from Rupert Brooke's The Soldier and a toast to France - 'Vive la France', long live France.
Amies was born in Faversham on 17 December 1884 the son of the Reverend Stuart Amies and his wife, Frances. He was educated at St John's, Leatherhead and Denstone College, Staffordshire. In August 1905 he went to Canada. He remained there for fifteen months before moving to Guatamala City where he became a coffee planter. He returned to Britain immediately war broke out and enlisted on 1 September 1914. He went to France on 1 June 1915 and was killed by a stray explosive bullet while returning from listening-post duty. His captain told his mother:

"I got to know him well and value his good qualities. He was a keen and earnest soldier, who never grumbled at whatever job he had to do (and many of them must have been distasteful to a man of his education), and, moreover, did it well. He was a great favourite with the other men, and had a great influence for good over them, and they all feel his loss deeply. He had done particularly well in his platoon over here, and seemed to enjoy every minute of life in the trenches."
Du Ruvigny's Roll of Honour Volume 2


FATALLY WOUNDED
WHILST CARRYING
ONE OF HIS MEN INTO SAFETY

SECOND LIEUTENANT GILBERT FIELDING SAMES


Mrs Frances May Sames, Second Lieutenant Gilbert Sames' mother, chose his inscription? How did she know what had happened to her son? There are three letters still in the family's possession that describe how he was wounded. The letters don't all agree about the manner of his wounding - sniper, shell, machine gun - but at least one tells of how he was trying to bring in twenty-five-year-old Lance Corporal John Benstead, a member of his tank crew, when he was shot in the chest. It was 5 am. Sames died in a Casualty Clearing Station the next day. Benstead had died of his wounds the previous day. Both men are buried in Premont British Cemetery.
Sames was twenty, he had been commissioned into the Tank Corps on 3 February 1918 and arrived in France on 13 August to serve with the 10th Battalion. On 23 October the battalion took part in an action at Bousies. The war diary notes the various successes and otherwise of its tanks. This one sounds as though it could have been Sames' tank; he would have been the OIC, the officer in charge:

9172 OIC and 4 men wounded. Fired 53 rounds 6 pdr, 275 SAA
Tank left Sp. at 01.30 and proceeded along laid down route. On reaching the sunken road in k36d.9.2 the driver was wounded and the engine stopped. The enemy threw 2 bunches of bombs at the stationary tank, the tank was restarted but one track was found to be broken. The tank was abandoned at k36d.9.2; the OIC and 4 crew were wounded whilst evacuating.


FAIR-HAIR'D
AND REDDER THAN A WINDY MORN

CORPORAL WALTER LUCAS CROFT


Walter Croft's inscription comes from a line in Tennyson's The Princess. Is it a coincidence that the words describe a man called Sir Walter:

No little lily-handed Baronet he,
A great broad-shoulder'd genial Englishman,
A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep,
A raiser of huge melons and of pine,
A patron of some thirty charities,
A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,
A quarter-sessions chairman, abler none;
Fair-hair'd and redder than a windy morn;

Walter Croft was, however, no scion of an ancient house, no son of a wealthy landowner but the son of James Croft, a railway clerk in Derby, and his wife, Edith.
His death attracted quite a lot of coverage in the local Derbyshire newspapers and one of the things they mentioned in particular was his 'sturdy physique', which was expected to help him pull through his wounds. It's curious that both inscription and newspaper reports comment on his physical appearance.
Croft had been a 'privileged' apprentice with the Midland Railway Company at Derby and was 'devoted to mechanics, and excelled in their study'. He volunteered in September 1914 and served with the Royal Fusiliers where he saw much action. After being wounded he returned to England and trained as a signaller. On 5 November 1916 he received shrapnel wounds 'down the left side from head to knee'. When he'd written to his parents on the 11th he'd told them that that he confidently expected to be back in England by Christmas, but complications set in and he died a week later.


A GALLANT GENTLEMAN
TYPIFYING WHAT IS BEST
IN THE BRITISH OFFICER

LIEUTENANT ARTHUR WELLESLEY HOOLEY MC


Arthur Hooley was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps on 29 April 1915 and went to France on 25 August 1915, which entitled him to the 1915 Star. He died of accidental injuries on 9 February 1919. There is no information as to how the injuries occurred.
His father, Dr Arthur Hooley, chose his inscription. It sounds like a tribute from a letter of condolence rather than something composed by Dr Hooley himself. It also sounds like a fairly conventional tribute but it does imply that Hooley had seen active service. At some point in the war Hooley had been awarded a Military Cross (I have not been able to discover the citation), and mentioned in despatches. At the time of his death he was attached to The Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment.
However conventional the tribute, the fact that Dr Hooley used it for his son's inscription shows that it brought comfort to his family as it was intended to do.


DISCHARGED FROM NZ FORCES
AS UNFIT, HAVING LOST
THE SIGHT OF AN EYE
RE-ENLISTED AT VANCOUVER

PRIVATE ARTHUR NORMAN HACKNEY


Born in London in 1882, Hackney's mother died in 1884 and his father, a surgeon, in 1886. Information about his life comes from his brother, Mr C Hackney of Westwood, Hythe, Kent who composed the inscription and told the War Graves Commission that his brother had served in the South African War.
Hackney's Canadian Attestation form was filled in on 6 July 1917. On it he revealed that he had served with the Aukland Battalion, New Zealand Expeditionary Force from 1914 to 1917 before being discharged. He confessed that the reason for his discharge was 'eyesight'. The accompanying medical form measured his eyesight on the Snellen Scale as 20/32 for his left eye and 20/80 for his right eye and pronounced him 'fit' for the Canadian Over Seas Expeditionary Force.
Hackney served with the 29th Battalion Canadian Infantry and was killed on the second day of the Battle of Amiens when their advance was met by German rifle and machine gun fire well concealed in gun pits among the bushes and brush.

"The men did good shooting at the retiring Hun, both with rifles and machine guns from the hip ... eventually the Bosche was dislodged ... leaving dead and prisoners."


EACH HOUR A PEARL
EACH PEARL A PRAYER
MARGARET

PRIVATE CHARLES SAVEGAR


Choosing casualties for their inscriptions rather than for their name, fame or rank has led to many random discoveries about people's lives at this time, the sort of lives that don't usually feature in history books.
Charles Savegar had a rough life. In 1891, aged 2, he was a boarder in an agricultural labourer's household in Cradley, Worcestershire. The head was unable to say where he had been born. On 29 September 1895, he and a brother, Joseph, were admitted to the Greenwich Union Workhouse, their mother being dead and their father in prison. It would seem that this wasn't their only time in the workhouse.
By 1911, Charles Savegar, now aged 23, was a coal miner, a hewer, working in Ynysybwl, Pontypridd and boarding with a family there. He enlisted on the outbreak of war and joined the 13th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers, going with them to France on 1 December 1915. He was killed on the 16 March 1917 when the battalion war diary reported that they had been the object of hostile shelling.
Charles Savegar's wife chose his inscription from a popular song called The Rosary. Written by Ethelbert Nevin and Robert Cameron Rogers in 1898 , the song became even more popular when it featured in Florence L Barclay's 1909 novel of the same name. During the war, Bamforth published the three verses of the song on one of their sentimental sets of postcards, which further increased its popularity. I haven't been able to discover when Charles and Margaret Savegar were married, but Mrs Savegar wasn't the only person to quote from the song for a husband's inscription.

The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
Are as a string of pearls to me.
I count them over every one apart,
My rosary.

Each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer,
To still a heart in absence wrung.
I tell each bead unto the end - and there
A cross is hung.

Oh memories that bless - and burn!
Oh, barren gain - and bitter loss!
I kiss each bead, and strive at last to learn
To kiss the cross,
Sweetheart,
To kiss the cross.

[The tweeted inscription should read 'each pearl a prayer' not each pearl and prayer, I have corrected it here.]




DON'T CRY MOTHER
I'LL COME BACK

PRIVATE ERNEST ROBERT LOUIS HICKS


Ernest Hick's assurance that he'd 'come back' was not to be. Despite the fact that his service with a Military Transport Company of the Canadian Railway Troops meant that Hicks was not a front-line soldier, with all the dangers that that entailed, he did not return. There is no record of how he met his death but there is a large chance that he was a victim of the influenza pandemic, which flared up again in February 1919.
Hicks was born in Eastbourne, Sussex in 1897; the youngest of his parents' four children. The family were still in Eastbourne in 1911 but all of them, except the eldest, Herbert, appear to have emigrated to Canada. Ernest and his parents were certainly in Canada when he enlisted in October 1917.
Hicks was a coil winder in civilian life, which perhaps indicates a certain mechanical skill and explains his service with an MT Company. However, although soldiers were employed for their technical skills, the Canadian military authorities insisted that they should all be trained as soldiers so that they could fight if necessary. And it was certainly necessary at least once when members of the Canadian Railway Troops were ordered to help defend Amiens during the last few days of March 1918.
William Richard Hicks chose his son's inscription. He wasn't the only parent to highlight the tragic irony of a casualty's words: Lieutenant Hill's inscription reads,"I'm all right mother, cheerio"; Private Cole's, His last words at home were "I shall be alright mother",and Private Hutchinson's, Tell mother not to worry.


DIED FOR THE STATE
THAT HOUSED HIM AS A CHILD
& FED HIM AS A MAN

PRIVATE LAWRENCE FLANAGAN MM


This is a very curious inscription, one I've thought about for a long time. Others might disagree with me but I've come to the conclusion that Flanagan's father, Michael Flanagan, who signed for it, wanted to avoid any hint of patriotism, any suggestion of God or king, and any reference to honour, freedom, liberty or any other intangible quality that some people felt they had been fighting for. However, he did want to acknowledge that his son had felt a sense of obligation, of duty, to the state that had nurtured him.
Lawrence Flanagan, the son of Michael and Mary Flanagan, was born at the RA Barracks, Barrackpore, Bengal, India in 1881. In 1901 the family were living in Dublin but by the time they chose their son's inscription they were living in Borth-y-Gest, Portmadoc, Wales.
In 1911 Lawrence Flanagan was working as a Civil Servant on the staff of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in London; his name is on their war memorial in Millbank House, Westminster. He volunteered soon after the outbreak of war, served with the 15th Battalion London Regiment (Prince of Wales' Own Civil Service Rifles). The regiment joined the BEF in France on 17 March 1915. Flanagan died of wounds in hospital in Etaples eighteen months later.
Further rather tortuous research into Laurence Flanagan's family history has revealed that his cousin, Sinead Flanagan, married the anti-British, Irish republican leader, Eamon de Valera, one of the commanders of the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising and a member of Sinn Fein who ended his career as President of Ireland 1959-1973.
Michael Flanagan, Lawrence's father, was born in Ireland but his wife was English. He had been a school teacher in the British army in India. A Roman Catholic, he spoke both English and Irish, which indicates at the very least an interest in Irish culture. However, two of his sons, Lawrence and Stanislaus, served in the British army during the First World War. Lawrence was killed just six months after the Easter Rising in which de Valera was arrested and sentenced to death. His sentence was later commuted. You can perhaps see why Michael Flanagan chose such a neutral, guarded inscription for his son ... and why he and his wife moved to North Wales.


COMRADES
LET ME SLEEP TONIGHT

PRIVATE DAVID ARNOTT


David Arnott enlisted on the outbreak of war and joined the BEF in France on 11 May 1915, serving with the 10th Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The son of James and Grace Arnott from Kirkintilloch, Dunbartonshire, his father was an iron moulder, as were his three older brothers so it seems likely that David too became an iron moulder when he left school.
Arnott was killed in action during the battle of Arras. Both his parents were dead and it was a Mrs Arlow who chose his inscription. This was one of his sisters with whom he had been living before the war. The line comes from verse one of the hymn, 'Call of the Roll',from 'First Truths or Lessons & Hymns for Christian Children', published by the SPCK in 1843.

Sadly from the field of conflict,
Where the wounded and the slain
Lay with pale and upturn'd faces,
Some in peace and some in pain -
Slow we bore a dying soldier,
Who had fallen in the fight;
And to us he faintly whisper'd,
"Comrades, let me sleep tonight."


CHE SARA SARA

MAJOR LEONARD RUSSELL


Che sara sara - what will be will be. This is an old phrase that predates by centuries the Doris Day song which will have made the words familiar to many people today. The phrase, which always seems to have a fatalistic edge to it, is a contraction of the Italian phrase, 'Quel che sara sara' (There are accents over the second 'a' of sara but the database won't accept them.)
This would seem to be appropriate for the inscription Mrs Jenny Eleanor Russell chose for her husband. Russell had been a soldier since he was commissioned into the East Lancashire Regiment in 1893. He had served in India for many years but his regiment were in South Africa when the war broke out. They left South Africa at the beginning of October 1914 and were in France by the 6 November.
The regiment took part in the opening day of the battle of Aubers Ridge when many of them were killed by the British artillery firing short rather than by the German guns - 'Che sara sara'.


BOY OF MY HEART, GOODNIGHT
NEVER GOODBYE
AGE 20 YEARS

PRIVATE WALLACE ROBERTSON JOHNSTONE


Wallace Johnstone's parents had read 'Boy of My Heart'; they have to have done. This was the book the popular novelist, Marie Connor Leighton, wrote in memory of her son, Roland Leighton. Roland was a prize-winning scholar from Uppingham School, the apple of his mother's eye, and Vera Brittain's fiance. (I have written more extensively about the book here.)
Roland was killed in December 1915 and the following year Marie published this hugely sentimental and over-the-top book. Under the title 'Boy of My Heart', there's a pencil portrait of Roland drawn by his sister the artist Clare Leighton, under which are the words:

"Goodnight!
Though life and all take flight
Never goodbye!"

The quotation, actually a purposeful misquotation, comes from WE Henley's poem, 'Echoes'. Henley's words are:

"Good-night, sweet friend, good-night:
Till life and all take flight,
Never good-bye."

Wallace Johnstone served in the 2nd Australian Light Trench Mortar Battery and was wounded in action on 23 February 1917. He died in hospital on 6 March. A week later, the hospital received an enquiry from the Australian Red Cross, asking if they could provide details of Johnstone's wounds, death and burial for his friends back in Melbourne. The hospital replied:

"From the O/C 18 General Hospital BEF
In reply to your letter of the 12th inst regarding the late No 3312 Pte WR Johnstone 2nd Aust TMB, please note he died at 9.am 6/3/17. He suffered from G.S. [gunshot] wounds in the left thigh which had been amputated, & also wounds of the R. arm. He was buried on the 7th ult at the British Military Cemetery, Etaples & the grave number is Q19."


BRAVE AND PATIENT
TO THE END

PRIVATE WALTER STANHOPE DAWSON


Private Dawson's inscription, and the fact that he's buried in Brookwood Cemetery, put together with the date of his death all suggest catastrophic injuries - and this was the case.
Dawson served with the 26th Battalion Canadian Infantry. On 15 September 1916 he was blown up by a shell during the battle of Flers-Courcellete. This left him not only shell-shocked but paraplegic. Shipped back to England, he was operated on several times in an attempt to return some movement and reduce his pain. But very little could be done and in August 1917 he was admitted to the newly opened Star and Garter Home in Richmond, Surrey for severely injured servicemen. He died on 26 March 1919.
Dawson was the son of Dr Alfred Dawson and his wife, Helen. Born in Cockermouth, he emigrated to Canada in 1911. He returned to England with the Canadian Infantry in July 1915 and joined the BEF in France on 26 October that year.
His mother, Helen Dawson, chose his inscription.

(Much of this information comes from the Canadian War Museum site.)


BETTER TO DIE
IN THE FLOWER OF YOUTH
THAN LIVE AT EASE
LIKE THE SHEEP

SECOND LIEUTENANT ROPER HENRY WHITROD


Second Lieutenant Whitrod's inscription comes from Charles Kingsley's 'The Heroes: or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children', published in 1856. The book was classic fare for the Victorian and Edwardian child. The quotation comes from the story of Perseus.
Pallas Athena came to him in a dream and 'looked him through and through, and into his very heart', telling him,

"'I know the thoughts of all men's hearts, and discern their manhood or their baseness. And from the souls of clay I turn away, and they are blest, but not by me. They fatten at ease, like sheep in the pasture ... But to the souls of fire I give more fire, and to those who are manful I give a might more than man's. These are the heroes, the sons of the Immortals ... Through doubt and need, danger and battle, I drive them; and some of them are slain in the flower of youth ... and some of them win noble names ... Tell me now Perseus, which of these two sorts of men seem to you more blest?'
Then Perseus answered boldly: 'Better to die in the flower of youth, on the chance of winning a noble name, than to live at ease like the sheep, and die unloved and unrenowned'."

This is the sort of reading matter that created the hearts and minds of so many men - and women - of the era. It's an attitude of mind that is conventionally thought to have belonged to the public-school-educated officer, schooled in the Classics. But Whitrod was no public school boy. He left school at 14 and joined the Coldstream Guards as a boy soldier. He was a corporal with nine years' service behind him when the war broke out.
His regiment landed in France on 12 August 1914, eight days after the outbreak. By late 1917 Whitrod was a serjeant. Early in 1918 he returned to England to take a commission in The King's (Liverpool Regiment). He arrived back in Flanders on 14 May 1918 and was killed by a shell two weeks later whilst returning with a working party from the front.
Whitrod was the son of Ramaiah Whitrod, a police constable, and his wife, Eliza. In July 1915, he married Minnie Wesson and in 1916 they had a daughter, Margaret. Minnie Whitrod chose her husband's inscription.


AWARDED D.S.O.
FOR HIS COOLNESS
GOOD JUDGMENT
SKILL AND COURAGE

MAJOR WILLIAM JAMES GORDON BURNS DSO


William James Gordon Burns was a Chemistry Fellow at Victoria College, University of Toronto, Canada. He joined the Canadian Field Artillery in August 1915, was promoted Captain in June 1916 and went to France the following month. In December 1917 he was promoted Major. His obituary in the University of Toronto Roll of Service relates how:

'During more than two years of continuous service he served through the battles of the Somme, Vimy (where he was wounded on April 17th), Hill 70, Passchendaele, Amiens and Arras. In the battle of Cambrai he was instantly killed by splinters from an shell when he was on a reconnaissance for a forward battery position at Bourlon Wood. Buried at Ontario Military Cemetery near Bourlon Village. In November 1918 his name was Mentioned in Despatches, and in January 1919 it was announced that the D.S.O. had been awarded to him for his service through the year, and particularly for his skill and courage in directing the work of his battery through the battles of Amiens and Arras."

'Major Burns
8th Army Brigade
Canadian Field Artillery
Killed in Action
While on reconnaissance, East of Bourlon on the morning of September 28th, 1918, he was hit in the region of the heart and lungs by splinters from an enemy shell. He also received minor wounds in the left arm and leg. Death was instantaneous.'
The Canadian Circumstances of Death Register

There are two scholarships at the University of Toronto, both set up by Burns' parents: the Reverend Robert Newton and Mary Jane Burns. The first, the James Burns Scholarship, in memory of Major Burns, is awarded to a second-year student whose studies have included three science courses. The second, the Mary Gladys Burns Scholarship, established in memory of his sister who died in 1929, is awarded to a female student whose second year included two courses in English.


AT REST WITH MOTHER
BELOVED BY THEIR ORPHANS

PRIVATE FREDERICK JAMES CROOK


Frederick Crook and Eva Rose Matthews were married in the first quarter of 1908. The next year their son, Frederick, was born, and the following year a daughter, Ethel Rose.
Frederick, a French polisher working in Bristol, was called up and served with the 5th Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment. He was killed in action on 26 August 1918.
Three years later, in September 1921, his wife died leaving their children, by now 12 and 10, orphaned. Private Crook's permanent headstone had not been erected by this date. When it was, the inscription was chosen by Mr JR Matthews, either Eva's brother or her father who were both called John Richard Matthews.
And that's unfortunately where we have to leave the story because there's nothing more I can discover.


AT REST
WITH HIS THREE BROTHERS
WHO ALSO DIED
FOR THEIR COUNTRY

SERJEANT ROBERT HENRY PIPE


William and Emma Pipe had four children: Percy, William, Robert and Edmund. All four were killed in the First World War - all within a year of each other.
William John, the second brother, was the first one to die; a Private in the Honourable Artillery Company he was killed in action on the 3 May 1917 just under two months after his arrival in France. He was 28. Private Pipe's body was never found and he's commemorated on the Arras Memorial.
Edwin George, the youngest brother, served as a Lance Corporal in the 2nd/4th Battalion Ox & Bucks Light Infantry and was killed in action on 10 October 1917. He was 21. Lance Corporal Pipe's body was never found and he is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial.
The eldest brother, Percy Dalby, a Private in the 2nd/4th Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, died on the opening day of the German Spring Offensive, 21 March 1918. He was 32. Private Pipe's body was never found and he's commemorated on the Pozieres Memorial.
Eight days after his eldest brother's death, Serjeant Robert Henry Pipe, 2nd/4th Battalion Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, died of wounds in a base hospital at Etretat. He was 26. He is buried in the churchyard there. His father chose his inscription.


ANOTHER LIFE LOST
HEARTS BROKEN FOR WHAT?

PRIVATE WILLIAM LINCOLN RAE


On 28 October 1916 Australians voted on whether to introduce conscription or not. The answer was, 'not', by 1,160,033 votes to 1,087,557. It was a deeply divisive, bitter and controversial subject. One year and two months later, on 20 December 1917, the public were asked again whether they would support the introduction of conscription and the answer was an even bigger 'no': 1,015,159 in favour and 1,181,747 against. One of the most vehement opponents of conscription, and the leader of the No-Conscription Campaign, was the Labour leader, Arthur Rae (1860-1943).
Rae had five sons, three of military service age; twins Charles and William and their younger brother, Donald. William and Donald enlisted on 28 December 1915, Charles on 27 December 1916, seven days after the no-conscription plebiscite, which his father had done so much to initiate.
William served with the 20th Battalion Australian Infantry and was killed in action on the opening day of the Battle of Amiens. Donald Rae served with the 19th Battalion and was taken prisoner at Hangard Wood on 12 April 1918. Repatriated to Britain on 11 December 1918, he died a month later of pneumonia following on from influenza.
Donald Rae is buried in Dumfries Cemetery, Scotland. His father chose his inscription:

Through fire, wounds, prison
Came safely
Then gazing homeward
Died

Arthur Rae chose his other son's inscription too, exposing his hostility to the war in which his sons had died.


A FALLEN HERO OF KUT

DRIVER EWART GEORGE WILLSTEED


This "Fallen hero" of the Siege of Kut died in hospital in Aldershot twelve months after the British surrender. This was long before those who had been besieged with him were released from captivity, if indeed they ever were released from captivity as about one third of those taken prisoner died of dysentery, ber-beri, scurvy, malaria and enteritis whilst prisoners of war of the Ottoman Turks. Why wasn't Willsteed with them?
Willsteed served with the 5th Hampshire Howitzer Battery, Royal Field Artillery. His medal card shows that he arrived in Mesopotamia with the battery on 22 March 1915. A plaque in the Freshwater Memorial Hall outlines the battery's war record:

Advance to Amarah, Nasiryieh, Capture of Kut
Ctesiphon and retirement to Kut
Siege of Kut 3-12-15 to 29-4-16

Kut surrendered on the 29 April and almost 12,300 British and Indian soldiers were taken prisoner. However, within three months of the surrender, a few badly injured officers and other ranks were exchanged for similarly incapacitated Turkish soldiers under the terms of the Geneva convention. I've seen the number 345 suggested but I haven't been able to check this.
On 8 July 1916 the Isle of Wight County Press published the following short article:

"Mr and Mrs G Willsteed, Top Barn Farm, Rowbridge, near Carisbrooke, have received letters from their son, Driver E Willsteed, 1/5th Hants (Howitzer) Battery RFA, in hospital in Bombay, after returning from Kut-el-Amara with exchanged prisoners of war, in which he says: "When we surrendered the whole garrison was starved out. It was terrible to see men dying every day for want of food. Our day's ration was 4 oz of bread and a pound of horseflesh, no tea, only water to drink. I stuck it till about three days before we gave in."

Just under a year later the same newspaper published a follow up.

"We regret to announce the death of Dvr EG Willsteed ... Deceased was one of the Island Howitzers who took part in the fighting under Gen, Townshend at Kut, and was taken prisoners by the Turks at the fall of that place. He was afterwards exchanged amongst the sick and wounded and following a severe illness at Basra and India was invalided home to England ... "

Three members of the battery who had also been taken prisoner at Kut attended his funeral in Aldershot. Seventy five members of the battery never returned but died in Turkish captivity.


"DID MY BEST - WAS UNLUCKY"

PRIVATE THOMAS FRANCIS WHITE


The quotation marks indicate that these are the dead man's words. Thomas White died of wounds in hospital in Abbeville. Quite when he spoke or wrote the words we'll never know. Who chose them for his inscription? Well it looks like his younger brother, Sydney White, he's certainly the person who signed for it and there seems to be something rather gruffly brotherly about it.
The White family lived at 11 Burton Street, London WC1. Father, Thomas White who died in 1918, was a printer's machine minder, Thomas was a compositor and Sydney was a monotype operator. Thomas Junior joined the 1st (City of London) Battalion. At first I thought he was old for a soldier: he was 38 in 1914 when the war broke out. But as from 23 October 1914, 38 was the upper limit for volunteering and from 31 May 1915 this rose to 40. The upper age limit after conscription was introduced in January 1916 was 41, and by April 1918 this had been extended to 50.
29,570 men and women between the ages of 40 and 50 are commemorated by the War Graves Commission, and 3,813 between the ages of 51 and 60. 606 died between the ages of 61 and 70, one of whom was General Kitchener who was 65 when his ship was sunk in the North Sea. There are 21 who were between the ages of 71 and 80, and four who were over 80, including Field Marshall Roberts who was 85.


A GLITTERING WAY
HE SHOWED THEM
BEYOND THE DIM OUTPOST

SERJEANT HAROLD NOEL DARLING GUTHRIE


Harold Guthrie was the son of William and Ellen Guthrie who were both school teachers. It was unusual at the time for a married woman with children to have a job outside the home. I have not come across many in the course of this project.
In 1901, Mr and Mrs Guthrie and their two children Harold and Bede were living in Hambledon, Buckinghamshire. In 1911 William Guthrie was teaching in Lancashire and boarding with a farmer in Carnforth, Mrs Guthrie was teaching in Norfolk and living in Fring, Harold was working as a bank clerk in London and Bede was still at school in Norfolk.
Harold volunteered soon after the outbreak of war and by 6 March 1915 was in France, serving with the Royal Fusiliers. He lasted three years before he was killed in action on 16 April 1918 during the Battle of Arras.
His mother chose his inscription, quoting from a poem written by Thomas William Hodgson Crosland, an outspoken journalist and poet described by Siegfried Sassoon as a 'vigorous versifier' and 'a human battleground of good and evil'. The poem is called 'Sursum', which means 'on high' in Latin. It was first published in 1917 in a collection of Crosland's poetry, and then again in 'Valour and Vision' (1919). The poem has not stood the test of time:

I saw his dread plume gleaming,
As he rode down the line.
And cried like one a-dreaming
"That man, that man, is mine!"

They did not fail or falter
Because his front so shone;
His horse's golden halter
With star-dust thick was sown.

They followed him like seigneurs,
Proud of both mien and mind -
Colonels and old campaigners
And bits of lads new-joined.

A glittering way he showed them
Beyond the dim outpost.
And in his tents bestowed them -
White as the Holy Ghost.

And by the clear watch-fires,
They talk with conquerors,
And have their hearts desires,
And praise the honest wars.

And each of them in raiment
Of honour goeth drest,
And hath his fee and payment.
And glory on his breast.

O woman, that sit'st weeping -
Close, like the stricken dove, -
He is in goodly keeping,
The soldier thou dids't love!

At the end of the war, Mrs Guthrie was living a few miles from Fringle in Brancaster Straithe. The village war memorial includes not only the name Harold Guthrie but also that of his brother, Bede. Lance Corporal Bede Guthrie was killed in action on 16 August 1918; he is commemorated on the Tyne Cot memorial.


LOOS-1915, LYS-VIMY-1916
ARRAS-1917, CAMBRAI-1917
MONTDIDIER-1918

CAPTAIN AUSTIN KIRK SHENTON


Memorial Plaque
All Saints' Church Husband's Bosworth, Leicestershire

Quirquid notuit ferit quirquid habuit dedit is qui plus potest praeredit
To the Glory of God
And in memory of
John Shenton
Captain of Cavalry in the Royalist army
Who fought at Naseby (1645) & Worcester (1651)
And is buried at Barwell
1612-1699
His sword rests here
Also of
Austin Kirk Shenton MC
Of the IXth generation from the above
Captain his His Majesty's Corps of Engineers
Who fought at Loss (1915) The Somme (1916)
Arras (1917) Cambrai (1917) Montdidier (1918)
And is buried at Grovy near Amiens
1895-1918
His sword rests here
To all who knew him, most loving and beloved
As a soldier, his fellow-soldiers write from the field
"A most gallant"
"He lived a
Splendid life"
"He didn't know
What fear was"
"His company was
In splendid order"

The Newsman 17 August 1918
Capt Austin Kirk MC RE whose death as the result of a riding accident took place on the Amiens front, was the eldest surviving son of the Rev GD Shenton rector of St Anthony's, Stepney and for some time vicar of Elmstead. He gained his MC for exceptionally good work in command of a cable section during the battle of Arras, and was gazetted Captain after gallantly establishing and maintaining a forward telephone post across the Cambrai Canal during the attack on Nov 23-30 1917. His last post was on the Head-Quarters Staff. His fellow-soldiers describe him as "one of the coolest men under fire and one of those who don't know what fear is. He has done good work for us in many unpleasant places, and his services were invaluable, but we valued him most for his cherry good nature. One of the finest characters we have ever known. He has played the game all through."

I have not seen the memorial in All Saints' Husband Bosworth but it must be worth a visit - for a start it would be good to see the Latin inscription as there's a suspicion that it has been incorrectly copied for the Imperial War Museum's online record since it's virtually untranslatable. But it would also be very interesting to see the two swords and the two cannon balls which are also part of the memorial and which apparently came from the Battle of Naseby (1645). In addition, Shenton's Military Cross is reported to be part of the memorial.


WHAT LAMP
HAD DESTINY TO GUIDE
A BLIND UNDERSTANDING
HEAVEN REPLIED

PRIVATE CHARLES ERNEST RENNELL


There was the Door to which I found no Key:
There was the Veil past which I could not see
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There seem'd - and then no more of Thee and Me.

Then to the rolling Heav'n itself I cried,
Asking, "What lamp had Destiny to guide
Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?"
And - "A Blind Understanding!" Heav'n replied.

Then to this earthern Bowl did I adjourn
My Lip the secret Well of Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd - 'While you live,
Drink! - for, once dead, you never shall return."

The poem is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the author Edward Fitzgerald. Private Rennell's inscription comes from quatrain XXXIII, but what his wife, Mrs Rose Ellen Rennell, meant by it is difficult to tell - even more difficult when you learn her story, which is related in two letters a descendant has put on Ancestry:

27/7/18
Dear Mrs Rennell,
Your husband wishes me to write and tell you he was wounded on the 25th July. I saw him as he passed through [the] dressing station, and he particularly wished me to send his love and to assure you not to have any anxiety about him.
I sincerely hope you will get good news of him soon.
Yours sincerely,
(Signed) C.T.Richards C.F.
Chaplin 7th London Regiment

1 Aug. 1918
Dear Mrs Rennell,
I am very sorry to have to give you news that your brave husband died on July 26th at a casualty Clearing Station, the day after he was wounded. When I saw him the day before, I knew matters were serious, but he wished me to reassure you, so I did not say all I felt about him.
Since returning to the Battalion, I have found that your husband received his wound in doing a very gallant and splendid action. He went out under very heavy fire to bring in a wounded man of another attacking battalion; was himself so severely wounded that he had to return; but in spite of the severity and pain of his wound he went out again, and succeeded in dragging in his man and getting back himself. All through he showed the utmost pluck and endurance, and I understand that he was highly recommended for his magnificent deed.
Please accept my very deep sympathy in your trouble. I know the blow will be a heavy one, and I do feel for you, especially too as your husband told me that your house was destroyed by a bomb not so very long since.
May you find comfort in the thought that he gave of his very best, and lived and died a real hero, his soul assuredly now in God's keeping. His one thought when I was with him was that you should not worry or be anxious about him.
Yours very sincerely,
(Signed) CT Richards C.F.
Chaplain 7th London Regt.

On the night of the 19/20 May 1918, at about 12.15 pm, a Gotha dropped three bombs - one 300g and two 50g - over Stratford East London. The larger bomb demolished two houses in Maryland Square, damaged fifty others, killed two people and injured seven others. Mrs Rennell and her two children lived at 48 Maryland Square.
The Gotha was shot down by a Bristol fighter over East Ham.
So what did Mrs Rennell mean by her choice of inscription? Was it that understanding is not necessary, you should just put your faith in God because whatever happens is His will? Perhaps, but then she could have found a more Christian source than this to say so. Or does she mean that fate strikes randomly and there is no sense in anything? Who can tell.

[The information about the bombing of East London comes from Ian Castle's wonderfully detailed and informative website: Zeppelin Raids, Goths and 'Giants' Britain's First Blitz 1914-1918.]


COME OVER
INTO MACEDONIA
AND HELP US

CAPTAIN ERNEST ALBERT ISAAC TAYLOR


Ernest Albert Isaac Taylor gave up his job at the Union of London and Smith's Bank, Nottingham on the outbreak of war and was commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in December 1914, serving with the BEF in France and Flanders from May 1915, first in the Second Battle of Ypres and second at the Battle of Loos. The following month, October 1915, his battery was posted to Salonika.
The British army went to Salonika to prop up Serbia but by the time in got there Serbia had been defeated. Nevertheless the army remained in the region, establishing the Macedonian Front that stretched 480 km from Albania to Eastern Thrace. The front was designed to prevent Bulgaria's advances into the region, part of the country's plan to gain overland access to the Mediterranean.
In July 1918, Taylor was wounded by a bursting shell. One report says that he died two weeks later, another that he died the same day. His colonel told his father:

"Captain Taylor's death has cast a gloom over the whole brigade, as he had endeared himself to both officers and men by his devotion to duty and his kindly nature. He was one of my most capable officers, and a most loyal and loveable comrade."

Taylor was born in Japan where his father, the Revd Isaac Taylor, was a missionary with the British and Foreign Bible Society. It was his father who chose his inscription, which despite appearances has nothing to do with the First World War but is a quote from the New Testament:

"And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us. And after he had seen the vision, immediately, we endeavoured to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them"
Acts 16: 9-10

However, from his choice of inscription, the Revd Isaac Taylor implies that the British Army was doing God's work in Macedonia.


AGAINST THE BARBARIANS
FREELY HE GAVE UP
AN EVER JOYOUS LIFE

LIEUTENANT VAN DYKE FERNALD


"An ever joyous life" was not the only thing Van Dyke Fernald freely gave up; in January 1916 he freely gave up his American citizenship and became a naturalized British subject in order to be able to join the British Army.

"Lieut. Van Dyke Fernald R.A.F., who is now reported as having died as a prisoner in Austrian hands, was born in San Francisco in 1897, and was the son of Mr Chester Bailey Fernald, the dramatic author. His American ancestry dated from 1630, through a long line of English colonial blood. At the period when America's entry into the war seemed doubtful, his protest was to surrender his American nationalitiy in order to enter the British Army. From Trinity College, Oxford, he entered the Univeristy Training Corps, and was gazetted second lieutenant in the Royal West Surrey Regt. He was subsequently attached to the R.F.C., qualified as an observor, and saw six months' service on the Western Front. He then qualified as a pilot, and was sent to Italy. He was last seen on July 23rd over the Austrian front, where, having finished a reconnaissance, it is believed he stayed behind his escort, on the joint initiative of himself and his observer, Lieut. Watkins, in the hope of meeting an enemy."
Flight magazine October 3 1918

One thing surprises me about this inscription: the use of the word 'barbarian', or to be more accurate, the fact that the War Graves Commission allowed Van Dyke Fernald's father to use the word barbarian. The Commission, which had given itself the right to censor inscriptions, refused: "He died the just for the unjust", where the Germans were the "unjust", since they didn't like inscriptions that insulted the Germans. I would have thought that calling the enemy "barbarians" was much worse but this one was permitted.


WE FAIL TO SEE THE GLORY
THE SORROW
HAS BROUGHT TO ALL

PRIVATE JOHN WILLIAM GOODALL


Just a few graves along from John Goodall's, Private Wakeling's inscription reads:

He died a hero
Facing the foe
Defending his country
From terror and woe

And a few graves along in the other direction, Private Smith's says:

One of the unreturned heroes
One of the noble dead

This is not how Private Goodall's parents viewed their son's death, in fact they saw no glory in any of the country's deaths, for them the general sorrow outweighed everything. But then Goodall's father was a carpenter at the Ministry of Pensions Hospital in Cannock Chase and he would have been only too familiar with the broken men who were still being treated there until the hospital closed in 1924.
John William Goodall was the only son of William FitzHerbert and Mary Ann Goodall of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. In 1911, aged 13, John was an assistant to a sanitary worker, which might mean that he assisted in the making of pottery sanitary ware ... and it might not.
Goodall was a volunteer, serving first with the 9th Battalion North Staffordshire Regiment, which joined the BEF in France on 28 July 1915, and then with the 2nd Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment. In July 1918 the battalion were in the trenches at Ayette when the war diary reported that on the 18th and 19th July the trenches were heavily shelled with gas causing two officer and eleven other rank casualties. It later commented that four of the casualties later died. It would appear that Goodall was one of these casualties.


HE HEARD THE DISTANT "COOEE"
OF HIS MATES ACROSS THE SEA

PRIVATE WILLIAM CHARLES DURRANT


There's a famous Australian recruiting poster that shows an Australian soldier with his legs bestriding the Dardanelles and his hands cupped round his mouth shouting, "Coo-ee- Won't you come?" to the men back home. Mrs Gladys Powell had this in mind when she chose her brother's inscription.
Durrant, a saddler from Rockhampton, Queensland, enlisted in October 1917. This was a year after the Australians had voted against the introduction of conscription by a majority of 72,476, and two months before a second vote rejected it by 166,588. He served in France with the 25th Battalion Australian Infantry and was killed in action on 17 July in an attack designed to "shorten and straighten our line" {Battalion War Dairy'.


F.R.C.O. F.T.C.L.
HE DETESTED THE
WHOLE ATMOSPHERE OF WAR
BUT DID HIS DUTY

LIEUTENANT HARRY ALBERT GRAY, MC


Harry Gray was an organist, a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists (F.R.C.O.) and of Trinity College London (F.T.C.L.). His father chose his inscription, using two interesting words: detested and atmosphere. Harry Gray "detested the whole atmosphere of war".
Gray, his mother, Elizabeth Sarah Gray, and his two siblings Elsie and Vivian, were born in Queensland, Australia. However, by 1901 they were all living in Hertford, England, where their father, also Harry Gray, a carpenter and joiner, had been born.
Gray originally joined the 28th Battalion London Regiment, the Artists Rifles, as a private. In March 1917 he was commissioned into the 1st Battalion the Queen's Own West Kent Regiment. That November he was awarded a Military Cross for:

"Conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in maintaining direction as leader of an assaulting wave. When his company commander became a casualty he reorganised the company, which had lost over 60 per cent, and beat off several minor attacks. He remained with his men in a shallow trench when they were being heavily shelled, when he might have gone to headquarters. The good work done by the company was mainly due to his splendid example."

On 19 June 1918 Gray was promoted lieutenant and just under a month later he died of wounds in a casualty clearing station in Aire. It's not a bad military career for someone who "detested the whole atmosphere of war". Was it war he hated, or the prevailing mood that surrounded it? We're never going to know. But as his father said, "He did his duty". As did his other son.
Second Lieutenant Vivian Gray of the King's Liverpool Regiment was killed in action on the Somme on 18 August 1916. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.


O CHILD, O STRIPLING
O DEAD BOY
THOU TOO SHALL LIVE FOR EVER

LANCE CORPORAL REGINALD ARTHUR PHILIP READ


This is so obviously a quotation and yet it was incredibly difficult to find the poem it came from. Eventually I found it published on 17 December 1917 in the New Castle Herald, a local paper from New Castle, Pennsylvania, USA. It's not exactly a quotation but a contraction of two lines. Quite how the poem was known to Reginald Read's mother, who at the time she chose it was living in Broadstone, Dorset, I don't know.
It appeared in a published sermon written by the Revd MB Williams of the First Methodist Episcopal Church. Williams was inspired by the publication of a young soldier's last letter home in which he told his parents that he was happy to die as "we shall live forever as the result of our efforts". I've copied out the whole of the poem, which is not great poetry nor even very comprehensible but you are unlikely to find it anywhere else:

What chaunt is this that thou dost sing,
Beside the shadow of the Wing
And marked for Victory and for Sting -
"But we shall live forever!"
What rose of wonder hast thou prest
With a gold pin to thy young breast
That in such pride thou goest dreast? -
"But we shall live forever!"

Thou saws't the Earth and all her spires,
Dreams and dominions and desires,
Fade from thee: and thy heart still quires,
"But we shall live forever!"
And while into the dark thou'rt flung
By irremediable wrong,
Yet boasteth thy submissive tongue,
"But we shall live forever!"

O child, O stripling, O dead boy,
That on the threshold of thy joy
Beheld the godness past the toy,
So shalt thou live forever!
Oh such as thou, men shall record:
"They break the terror of the sword
And built the garden of the Lord
And 'stablished it forever".

Reginald Read, the son of Albert Read, a ship's steward, and his wife Jessie, was born in Newhaven in October 1900. He joined the RAF in July 1917 whilst still only 16. He went to the RAF Boys Wing Training Establishment at Cranwell in Lincolnshire where he achieved the rank of Acting Lance Corporal before he died of pneumonia in hospital in Lincoln. His body was returned to Newhaven to be buried.


TO HIM AND HIS COMRADES
ENGLAND OWES A DEBT
OF UNDYING GRATITUDE

GUNNER JAMES MASTERS


James Masters had been a serving soldier for six years when he died of wounds in 1918. He'd joined the Royal Artillery in October 1912 and served with the 13th Brigade in India from November 1913 until it was recalled on the outbreak of war. Leaving India on 21 September 1914 the brigade was in France on the 21 October.
Wounded in the shoulder in October 1917, Masters was hospitalized in England, returning to the front in April 1918. On 2 July he was wounded in the chest, the form says 'GSW wounds', meaning gun shot wounds' but shrapnel wounds were described with the same initials. He died the same day.
Before the war, Masters had been a carter on a farm in Ripe, Sussex where his father was a cowman, It was his father who chose his inscription as his mother had died when he was a boy. It's a very emphatic statement with which it would be hard to disagree. And yet I feel that the dead would want more than our undying gratitude, and more than to be never forgotten, they would like to think that individuals did everything they could to try to avoid such a murderous situation arising again.


NO BAN OF ENDLESS NIGHT
EXILES THE BRAVE

PRIVATE HEDLEY RIMMER


This American Civil War poem has been the source of more than one British First World War epitaph. Hedley Rimmer's comes from 'Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration July 21 1865' by James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), the Smith Professor of Modern Languages. This particular commemoration service was designed to honour the 590 former members of the university who had served in the Civil War and in particular the ninety-nine who died.
Although the poet tries to celebrate the outcome of the war, Lowell can only think of those who never came home:

In these brave ranks, I only see the gaps,
Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps
Dark to the triumph which they died to gain:

Their only consolation is that:

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave;
No ban of endless night exiles the brave;
And to the saner mind
We rather seem the dead that stayed behind.

Hedley Rimmer was the youngest of his parents' five children. Born and brought up in Seacombe, Cheshire where his father was a general warehouseman, Rimmer joined the army when he became 18 in 1915. He went to France the following year, serving with the 57th Battalion Machine Gun Corps. There is nothing to indicate how he was wounded but he died in a hospital, casualty clearing station centre on 1 July 1918.


LIFE IS A CITY
OF CROOKED STREETS
DEATH THE MARKET PLACE
WHERE ALL MEN MEET

LIEUTENANT COLONEL GORDON CHESNEY WILSON


In a way Gordon Wilson chose his own inscription because his wife found the lines on a newspaper cutting in his writing case when it was returned to her after his death. Wilson had cut out the first two lines of an epitaph that was relatively well known in the eighteenth-century, one of the earliest and best-known examples being on the grave of James Handley who died in 1694 and is buried in the churchyard at Redmile, Leicestershire:

This world is a city full of crooked streets
Death is a market place where all men meet.
If life were merchandise that men could buy
Rich men would ever live and poor men die

Even earlier occurrences of the epitaph can be found, including a variation in Shakespeare's Two Noble Kinsmen, written in 1614-5, where these lines are given to the Third Queen:

This world's a city full of straying streets,
And death's the market-place, where each one meets.

But perhaps Shakespeare in his turn was just quoting a familiar epitaph. Whichever, Wilson's wife chose the lines for her husband.
Gordon Chesney Wilson, a regular soldier who had served in South Africa, was by 1911 in command of his regiment, the Royal Horse Guards. The regiment went to France on 7 October 1914 and was involved in all the fierce, close fighting around Ypres. He was killed leading an attack on 6 November, one of the many well-trained, experienced soldiers that the British army could ill afford to lose.
Born in Australia in 1865, Wilson was the son of Sir Samuel and Lady Sarah Wilson. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford he was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards in 1888. In 1891 he married Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill, sister of Lord Randolph Churchill and aunt of Winston Churchill.
The new commander of the regiment, Lord Tweedmouth, wrote to Lady Sarah, his aunt, to tell her:

"I cannot express my sympathy sufficiently with you over poor Gordon's loss, and it was a great disaster for us as a regiment: he was so active and keen, brave as a lion and full of sympathy for the men and officers. I feel his loss tremendously, as we had been so much together in the last month, and he has been very kind to me."


THE RECORD OF A GREAT JOY
AND A GREAT SORROW
OUR BELOVED BOY

SECOND LIEUTENANT VIVIAN FREDERIC NEWTON


Vivian Frederic Newton was his parents only child - their great joy and hence their great sorrow. Except it was his mother's great sorrow as her husband, Vivian's father, had died in 1911.
Vivian was educated at Cheltenham College, left school and went straight to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Gazetted into the 1st Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers in October 1915, his medal index card shows that he went to France on 24 May 1916. He was wounded on the Somme on 15 September 1916 and died that same day in hospital at Rouen.


LEAVING FOOTPRINTS ON
THE SANDS OF TIME

LIEUTENANT BERTRAM COLEBY RANSOME


Bertram Ransome was forty-five, a director of the family firm, Ransome, Sims and Jefferies of Ipswich, married and with six children when he joined the Royal Defence Corps on its formation in March 1916. The corps was intended only for home duties: guarding ports, bridges and prisoners of war. But a year later Ransome transferred to the Army Service Corps, Mechanical Transport Section and went to France.
Ransome was a mechanical engineer, his firm, which made agricultural equipment, turned out aeroplanes during the war. In France he was involved with the building of the hospitals at Trouville. In 1917, he transferred to the 8th Auxiliary Steam Co. which was beginning to use steam vehicles to move heavy equipment and guns. In June 1918 he became ill with influenza and died from pneumonia in hospital in Le Havre.
His wife, Phyllis Ransome, chose his inscription from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's A Psalm of Life. Despite knowing very little of the man, from the little I've discerned from websites like this, the words of the poem would seem to suit him well. These are the last three verses:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.


WE ASKED HIS LIFE
THIS WAS DENIED

PRIVATE REGINALD RODGERS ELLERINGTON


This is a very bitter inscription. It's not unusual to come across ones where the family have put a brave face on it and said: 'We asked life for him and thou gavest him life for evermore'. There are other inscriptions where the relations express their disappointment that God has not answered their prayers in the way they wanted but they are willing to acknowledge that God's will must be done, or that God knows best. This is not how Private Ellerington's mother felt; his family wanted him to live and God denied their prayers.
'Denied', it's a strong word, indicating the strength of Clara Ellerington's anger. But did Christ not say:

Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it.
St John 13:13-14

To her thinking, her prayers had been denied.
Reginald Ellerington was a regular soldier. In 1911 he was with the 1st Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment in India but at the outbreak of war he was with the 2nd Battalion in Malta. They returned to Britain in September and were sent to France on 5 November. The date qualified Ellerington for the 1914 Star. Between then and his death in June 1918, Ellerington served with 179 Tunnelling Co. Royal Engineers, with 18th Corps HQ and with the 15th/17th West Yorkshire Regiment. He died of wounds in St Omer, a large hospital centre, on 30 June.
Ellerington's younger brother, Herbert, was in the Merchant Marine serving on board the cargo ship SS Trewyn. The ship was carrying ore from Algiers to Middlesborough. She passed through the Straits of Gibraltar on 25 March 1916 and was never seen again.


HEARTS DO NOT BREAK
THEY LIVE AND ACHE
FROM HIS LOVING
MOTHER & WIFE HANNAH

PRIVATE JOHN STACEY


It's possible that Mrs Hannah Stacey has slightly misquoted a song from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado for her husband's inscription. These are the words of the song:

Hearts do not break!
They sting and ache
For old love's sake,
But do not die,
Though with each breath
They long for death
As witnesseth
The living I!
The living I!

The song goes on to ask why someone can't just die when all hope is gone. The words could easily be appropriate to a grief-stricken wife, even if in the operetta they are sung by an unsympathetic woman, Katisha, who's discovered that the man she hoped to marry is going to marry someone else.
John and Hannah Stacey married on 8 August 1914. In the 1911 census both were working in the cotton industry, John as a doffer and Hannah as a twist doubler. From his medal card it doesn't appear that Stacey was a volunteer. He served with the 11th Battalion East Lancashire Regiment, the Accrington Pals, and was killed in action at La Becque on 29 June 1918 following the battalion's capture of Beaulieu Farm on the eastern fringes of Nieppe Forest.


WE OFTEN CALL HIS NAME
THERE'S NOTHING LEFT
TO ANSWER BUT
HIS PHOTO ON THE WALL

PRIVATE THOMAS SLACK MM


Thomas Slack's inscription comes from a piece of memorial verse that often appeared in the 'In Memoriam' columns of newspapers. This is one of the longer versions:

There's a lonely grave in France
Where a brave young hero sleeps;
There's a cottage home in England
Where his dear ones sit and weep.
We think of him in silence,
Whose name we often call,
Though there's nothing left to answer
But his photo on the wall.

Slack was one of William and Eliza Slack's fifteen children, of whom ten had survived. William Slack was a coal miner in Tibshelf, Nottingham, as were his sons who went to work in the mines when they left school at 14.
Thomas volunteered when the 11th Battalion Sherwood Foresters was raised in Derby in September 1914. He went with it to France on 27 August 1915, thus qualifying for the 1915 Star. The battalion took part in the Battle of Loos, 25 September 1915; in July and October 1916 it was engaged on the Somme and in 1917 in the Third Battle of Ypres. It was during this battle that Slack was awarded a Military Medal: "For gallantry and devotion to duty when in the attack near Zillebeke, near Ypres, on 20th September 1917".
In November 1917, the battalion was posted to Italy where it served on the Asiago Plateau. This had been a fairly quiet sector until the 14/15th June 1918 when the Austrians attacked in great force along the line. Slack was killed on the 29th.


TELL MOTHER NOT TO WORRY

PRIVATE GEORGE JACKSON HUTCHISON


Well-Known Young Scottish Artist Killed in Action
Lance-Corporal (sic) George Hutchison K.O.S.B., who has been killed in action, was a son of Mr R. Gemmell-Hutchison R.S.A., who is meantime residing at Coral Den, Carnoustie.
Deceased, who was about 22 years of age, was well known in Scottish artist circles. Following in the footsteps of his distinguished father, he had attained a high place in artist circles. He had pictures shown in the Royal Academy, London, the Royal Scottish Academy, and at all the important exhibitions in Great Britain. One of his drawing masters said of him the other day that George Hutchison gave promise of being one of the finest animal picture artists in this country.
Dundee Courier
Monday 8 July 1918

George Jackson Hutchison served with the 2nd Battalion King's Own Scottish Borderers and died of wounds received in action at Merville, according to the inscription on his father's headstone in Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.
Following her brother's death, his sister, Marion Maude Hutchison, instituted the George Jackson Hutchison Memorial Prize at the Royal Scottish Academy, which is still awarded every year for the best painting or drawing of an animal.
Hutchison's father signed for his inscription - 'Tell mother not to worry' - the irony cannot have been lost on anyone.


HIS LAST WORDS
"BEST LOVE TO MOTHER"

PRIVATE JOSEPH FREDERICK HOUSTON


Joseph Houston died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station. It was the custom for the matron, or a senior nursing sister, to write to the next-of-kin and tell them of their relation's death. This would be how Mrs Annie Houston learnt of her son's dying words.
Annie Houston was a widow who ran a grocery shop in Dromman More, Armagh. In the 1911 census, Joseph was the only other occupant of the household. He gave his occupation as shop assistant - in the grocery shop perhaps?
Joseph volunteered in 1915; his medal index card showing that he was entitled to a 1915 Star having entered a theatre of war - France - on 4 October 1915. He served with the 9th Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers whose war diary has been transcribed for the dates 1 September 1917 to 9 June 1919. It shows that the battalion had not been in action during either May or June and any time they had spent in the trenches had been very quiet.


A MOTHER'S GRATEFUL PRAISE
TO THE KING FOR HAVING
ERECTED THIS TABLET
IN MEMORY OF HER BELOVED SON

PRIVATE A WALTERS


Private Walters served with the 4th Battalion British West Indies Regiment, raised in Jamaica in May 1916. Many Caribbean men were very patriotic and keen to serve their King, but the War Office was much less keen to accept them. However, in May 1915, after the intervention of King George V and the Colonial Office, the policy was altered.
It is estimated that over 16,000 volunteers came from the Caribbean islands. They served in all the theatres of war but much as many of them wanted to see combat, they were mostly used in labouring, supply and guard roles. Over 1,500 of them died, the majority from disease. They were the object of both casual and overt racism as well as acceptance and respect. But they were not treated equally and many returned home with their loyalty to Britain diminished.
Walters' mother, Louise Tingle Walters, chose her son's inscription. In all the thousands of inscriptions I've looked at, I've not yet come across another one that thanked anyone - King, Army, Government or War Graves Commission - for putting up a headstone for their relation. There were many families who were furious that they weren't going to be able to bring the bodies home, others objected vociferously to the fact that no private headstones were to be allowed in the war cemeteries, some to the fact that the uniform headstone was not going to be a cross and people today are outraged that relations were made to pay 3 1/2d a letter for the inscription, but no one has been grateful that the authorities paid for the burial and commemoration of their dead relation.
There is a bit of a problem with Private A Walters, service number 8403. His mother did not provide the War Graves Commission with either his Christian name or his age and whilst there is a Medal Index Card for a Private Walters 8403, his Christian name is given as Nathaniel. So we will never know any more about Private Walters other than the fact that his parents lived at Three Hills Retreat, Jamaica and that his mother was a polite and gracious woman.


GOD SEND HIM BACK TO ME

PRIVATE ERNEST ALDERSON


Numerous inscriptions look forward to the happy time when the writer will be reunited with their loved one beyond the grave. Others rail against God for taking away their reason for living. Hannah Alderson simply demands that God sends her son back to her. Here is a mother who seven years after her son's death has still not been reconciled it. But why would she be; Ernest was her only surviving child.
I say seven years because I can see that it was March 1925 before Ernest Alderson's body was exhumed from where the Germans had buried it in Asfeld la Ville German Cemetery. This is when Mrs Alderson would have been asked to choose an inscription and confirm her son's details for his permanent headstone.
Ernest Alderson was the son of Israel and Hannah Alderson of Sedgefield, Co. Durham. Israel, born in Sedgefield, was a plate layer with the North Eastern Railway. Ernest served with the East Yorkshire Regiment. The record states that he served with the 1st Battalion but it was the 1st/4th that was caught in Operation Blucher-Yorck on 27 May 1918. The battalion's casualty statistics for June tell their own story: one officer believed killed, twenty-two missing; three other ranks killed, fifty-two wounded, 566 missing. This left three officers and 107 other ranks available for service. The following month the 1st/4th East Yorkshire Regiment was reduced to cadre strength and ceased to exist as a fighting unit.
Without any real supporting evidence for this, other than the fact that the Yorkshires were in the trenches at Craonne and Asfeld, where Alderson was originally buried, is not far from there, I suspect that Ernest was serving with the 1st/4th when he was taken prisoner and that he died in German captivity.


FOR THOSE IN PERIL ON THE SEA

RICHARD PAWSON


Richard Pawson was killed in a famous, or perhaps one should say, infamous, incident when a German U-boat fired on a group of six trawlers returning to their home port in Hull from a fishing trip in Icelandic waters. The trawlers were 55 miles south of the Faroe Islands when U-53 opened fire. Five of the trawlers had guns and after a three and a half hour engagement the trawlers eventually saw off the U-boat. The incident received much press publicity where it was viewed as a classic David and Goliath event since there was only one RN officer among the trawler crews, the rest of them were all civilian fishermen.
Richard Pawson was a 'spare hand' on the trawler SS Aisne. It was Aisne that achieved a direct hit on the U-boat just as the trawlers' ammunition was running out and the order 'prepare to ram' was about to be given. But Aisne herself had been badly hit: one crewman, Pawson, was killed and four others wounded.
Aisne returned to port and Pawson was buried in Hull Western Cemetery. His grave was not originally marked as a war grave but his name was included on the Mercantile Marine Memorial on Tower Hill. However, from the records, it looks as though his grave acquired a Commission headstone in 1998 and someone, the records do not record who, chose an inscription from the 'sailors' hymn:
Eternal Father strong to save
Who arm does bind the restless wave,
Who bids the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.



THE SUNSHINE COMES
THE DEWDROP SLIPS
INTO THE SHINING SEA

AIR MECHANIC 3RD CLASS ARTHUR GEORGE CHARLES GROSS GROSS


This wonderful metaphor for death comes from the last two lines of The Light of Asia, Sir Edwin Arnold's long narrative poem, first published in 1879, which introduced Western readers to the philosophy of Buddhism. The words appear twice in Book 8:

Never shall yearnings torture, nor sins
Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes
Invade his safe eternal peace, nor deaths
And Lives recur. He goes
Unto Nirvana! He is one with life
Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be.
Om, Mani Padme, Om! the Dewdrop slips
Int the shining sea.

Arnold's words have a distinct echo of Shelley's Adonais:

He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;'

Gross's precise inscription appears in the last two lines of the poem:

The dew is on the lotus! - Rise, Great Sun!
And lift my leaf and mix me with the wave.
Om Mani Padme Hum, the sunrise comes!
The Dewdrop Slips into The Shining Sea!

'Om mani padme hum', is a Bhuddist mantra which cannot really be translated into English since it is hardly more than a transformative, meditative collection of sound syllables all intended to bring the speaker closer to the way of the Bhudda. Arnold himself had spent some years in India and was keen to introduce Bhuddist philosophy to the Western world.
Arthur Gross died in hospital in Hounslow. At the time of his death he was an Air Mechanic Third Class at the Armament School in Uxbridge. I have been unable to discover whether the cause of death was accident or illness. His body was taken back home to Suffolk where he is buried in St Andrew's churchyard, Boynton. His father, Dr Charles Gross, chose his inscription, did he just like the words or was he interested in Bhuddism? Whichever, it's an interesting inscription in an English churchyard.


BECAUSE OF YOU
WE WILL BE GLAD AND GAY
REMEMBERING YOU
WE WILL BE BRAVE AND STRONG

CAPTAIN ROBERT VAUGHAN KESTELL-CORNISH MC & BAR


If ever "the voice of a schoolboy rallied the ranks" it was nineteen-year-old Second Lieutenant Robert Kestell-Cornish at Hill 60 on the 1 May 1915. Hill 60 is not much of a hill being merely displaced spoil from the building of the Ypres-Comines railway line. Nevertheless, in the flat fields of Flanders it was of huge strategic importance.
On 1 May 1915 the 1st Battalion Dorsetshire Regiment were holding the front line when the Germans launched an assault on their trenches, preceding the attack with a devastating gas attack, killing and immobilising many of the men. With the line fatally weakened and a German attack imminent, Kestell-Cornish called four other survivors to mount the parapet and fire through the mist of gas into the approaching German soldiers. Convinced that the line was much more securely held than they had expected, the Germans withdrew just as British reinforcements arrived. For his bravery and prompt action Kestell-Cornish was awarded an immediate Military Cross, 'in the field'.
Robert Kestell-Cornish left school, Sherborne, at the end of the Summer term 1914 destined for Worcester College, Oxford. But when war was declared, he joined up immediately. A month after the award of his Military Cross, he was promoted Lieutenant and eight months later, in February 1916, to Captain. The following February he received a Bar to his MC for 'marked courage and ability'.
In September 1917 he joined the Staff attached to the Divisional HQ. He was wounded on 8 March 1918, the only information I've found says that he was "wounded beside his general". Perhaps they were on a tour of inspection. Kestell-Cornish's leg had to be amputated and he died in hospital in Wimereux three months later.
His father, Vaughan Kestell Kestell-Cornish, for many years the British Consul in Brest, chose his son's inscription. It comes from an elegy written by Maurice Baring (1874-1945) in memory of Julian Grenfell who died of wounds in May 1915 aged 27. The poem was published in The Times nine days later.

To Julian Grenfell
Because of you we will be glad and gay,
Remembering you we will be brave and strong;
And hail the advent of each dangerous day,
And meet the great adventure with a song.
And, as you proudly gave your jewelled gift,
We'll give our lesser offering with a smile,
Nor falter on the path where, all too swift,
You led the way and leapt the golden style.
Whether you seek new seas or heights unclimbed,
Or gallop in unfooted asphodel,
We know you know we shall not lag behind,
Not halt to waste a moment on a tear;
And you will speed us onward with a cheer,
And wave beyond the stars that all is well.


SIX ANGELS ROUND MY BED
TWO TO WATCH, TWO TO PRAY
AND TWO TO CARRY
MY SOUL AWAY

PRIVATE FRANK HULLEY


Mrs Isabella Hulley quotes from a children's night-time prayer for her nineteen-year-old son's inscription:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
Bless the bed that I lie on.
Four corners to my bed,
Four angels round my head;
One to watch and one to pray
And two to bear my soul away.

Except that for Mrs Hulley there are six angels round her son's bed.
Frank Hulley's is one of the few service files to have survived to the present day. He was one of Alfred and Isabella Hulley's five children. The family lived in Gresford near Wrexham in Denbighshire where Alfred Hulley was a coal miner, a hewer. At the time of his enlistment, in April 1917, Frank too was working at the colliery, as an above ground worker.
Hulley served with the 7th Battalion Border Regiment in France from 28 October 1917. He was wounded on 8 June 1918. It would appear that he was one of the casualties of a German barrage that occurred just as the battalion were being relieved on the night of the 7th/8th.
On 16 June 1918, 'Attestone' Preston received the following telegram from Proelicus Ave:

"Gen Hos Rouen telegraphs 16 June died 16 6 18 35164 Pte F Hulley 7 Border Regt gsw comp fract rt femur"

GSW stands for gunshot wounds, the letters being applied to shrapnel wounds too. Hulley also had a compound fracture of his right femur. 'Attestone' would have passed on the news to Hullley's parents simply telling them that their son had died of wounds without giving them the details, which they might have already received when first informed that he's been wounded. Private Hulley had taken eight days to die.


A SOLDIER-PRIEST
R.I.P.
MISERERE JESU

LIEUTENANT NAPIER GUY SHEPPEY SHEPPEY-GREENE


Educated at Malvern, Eastbourne and Worcester College Oxford, Sheppey-Greene attended Lincoln Theological College and was ordained in 1907. The Latin tag on his headstone, 'Miserere Jesu', Jesus mercy, suggests he may have been a Roman Catholic, but Sheppey-Greene was a Church of England clergyman, albeit High Church. Between 1907 and 1915, when he joined the army, Sheppey-Greene was a curate at St Chad's, Haggerston, an east end Anglo-Catholic church; St Cyprian's, Clarence Gate, a mission church in Marylebone, and St Thomas's Clapton another High Anglican Church.
Despite being a priest, Sheppey-Greene served as a soldier. It would be interesting to know why he decided to do this rather than serve as a padre but there doesn't appear to be information on this. In September 1915, he was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment, and Lieutenant in March 1918. At the time of his death, he was attached to the 7th Battalion. The war diary makes no mention of any action on or around the 14th June but nevertheless Sheppey-Greene died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Halloy-les-Pernois and is buried in the adjacent cemetery.


FOR THE YEARS
UNTOUCHED BY SORROW
WE THANK THEE LORD

GUNNER THOMAS EDWARD MILTON CLAYTON CLAYTON


Some parents are astonishingly magnanimous, as Mrs Julia Clayton has been here. She thanks God that for twenty years her family of two sons and two daughters has been untouched by sorrow. All this changed when her son, Milton Clayton, serving with the 23rd Howitzer Battery, 5th Brigade Canadian Field Artillery, was killed on 14 June 1918. The war cemetery register records that he 'died of accidental injuries'. The military record states:

"The gun on which Gunner Clayton was engaged was firing at the time and he was assisting in the supply of ammunition. Several rounds were fired when a premature occurred directly in front of the muzzle of the gun, several pieces flying back into the gun pit, one striking him in the chest. He was placed on a stretcher, dying while on the way to the dressing station, presumably from hemorrhage."


THE SHELL THAT STILLED
HIS TRUE BRAVE HEART
BROKE MINE

CORPORAL JAMES EDWARD NOBLE


25th Battalion Canadian Infantry War Diary
Neuville Vitasse
At 2.00 am on 13 6 1918 [the diary says 1917 but this is a mistake] the Royal Engineers put over a gas projection on the lines opposite our front, which was accompanied by heavy artillery fire. In reply to this, the enemy put down a barrage on our front and support lines, which lasted until 2.45 am. [...] Casualties - killed in action, Lieut. E.C.C. Bing and 8 Other Ranks; wounded Capt. W.A. Livingstone and 21 Other Ranks.

This was the enemy barrage that stilled Corporal Noble's heart and broke his mother's.
James Edward Noble attested in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia on 31 March 1916. He was nineteen and one month. He served with the 25th Battalion Canadian Infantry, the Nova Scotia Rifles.
Noble's parents, William and Agnes, had ten children, two of whom died in infancy. James was killed in 1918 and his younger brother, George Ross Noble, died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Nova Scotia on 30 March 1921. He was 22. George had been a soldier. He'd served in France for a year with the 193rd Battalion, which it was believed had brought on his condition. He's buried under a War Graves Commission headstone with an inscription chosen by his wife, Ruby: 'Sadly missed and lovingly remembered'.


MANY WATERS
CANNOT QUENCH LOVE

NURSE ALCE HILDA LANCASTER


Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
Song of Solomon 8:6-7

This vehement assertion of the power of love was chosen for Alice Lancaster by her father, Thomas Lancaster JP of The Cliffe, Monk Bretton, Barnsley, Yorkshire. Alice went to France as a Special Military Probationer Nurse attached to the Territorial Nursing Service at the end of May 1918. A week later her father received this letter:

6 June 1918
Sir,
It is with deep regret that a report has been received in this Office stating that Miss Alice Hilda Lancaster, Special Military Probationer, was drowned while bathing on the 3rd of June, 1918.
I beg that you will accept this expression of my sincere sympathy.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient servant.

Sir Alfred Keogh
Director General
Army Medical Services

According to a Court of Enquiry, both Alice and the friend she went swimming with were caught by a strong current. The friend managed to get ashore but Alice was drowned.
There is more information about Alice Lancaster and her family on the Barnsley Historian Blogspot.


IN LIFE I LOVED HIM DEARLY
IN DEATH I DO THE SAME

PRIVATE WESLEY GOODMAN


One might have thought it was a wife who signed for this inscription but no it was a father, Frederick Goodman, a china-clay labourer from St Stephen's-in-Brannell, Cornwall. Wesley was one of his parents' four children: their only son. In 1911 he too was working in the china clay industry.
Wesley served in the 1st Battalion Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. At the beginning of June 1918 the battalion was in the left sub-sector of the Le Sart front. Their casualty list for the month records that Private Goodman was wounded on 3 June and died the same day. The war diary records that 3 June was a quiet day and a quiet night. The previous day had passed very quietly too until 10.30 pm when a patrol of ten men under Second Lieutenant Eveleigh attacked an enemy post, "capturing one prisoner, wounding one and killing one - the remainder bolted". Although unmentioned, this sounds like the occasion when Goodman was wounded.


"HE WAS -
WORDS FAIL ME TO SAY WHAT.
THINK WHAT A MAN SHOULD BE!
HE WAS THAT."

GUNNER THOMAS MCKIE


Gunner McKie's wife, Kate, signed for his inscription, asking particularly that the War Graves Commission note the inverted commas, stops and exclamation mark. This suggests that she was quoting from something, most probably a letter of condolence, and wanted it reproduced exactly. It's a lovely tribute.
McKie was the manager of his parents' grocery store, which his mother had been running on her own since the death of her husband in 1897. He served with the 153rd Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery. The battery had been in France since August 1916. The siege batteries fired the heavy guns, aimed at the enemy's strongpoints: dumps, stores, railways and artillery ... and they were in turn the object of the enemy's fire.
On 27 May 1918 the German's launched an attack with an artillery bombardment of 4,500 guns and seventeen infantry divisions along a nine mile front on the opening day of the Third Battle of Battle of the Aisne. Thomas McKie died of wounds six days later.


GEORGE, A TARNAGULLA LAD
CELEBRATED HIS 16TH BIRTHDAY
AT ANZAC IN 1915

PRIVATE GEORGE DUNCAN RADNELL MM


TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
This is to certify that I the undersigned, father of George Duncan Radnell of Tarnagulla whose age is eighteen years and five months, hereby grant my consent to his enlistment as a unit of the Expeditionary Forces now being trained at Broadmeadows, Victoria.
Wm J Randall
Dated at Tarnagulla this 19th day of Jan. 1915

At the beginning of March 1915, Radnell embarked from Australia with the 14th Australian Infantry for Egypt. A month later, on 14 April, the battalion set sail from Alexandria and on 26 April went ashore at 'Kaba Tepe', Anzac Cove. On 21 August Randell went sick with enteritis - dysentery - and was hospitalized in England, only returning to his unit at the end of November, just in time for the evacuation from the peninsula.
The battalion transferred to France and on 28 August 1916 Radnell was wounded in the left arm, 'shell wound'. Hospitalized again in England, he returned to the front at the beginning of January 1917. Wounded and hospitalized in England again in September, he returned to France in January 1918.
In September 1917, Radnell was awarded a Military Medal:

"During the operations near Zonnebeke on 26 September 1917, Pte Radnell displayed great courage and initiative by getting together a party of 7 men and rushing an enemy post in which were 10 Germans, killing four and taking the remainder prisoners."

On 31 May Radnell was wounded for a third time, this time in the shoulder, face and legs. He died in a Casualty Clearing Station the next day.

Now look at his inscription: "George, a Tarnagulla lad, celebrated his 16th birthday at Anzac in 1915". George was not 18 and five months when he enlisted, as his father must have known only too well. He was 15. But he wanted to be with his elder brother and cousins who had all gone to fight. His brother, Charles Victor Radnell, was killed on 27 February 1917, and one of his cousins, Joseph Charles Radnell, on 4 August 1916.


"MY DAY WAS HAPPY
AND PERCHANCE
THE COMING NIGHT
IS FULL OF STARS"

SIGNALLER ARCHIBALD GRAEME ANDERSON


Archibald Anderson attested in Canada on 15 May 1917, arrived in England on 5 July, was hospitalized in England with German measles from 25 January to 4 February 1918, and then again with mumps from 5th to 25th March. He went to France on 28 May and died three days later on the 31st. Born on 6 April 1899, he was one month past his nineteenth birthday. His service file indicates that he served with the McGill University Siege Artillery, and it states that he was killed in action, 'hostile aircraft'. On the night of the 31 May 1918 there were many casualties when the camp and hospitals at Etaples were bombed by German aircraft. Archibald Anderson was one of the casualties. It looks as though he got no further than the base camp before he was killed.
Anderson's inscription comes from 'Better Far to Pass Away' by Captain Richard Molesworth Dennys (1884-1916), 10th Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, who was killed in action on the Somme in August 1916.
Dennys' poem repeats the ancient theory that it is better to die young:

Better far to pass away
While limbs are strong and young,
Ere the ending of the day,
Ere youth's lusty song be sung.

The poet's reasoning - how he could enjoy the things he loves so much - "the hills, the sea, the sun, the winds, the woods, the clouds, the trees" when he's an old man.

Come when it may, the stern decree
For me to leave the cheery throng
And quit the sturdy company
Of brothers that I work among.
No need for me to look askance,
Since no regret my prospect mars.
My day was happy - and perchance
The coming night is full of stars.

We find it difficult to believe that young First World War soldiers really had this insouciant attitude towards death. In my head I hear these lines by AE Housman (1859-1936):

Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.






THEY CROWDED ALL THEIR YOUTH
INTO AN HOUR
& FOR ONE FLEETING DREAM
OF RIGHT THEY DIED

PRIVATE CHARLES EDWIN MORRIS


Eighteen-year-old Charles Edwin Morris was his parents' only child, born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire and raised in Coventry, Warwickshire where his father was a clerk in a cycle works. Morris enlisted in July 1917. At one time a soldier had to be nineteen before he could be sent abroad, but after the casualties of the 1918 German Spring Offensive the rule was less strictly observed.
Morris's inscription comes from 'The Victorious Dead', a poem by Alfred Noyes first published in a special souvenir edition of the Daily Mail, The Golden Peace Edition, to commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in July 1919. The inscription comes from the second verse:

Make firm, O God, the peace our dead have won.
For folly shakes the tinsel on its head
And points us back to darkness and to hell,
Cackling 'Beware of visions', while our dead
Whisper, 'It was for visions that we fell'.
All that this earth can give they thrust aside.
They crowded all their youth into an hour.
And, for one fleeting dream of right, they died.
Oh, if we fail them, in that awful trust,
How should we bear those voices from the dust?

You can hear in this the echo of a very famous line from 'The Call', written by Thomas Osbert Mordaunt (1730-1819): 'One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name'. But Noyes, and many like him, didn't think this was enough, the dead had died for a 'fleeing dream of right' and we will fail them if we don't try to make that dream come true. The dream is summarised in another of Noyes' poems, 'Victory':

There's but one gift that all our dead desire,
One gift that men can give, and that's a dream,
Unless we, too, can burn with that same fire
Of sacrifice; die to the things that seem;

Die to the little hatreds; die to greed;
Die to the old ignoble selves we knew;
Die to the base contempts of race and greed,
And rise again, like these, with souls as true.

To Noyes this dream is not to be achieved 'by sword, or tongue, or pen, There's but one way. God make us better men'.


A GIFTED SURGEON
KILLED AT THE POST OF DUTY
BELOVED BY ALL

CAPTAIN ETHELBERT ELDRIDGE MEEK


War Diary: 3rd Canadian Stationary Hospital, Douellens
30 May 1918
"On the night of 29-30 May hostile aeroplanes were heard in the area. The night was clear and the moon was shining. About 12.25 an hostile aeroplane passed over the hospital, dropped a flare, and immediately a bomb was dropped which struck the main building over the sergeants quarters, Ward S.6 (officers ward) operating theatre and X-Ray room, which collapsed immediately. Almost instantly a fire broke out and the whole group of buildings in the upper area was threatened. .... During the work of rescue and while other members of the unit were combating the fire, the aeroplane returned and dropped more bombs ... At this time the flames were mounting sky high and the whole upper area was clearly illuminated and the buildings sharply delineated. The red crosses on the buildings being very visible so that there was no excuse for his not knowing that it was a hospital. ... Three surgical teams were on duty that night but two had completed their operation and had gone for their midnight meal. The other team (Capt. E.E. Meek, C.A.M.C. and Lieut. A.P.H. Sage, M.O.R.C. U.S.A.) were finishing their operation and they, their patient, Sisters A McPherson and E.L. Pringle, the orderlies and stretcher bearers, were all victims of the bomb. ... The night was clear and bright. There should have been no difficulty in the airmen recognising it as a hospital. The plane is stated to have been at a height of about 6000 feet. The hospital is well marked with red crosses which airmen say are quite visible from the air. There is no doubt that the occupants of the aeroplane knew it was a hospital for when they came back and dropped bombs a second time, the flames clearly illuminated the red crosses on the buildings. This hospital, being in the Citadel, is surrounded on three sides by fields and on the fourth by a French hospital. There were no camps or dumps of any description in the vicinity of the hospital."

Captain Meek was a surgeon from Regina, Saskatchewan. Born in Nova Scotia the son of Benjamin and Ella Meek, he was married and the father of a daughter when he went abroad with the Canadian Army Medical Corps in April 1916.


SATISFIED

PRIVATE PERCIVAL LEONARD TIMMS


There is no question mark after the word 'satisfied' so no this is not Alfred Timms asking the world whether it's satisfied now that it's killed his son - and many other people's sons. I have a feeling that that's how a lot of people who see this single-word inscription today would interpret it. But that is not it at all.
The word is a quotation from Psalm 17 v 15:

"As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with they likeness."

I say this confidently because I have seen the last ten words quoted fairly frequently in personal inscriptions. And what do they mean?
The psalmist asks:

"Keep me as the apple of thy eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings,
From the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who compass me about."

The psalmist knows that there is danger everywhere, and that there are easier and more prosperous routes to follow in this life than God's ways. But he will try to keep to God's ways so that when he dies it will be as a righteous person who will awake in God's presence. At which point he will be 'satisfied'. Alfred Timms is therefore telling the world that his nineteen-year-old son, Percy Leonard Timms, by fighting the Germans, doing God's work, will now be in God's presence and be 'satisfied'.
Timms was the eldest son of Alfred and Kate Timms' five children. He was born in Brize Norton, Oxfordshire. In 1978, Howell Powell was asked by the Brize Norton Parish Council to record his memories of those who'd died in the First World War. He said of Percival Timms:

"After leaving school he worked on Tom Pratt's farm (Tom Pratt kept the Chequers [pub] as well) Perce must have put his age up to join up. He died as he was being taken to a Prisoners Camp hospital. It was his first trip to France."


TRULY YE ARE OF THE BLOOD

SECOND LIEUTENANT GEORGE EDWARD ARCHIBALD AUGUSTUS FITZGEORGE HAMILTON


"Truly ye come of The Blood; slower to bless than to ban;
Little used to lie down at the bidding of any man.
Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare;
Stark as your sons shall be - stern as your fathers were.
Deeper than speech our love, stronger than life our tether,
But we do not fall on the neck nor kiss when we come together."

Second Lieutenant Hamilton's inscription refers to the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's 'England's Answer'. This speaks of the blood ties that link the people of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa into the British Empire, and lauds the qualities of the British race and the responsibilities it has assumed in the world.
However, there is more going on with this inscription than just Kipling's poem. The War Graves Commission has only the most minimal information about Second Lieutenant GEAF Hamilton, no Christian names, no parentage and no age. But he was, in fact, George Edward Archibald Augustus FitzGeorge Hamilton, son and heir of Sir Archibald Hamilton and his first wife Olga Mary Adelaide FitzGeorge. Both these families came of royal blood: Olga's grandfather was the Duke of Cambridge, one of the sons of George III, and Sir Archibald was descended from James II. 'Truly ye are of the blood' is a reference not just to the binding blood of the Empire but to royal blood. After the divorce Sir Archibald was given custody of his son but it was his mother's second husband, Squadron Leader Richard Charlton Lan of the Air Ministry, who signed for the inscription.
Olga and Sir Archibald divorced in 1902 and Sir Archibald went on to have a fairly colourful career, which saw him convert to Islam and become a leading member of the British Union of Fascists.
George Hamilton was educated at Winchester, left in 1916 to go to Sandhurst, was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards - the regiment of which his great-grandfather the Duke of Cambridge had been Colonel in Chief for over forty years - joining the 1st Battalion in France in January 1918. By May 1918 the German offensive was beginning to lose steam but their artillery and aeroplanes were still very active. The regimental history records that:

"On the 17th the area occupied by the 1st Battalion was subjected to a severe bombing by aircraft; Second Lieutenant W.A. Fleet and Second Lieutenant G.E.A.A. Fitz-George Hamilton were killed, and Second Lieutenant S.J. Hargreaves and Second Lieutenant G.D. Neale were seriously wounded. The two latter never recovered from the wounds they received, and died the next day. The loss of these four keen young officers was deeply felt by the whole Battalion."




AFTER 17 YEARS SERVICE
WM. HENRY

DRIVER WILBY ILLINGWORTH


Wilby Illingworth's unusual Christian name was his mother's maiden name - Elizabeth Conyer Wilby - the mother he never knew as she died the year he was born. He was brought up by his grandparents, Edmund and Hannah Illingworth, in Ossett, Yorkshire.
The War Graves Commission records his parents as James and Elizabeth Illingworth. The excellent Ossett WW1 history site has compiled biographies of all the men of Ossett who died in the war, including Illingworth. This site suggests that Wilby wasn't James Illingworth's son because James Illingworth died in 1872, four years before Wilby was born. However, the 1881 census records four-year-old Wilby living with his grandparents and their son, James Illingworth, a widower aged 33. I have a feeling it might have been another James Illingworth who died in 1872. Among the occupants of the 1881 household was another grandson, eleven-year-old William Henry Illingworth, Wilby's brother. This is the Wm. Henry named on Wilby's inscription.
Illingworth's medal index card shows his entitlement to the 1914 Star with clasp, the date of entitlement being 19 August 1914. This is scarcely two weeks after the outbreak of war so he must have been a reservist, mobilised on the outbreak. This explains the seventeen years service mentioned in the inscription. Although both the 1901 and 1911 censuses show him working in civilian jobs, in the intervening ten years he must have been a soldier who in 1914 was still on the reserve. Men who finished their regular army service spent five years on the reserve, being paid but having to undergo twelve days annual training a year. During this time he could be called up in the event of general mobilisation.
Illingworth served with the 119th Battery, 27th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery in France, Belgium and Italy. He died in a Casualty Clearing Station on 14 May 1918 after the Brigade had been in action in the Nieppe Forest. On 26 June, the Ossett Observer reported his death and published a letter the matron had written to his fiancee, Miss Edith Winpenny, to say that Illingworth had been brought in 'severely wounded and gassed' and had died peacefully.


ONE OF THREE DEAR SONS
WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES
FOR KING AND COUNTRY

PRIVATE WILFRED JOHN MARTIN


William and Amy Martin had seven children, five sons and two daughters. Herbert William was the oldest. A warehouseman in London where the family lived, he volunteered in September 1914 and went to France with the 23rd Battalion London Regiment on 14 March 1915. He was killed in action just over two months later in the Battle of Festubert. He was 28. His body was never identified and he's consequently commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial.
Alan Stewart, at the age of 15 working as a junior clerk, volunteered in November 1914. He served with the Royal Engineers and was present in Gallipoli from the landing at Suvla Bay on 25 April 1915 to the evacuation in December. He served in France with the 29th Divisional Signal Company and was wounded at Merris on 12 April 1918. He died in hospital at Wimereux a month later, the day after his younger brother, Wilfred John, serving with the 2nd Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment had been killed in action near Arras.
Wilfred, who had volunteered in February 1915 when he was only 16, served in Dublin during the 1916 rising. He went to France on 31 March 1918 and was dead within six weeks. He was 19.
Both Wilfred and Alan have the same inscription, signed for by their father. The single adjective giving it a simple, affecting poignancy.


FOR HIS ENGLISH AND FRENCH
BROTHERS AND SISTERS

LIEUTENANT ELMER WINFRED DRAKE LAING MC


Elmer Laing's father, William Drake Laing, chose his inscription, very specifically giving the cause for which his Australian son had fought and died.
Born in Australia, educated in England and Marburg, Germany, Laing returned to Australia in 1911 when he was 18. He became a fruit grower, an orchardist, but joined up on 14 September 1914, barely a month after the outbreak of war.
He served with the 12th Battalion Australian Infantry, the first battalion to go ashore at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915. The battalion remained on Gallipoli until the evacuation in December. It was then deployed to France, fighting at Pozieres where Laing was awarded a Military Cross:

"Lieut, Laing was in command of his platoon in the attack at Pozieres which he led with conspicuous bravery and coolness. On the night of 24th July 1916 he commanded a patrol sent out to the N.E. corner of Pozieres to cover a party of Engineers digging a strong post and when they were driven back by machine gun fire he assisted to bring back a wounded man and by his coolness and courageousness fully got his patrol back to our line."

In the autumn of 1917 the battalion were engaged at Third Ypres and in the Spring of 1918 in attempting to halt the German offensive in the same region. On 4 May 1918 the 12th Battalion relieved the 4th in the line "east & south east of Strazeele". Laing was killed on the 8th, the war diary recorded:

"Heavy barrage of 4.2's & 7.7's on the two left companies & support company at 3 am during which Lieut E.W.D.Laing M.C. was killed."

"For his English and French brothers and sisters."


THE IMAGE HE LEFT
MAKES WORTH LOOK FAIRER
AND TRUTH MORE BRIGHT

PRIVATE ALEXANDER GEORGE CHILD


Alexander Child's eldest sister, Beatrice, chose his inscription. The words come from a poem written by Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), 'It is not the tear at this moment shed', which he wrote following the death of a dearly loved relation.

It is not the tear at this moment shed,
When the cold turf has just been laid o'er him,
That can tell how beloved was the friend that's fled,
Or how deep in our hearts we deplore him.
'Tis the tear, thro' many a long day wept,
'Tis life's whole path o'ershaded;
'Tis the one remembrance, fondly kept,
When all lighter griefs have faded.

Thus his memory, like some holy light,
Kept alive in our hearts, will improve them,
For worth shall look fairer, and truth more bright,
When we think how we lived but to love them.
And, as fresher flowers the sod perfume
Where buried saints are lying,
So our hearts shall borrow a sweetening bloom
From the image he left there in dying!

The poem was set to music in 1901 by the Anglo-Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford and it's this that probably brought it to prominence. But Child's inscription goes to show yet again that the rank of a soldier does not define the type of his inscription, it isn't only officers whose families find profound and unusual things to say.
Child was the sixth of John and Ada Child's nine children. In 1911, at the age of 15, he was working as a shop assistant - his sister Beatrice was a coca demonstrator. He volunteered on the outbreak of war and joined the Wiltshire Regiment, going with them to France on 4 January 1915. He was killed on 7 May 1918. Originally buried in the churchyard at Marle-sur-Serre his body was exhumed a reinterred in 1924.


COME IT SLOW
OR COME IT FAST
IT IS BUT DEATH
WHICH COMES AT LAST

LANCE CORPORAL HAROLD SIDEBOTTOM


This blunt truism appears all over the Internet, always in inverted commas but never attributed to an author. That is, until you change the pronoun to 'he', "Come he slow, or come he fast" and then it emerges as a line from Sir Walter Scott's Marmion (1808). Writers have quoted it ever since to indicate that death and danger are old friends, or to remind us of the transient nature of life, either of which could have been in Mr Joseph Sidebottom's mind when he chose it for his son's inscription.
Harold Sidebottom served in the 10th Battalion Cheshire Regiment and died of wounds in a hospital in Boulogne. It's difficult to identify when soldiers can have been wounded but the 10th Cheshires had been up in Flanders, near Kemmel, when the Germans attacked on 10 April, and on the 26th they had been part of a counter-attack. Their casualties from the two operations included more than 236 wounded and 372 missing. In June the battalion was reduced to cadre strength and the 10th as a fighting unit ceased to exist.
Harold Sidebottom was a cotton weaver from Glossop in Derbyshire where his father, Joseph was a coal heaver and his mother, Ann, assisted in the business as a book keeper.


MY BELOVED FIRST BORN

LIEUTENANT JACK KEITH CURWEN-WALKER


Jack Keith Curwen-Walker was the eldest of John and Lucy Curwen-Walker's seven children. John Curwen-Walker died in 1905 and the children went to live with their father's mother and his sisters. A letter from their mother, in Curwen-Walker's service file, explains that, after her husband's death, "circumstances necessitated my little sons (sic) living with his grandmother & Aunts who supervised his education until the age of 17 years when he began to care for himself".
Curwen-Walker was a keen sportsman and something of a speed merchant. He represented the State of Victoria in ice hockey and was a member of the team that won the first inter-state Goodall Cup in 1910. In 1914 he broke the Australian motor-cycling speed record over one hundred miles when he cut 47 minutes off the previous record, which had only been set three weeks earlier. Curwen-Walker, riding "an Indian machine", averaged 56 mph over the course.
The American 'Indian Motor Cycle Company', was at this time the largest manufacturer of motor cycles in the world. Such was Curwen-Walker's enthusiasm for the machines that just before the war he took up an agency for the company.
In October 1916, he joined the Australian Flying Corps, giving one of his aunts, Miss Isabella Curwen-Walker as his next-of-kin. Qualifying as a pilot in September 1917 - delayed by having to recover from a crash - he joined No. 2 Squadron in Palestine in January 1918.
On the morning of 3 May 1918, soon after taking off from the airfield, Curwen-Walker's plane was seen to spin and crash. It was thought that through inexperience he had tried to climb too quickly. Both he and his observer, Corporal Jensen were killed.
Initially it was his aunt, Isabella, as his next-of-kin, who was informed of his death, but it was his mother who eventually chose his inscription.


BLEST BY SUNS OF HOME

LIEUTENANT HAROLD VICTOR HOWARTH


Did you recognise it?

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Rupert Brooke's lyrical description of the English countryside forms an ironic contrast with the the sun of the last few months of Harold Howarth's life. He served with the 1st/5th Devonshire Regiment, which had been fighting in Palestine since June 1917. Of the march to Jerusalem that October the regimental history says, it "was a torment of heat, dust, thirst and exhaustion". Howarth is buried in Ramlah War Cemetery, beautifully maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission with green lawns and flowers as in the gardens of England, but he's very far from home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
[The Soldier, from '1914' by Rupert Brooke

The 7 May edition of the 'Western Morning News' reported Howarth's death:

"Lt Harold Victor Howarth, who died on May 2 of wounds received in action in Palestine on April 21, was the younger son of Mr Frank Howarth (water engineer) and Mrs Howarth. Lt Howarth was previously dangerously wounded in July 1917, in the head with shrapnel, but recovered and went back to the front in Dec. Only on Sunday last three cheerful letters were received from him, in one which he congratulated himself on having gone through without being hit, the same action in which Maj. Spooner was killed. He was educated at Plymouth College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, having won an open exhibition to the latter in the year before the war broke out. After being a year at Cambridge he obtained a commission in the - Devons in July 1915, and took a draft out to India the following year. He accompanied the battn. to Palestine and was dangerously wounded at Gaza. Mr and Mrs Howarth's elder son holds a commission in the Machine Gun Corps, and is serving in Mesopotamia, having gone to India in Dec. 1914."


WHEN THAT WHICH DREW
FROM OUT THE BOUNDLESS DEEP
TURNS AGAIN HOME

GUNNER EDWIN CHARLES HENSON


Gunner Henson died of wounds in a base hospital in Boulogne. His wife, Mrs EJ Henson, chose a quotation from the second verse of Tennyson's famous four-verse poem, Crossing the Bar.

Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning at the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be so sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.

Mrs Henson has chosen a very powerful image for the moment of death, that moment when whatever force it is that has driven the tide inexorably onwards suddenly slackens, eddies and withdraws taking the water - us - back into the boundless deep, that vast anonymous nothingness from whence we came.
Edwin Charles Henson was born in Leytonstone, East London to Edwin and Annie Henson. His father, who died in 1908 was a carpenter. In 1901, fourteen-year-old Edwin Charles was an office boy. Henson served with the 72nd Battery, 38th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. I haven't been able to discover how, when or where he was wounded


GASSED AP. 21
AFTER 3 1/3 YRS FIGHTING
SON OF G.M.W.
DYSON'S WOOD, READING

MAJOR WALTER GUSTAVUS WORTHINGTON MC


Major Worthington was gassed at Villers Bretonneux on 21 April 1918 and died six days later in hospital in Rouen. I've written before about dying from the effects of gas:
"The effects of mustard gas take some time to develop. First, several hours after exposure, a mild skin irritation appears. Eventually the affected areas turn yellow and agonising blisters develop. The eyes become red, sore and runny and extreme pain and sometimes blindness can follow. These symptoms can be accompanied by nasal congestion, sinus pain, hoarseness, coughing and in extreme cases respiratory failure."
Worthington was obviously an extreme case.
Walter Worthington, educated at Charterhouse and Oriel College, Oxford, was a territorial soldier who joined The Rangers in 1911. Mobilized on the outbreak of war, he was deployed to France on Christmas Day 1914 - three months after his elder brother Reginald, a lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry had been killed in action on 16 September at the Battle of the Aisne.
His mother, Eveline, chose his inscription, choosing to highlight the manner of her son's death, the precise length of his military service, and his father's initials. George Montague Worthington, a barrister, had died in 1913 so Mrs Worthington managed to get in a reference to him too on her son's headstone. One of the things the War Graves Commission were very strict about was mentioning other family members on a soldier's headstone. You could say that the dead solider was the son of .... , you could mention by name the numerous brothers and sisters who mourned, you could mention the names of his brothers who'd also died in the war, but you couldn't include a civilian/family death on your headstone - something like "and his wife, Betty, who died in 1921" - unless you were buried in Britain. Not sure of the logic but that's how it was.


HE WAS A GENIUS
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE
AND A HERO OF THE FIRST WATER

SERJEANT CECIL FREDERICK GOTTLIEB COLES COLES


Cecil Coles was a musical genius and not just according to his wife Phoebe, who chose his inscription. Coles, whose father, Frederick, was Assistant Keeper at the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland in Edinburgh, had composed his first orchestral work whilst still at school. He read music at Edinburgh University, won a scholarship to the London College of Music and then the following year, 1908, the Theophile Bucher Scholarship at Stuttgart University. He remained in Germany for the next five years, returning in 1913 to resume a teaching post at Morley College where Gustav Holst was his friend and mentor. During this time he continued to write several well-received pieces of music.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the years he had spent in Germany, Coles was a very early volunteer, enlisting on 2 September 1914. He served as a bandsman with the 9th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, becoming the bandmaster, which came with the rank of serjeant.
Although at one time bandsmen always served as stretcher bearers, by 1916 they were two separate occupations. Stretcher bearers were selected for their physique and stamina, bandsmen, obviously, for their ability to play an instrument. As such they were too valuable to loose. They played at concerts, church services and funerals, medal presentations, sports days and entertainments. Their work was good for morale.
But, when times were desperate they still could be needed for stretcher bearing and times were desperate when Coles volunteered to help bring in the wounded following a heavy bombardment near Hangard Wood. However, stretcher bearers were unarmed and vulnerable; Coles was shot by a sniper as he helped to recover the casualties. This is why his wife described him as a hero. 'Of the first water' is a measure of the quality of diamonds, those of the greatest purity and translucence are described as being of the first water - a hero of the greatest purity and perfection.
Coles' reputation disappeared after his death and it wasn't until his daughter, Catherine Coles, who never met her father, rediscovered his manuscripts in 1993 that his reputation was reestablished.


SO SAD, SO FRESH
THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE

SERJEANT HUGH REID MCGROGAN


Twenty-year-old Serjeant Hugh McGrogan died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Lijssenthoek. Educated at Paisley Grammar School, McGrogan would have gone to Glasgow Provincial Training College had he not joined the Royal Garrison Artillery in July 1916 when he was eighteen. When he died two years later, he was a serjeant.
Born in Paisley, Hugh McGrogan was the only son of James and Margaret McGrogan. His father, who was a tailor, died in August 1916, the month after Hugh enlisted, so it was his mother who chose her son's inscription.
It comes from The Princess,Tennyson's long narrative, serio-comic poem about the education of women and their role in public life. The inscription comes from a beautiful four-verse song, a lament for "days that are no more". These are the first two verses:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

McGrogan served with the 263rd Siege Battery and was wounded as the Germans pushed forward in Belgium during their Spring Offensive.





"A MAN AND A GENTLEMAN"
(ONE OF HIS BOMBARDIERS)

MAJOR GASTON PIERRE PETER KURTEN


This is a lovely tribute from a soldier, a bombardier, the equivalent of a lance corporal, to his officer. It was one that his father appreciated enough to chose as his son's headstone inscription. There would have been other tributes in plenty as Kurten was something of a superstar, however this was the one that most touched him.
At the time of his death, Major Peter Kurten was the officer commanding 291st Siege Battery, a rapid promotion for someone who had only joined the army in 1916. But then Kurten was an able man. He had 1st Class degrees from both Oxford and King's College, London and in 1912 had entered the Civil Service as an Upper Division clerk. Two years later, in 1914, he was appointed private secretary to Sir Matthew Nathan, Under-Secretary for Ireland.
Kurten joined the Army Service Corps in February 1916, transferred to the Royal Garrison Artillery the following September, was appointed acting captain in April 1917, acting major two months later and was given command of his battery that August. He was killed by shellfire near Villers Bretonneaux during the German Spring Offensive.
Gaston Pierre (Peter) Kurten was the son of Johann Robert Kurten, a naturalised British citizen born in Germany in 1858.


AMONGST THE VERY BRAVE
THE VERY TRUE

GUNNER JOHN HENSHALL


John Henshall's inscription comes from the last line of 'In Memoriam A.H.' the poem Maurice Baring wrote in memory of his friend Auberon Herbert, Captain Lord Lucas RFC, who was killed on 3 November 1916. Baring asserts that it is well with those who mourn:

... because they know,
With faithful eyes,
Fixed forward and turned upwards to the skies,
That it is well with you,
Among the chosen few,
Among the very brave, the very true.

John Henshall was a lace designer from Shardlow in Derbyshire, the second youngest of his parents' seven children. He joined the army in 1916 and served with the 84th Battery Royal Field Artillery. He was killed in action near Mont Rouge whilst the battery was under the orders of the French IX Corps and covering the French infantry.
Originally buried in the churchyard at Boesheppe, his body was reburied in May 1919.


"NEZDAR"

RIFLEMAN CHARLES DESORT


Charles Desort was born Karl Dezort to a Bohemian father and a Dutch mother. His parents married in London in 1899 but at the time of the 1911 census Karl Dezort Senior was still an Austrian citizen, neither parent had taken out British citizenship, nor had they Anglicized their names. Yet Karl joined the army as Charles Desort and his father signed for his son's inscription as C Desort Esq.
The word 'Nezdar' means misfortune in Czech, although it's probably a word that doesn't translate properly into English as it has cultural resonances which we can't pick up. However, it's possible that what C. Desort Esq wrote was the word 'Nazdar'. It's a Czech word, a toast, meaning "to success", which had become associated with the Bohemian independence movement. Bohemians/Czechs were Austrian citizens but many would have preferred not to fight with Austria but against it in order to achieve their freedom. The Nazdar Company, whose battle cry was 'Nazdar', was a unit of the French army made up of Czech citizens, and the Nazdar Cemetery near Arras is where many Czech soldiers who died for France are buried.
Rifleman Desort's inscription comes with quotation marks round the word Nezdor, which makes me think it's a misspelling of the battle cry rather than the word for misfortune.
Desort served with the 13th Battalion Rifle Brigade and died of wounds at No. 3 Casualty Clearing Station, based in the Citadel at Doullens.


BRITAIN IS FREE
FOR THIS OUR HEROES DIED

SECOND LIEUTENANT JAMES BELL


April 22nd 1918
Bouzincourt
"At 7-30 pm 35th & 38th Divisions attacked - 19th Durham L.I. taking part. The attack as far as the 19th Durham L.I. were concerned was not a success - the right Coy. suffering severe casualties. The Battalion had to wait 8 minutes after Zero before advancing to conform to the Barrage and thus possibly gave the enemy M.G.s time to get ready".

Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer
Friday 3 May 1918
"Sec-Lieut. James Bell, Durham L.I. who was killed in action on April 22, was the elder son of Mr John Bell, of 6 Lowthian Road, West Hartlepool. He joined the Honourable Artillery Company in November 1915, and was with them in France for seventeen months. He was granted a commission in February last. Formerly he was a Second Division clerk at Somerset House, and later was with the Health Insurance Commissioners at Buckingham Gate."

John Bell, a ships plater in the naval dockyards at Hartlepool, chose his son's inscription. To Mr Bell, his son had given his life so that Britain might be free. Imagine telling him that today people think the war was a futile waste. It's not just that he wouldn't believe you but he would be insulted - and he would consider that you had insulted his son ... and perhaps you had. As people like Mr Bell saw it, Germany had threatened to destroy Britain and her Empire and people like his son had saved it ... and perhaps they had.


"MAY I GO
UNTO THE ALTAR OF MY GOD"
(EXTRACT FROM POCKET BOOK)

LANCE CORPORAL CHRISTOPHER LANGE


Priest: O send out thy light and thy truth: that they may lead me, and bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy dwelling.
Server: And that I may go unto the altar of God, even the God of my joy and gladness: and upon the harp will I give thanks unto thee, O God my God

These words from Psalm 43 form part of the preparation for an Anglo-Catholic Mass. Christopher Lange had written them down, slightly altered, in his pocket book. These were books that soldiers carried with them at all times. They contained everything he needed to know about matters practical, procedural, organizational and legal to do with his military service. Lange had the book on him when he died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station at Aubigny.
Christopher Lange was the youngest of Henry and Ellen Lange's twelve children. Henry Lange was a cabdriver and groom at a private house in London. He died in 1899. After his death, Ellen went out to work as an office cleaner.
It's strange the social history that emerges from the censuses. Ellen was an office cleaner, most cleaners I've come across have been charwomen. Her daughter Annie was a police detective, and two other daughters were cigarette makers. Christopher Lange had been a solicitor's clerk.


"AS UNKNOWN
AND YET WELL KNOWN
AS DYING
AND BEHOLD WE LIVE"

LANCE SERJEANT ALBERT HAMPSHIRE


As the Cenotaph in Whitehall is taciturn so the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey is loquacious. The Cenotaph has a mere three words carved onto it - The Glorious Dead - and originally just the dates MCMXIV - MXMXIX (1914-1919). These have now been joined by two more dates MCMXXXIX - MCMXLV (1939-1945). The tomb of the Unknown Warrior has 155 words. There is the main dedication, sonorous, resonant, explicit, and then round the edge of the stone, four texts.
Albert Hampshire's inscription is one of these texts. The words come from 2 Corinthians 6:9 and suggest the comfort that even those who are not famous are 'known', and that through Christ we shall all 'live'.
Hampshire had been a regular soldier. The 1911 census shows him to have been a private in the Coldstream Guards, living in Victoria Barracks, Doncaster. But he was no longer a soldier by the outbreak of war. One of his parents' eleven children, their father, George, was a farmer in High Melton, Yorkshire. Albert's younger brother, Richard, was killed in action at Passchendaele on 9 October 1917; George Hampshire died in January 1918, and Albert was died of wounds in hospital at Etaples three months later. Richard Hampshire is commemorated on the Tyne Cot memorial, Mrs Eliza Hampshire, their mother, chose Albert's inscription.


"WE SEE THE SIGN
OF A FUTURE GRAND
AS WE GAZE ON A RISING STAR"

PRIVATE SAMUEL ERNEST CRANE


Samuel Ernest Crane was a veteran of the South African War who re-enlisted in March 1915 and was given the rank of corporal. He served in Gallipoli, where he was wounded and hospitalised in England. He spent a year in England, training soldiers once he'd recovered, and being promoted to the rank of sergeant. However, he wanted to return to the front and was prepared to be reduced to the rank of private to achieve this. He served with the 6th Battalion Australian Infantry and was wounded in both legs on 16 April 1918. He died in a Casualty Clearing Station four days later.
His inscription comes from a poem called 'My Land and I' (1903), written by Henry Lawson (1867-1922). Lawson was one of the most famous and popular of all Australian writers, revered as someone who "represented the real voice of Australia". It was a voice that would have preferred Australia to be 'white'. Sites that feature his poetry today come with a warning that:

"the phrasings used in his lifetime were correct for his time period in that the usage of terms not regarded as "politically correct" today were quite acceptable at that time and were not regarded as "offensive".

'My Land and I' is a savage attack on the sort of people who insisted that Australia was dead, finished. This is the last verse.

The parasites dine at your tables spread
(As my enemies did at mine),
And they croak and gurgle, 'Australia's dead'
While they guzzle Australian wine.
But we heed them never, my land, my land,
For we know how small they are,
And we see the signs of a future grand
As we gaze on a rising star.


THE GUNNER SMILED
AS HE WENT OUT WEST

GUNNER HARRY TWYFORD TRUMAN


War Diary 5th Australian Field Artillery Brigade
19 April 1918
"Snow fell during the day. Hail and snow showers at intervals and very cold wind."

At mid-day, Gunner Truman and eight other members of his battery were gathered round a fire in an old house in the village of Lavieville waiting for their dinner when a German shell crashed through the roof killing one gunner and wounding the other eight. Truman was hit by pieces of shell all over his body and head and died soon afterwards. Truman was "a bright, high spirited chap", with a "fresh complexion, shortish, always lively".
All this information was given by various witnesses to the Australian Red Cross who conveyed it to his parents in South Africa. Truman was born in Sydney and was working there as a draughtsman when he enlisted in January 1916. His parents were by this time in Pretoria, South Africa.
His father chose his inscription. It comes from a poem, which I found published on 26 September 1918 in the Southern Reporter, a Scottish newspaper, and again in the book, 'Victory Over Blindness: how it was won by the men of St Dunstan's and how others may win it' (1919) by Sir Arthur Pearson. It's introduced in this book with the comment that it was by a 'St Dunstaner'.
I'll reproduce it in full.

The Gunner smiled as his breachblock closed,
His arm was steady, his grip was tight;
The Gunner smiled, and his face beamed bright
In the twilight flush of an autumn night.
Silent columns of moving men
Moved to a point in a neighbouring glen,
And the Gunner smiled.
The Gunner smiled as his gun spoke loud,
With deafening crash and darkening cloud;
The Gunner smiled as the darkness fell,
Smiled at the wreck of shot and shell.
The Gunner smiled with firm fixed eye
On the field of death, where brave men die.
Then he sank down slowly beside his gun,
And smiled, though his course was nearly run;
Though his heart beat faint in his wounded breast.
The Gunner smiled as he went out west.


"BECAUSE"
R.I.P

PRIVATE WILLIAM HENRY CROWE


William Crowe was killed because he went with a group of soldiers to get some straw from a haystack to make their shelter more comfortable for the night just as a German plane flew the haystack and dropped four bombs. Crowe was severely injured and two other soldiers were killed outright. Crowe died of his wounds the next day. All this comes from his Australian Red Cross file. However, I cannot believe that his brother had this in mind when he chose Crowe's inscription. In fact, it's possible that his brother never knew how Crowe died since the copy of the letter in his service file just says he was killed in action. But perhaps some of Crowe's friends passed on the facts.
So what could it mean? Are the speech marks significant? Is it a reference to Emily Dickinson's poem:

Because I could not stop for Death -
He kindly stopped for me,
The carriage held but just ourselves -
And immortality

Or perhaps it's just a fatalistic comment - because ... It's another one to add to the list of enigmatic inscriptions.
Crowe was an iron moulder from Camperdown, Sydney, New South Wales. He enlisted in January 1916 and served with the 17th Battalion Australian Infantry. They had just come out of the line at Gentelles and were about to bivouac for the night at Bois de Blangy.


THE SHIPS CAME BACK
WITH HONOURED BRAVE
BUT NONE CAME BACK
WITH OUR DAVE

PRIVATE DAVID EDWARD ARNOLD


This heartfelt piece of verse was written by Private Arnold's father. It was, of course, extremely difficult for the bereaved when the soldiers came home to great rejoicing. For some relations these were the hardest days of all.
David Arnold enlisted in September 1915 aged 18. He left Australia in January 1916 and served with the 55th Battalion Australian Infantry in France from 12 August 1917. He was killed by a shell in the trenches on 16 April 1918. A witness told the Australian Red Cross:

"I knew both the above [Lieutenant Collins and Private DE Arnold] - they were in No. 1 Platoon. We were in the front line at Villers-Bretonneux ... I did not see them killed but was told that a shall burst in the trench and killed six of them ... This was in the morning. That same night, as I was doing despatch running, I saw Collins and Arnold being carried out of the trench, and I subsequently saw the Pioneers making crosses for their graves ... I knew them both well. Arnold was a stretcher bearer. He was a nuggety fellow - a bit deaf - fairish complexion - we called him Dave."


ONE MORE
TO MAKE THE STRANGE BEYOND
SEEM FAIR

GUNNER JOHN SAMPSON FORSYTH


I never stand above a bier and see
The seal of death set on some well-loved face
But that I think, "One more to welcome me
When I shall cross the intervening space
Between this land and that one 'over there';
One more to make the strange Beyond seem fair".
The Beyond v3
Ella Wheeler Wilcox 1850-1919

Ella Wheeler Wilcox was a popular American poet whose status can be judged by the fact that none of her poetry was included in The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950) and yet fourteen of her poems were published in Best Loved Poems of America (1936). Gunner Forsyth's wife, Ada Nellie Forsyth, quoted from The Beyond.
According to the Burnley Express of 24 April 1918, Forsyth , who joined up in June 1916 and was mobilised in February 1917, died of multiple gun shot wounds. His service record shows that these were received on 12 April 1918. He died two days later.
Ada and John Forsyth were married in December 1905, He was a grocer, tea and drapery dealer in Burnley. Childless at the time of the 1911 census, they had a daughter in July 1914 who was therefore three when her father died. Ada Forsyth died in 1974, fifty-six years after her husband.

And so for me there is no sting to death,
And so the grave has lost its victory.
It is but crossing - with a bated breath,
And white, set face - a little strip of sea.
To find the loved ones waiting on the shore
More beautiful, more precious than before.


"THEY FOUGHT AND DIED
AS WE KNEW THEY WOULD -
AS WE KNEW THEY WOULD"

PRIVATE EUGENE ALPHONSUS EDMAN


Private Edman's father, George Hunston Edman, chose some lines from The Song of the Dardanelles by Henry Lawson for his son's inscription. It's a very nationalistic poem heroising the Australian landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915:

The sea was hell and the shore was hell,
With mine, entanglement and shell,
But they stormed the heights as Australians should,
And they fought and they died as we knew they would.
Knew they would -
Knew they would;
They fought and they died as we knew they would.

Edman, who served with the 20th Battalion Australian Infantry, landed on Gallipoli on 22 August 1915. After the battalion was withdrawn in December, it was sent to France. Here, on 12 April 1918, Edman was one of two soldiers wounded when the Germans shelled the town where they were billeted. He was admitted to hospital with a compound fracture of his left femur and died two days later.
His father, who filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia, told how Edman's eldest brother had lost an eye in a bayonet charge at Armentieres and another brother had been wounded in April 1918 during the Battle of the Lys.


"TELL THEM
ENGLAND HATH TAKEN ME"
KIPLING

SECOND LIEUTENANT VINCENT TALLEMACH ANDERSON


Both Vincent Anderson's parents were born in England but he himself was born and brought up in South Africa. However, as his inscription hauntingly conveys - England took him.
Anderson's inscription comes from, Sir Richard's Song in Kipling's 'Puck of Pook's Hill'. Sir Richard is Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a Norman knight who comes to England with William the Conqueror. He comes as a conqueror but is conquered himself by his love for a Saxon lady - and for the country - and he sends back messages, each message a verse, to his father, mother, brother and sister, which each end telling them, 'England hath taken me'.

Anderson enlisted in the Inns of Court OTC in December 1915. He was 18. On 24 October 1916 he was commissioned into the Machine Gun Corps and joined the 1st Machine Gun Company in France on 31 July 1917. In February 1918 this became part of the 1st Machine Gun Battalion. Anderson died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Lapugnoy on 13 April. As the battalion were involved in the Battle of Estaires, 9-12 April, it is possible that this is when he was wounded.

I had my horse, my shield and banner,
And a boy's heart, so whole and free;
But now I sing in another manner -
But now England hath taken me!


COULD I HIS MOTHER
HAVE CLASPED HIS HAND
THE SON I LOVED SO WELL

PRIVATE THOMAS POTTER


On 28 March 1918 the 8th/10th Battalion Gordon Highlanders were in the support trenches near Tilloy when at 3 am:

"The enemy opened a terrific bombardment consisting of a large amount of gas & HE shells which lasted till 7 am. Soon afterwards an attack was launched under a terrific barrage. The 7th Cameron Highlanders who were there holding the front line were badly knocked about and we sent two companies to assist them and who did fine work there greatly checking the German advance. Fighting continued intermittently all day and at about 12.30 pm orders were received to withdraw to the Army Line as the enemy had turned the flanks of the Divisions on our Right and Left. This was carried out in good order, the men fighting a heroic rearguard action the whole way. As casualties were heavy the Battalion was relieved by the 8th Bn Seaforth Highlanders and withdrew to trenches behind Telegraph Hill."
War Diary 8th/10th Battalion Gordon Highlanders

Thomas Potter was wounded on 28 March 1918 and died as a German prisoner on 11 April 1918. It was April 1919 before his widowed mother received definite news of his fate. Buried originally in Dechy Communal German Extension, his body was exhumed and reburied in Cabaret Rouge British Cemetery in 1923.
Mary Potter chose her son's inscription from a popular memorial verse:

Could I, his mother, have clasped his hand
The son I loved so well
Or kissed his brow when death was near,
And whispered, My son, Farewell,
I seem to see his dear, sweet face
Through a mist of anxious tears
But a mother's part is a broken heart
And a burden of lonely years.


HIS NAME IS WRITTEN
IN LETTERS OF LOVE
IN HEARTS HE LEFT BEHIND

PRIVATE RONALD WILLIAM RESCHKE


This is a very popular inscription from an equally popular piece of memorial verse regularly printed in the 'In Memoriam' columns of newspapers:

We think we can see his smiling face
As he bade his last good-bye,
When he left his home forever
In a foreign land to die.
He sleeps beside his comrades
In a grave across the foam,
But his name is written in letters of love
On the hearts he left at home.

Ronald William Reschke was a labourer in Kyogle, New South Wales when he enlisted on 31 October 1916. He served with the 31st Battalion Australian Infantry and was killed on the 10 April 1918.
On the night of the 9/10 April, the 31st Battalion relieved the 58th in the Corbie sector of the front line. The war diary reports that the enemy was very quiet during the relief but that their artillery became very active during the day:

"At 1.30 pm enemy shelled farm occupied by us in J.34 central with 40 rds of 5.9" and 4.2". Three direct hits on the farm caused 27 casualties ... "

Reschke was one of the 27 as these were the only casualties to be reported that day.


BELOVED WIDOW OF
CPL. G.W. MAYNE
KILLED IN FRANCE FEB. 20 1917
THY WILL BE DONE

GERTRUDE MAYNE


In January 1910, Gertrude Sadler married George William Mayne. Their son Harry was born in February the following year. George was a printers' machine feeder in Armley, Yorkshire. He was called up in 1916 and served with the 2nd/8th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment. On 20 February 1917 he died of wounds at a Field Ambulance Dressing Station in Aveluy, France.
Gertrude joined Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps. This was instituted in 1917 in order to release men for the front line it having been decided that women could do the jobs that had kept men on home service and working in the base camps abroad. They could cook and clean, fill roles in military offices and stores, and even drive and repair vehicles.
There is no evidence that Gertrude ever served abroad. She died at home on 9 April 1918 and was buried in Armley. There is nothing to indicate the cause of her death, but it's too early to have been the flu pandemic as this didn't really hit the UK until the following month.
Harry Mayne, his parents seven-year-old son, was now an orphan. His grandparents, Thomas and Elizabeth Sadler chose both his parents' inscriptions. His fathers' says:

We could not spare you
Daddy dear
In God's keeping
Harry


OUR ONLY ONE
OH HOW WE MISS HIM
MA AND DAD

GUNNER WALTER DAKIN


Walter Dakin was an only child. The 1911 census shows that his parents, Joseph and Mary Jane Dakin, had had four 'children born alive' but that three of them had subsequently died. Joseph Dakin was a coal miner, a hewer, in one of the collieries in Mexborough, Yorkshire.
Walter Dakin was called up in 1917, when he was 18. He served with 'B' Battery, Royal Field Artillery, and was killed in action, along with three other members of the battery, on 9 April 1918
His inscription says all it needs to of his parents' grief.


GOD KNOWS HOW MUCH
I LOVED HIM AND I STILL
HAVE HIS EMPTY CHAIR
LOVING MOTHER

RIFLEMAN LIONEL SIDNEY GEORGE BUCKMAN


'Empty chair' is the gentle euphemism for the dead that was in use all over England during the war years and after, both in sentimental poetry and in newspaper columns:

There's a sadness in the landscape,
There's a stillness in the air,
Save the sound of someone weeping near at hand;
There's many an empty chair
For the Reaper - Death - is stalking through the land.
[From The Reaper by Percy A Gamble October 1918]

Lionel Buckman was his mother's only child. The 1901 census shows them to have been living alone in Marylebone where Mrs Buckman worked as a dressmaker. She was still a dressmaker in 1911 and seventeen-year-old Lionel was working as an errand boy for a builder.
Buckman didn't go out to France until January 1917. From his entry in Service Medal and Award Rolls, it would appear that he was wounded in February 1917. He was back in action in April that year and served until he died of wounds in hospital in Abbeville on 7 April 1918.
His mother, obviously, chose his inscription. By this time she was living in Burgh, Suffolk, a few miles from where she'd been born. She still had "his empty chair".


MISSED BY FEW
FORGOTTEN BY THOUSANDS

PRIVATE EDWARD JOHN GIBBONS


This is a very different inscription - extraordinary in fact. What can his mother have been thinking of? Edward Gibbons was the son of Patrick and Louisa Gibbons. Patrick was a 'carman' in the furniture trade, in other words someone who delivered furniture. The couple had five children, Edward was the third.
Edward Gibbons served with the 8th Battalion, Rifle Brigade which was in the front line just east of Flavy-le-Martel at Jussy on 21 March 1918 when the German assault opened. On 22 March the war diary reported:

"enemy put down a heavy machine gun barrage all day .. enfilading Canal Bank. During the afternoon enemy artillery shelled area between Canal Bank and Flavy. Heavy casualties to Battalion sustained."

The 8th Battalion's casualties were huge: on 1 March the battalion's fighting strength had been 16 officers and 354 men. By the 31st March it was 5 officers and 27 men. (See 1914-1918.invasionzone.com).
It's not possible to tell exactly which day Gibbons was wounded but he died of wounds in a hospital in Etaples on 6 April.
"Missed by few forgotten by many" ... it's such a dismissive inscription. I wonder if we'll ever know what lies behind it? Next time I go to Etaples I shall visit his grave (XXXIII E 25) just to show that he hasn't been completely forgotten.


HE HELPED TO HOLD THE LINE

PRIVATE JAMES FARQUHARSON BROWN BROWN


On the 21 March 1918 the 8th Battalion Black Watch were in the trenches between Gouzeaucourt and Sorel when the Germans opened their Spring Offensive. From then until the 27th they withdrew and withdrew and withdrew, fighting all the way in an attempt to stem the speed of the German advance. Eventually on the 27th the battalion arrived in Baizieux almost 70 kilometres from where they had been on the 21st. During this time more than 250 soldiers had gone missing, among them James Brown.
James Brown came from Alyth in Perthshire where his father was a grocer. On 26 April 1918 the Alyth Guardian reported that his parents had received word that he was a prisoner of war in Germany. This was confirmed by the Red Cross at the beginning of October but then immediately 'negatived'. Private JF Brown had died on 2 April in a German hospital at Le Cateau of "paralysis of both legs" and had been buried in a German military cemetery.
You can see why his parents chose the inscription they did, young James Brown had helped to hold the line at a desperate time for the British army.




A HUMAN SACRIFICE
ON THE ALTAR OF DUTY

PRIVATE EDWIN MARTIN


On the 28 March 1918 the 40th Battalion Australian Infantry were rushed up to the front to try and close the gap that was developing between the British 3rd and 5th Armies under pressure from the German offensive. The Germans were held for a short while but eventually the Australians were forced to withdraw, having suffered huge casualties, among them Private Edwin Martin.
Martin was first treated for a fractured femur, and for gun shot wounds in his thigh and side at a Field Ambulance on the 28th. He was passed the same day to a Casualty Clearing Station. Four days later he was admitted to a hospital in Etaples. Here his left leg was amputated but he died that same day, 1 April 1918.
Martin's brother, Howard Martin, chose his inscription - who was sacrificing who? Christ sacrificed himself on the cross to save mankind. I would suggest Edwin Martin sacrificed himself.
There was no conscription in Australia, every Australian soldier was a volunteer. It was a deeply controversial issue but despite there being two referendums on the issue, the public never voted for it. Martin enlisted on 14 November 1916, just two weeks after the first referendum had voted 1,087,557 in favour and 1,160,033 against; a majority of 72,476 against conscription. Martin sacrificed himself for what he saw as his duty.


AT THE END OF A PERFECT DAY

ABLE SEAMAN JOSEPH HENRY DAVIES


By 1918 the Royal Naval Division was a British Army division, the 63rd. However, it began life in 1914 as a division of Royal Naval and Marine reservists who, as the Navy didn't need them, fought on land as soldiers. Their soldiers used naval ranks, which is why Joseph Davies was an Able Seaman, the equivalent rank to Private.
On 24 March 1918, Hood Battalion were caught up in a complicated fighting retreat from Flesquieres, just east of Bapaume. Davies died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station cemetery at Doullens on 1 April.
His mother chose his inscription - At the end of a perfect day. It comes from 'A Perfect Day', a popular, sentimental song written by Carrie Jacobs-Bond in 1909. In the song, the singer looks back over a perfect day, taking pleasure from its memories but feeling sorrow at the need to part with friends. Verse two transfers these thoughts to life:

Well, this is the end of a perfect day,
Near the end of a journey, too;
But it leaves a thought that is big and strong,
With a wish that is kind and true.
For mem'ry has painted this perfect day
With colours that never fade,
And we find at the end of a perfect day
The soul of a friend we've made.

Joseph Davies was John and Fanny Davies' eldest child. He was born and brought up in Wolverhampton where his father was a turner in an electrical engineering works. His mother too had a job, one of the very few women I've come across in this project who had a job outside the home - and this despite the fact that in 1911 she had a six-month-old baby. Fanny Davies worked in an enamel works where it looks as though her job was a 'swiller'.


THERE ARE TWO EYES OF BLUE
SMILING THROUGH AT ME

LANCE SERJEANT STANLEY HENRY WAYLAND


Lance Serjeant Wayland's inscription, chosen by his wife, Lilian, comes from 'Smilin' Through' a popular song written by Arthur A Penn, which was first published and recorded in 1919.

There's a little brown road windin' over the hill
To a little white cot by the sea;
There's a little green gate
At whose trellis I wait,
While two eyes o' blue
Come smilin' through
At me!

There's a gray lock or two in the brown of the hair,
There's some silver in mine too, I see;
But in all the long years
When the cloud brought their tears,
Those two eyes o' blue
Kept smilin' through
At me!

And if ever I'm left in this word all alone,
I shall wait for my call patiently;
For if heaven be kind,
I shall wake there to find
Those two eyes o' blue
Still smilin' through
At me!

Wayland joined the army as a territorial soldier in April 1912 when he was 19 and four months. In February 1916, a clerk in a solicitor's office, married and with two children, he transferred to a service battalion. He was sent to Salonika with the 2nd/23rd London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), part of the 60th London Division, in December 1916, and went with them to Egypt in June 1917. In the first three months of 1918, the allies attempted to extend their hold over the lower Jordan valley. Wayland was wounded in the attack on Amman and died the same day.

[You can hear Richard Tauber sing 'Smilin Through' here.]


I FOUGHT AND DIED
IN THE GREAT WAR
TO END ALL WARS
HAVE I DIED IN VAIN?

SERGEANT PHILIP JAMES BALL MM


Is there doubt in this question or is it more of a prompt? Is Clara Ball, Sergeant Ball's sister, doubting that the Great War was the war to end all wars or is she reminding people of what it was meant to be and that they need to make sure it comes about?
It's not possible to tell but as it seems that Ball's permanent headstone was in place by 1920 it's more likely to be a prompt. Doubt about the war didn't creep in until later in the decade.
How could people see it as the war to end all wars? It was simple, German/Prussian militarism needed to be crushed for all time and then world peace would be possible. In the fifty years prior to 1914 Prussia had fought its neighbours - Denmark, Austria-Hungary, France - and in more recent years it had had the temerity to challenge the British Empire and the Royal Navy. Would defeat and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles bring an end to German threats, and would the people of the world put their backs into being worthy of the dead and into supporting initiatives like the League of Nations.
Philip James Ball was born in Birmingham to Henry George and Emily Ball. His two eldest siblings were born in England but the next three were born in Australia where Henry George had gone to try his hand at farming. However, by the time of Philip's birth in 1897 the family had returned to Britain. Nevertheless, in 1914, at the age of 17, Philip went to Australia where he worked in the dairy industry. He enlisted in the Australian Infantry on 24 January 1916 and embarked for Europe on 6 June 1916.
Ball served with the 44th Battalion Australian Infantry and went missing on 28 March 1918. Enquiries to the Red Cross elicited the following response:

"Bell came from West Australia; was medium build, fair & had the MM ... About March 28th we were at Sailly le Sec. About 11.30 pm we went to try & locate the Germans & had advanced about 1000 yards beyond our first line when we came on a nest of M.G. We retired about 100 yards & dug in behind the crest of a small hill. I saw both men when we started on our attack but neither returned. We searched the ground the same night and got in all our wounded but could get no news of the men named. If the bodies had been there I think they would have been found. So I think they must have got & wandered into the German lines."

In September 1918, Ball's body was discovered buried in a shell hole. After the war it was exhumed and reburied at Villers-Bretoneaux.


WHEN YOUR BROTHERS
STAND TO A TYRANT'S BLOW
AND ENGLAND'S CALL IS GOD'S

RIFLEMAN JAMES REID


Mrs Annie Reid quoted the last two lines of Harold Begbie's famous, or should I say infamous, recruiting poem, 'Fall In', for her husband's inscription. The poem appeared in numerous local papers during the first weeks of the war, designed to shame men into volunteering by asking them how they were going to feel when they were shunned by girls for not being a soldier, how they would cope when their children questioned the role they'd played in the war, and how they would feel when they were old and their mates were reminiscing and they were excluded. The poem concludes:

Is it naught to you if your country fall,
And Right is smashed by Wrong?
Is it football still and the picture show,
The pub and the betting odds,
When your brothers stand to the tyrant's blow,
And England's call is God's!

How could you stand aside when your 'brothers' are fighting for God against tyranny.
James Reid was born in Stirling, Scotland, the son of John and Marion Reid. He served with the 8th Battalion London Regiment (Post Office Rifles) and from his service number it would appear that he enlisted in the second half of 1915. He was killed on 27 March 1918 as the regiment fought to contain the German advance across the Crozat Canal, through Teignier Wood, Noreuil and Chauny. Reid is buried in Chauney Communal Cemetery British Extension.


HE PLAYED UP
AND PLAYED THE GAME

PRIVATE WILLIAM SPRINGFIELD PLAYLE


Private Playle's father, also William Springfield Playle, who chose this inscription, is referencing very directly Henry Newbolt's famous poem Vitae Lampada [1897] [The Torch of Life], which was based on a passage from De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things] by the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius:

"Thus the sum of things is ever being renewed, and mortal creatures live dependent one upon another. Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life"
Book II line 75

In Newbolt's poem, at a crucial point in a school cricket match - "ten to make and a match to win" - the last batsman is inspired not by the thought of the glory that could be his but by: "his captain's hand on his shoulder" and the words: "Play up! play up! and play the game": play for your team and not for yourself. To Newbolt, it's this same spirit of selflessness that can rally a group of soldiers who find themselves in a desperate situation:

The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

It's a spirit of selflessness, of responsibility to others, transferred from the cricket pitch to the field of battle. And writ large - transferred from the cricket pitch to life:

This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

The poem is always thought to have epitomised the public school ideal of selfless service to the community. But Playle was not a public schoolboy. He was educated at Rotherham Grammar School, which shows that this ideal of 'playing' for others and not for yourself was not limited to the public schools
William Springfield Playle was the eldest son of William Springfield Playle Senior, a quantity surveyor from Eccleshall in Yorkshire, and his wife, Minnie Kate. He served with the 17th Battalion Royal Fusiliers. In March 1918 the battalion was involved in a fighting retreat in the face of the German offensive. Playle, who had been at the front since January 1918, was said to have been killed by a sniper whilst carrying a wounded comrade.


IN MEMORY OF MY SON
KILLED WHILST RESCUING
A WOUNDED COMRADE

TROOPER EDWARD BOYLE


"I met Boyle in Egypt; he and I were in the same Squadron. He came from Nundle or Trundle. He was slim and athletic - standing about 5'9", fair, clean-shaved. He played football well. On 28th March 1918 C & D Troop were lining a ridge at Amman in support of "B" Squadron. Lying in front of our position, 30 yards away, was a wounded B Squadron man. Boyle walked from D Troop to C Troop to get a better look at the wounded man; as he was walking over he said "There should be a good chance of getting him in" - just then he was shot through the head and was killed instantaneously. I recovered all his personal property from his body, including a little round bone identification disc - on it was "Mother-Hundle" (or Trundle). Six months later we came back to Amman and found Boyle's body lying where it had fallen. Sergeant McNair and I buried the body, McNair painted Boyle's name on the cross over the grave. Boyle was a very good fellow."
Informant: No. 571 Corporal NJ Ausburn
Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau Files 2869 Trooper Edward Boyle 6th Light Horse

The 6th Light Horse had been ordered to make an attack on Amman but were met by stubborn Turkish resistance. On the 28 March they took up positions on the extreme left flank of the brigade:

"At 14.00 A and B Squadrons made a dismounted attack on Amman from the North with 7th LH Regt on their right. At 1530 they were forced to withdraw owing to the great strength of the enemy on this flank. Casualties 6 officers, 50 O/Ranks killed & missing."
War Diary 6th Australian Light Horse

Edward Boyle was the son of George and Caroline Boyle of Waterloo, New South Wales. He enlisted on 1 February 1916 and embarked from Australia on the 19 September the same year.


THE FEVER OF LIFE OVER
AND HIS WORK DONE

COMPANY QUARTERMASTER SERJEANT JOHN EDWARD CATTRALL


John Edward Cattrall's inscription comes from a prayer written by John Henry Newman (1801-1890):

O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shades lengthen and the evening comes, the fever of life is over and our work done; then Lord, in thy great mercy, grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest and peace at the last, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Cattrall, an ordained Congregational Minister, served throughout the war with the 44th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Service Corps. Dedicated to being a soldier of Christ in civilian life, he saw it as his duty to be a soldier of his King during the war, albeit in a non-combative role.
In March 1918 the 44th were stationed just south of St Quentin on the Crozat Canal. At 5 am on the morning of 21 March the Germans launched their Spring Offensive, the force of the onslaught pushing the British back from their lines. 'With the Forty-Fourths Being a Record of the Doings of the 44th Field Ambulance (14th Division)', apart from providing a colourful account of the doings of the unit throughout the war, relates what happened to it in the face of the German advance:

"Back, back, back we went by degrees, doing what we could for the wounded at hastily extemporised dressing stations at Flavy-le-Martel ... , Villeselve, Beaumont-en-Beine and Guiscard. Shall we ever forget the packed state of the roads, the ebb southwards of the mauled units, and the coming through of the reliefs, especially the cavalry? It was grim satisfaction to know that the cavalry-men put up such a fight round our old quarters along the canal, that the channel was literally packed level with German dead. ... we had nearly reached Noyon. We were congratulating ourselves that we were almost outside the maelstrom, when a Fritz airman managed to plump a bomb right in the middle of us as we halted by the roadside. As bad luck would have it, the bomb fell on the hard road, with disastrous results. It killed eight of our lot ... "

QMS Cottrell was among those killed. Cottrell was the second of John and Mary Cottrell's seven children - six of them sons. His younger brother, Edgar, the fifth son, was killed in action serving with the 6th Battalion Shropshire Light Infantry on 26 August 1916.


ELDER SON OF
BR. GEN. S. GEOGHEGAN C.B.
INDIAN ARMY
"HE WAS ONE OF THE BRAVEST
AND MOST WILLING SUBALTERNS
I HAVE EVER MET"
HIS CAPTAIN

LIEUTENANT STANNUS GEOGHEHAN


As you might have noticed, this inscription is seven lines long and has almost double the amount of characters stipulated by the War Grave Commission. The Commission nowhere states formally that excessive inscriptions will be permitted, but there's plenty of evidence that this is so. It seems that if you made a special case, and were prepared to pay, then sixty-six characters was not the limit. Both Lt Horace Allenby and Lt.Col. Percy Machell have inscriptions that are also over a hundred characters, whilst Captain Willock's is over two hundred.
Why has Brigadier General Stannus Geoghegan C.B. Indian Army used up valuable letters on himself you may ask. It's not because he was proud of himself but because, as many parents felt, their sons were still boys and not having had a chance to make their own mark in the world their identity was still linked to that of their family.
Geoghegan's entry in de Ruvigny's Roll of Honour Volume V tells the story of his brief life and military career:

"b. Naini Tal, India, 3 July 1898; educ. Sangeen, Bournemouth; St Winifred's, Kenley; Marlborough College, and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst; gazetted 2nd Lieut. Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 16 Aug 1916; promoted Lieut. 16 Feb. 1918; served with the Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders from Aug. 1917, and died of wounds received in action near Passchendaele, a few hours previously. Buried in Nine Elms Cemetery, Poperinghe. His Company Commander wrote: "He had been in my company for six months, and I had a great affection for him. He was one of the bravest and most willing subalterns I have ever met with, and I feel his loss very deeply. He was always a great favourite in the mess."


MOTHER'S ONLY ONE
DEARLY LOVED

SAPPER FRANK ALFRED LEVESON CURZON


Frank Curzon was his mother's only child. His father, Frank Joseph Curzon, died when he was three. His mother, Florence Stringer, remarried in 1909, a 'professional trainer of horses', ten years younger than herself and a 'resident United States of America'.
Curzon served in the Royal Engineers as a signaller with the 47th Heavy Artillery Brigade. He was killed in action on 23 March 1918 and buried originally in Marchelepot British Cemetery, which almost immediately fell into German hands. It was August 1920 before his body was exhumed and reburied at Roye, and it may have been even later than this before his next-of-kin were asked to choose an inscription.
In the summer of 1916, Frank had married Margaret Shepherd. She would have been his next of kin, presumably even after she remarried in December 1919. But when the time came for the choice to be made, Margaret was dead so the next-of-kinship reverted to his mother and she could once more claim him for herself:

Mother's only one
Dearly loved


HE IS NOT HERE
FOR HE IS RISEN

LIEUTENANT HUGH ALEXANDER WARK


"In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. And behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: and for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen ... "
St Matthew
Chapter 28:1-6

This is the central tenet of Christianity, the belief that Jesus Christ:

"for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven,
And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,
And was made man,
And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.
He suffered and was buried,
And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures,
And ascended into heaven ... "
Nicene Creed
Book of Common Prayer 1662

In this way, Christ overcomes death making it possible for mortals to enter the kingdom of heaven:

Jesus lives! henceforth is death
But the gate of life immortal:
This shall calm our trembling breath,
When we pass its gloomy portal.
Hymn 207
Hymns Ancient & Modern


Lieutenant Wark's father, the Revd James Reid Wark, chose his inscription. Wark himself was destined for the ministry but when the war broke out he was in his third year at Aberdeen University reading English. He immediately tried to get a commission in the Gordon Highlanders, but was prevented by poor eyesight so he enlisted in the ranks and served in the Territorials for a year before eventually being commissioned in December 1915.
Wark served in France and Flanders with the 6th Battalion Gordon Highlanders for two years and four months before being killed while in the line on 14 March 1918. There is no mention of any deaths in the battalion war diary, which simply says that all available men who were not actually in the front line were "in Support and Intermediate lines working 8 hours per day on wiring and general trench repair."


WHY SEEK YE THE LIVING
AMONG THE DEAD?

THE REVEREND WILLIAM DAVID ABBOTT


Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they [the women from Galilee] came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments. And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen."
St Luke 24:1-6

By his death, Christ overcame death therefore don't look for those who are alive among the dead. The comfort of the resurrection, the idea that the dead live beyond the grave, which is one of the central tenets of Christianity, is a very strong theme in personal inscriptions. It's not therefore surprising to see it on the grave of an army chaplain.
The Revd David William Abbott died from pneumonia in hospital in Dieppe three weeks after the end of the war. Deaths from pneumonia were often a consequence of the influenza pandemic raging through the world at this time and Williams was in the most vulnerable age group, adults between the ages of 20 and 40. However, a report in the Boston Guardian on 21 December 1918 stated that the pneumonia followed on from a chill he'd contracted whilst officiating at military funerals.
Abbott, the son of a vicar, trained at Lichfield Theological College and was ordained in 1909, the same year he married Ruby Williamson. The couple had two sons. Abbott became a Chaplain to the Forces in June 1918 and went to France that August.
In July 1922 a memorial was unveiled at Litchfield Theological College to the six priests and four laymen from the College who had died in the war.

"The Bishop, in the course of his address, pointed out that war was always an evil. The wickedness of man brought it about [so] that sometimes he had only a choice between two evils. He ought then to choose the lesser evil. The Bishop stated that it was his firm belief that the country rightly chose the lesser evil in 1914. So did those who offered their lives for their country who were being commemorated. But it was not enough for them to die for the cause of justice and mercy. We had to complete their work by living for it. And no class of people could do more for that cause than the priesthood to which his hearers were hoping to attain."
Staffordshire Advertiser
22 July 1922


JESUS SAID
TO-DAY THOU SHALT BE
WITH ME IN PARADISE

PRIVATE SAMSON FREDERICK JAMES


"And there were also two other, malefactors, led with him to be put to death. And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. ... And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss. And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise."
St Luke Chapter 23 v 32-42

Christ's words provide the evidence that his death will save mankind from the consequences of its sin - 'To-day thou shalt be with me in paradise'. If this is to be true of the malefactor being crucified beside Christ then it must be true for everyone. Private James' mother chose her son's inscription, finding comfort in the reassurance of these words.
Samson Frederick James was the son of Thomas and Ellen James of 23 Chestnut Street, Worcester, England. He enlisted in the Canadian Infantry in July 1917 giving his address as, 662 Lexington Avenue, New York and his occupation as valet. He left Canada on 3 February 1918 and after several more months training in Britain joined the 14th Battalion, the Royal Montreal Regiment, in France on 14 August.
Two weeks later, the battalion took part in a major operation to capture the Drocourt-Queant Line. Pages 238 to 243 of the regimental history give the details of the operation: two days of endurance and bravery, enemy treachery and enemy magnanimity, which resulted in the loss of thirty-seven officers and 260 other ranks. Many of these casualties would have died had Major EE Graham, Chaplain of the 13th Battalion, not taken command of the German prisoners, who were surrendering in large numbers, and used them to carry casualties to the rear.
The cemetery where Private James is buried was used by fighting units, which suggests that he was not among the wounded but was killed in action.


"FATHER FORGIVE THEM
FOR THEY KNOW NOT
WHAT THEY DO"
S. LUKE 23.34

LANCE CORPORAL THOMAS NORMAN JACKSON VC


Citation for Award of Victoria Cross
London Gazette 26 November 1918
"For most conspicuous bravery and self-sacrifice in the attack across the Canal du Nord, near Graincourt. On the morning of the 27th September, 1918, Lce Cpl. Jackson was the first to volunteer to follow Capt. C.H. Frisby, Coldstream Guards, across the Canal du Nord in his rush against an enemy machine-gun post, with two comrades he followed his officer across the Canal, rushed the post, captured the two machine-guns, and so enabled the companies to advance. Later in the morning, Lce. Cpl. Jackson was the first to jump into a German trench which his platoon had to clear, and after doing further excellent work he was unfortunately killed. Throughout the whole day until he was killed this young N.C.O. showed the greatest valour and devotion to duty and set an inspiring example to all."

Two days later, the Sheffield Evening Telegraph elaborated on the story:
"Lce. Cpl. Thomas Norman Jackson ... was the elder son of Mr and Mrs Edward Jackson 3, Market Street, Swinton, near Mexborough ... he enlisted voluntarily in 1916. He went to France in October 1917, and in a few days took part in the great Tank drive to Cambrai ... Up to September 27 last he had come through some of the severest fighting imaginable without receiving a scratch. The only hint he conveyed to his parents of the nature of his work was a passage in one of his letters which ran: 'Fancy such as me standing up to the Germans and bayoneting them without turning a hair!' He was a leading member of the Primitive Methodist church and Bible class at Swinton, and possibly he had that in mind."

"A leading member of the Primitive Methodist church", this comment is probably the clue to Jackson's inscription: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do". These, the words Christ used to ask God to forgive the men who had just nailed him to the cross, are the words Mr Thomas Jackson chose for his son's inscription. Was he asking forgiveness for his son's killers? Perhaps, but if he too, like his son, was a Primitive Methodist, he was asking forgiveness for the whole of mankind for indulging in the war. Two days before the outbreak in 1914, Arthur Guttery, the President of the Primitive Methodists, had given an impassioned anti-war speech:

"A wave of madness has swept over Europe and Britain is invited to plunge into a fury that is insane ... It is the policy of bedlam and it is the statecraft of hell."

Never mind that a week later Guttery had changed his mind and was prepared to encourage his followers to fight for liberty against tyranny, some of his followers never changed their minds. Lance Corporal Jackson's father was possibly one of these. That is how I read the inscription: Mr Thomas Jackson is criticising the madness and insanity that has gripped the world. A world that not only killed his son but had him glorying in the bayonetting of Germans. Would it have been any consolation to have learnt from his son's lieutenant that, "Your son was magnificent - his example altered the course of the whole battle".


".. NEVERTHELESS NOT AS I WILL
BUT AS THOU WILT"
MATT. XXVI. 39

PRIVATE JOHN JOSEPH QUINN


Private Quinn's father quotes Christ's words in the Garden of Gethsemane for his son's inscription. Knowing what is to come, Christ prays that he might be spared:

"And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt."

This is not just the acceptance of God's will as in, 'Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven', but a declaration that this is not what I want to happen but if it is God's will then I will accept it.
John Joseph Quinn was born in Ireland to John and Mary Quinn. He grew up in Altrincham, Cheshire where his father was a domestic gardener. He served from 1916 with the 9th Battalion Manchester Regiment.
On 21 March 1918 the battalion war diary records that they were in the reserves at Hervilly when at 4.30 am they were ordered:

"to take up battle positions owing to enemy activity. This was done through heavy gas bombardment which caused about 30 casualties. The Battalion went into action and continued in action until April 1st."

The next few days saw constant enemy attacks, counter attacks, withdrawals and regroupings until 31 March when the battalion were finally relieved. Knowing this you can understand why Quinn's date of death is given by the War Graves Commission as between 21st and 31st March. In the chaos it was impossible to keep track of the fate of every soldier. However, on the 31st the diary writer records:

"During the time from March 21st/31st, the Battalion was continuously in action and fought very hard. The casualties were 25 officers and 630 ORs."

What happened to Quinn? Red Cross records show that he was taken prisoner by the Germans and then buried by them in the military cemetery at Bohain. In March 1925 his body was exhumed and reburied in Premont British Cemetery.


HIS EXAMPLE
CAN NEVER BE LOST
TELL MY MOTHER FOR ME
I DIED AT MY POST

PRIVATE OLIVER RUMBLE HAY HAY


9th Battalion Australian Infantry War Diary
"6.3.1918
HOLLEBEKE, Belgium
Enemy commenced a heavy gas shell bombardment at about 4 pm which lasted approximately four hours. Area shelled was mainly the reserve line in the vicinity of Battalion H.Q. and 'D' Company.
7.3.1918
As a result of yesterday's bombardment the following officers [9] in addition to about 150 other ranks were evacuated gassed."

The next day, Private Hay was admitted to a Casualty Clearing Station suffering from mustard gas poisoning. He died on the 13th.
The Hays received the news that their son had been wounded on the 18 March, five days after his death. Ten days later, on 27 March, a notice appeared in their local newspaper, the Townsville Daily Bulletin, saying:

"Mr W Hay, Prairie, who for many years was a very prominent member of the Salvation Army in Charter Towers has received the distressing news of the death in France of his son, Oliver, Rumble Hay, who was killed by gas shells on March 13th."

The effects of mustard gas take some time to develop. First, several hours after exposure, a mild skin irritation appears. Eventually the affected areas turn yellow and agonising blisters develop. The eyes become red, sore and runny and extreme pain and sometimes blindness can follow. These symptoms can be accompanied by nasal congestion, sinus pain, hoarseness, coughing and in extreme cases respiratory failure. Hay was an extreme case. He took seven days to die but not before he had sent his mother a proud message - 'I died at my post'.

Hay, a drover, who had been born in Charter Towers, enlisted on 29 June 1916. He embarked from Brisbane on 21 October 1916 and arrived in England on 10 January 1917. He spent a month in hospital with mumps and then joined the 9th Battalion in France on 3 May 1917.


LEAD KINDLY LIGHT
AMID THE ENCIRCLING GLOOM

PRIVATE ERNEST CREASY HALL


The words of this hymn by John Henry Newman (1801-1890) have provided many inscriptions, usually from the first and last verses of this three-verse hymn:

Lead kindly light, amid the encicling gloom,
Lead Thou me on.
The night is dark and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on;
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

...

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on.
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone.
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

The theme of stoically enduring this life, sustained by the hope of the eternal life to come, struck a note not only with the Victorians but with later generations too, as shown by the fact that it was one of the hymns regularly depicted in postcard series, like these Bamforth cards.
Ernest Creasy Hall was the younger son of Charles and Laura Jane Hall of Withernsea, East Yorkshire. Born in 1899, Ernest didn't come of military age until 1917 and wasn't old enough to serve abroad until 1918. He can't have been at the front for very long.
Hall served with the 2nd Battalion Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and was killed in action on 13 March 1918 when the battalion were in the front line.


HE LIES CONTENT
WITH THAT HIGH HOUR
IN WHICH HE LIVED AND DIED

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN LODGE


John Lodge's inscription comes from Herbert Asquith's poem, The Volunteer, which he wrote two years before the outbreak of war but which is always assumed to have been written after it.
Asquith writes of "a clerk who half his life had spent, toiling at ledgers in a city grey". As he worked at his books, his ledgers, the clerk assumed his life would drift away, "with no lance broken in life's tournament". Yet he cannot rid his mind of romantic images of war:

The gleaming eagles of the legions came,
And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,
Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.

But then his life changes and the chance of war does come and the clerk is killed.

And now those waiting dreams are satisfied
From twilight to the halls of dawn he went;
His lance is broken; but he lies content
With that high hour, in which he lived and died.

John Lodge, the son of Adam, a railway signalman, and his wife Phoebe was not a clerk but a Post Office letter sorter. He enlisted in September 1915 and served originally as a bombardier in the Royal Artillery, rising through the ranks until he was commissioned in July 1917. In March 1918 he was with the 190th Siege Battery when he died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station in Lijssenthoek. His mother signed for his inscription.
The poem concludes:

And falling this, he wants no recompense,
Who found his battle in the last resort
Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence,
Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.


WHISPERING
SISTER DO NOT FRET
I DID MY DUTY TO THE LAST

PRIVATE HENRY MCEWAN


The 6th Battalion Connaught Rangers' war diary for the month of March 1918 does not exist. The following is extracted from the report Lt. Colonel Feilding submitted to the Brigade in April 1918.

At 4.30 on the morning of 21 March the Germans began an intense and extensive bombardment that fell on the 6th battalion, in reserve at Villers-Faucon. By lunchtime the village in front of them, Ronssoy, had been lost and the battalion were ordered to take part in an immediate counter-attack with the 1st Battalion Royal Munster Fusliers. The attack began at 3.45 pm:

"It was pressed with the greatest gallantry" but "As C Coy under Captain Norman advanced they saw what at first they thought was the 1/RMF but soon discovered to be the enemy lining the factory ridge to their right front, as well as parties of the enemy approaching along the Ronssoy St. Emile Road." ... "C Coy immediately engaged the enemy forming a defensive flank along the Ronssoy-St. Emilie road, but all the officers and the greater part of the company becoming casualties, they were soon compelled to fall back on the Brown Line, together with the few that remained of A and B Coys who had also suffered very severely,"

Early that evening Feilding reported to Brigade HQ to be told: "that the orders for the counter-attack should have been cancelled: he [the Brigadier] added that they had been cancelled in the case of the 1/RMF, but that he had not been able to communicate with me in time."

Quote from the Connaught Rangers Association website:
"On 21 March 1918 the 6th Batallion Connaught Rangers was caught in the middle of the Great German offensive and suffered such heavy casualties that the battalion could no longer be sustained and was disbanded in April 1918."

Private Henry McEwan served with the 6th Battalion and was killed in action on 21 March. One of the eleven children of Henry and Elizabeth McEwan, he came from Borrowstounness on the Firth of Forth in Scotland. A Mrs Mary M. Millan chose his inscription. I do not know who she was but she may have been his oldest sister, Mary.
It's a strange inscription: "Whispering sister do not fret". Is this the soldier telling the sister not to grieve for him because he is now in a better place, somewhere where age shall not wither him nor the years condemn, or where he is "With Christ which is far better". But the next part of the inscription, "I did my duty to the last", sounds as though he's telling his sister not to fret because she can rest assured that he did his duty by his country until the last and this conjures up the image of the recruiting poster that says, "Women of Britain say 'Go'", or of the music-hall song: 'We don't want to lose you but we think you ought to go'. Had she encouraged him to war?


TRUE TO THE FLAG

PRIVATE STANLEY JOHN BOWLAND


There no definite source for this inscription, which expresses a patriotic culture that venerates the national flag. 'True to the Flag' is best known today as the title of an American marching song, written in 1917. The American flag, the star spangled banner, or Old Glory, is more prominently revered in the United States in the twenty-first century than the Union Jack is in Britain, but in the early years of the twentieth century, especially in the years surrounding the South African War, British poems like this showed the same sentiment:

It's only a small piece of bunting,
It's only an old coloured rag;
Yet thousands have died for its honour,
And shed their best blood for the flag.

After the next sixteen lines that boast of how Britons never yield, and about the number of countries in the British Empire over which the flag flies, the poem concludes:

We hoist it to show our devotion
To our Queen, to our country and laws;
'Tis the outward and visible emblem
Of advancement and liberty's cause.
You may say it's a small bit of bunting,
You may call it an old coloured rag;
Yet freedom has made it majestic
And time has ennobled the flag.

You can see therefore how the four words, 'true to the flag' encapsulate a whole world of patriotic, martial pride, a pride in which Mr Alfred Bowland, baker and confectioner of Norton Malton, Yorkshire, could find comfort in the face of his son's death.
Stanley John Bowland was one of Alfred and Elizabeth Bowland's eight sons: George, Charles, Frederick, Stanley, William, Leonard, Harold and Thomas Octavius.
George served with the RAMC and survived the war; Charles, a reservist with the 1st Grenadier Guards, was recalled immediately on the outbreak and was in France by November 1914. Frederick was a baker like his father and I can't find a medal index card for him, Stanley, who served with the 1st/5th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment (The Prince of Wales Own) died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station on 23 March 1918, and William was killed in action eight days later. I can't find medal index cards for either Leonard or Harold but nineteen-year-old Thomas Octavius was killed in action on 27 September 1918.
'True to the flag' is a sentiment in which I've just said Mr Bowland could find comfort in the face of his son's death - but the apostrophe needs moving - it should be, in the face of his sons' deaths.


SUBMISSION
I WAS DUMB
AND OPENED NOT MY MOUTH
FOR IT WAS THY DOING

SECOND LIEUTENANT LESLIE GORDON PEASTON


There are many ways of expressing submission to the will of God 'Thy will be done', 'Not my will but thine O Lord', but this one seems particularly stark. The words come from Psalm 39 verse 10 and are closer to the version in the Book of Common Prayer than in the King James Bible: "I became dumb, and opened not my mouth: for it was Thy doing".
Leslie Peaston was the youngest of the four sons of George and Caroline Peaston of 66 Narbonne Avenue, Clapham Common. Caroline Peaston, by now a widow, chose the inscription. Whatever she might have felt like saying, however she might have felt like complaining, Mrs Peaston felt she couldn't because she knew that it was the will of God that her son Leslie had to die and that therefore she must submit herself to it.
Peaston served originally in the Royal Fusiliers, rising to the rank of corporal. He transferred to the Middlesex Regiment and was then commissioned into the Fusiliers in June 1917. He served with the 1st Battalion and was one of two officers killed in action at Vendelles on 21 March when the Germans subjected their lines to a heavy bombardment of HE and gas shells.
As with many of the casualties on this first day of the German offensive, Peaston's body was not initially buried. In September 1919, it was exhumed from map reference 62c R2 B5-6 and identified by the fact that his shirt had his name on it.


FLOREAT ETONA
SON OF ARTHUR G &
BEAUJOLOIS M RIDOUT
HE ALWAYS UNDERSTOOD

SECOND LIEUTENANT GASPARD ALURED EVELYN RIDOUT


"He always understood", what a lovely thing for a father to say of his nineteen-year-old son. Who knows what Gaspard Ridout understood but from his obituary in the Eton Chronicle it sounds as though he possessed both intellectual and emotional intelligence:

"Gaspard Ridout was a very quiet boy, who nevertheless, had devoted friends, and took an intense interest in all aspects of school life. He was endowed with considerable talent, and when he tried for Woolwich he was the only Etonian who passed. The work interested him, and he made his mark there, and passed out third in his year."

Born on 1 September 1898, Ridout was the younger son of George Arthur Ridout, manager of Lloyds Bank in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and his wife Beaujolois Mabel Fanshawe. Educated at Eton - Floreat Etona, may Eton flourish, is the School's unofficial motto - Ridout was gazetted second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery on 25 January 1918. He went to France on 6 February and was killed in action on 21 March, the opening day of the German offensive.
Ridout was with the 331st Brigade RFA, part of the 66th East Lancashire Division, based at Carpeza Copse, close to the village of Hesbecourt, east of Roisel, when they were overwhelmed by the German advance. His body was unburied but later discovered at map reference 62c L15c .5.5 and buried at Jeancourt in August 1919.
Many parents of young soldiers felt the need to identify themselves on their son's headstones. Not because they were proud of themselves - although no doubt some were - but just because this is who the dead boy was - their son.



THIS WAS A MAN

LANCE CORPORAL REGINALD CHARLES JONES


9th Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps War Diary
Trenches March 21 1918
"At about 4.45 am an intense bombardment was opened on the Battalion front and on back areas. Wires to Brigade Headquarters were broken at once, and a heavy ground mist made visual signalling impossible. The bombardment continued until about 9.30 am, gas shells being extensively used for the last two hours. The German infantry then came over in small columns.
Information as to what actually happened is almost entirely lacking but it would appear that the enemy came in on our left flank, and not on our front, as the first warning of the attack was the appearance of Germans moving down the St Quentin Road. C and A Coys were killed or captured to a man. A few men of B Coy escaped, together with Capt Webber "OC" "B Coy" who was wounded early. The Germans would seem to have lost direction in the mist and to have remained in some force round our front line for several hours. "Funny" and "Frosty" works and "Excellent" (Bn. HQ) were reported by Col Bury to be holding out at 11 am. The Red Smoke Signal for the closing of barrage lines had been sent up, but it is almost certain that the gunners were unable to see either this signal or the SOS which had been sent up from Battalion Headquarters at 10.00 am.
D. Coy in Lambay Switch had seen no signs of the enemy at 11.20 am, but very shortly after this small columns of his infantry began to press forward into the Bois de Lambay, and over the Urvillers Lambay ridge. A pigeon message from Col Bury stated that Battalion Headquarters were still holding out at 12.20 pm but no further information was received from the front line, or from D Coy, one or two men escaped from D Coy and it would appear that the Lambay position was not seriously attacked, at any rate until about 2 pm by which time the enemy had occupied Benay and had reached the Battle Zone and had thus entirely cut off Lambay Farm. Sounds of M.G. fire were heard later in the day from the direction of Lambay which would suggest that the company held out for some time after being surrounded.
Mention should be made of Cpl Harber who escaped from the Vauban PO and, after being twice in the hands of the Germans, made his way by compass to Brigade Headquarters and gave very clear report as to the situation in the front line.
March 22
By the evening of March 21st the Battn had apparently ceased to exist."

The 9th Battalion was one of the many to find itself in the eye of the storm when the Germans launched their Spring Offensive on 21 March 1918. At its full establishment a battalion had approximately one thousand men, but it is unlikely that at this stage of the war the 9th Battalion had exactly this number. However, come the end of the month, the adjutant summarised March's casualties as 23 officers and 630 ORs. Casualties for the previous month, February 1918, had been 7 ORs wounded.
Lance Corporal Reginald Jones was buried by the Germans in Urvillers, along with fourteen other soldiers of the 9th Bn KRRC, all killed on 21 March. They now have 'Kipling Memorials' in St Souplet British Cemetery. These look like normal CWGC headstones but commemorate casualties known to have been buried in a particular cemetery whose graves have subsequently been lost. Rudyard Kipling chose the words from the Book of Ecceliasticus that are carved on these headstones: 'Their glory shall not be blotted out'.
Jones joined the army after 1915. The son of Evan and Susannah Jones, he was born in the City of London. His father had been a general clerk but by 1911 his mother was a widow. Jones and his sister, Annie Emma, lived with their mother in three rooms in Plaistow. Reginald was a sculleryman at a Club and Annie was a restaurant counter hand.
Annie Emma, by then Mrs AE Foster, chose her brother's inscription from the words Shakespeare's Mark Antony speaks over the body of Brutus:

"This was the noblest Roman of them all. All the rest of the conspirators acted out of jealousy of great Caesar. Only he acted from honesty and for the general good. His life was gentle, and the elements mixed so well in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, "This was a man".
Julius Caesar Act 5 Scene 5


THOU HAST NO SORROW
IN THY SONG
NO WINTER IN THY YEAR

SECOND LIEUTENANT STUART STIRLING GEMMELL


Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green,
Thy sky is ever clear;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year!

From 'To the Cuckoo'
Authorship disputed

This eight verse poem was either written by John Logan (1748-1788) or by his friend Michael Bruce (1746-1767). Logan edited and published Bruce's poems and added some of his own. 'To the Cuckoo', thought to be the best in the collection, was one Logan claimed for himself but Bruce's friends hotly disputed this. The poet sees the cuckoo as forever associated with spring and summer, making it a beautiful image for a young person who dies before their time, someone born to "know not winter, only spring" ['In Memoriam F.A.S.' by Robert Louis Stevenson].
Stuart Stirling Gemmell was 19 when he was killed on the afternoon of 21 March 1918 "during hostile bombardment" whilst his battalion were in the trenches at Les Fosses Farm off the Cambria Road. Gemmell served in the 3rd Battalion Cameron Highlanders but at the time of his death was attached to the 7th. All through February and March 1918 the British army had been expecting the German offensive. The 7th Battalion's regimental history notes that for many weeks beforehand neither officers nor men had taken their clothes off as they worked hard to prepare belts of wire and improve the trench systems in anticipation of the attack. Although the 21st was the day the Germans launched their offensive, it was not in the location of the 7th Battalion. They had to wait until 3 am on the morning of the 28th before the onslaught reached them.
Stuart Gemmell was the youngest of the three sons of John Edward Gemmell, a consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician, and his wife Margaret Ann of Beechlands, Mossley Hill, Liverpool. Educated at Uppingham School, Gemmell took up his place at Cambridge University until he was old enough to join up. He was gazetted second lieutenant in July 1917 and had been at the front since September. His older brother, Lieutenant Kenneth Alexander Gemmell of The King's Liverpool Regiment, was killed in action at Bellewaarde on 16 June 1915. He does not have a grave and is commemorated on the Menin Gate.


" ... DEAD ERE HIS PRIME
YOUNG LYCIDAS
AND HATH NOT LEFT HIS PEER"

PRIVATE ROBERT HENRY KIDDLE


Robert Kiddle's inscription comes from Lycidas, John Milton's (1608-1674)threnody, his lament, for his friend Edward King who was drowned in 1637 whilst on his way to visit his family in Ireland. King was twenty-five, five years older than Kiddle when he met his death. Both of them dead before their prime. Milton claimed that there was no one left who was King's peer, his equal, and this is the line Kiddle's father chose for his son.
Robert Henry Kiddle was the younger of John and Elizabeth Kiddle's two sons. How could the father say that Robert had not left anyone who was his equal when he had another son? The announcement of Robert's death in the Liverpool Echo of 20 March 1918 makes the reason clear:

Kiddle - 15 March, died of wounds, at Casualty Clearing Station. Signaller Robert Henry Kiddle K.L.R., aged 20, only surviving child of John Henry and Elizabeth Parker Kiddle, now of 75, Urmston Road, Wallesy.

Kiddle, who was twenty in February 1918, was a qualified signaller serving with the 10th Battalion The King's Liverpool Regiment. He had been in France since January 1917. He died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station on 15 March, the Sister in charge writing to tell his parents that he'd been brought in seriously wounded in the head, thigh, arm and abdomen, and that his condition was hopeless from the first.
It's not possible to tell what date Kible was wounded but the 10th Battalion were in the front line near Festubert at the time he died. On the 13th the war diary records that it had been an "exceptionally quiet day"; on the 14th that their sector was subjected to a heavy bombardment, which left two of their men dead, and on the 15th, "Enemy artillery very aggressive, and 4 casualties were sustained (1 killed, 2 died of wounds, I wounded)". That suggests to me that Kibble died of wounds received on the same day.


ONE OF IRELAND'S SONS
WHO GAVE HIS LIFE FOR ENGLAND
MOTHER OF JESUS
PRAY FOR HIM

PRIVATE WALTER CAREY


This is yet another inscription that reveals Ireland's complicated relationship with England after the First World War. Walter Carey joined the British army long before the war. In the 1911 census both he and his elder brother, Francis, were serving in India with the 1st Munster Fusiliers.
It would appear that Carey was still in the army on the outbreak of war as his medal card shows that he landed in France on 28 August 1914, and then that he transferred to the Royal Irish Fusiliers on 27 May 1916. However, when he died he was serving with the 1st Garrison Battalion Royal Munster Fusiliers which at the time of his death was in Italy on Lines of Communication Duty for the British Salonika Force. The information given to the War Grave Commission states that he died of wounds and that he'd previously been wounded in France. He's buried in Legnago Communal Cemetery, the only serviceman to be buried there.
Having served voluntarily in the British army in India, where these Irish brothers could have argued that they were defending the British Empire, his family then chose to say that this son of Ireland gave his life for England. This isn't how the Royal Munster Fusiliers recruited in the areas from which they drew their soldiers. This is one of their posters:

The
Royal Munster Fusiliers
are earning eternal
fame fighting
For YOU
Will the fine lads of
Kerry, Cork, Limerick & Clare
do nothing to help
their kinsmen?
Come along and assist in destroying the
German Menace

Carey's family obviously didn't see it like this, in their eyes the war was nothing to do with Ireland. The Careys were Roman Catholic. The Irish census form asks your religion, and even if it didn't we could tell from the final two lines of Walter Carey's inscription. However, it's not possible to tell what side the family were on in the Irish Civil War. Most of south-west Ireland, including Cork, was in the hands of republicans who opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Savage fighting between those Irish who were pro- or anti the treaty lasted until April 1923, causing much lasting bitterness within Ireland and beyond.
I said at the beginning that Carey's was yet another inscription that revealed Ireland's complicated relationship with England in the aftermath of the First World War. These are some of the others:

He died for Ulster
We gave our best


Religion Church of Ireland
An Irishman loyal to death
To King and Country


Ireland

"An Irish Volunteer"
He died for the freedom
Of small nations




HE ANSWERED THE CALL
CHEERFULLY
AND WITH QUIET COURAGE

SECOND LIEUTENANT RAYMOND HUGH MURRAY


Raymond Murray 'answered the call', in other words volunteered, in September 1914, serving originally as a private in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. He transferred to the 155th Coy Machine Gun Corps where he rose to the rank of serjeant before being commissioned on 30 November 1916.
The 155th Coy served in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign during 1917 and early 1918, taking part in the Battle of Tell Asur, 8 to 12 March 1918, a successful attempt to broaden the area held by the Allies before they began their Transjordan operations at the end of the month. Murray was killed in action on the 12th.
Raymond Hugh Murray was the son of George and Elizabeth Murray of Colesberg, Cape Province, South Africa, one of more than eight brothers and sisters. Both his parents died in 1901 and so it was his eldest brother, George John Murray, who chose his inscription. There could hardly be a more charming tribute: 'He answered the call cheerfully and with quiet courage'.


WHAT'S BRAVE - WHAT'S NOBLE
HE DID IT - AND MADE DEATH
PROUD TO TAKE HIM

FLIGHT SUB-LIEUTENANT GODFREY JOHN WHITEHOUSE GOODWIN


Godfrey Goodwin joined the Royal Navy just before he became 18 in August 1916. He served initially as a naval rating on torpedo patrol boats until October 1917 when he began pilot training in the Royal Naval Air Service. After three days leave he went to France on 1 March 1918 and died 'whilst flying' eleven days later.
A friend wrote to tell his parents that he'd heard that,

"Godfrey was landing from his fourth or fifth raid on enemy territory on the morning of the 12th inst, when his engine choked, igniting or exploding the petrol tank. And you may take it that he had not a sporting chance of escaping death."

His commanding officer said of him that,

"He was a steady painstaking officer, quick at learning the art of flying, brave and confident in himself, and with his machine he made rapid progress in his course, getting through in under five months. Your son chose the most dangerous branch of the service, and it is wonderful to see these young men eager to serve their Country and so willing to make the supreme sacrifice. My sympathy is but a poor comfort in your irreparable loss."

Godfrey Goodwin, born in Kings Norton, Birmingham on 1 August 1898, was the eldest child of John Goodwin, a commercial traveller in soap, and his wife, Mary Whitehouse. His father chose his inscription from some lines Cleopatra speaks towards the end of Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, as she contemplates following Anthony and killing herself:

"and then, what's brave, what's noble
Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make death proud to take us."

Much of this information for this article has been taken from the Nottinghamshire County Council 'Roll of Honour' site.


NATIVE OF NOVA SCOTIA
INTERNED 3RD AUGUST 1914
BELOVED HUSBAND OF
GEORGINA R.I.P.

MASTER ALEXANDER CORDINER


Alexander Cordiner was the master of the SS Heworth. At the beginning of August 1914 the ship was berthed on the River Elbe near Hamburg. At 12.15 am on the morning of 5 August the British Foreign Office issued a statement that concluded:

"His Majesty's Government have declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11 pm on Aug. 4."

If, as Cordiner's inscription states, he was interned on 3 August 1914 the German Government rather jumped the gun as the two nations were not yet at war.
Cordiner and his crew were interned for the duration in Ruhleben Spandau a camp on a Berlin racecourse, which held about 4 to 5,000 internees of various nationalities. There were a total of nearly one thousand British internees held in Germany during the war, people who had been living, working or on holiday when the war broke out and who were then held by the German Government as enemy aliens.
Cordiner was one of them and after three years and seven months of internment he died of heart failure after an intestinal operation at the Red Cross Hospital in Charlottenburg, Berlin.
Born in Nova Scotia, the eldest son of Charles and Mary Cordiner, Alexander Cordiner was a master mariner. In 1881 he married Georgina Garton in South Shields, County Durham. The couple had four children, the eldest, Charles, was accidentally drowned in 1905 whilst serving as an apprentice on the barque Marion Lightbody. Georgina Cordiner died in 1925.


THE ARCHITECT
OF THE UNIVERSE
CALLED THIS PROMISING
MATHEMATICIAN

SECOND LIEUTENANT ALFRED EDWARD IKIN


The architect of the universe is how the sixteenth-century reformer, John Calvin (1509-1564) regularly referred to the Christian God. The Great Architect of the Universe is how Freemasons sometimes refer to their undefined deity who could be called God, Krishna, Buddha, Allah or by any other name according to the member's belief.
Alfred Edward Ikin's father, who went by the same name, chose his son's inscription. There is no evidence that he was either a Calvinist or a Freemason but the omission of the word 'Great' inclines me to think that if he was either it was probably the former.
Alfred Jnr was the eldest son of Alfred and Eliza Ikin. Alfred Snr was a scientist and an educationalist who retired as the Director of Education for Blackpool. Alfred Jnr's obituary in the Yorkshire Post & Leeds Intelligencer on 23 March 1918 explains in what way he was a promising mathematician:

"At 14 [he] gained honours in Cambridge Local Examinations and passed the London Intermediate Science Examination three years later. Afterwards he won a Board of Education Exhibition of £50 a year at Cambridge and also an open scholarship at Clare College."

Ikin never took up these scholarships. Instead, on leaving school he enlisted in the 28th London Regiment before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps.
Reports of his death simply state that he was killed while flying in France. The 4 April 1918 edition of Flight Global records that,

"For two months before going to France Mr Ikin had been engaged in night flying against enemy raiders; but more recently he had taken part in night-bombing over the enemy lines and on other special flight work."

The newspaper account of his death concludes with these words from his commanding officer:

"The service has lost a keen and intrepid pilot, and I have lost one of the most efficient officers of my flight."


A NOBLE SON
WHO DID HIS DUTY TO GOD
KING AND PARENTS

CAPTAIN HARRY WEBBER


Captain Harry Webber, aged 23 when he was killed in action on 10 March 1918, is not to be confused with his namesake, Lieutenant Harry Webber, who was 68 when he was killed on the Somme by a stray shell on 21 July 1916. Lieutenant Harry Webber is thought to have been the oldest man to have been killed at the front in the First World War.
Captain Webber enlisted on 20 August 1914. Webber, a turner and fitter, was already a sergeant in the Australian militia, the 92nd Infantry Regiment based in his home town of Launceston, Tasmania. He embarked from Hobart for Egypt on 20 October 1914 and served on Gallipoli after the landings in April 1915 where he was wounded and hospitalised. He rejoined his battalion in France and was wounded again. In January 1918 he was mentioned in dispatches. The recommendation reads:

"For conspicuous devotion to duty. He has always shown great energy, initiative and efficiency as Lewis Gun Officer, 2nd in Command & Company Commander. Although one of the youngest of the officers in the Bn he always sets an excellent example to the others. Was recommended for gallantry in action on 25/27 Feb. 1917."

His father, Henry Webber, signed for his inscription, describing his son as noble, in other words as having fine moral principles, and referring to the duty, the sense of moral responsibility, that his son felt towards God, King George V and his parents. There is something infinitely touching about the juxtaposition of these three, and for an Australian-born soldier it shows the unity his parents still felt with Britain, the Motherland of the Empire.


GOOD NIGHT
THOUGH LIFE AND ALL
TAKE FLIGHT
NEVER GOOD BYE

SERJEANT THOMAS OLIVER CREW


A wink from Hesper, falling
Fast in the wintry sky,
Comes through the even blue,
Dear, like a word from you.
Is it good-bye?

Across the miles between us
I send you sigh for sigh.
Good-night, sweet friend, good-night:
Till life and all take flight,
Never good-bye.

It's far more usual to see this lovely poem by WE Henley misquoted than it is to see it correctly quoted in headstone inscriptions. Henley wrote, "till life and all take flight, never good-bye", whereas most inscriptions deny that death is the end and write, "though life and all take flight never good-bye". There is, of course, much more consolation in the latter.
Serjeant Crew's mother, Eliza Crew chose the inscription. Thomas Oliver Crew was his parent's eldest child. The family lived in Poplar, east London, where the father, John Crew, was a marine engineer. In 1911, Crew was a clerk working for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He enlisted in June 1915 and served for a year with Queen Victoria's Rifles, a territorial battalion before transferring to the Machine Gun Corps. He went to France in July 1916 attached to the Royal Fusiliers.
Crew's is one of the few service files to exist and it records that on 9 March 1918 he was admitted to a Canadian Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek with gun shot wounds penetrating his abdomen and both legs. He died the same day.


SOME ARE BORN
TO DO GREAT DEEDS, AND LIVE
AS SOME ARE BORN
TO BE OBSCUR'D AND DIE

SECOND LIEUTENANT CHARLES RONALD MOORE


'Ron' Moore was two months short of his nineteenth birthday when, according to Flight Global (28 March 1918), he and his observer, 2nd Lieutenant Geoffrey Walter Ashdown Green, were killed when their plane crashed in flames whilst on a practise artillery patrol. To the end of her life, his mother, Katherine von Kusserow Moore, inserted an In Memoriam in The Times on the anniversary of his death:

Moore, 2nd Lt. Charles Ronald, 59th Sqdn. R.F.C. - Killed in aerial combat, March 8, 1918, aged 18. Sleeping Achiet-le-Grand Cemetery, Flanders - Mother, Con and Barney
The Times, Thursday March 8 1951

Mrs Moore died in February 1952. The next month 'Con and Barney' put the same message in The Times but they never did so again.
Charles Ronald Moore was still at school, Trinity College, Glenalmond, when the war broke out. He joined the RFC as a cadet in April 1917 and was gazetted 2nd Lieutenant in September 1917. In January 1918, he was awarded his pilot's wings and although he was still only 18, he volunteered for foreign service. In February 1918, he was appointed to 59 Squadron in France and was killed the following month.
Moore's father, Charles Edwin Moore, chose his inscription. It comes from Matthew Arnold's, Sohrab and Rustum, a deeply dramatic narrative poem in which Rustum, a famous Persian warrior, kills Sohrab, the son he never knew he had, in single combat. Distraught, Rustum tries to kill himself, but the dying Sohrab stops him saying:

Desire not that, my father! thou must live.
For some are born to do great deeds and live,
As some are born to be obscur'd and die.
Do thou the deeds I die too young to do.

It's rather a strange inscription for a father to choose for his son - some people are born to do great things in their lives and others to die without achieving anything. Many families felt that dying in the service of your country was some form of 'great deed'. To Charles Moore, however, his eighteen-year-old son had had an unfulfilled life. And was he also feeling, as many survivors felt, an obligation to be worthy of the dead in their own future lives.


TELL THEM AT HOME
IT IS ALL RIGHT

LIEUTENANT HARRY WILLIAM MACKINTOSH MACKAY


Seventeen-year-old Harry William Mackintosh Mackay enlisted on the 5 August 1914, the day after Britain declared war on Germany. He was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the 6th Battalion Gordon Highlanders on 22 November 1915. By now he was 18. He served with them until the autumn of 1917 when he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, qualifying as an observer.
On 6 January 1918, Mackay and his pilot, David Arthur Stewart, brought down an enemy Albatros whilst returning from a photo reconnaissance mission. Two months later, they were returning from bombing an enemy dump near Carvin when they were intercepted by three formations of enemy aircraft. In the next ten minutes, Stewart and Mackay brought down four enemy planes - two at 11.15 and two at 11.20 - but they were surrounded and their plane badly damaged. Stewart just managed to land behind the British lines. The time was 11.25 and Mackay, shot in the chest, was dying. He didn't survive long enough to get to hospital.
His father, William Mackay, Editor of the North British Agriculturalist, signed for his son's inscription - Tell them at home it is all right. I am presuming that the words originally came from Harry Mackay, but quite what he meant, and quite what his father meant by quoting them, I can't tell. Perhaps his father was trying to signify that his son had philosophically accepted his fate.


SO TEACH US
TO NUMBER OUR DAYS
THAT WE MAY APPLY OUR HEARTS
UNTO WISDOM

PRIVATE EBENEZER HORATION MILLER


Ebenezer Miller's inscription comes from Psalm 90, the beautiful psalm that begins:

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

And continues:

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night.

And has the well known words:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Then it asks the question:

Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

Which it answers:

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

So the message is, in effect, don't let's waste our all-too-short-days on this earth in the sort of activities that earn us God's wrath. Private Miller's mother, Mary Albertha, chose his inscription and I think we can read it as a reprimand.
Ebenezer Horatio Miller was born and brought up on Tobago. He enlisted on 22 November 1916 in Bellevue, Ontario and on 16 May 1917 was discharged as medically unfit. The reason? He was tall, 5'9", and very slim, with a 29 and a half inch chest, and a one and a half inch expansion. In the medical officer's opinion he was "not likely to stand the strain of military service". Why? Because he "seems a man would be subject to tuberculosis", even though he was in good health at the moment.
Miller's record notes that his conduct was good, his habits were good and his temperance was good. And under the section asking about distinguishing features the officer has written, "None, only colored". Ebenezer Miller was black.
The form also asks how long it is thought he will be medically unfit and the answer is - "permanent". So it's rather surprising to see that Miller enlisted the next day and appears to have been accepted. The verdict on his health was "Slight defects, not enough to cause rejection".
Miller joined the 21st Battalion Canadian Infantry in France on 21 December 1917 and was killed in action on 4 March 1918. The 21st had only just taken over a section of the front line at Lens, the relief being completed at 11.30 pm the previous day. At 5.45 am the next morning the Germans launched a large-scale raid on their section of the line but were driven back.
A few days later the Toronto Star published a heroic account of the raid, describing how three hundred specially picked enemy assault troops were driven off:

"Our chaps killed a great many Boches in the trenches, and during his retirement many Germans were lying dead in No Man's Land. Not a man of ours is missing, so he failed absolutely in his mission, which we learn from prisoners was himself to take prisoners and gain information."

'Not a man of ours is missing'; no but three officers were wounded, three other ranks killed and 38 wounded. Ebenezer Horatio Miller was one of those killed.
I had meant to finish here but the name Horatio fascinated me. There were nine West Indian sailors listed as being on board HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. Perhaps one of them was Ebenezer Miller's ancestor and the name was a legacy.


WOULD GOD
I HAD DIED FOR THEE
O WILFRED, MY SON, MY SON

PRIVATE WILFRED DUNN


Mrs Jemima Dunn has quoted from the Book of Samuel, substituting her son's name for that of King David's deeply loved son Absalom, his favourite child, who was killed fighting in a rebellion against his father. After he hears the news of his son's death,

"the king was much moved, and went up to the Chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
[2 Samuel 18:33]

It's a passage echoed in 'To You Who Have Lost', a poem by John Oxenham, (William Arthur Dunckerley 1852-1941), which was published during the war:

I know! I know!
The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe, -
The pang of loss, -
The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross,
" - Heedless and careless, still the world wags on,
And leaves me broken ... Oh, my son! my son!"

Wilfred Dunn came from Cassava River, a district of Glengaffe in Jamaica. He served with the British West Indies Regiment, formed during 1915 from Caribbean volunteers. Dunn was with the 11th battalion, like all the other battalions in the regiment a non-combatant labour battalion - an indication of the British government's reluctance to use coloured troops in combatant roles.
Dunn is buried in Taranto, a town on the southern tip of Italy. The town had been used by the Royal Navy since Italy entered the war on the Allied side in May 1915. After the summer of 1917, its importance increased greatly when it became the main port, at the end of the overland route from Cherbourg, for supplying men and materials to the war in the eastern Mediterranean. The British West Indies Regiment was used for loading and unloading vessels and numerous other labouring roles, much to the disappointment, and in some cases increasing dissatisfaction, of many of those who served in it. The cause of Dunn's death is not known.


SACRIFICED TO MONARCHICAL AMBITION

SAPPER ARCHIBALD RUTHERFORD


This is a very blunt inscription. I wonder whether there was any correspondence over it between Rutherford's parents and the War Graves Commission. We'll never know as this sort of correspondence was not kept when the Commission moved out of London in the 1970s. If there was, presumably the Rutherford's argued that the monarchical ambition they were referring to was the German Kaiser's and had nothing to do with the British monarchy.
Archibald Rutherford died in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. Germany's plans to establish a Deutsch-Mittelafrika (German Central Africa), part of the Kaiser's 'monarchical ambitions', had brought her into conflict with other European countries trying to maintain their own influence in the area, particularly Portugal and Great Britain. The outbreak of war gave the Germans the opportunity to expand out of German East Africa (Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi) into Mozambique, the northern part of which they occupied 1914. They ran a very successful campaign throughout the whole war in the region, tying up valuable allied troops that could have been used elsewhere.
Rutherford served in the Royal Engineers, as a dispatch rider in a Lines of Communication Signal Company. The announcement of his death in The Scotsman says that he 'died on active service'. This could have been as a result of an accident but disease accounted for the majority of deaths among European troops in this region: dysentery, malaria, influenza, pneumonia.
Rutherford's father, William Duncan Rutherford, a manager in the Edinburgh biscuit manufacturing company of R. Middlemass and Son, signed for his inscription. Many people, then and since, believed that Kaiser Wilhelm's territorial ambitions were a major cause of the First World War. Others blamed it on Great Power rivalry in which Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were all equally to blame.
I wonder what William Duncan Rutherford really thought his son had been sacrificed for?


"GONE WEST"
WITH THE GLORY OF
THE SETTING SUN

LANCE CORPORAL JAMES MAXWELL


Dread sound of guns, and hurrying feet,
The dying groans of the sore distressed;
And then - the peace that is deep and sweet,
And another soul "Gone West".

"Gone west" - with the glory of the setting sun,
To an endless day of a well-earned rest;
For another hero's part is done,
And another soul "Gone West".

The sky is aflame with its burnished gold,
Red is the land with the blood of our best,
Whose bodies are lying so strangely cold,
Whose spirits have all "Gone West".

The earth is darkened with clouds of gloom,
Its new made graves, and its laws transgressed;
But see! - how angels from the tomb
Bear all the souls "Gone West".

Gone West by Winifred A Cook
First published in Bibby's Annual c. 1917

The use of the phrase 'Gone West' to mean to die came into use during the First World War. And whereas today we might use it in a fairly colloquial fashion, in those days it had a certain majesty. So much so that some local newspapers listed the names of their of casualties under the heading, 'Gone West'.
Although many column inches were dedicated to puzzling over the origins of the phrase, and many bizarre explanations put forward, the association of death with the setting sun in the western sky is an ancient one. Sophocles used the analogy in Oedipus, writing of the 'western shore' where 'soul after soul is known to take her flight'. The dying sun and the splendour of the sunset provided a vivid analogy for the blaze of glory to be associated with those who died for their country.
The phrase provoked many execrable pieces of verse, which were liberally quoted in newspaper In Memoriam columns, but Winifred A Cook's seems to have become the most popular. A writer of children's books and occasional verse, very little is known about her.
James Maxwell, the son of John and Agnes Maxwell, enlisted in Dumfries on 14 September 1914 and embarked for France on 8 July 1915. He served in the 6th Battalion Cameron Highlanders and was killed in a German air raid near Monchy-le-Preux on 21 February 1918.


MY MOTHER'S GREATEST SACRIFICE

PRIVATE HUGH ROBINSON


Mrs Hannah Robinson had five children, four sons and a daughter. Her eldest son, John Marsden Robinson was killed in action on 21 March 1918, just over a month after her youngest son, Hugh. Her daughter, Mary, signed for the inscription. It looks as though she must have composed it too - 'My mother's greatest sacrifice'.
Hugh was her youngest son, named after her husband who died before Hugh Jnr's first birthday. Hugh, a window cleaner, was still living at home in Buxton, Derbyshire when he joined up. The Buxton War Memorial site says that he was a small man - really small - 4 ft 11 inches and weighing 6 stone 10 lbs. He enlisted in August 1916 and served with the Labour Corps, embarking for France on 23 March 1917. There is no record of the cause of his death, but he died at a Casualty Clearing Station between the villages of Rocquigny and Equancourt on 16 February 1918.
A month later his brother, John, (also remembered on the Buxton War Memorial site) aged 41 and serving with the 36th Labour Corps, was killed on 21 March 1918, the opening day of the German Spring Offensive. He's buried in the village of Favreuil, which was overrun by the Germans before the end of the month. His wife chose his inscription:

Until we meet again
Ever remembered by
His loving wife & children


OUR LOVING SON
DIED IN THE DEFENCE
OF ENGLAND AND POLAND
R.I.P

GUNNER STANISLAW RAUCH


Stanislaw Rauch is known as Stanley Stanistaw Rauch by the War Graves Commission, and Stanley Ranch on his Medal Index Card. However, he was registered at his birth as Urbon Stanislaw Rauch, the son of Wilhelm Rauch and his wife, Stanislawa Baderski.
All the couple's ten children were born in London, where Wilhelm and Stanislawa were married in 1892. In the 1911 census, Wilhelm gives his birthplace as Warsaw, Russia and Stanislawa as Mikstadt, Germany. In the 1891 census, she describes her place of birth as Prussian Poland. As both places are now in Poland, it gives you an idea of the situation in the country, which at the start of the First World War was partitioned between Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany.
America's entry into the war, and Woodrow Wilson's attempt to use the war to spread democracy and national self determination, gave Poles the hope that the war might liberate their country. This is how the Rauch's could say that their son had died in the defence of Poland. I like the way they included their adopted country in this too.
In 1911, Stanislaw was a hairdresser's assistant. He didn't join the army until after 1915 when he served with D Battery, 79th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. He died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station close to the villages of Rocquigny and Estcourt, which were overrun by the Germans just over a month later.


HE HEARD THE CALL
AND ANSWERED
HE FELL OPEN EYED
AND UNAFRAID

PRIVATE STANLEY ARTHUR JAMES LAMBERT


The brothers Stanley and Roy Lambert both had the same inscription. Stanley was killed on 17 February 1918, having only joined his unit in France a month earlier. Roy, who was 21, was killed on 11 July 1918 having been on active service since February 1916.
Soldiers' photographs were often framed in elaborate patriotic frames - especially if they had been killed - and one such frame features 'He heard the call and answered' in a banner across the top of the frame, along with the Australian flag and a vase of foliage that I can't quite make out but is probably made up of oak, laurel and wattle.
The second line of the inscription comes from Laurence Binyon's famous poem, For the Fallen, interestingly, from a verse that is now usually omitted:

They fought, they were terrible, nought could tame them,
Hunger, nor legions, nor shattering cannonade.
They laughed, they sang their melodies of England,
They fell open-eyed and unafraid.

The very next verse begins: 'They shall not grow old, as we that are left grown old'.
The Lambert brothers were both born in Australia. Roy was a poultry farmer when he enlisted in September 1915, and Stanley, who enlisted in November 1916, was an electrician. Stanley spent most of 1917 in England before joining his unit, the 24th Coy Australian Machine Gun Corps, on 26 January 1918.
According to a witness to the Australian Red Cross, Lambert was killed at a place called Sherwood Dump on Hill 60:

"He had been caught by a shell, pieces of which hit him about the head and side. He was badly hit and I think death must have been instantaneous."

Roy Lambert was similarly a casualty of shell fire. Sergeant Lewis reported to the Red Cross:

"On July 11th at night time, he was in charge of a ration party and passing a dangerous gully, was, I understand, killed instantly, owing to heavy enemy barrage; there was no wound and death was from concussion. I did not see the body but was told by C/S/M A King 82, of A Co. that he had seen it and there was no mark whatever on it."

Roy Lambert had done well in the army and was promoted to sergeant in December 1917. However, there is a curious incident on his record sheet, which relates that, whilst at Codford Camp, a large ANZAC training and transfer camp, he was seriously reprimanded and docked three days pay for being absent without leave from midnight on 19 February 1918 to 3 pm on the 22nd. What day had his brother been killed? The 17 February. It sounds to me as though Roy went on a 'blinder'. Interestingly, the reprimand had no effect on his rank.


DIED A PRISONER OF WAR
AT HANOVER
FROM WOUNDS RECEIVED
IN ACTION AT CAMBRAI

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NEVILLE BOWES ELLIOTT-COOPER VC, DSO, MC


The day Neville Elliott-Cooper was taken prisoner was the day he earned his Victoria Cross and the day he received the wound from which he died just over two months later. Two days before his VC was announced in the London Gazette.
Elliott-Cooper, a regular soldier who passed out of Sandhurst in 1908, was a lieutenant at the outbreak of war. On 14 May 1916 he was awarded a Military Cross for successfully taking and holding a section of the Hohenzollern Redoubt at Chord. He was promoted to Captain.
On 17 July 1917 he earned a DSO for rallying his battalion and leading a patrol that captured vital information and twenty German prisoners. He was promoted to Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel. On 30 November 1917, his VC citation records how on "hearing that the enemy had broken through our outpost line, he rushed out of his dug-out, and on seeing them advancing across the open he mounted the parapet and dashed forward calling on the Reserve Company and details of the Battalion Headquarters to follow".
Although unarmed he made straight for the enemy and under his direction they were driven back. However, before long he was badly wounded and realising that his men were seriously out numbered he ordered them to withdraw - and to leave him behind. His action delayed the enemy advance long enough for reserves to move in and hold the line.
Elliott-Cooper was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Munster. A fellow prisoner, Frank Vans Agnew, wrote in his memoir:

We had Colonel N.B. Elliott-Cooper with us, badly wounded in the hip joint. He suffered pains of the the damned, but never whimpered once. His language was very bad but a joy to hear, and, when at his worst, he hurled things about ... the poor chap died in Hanover Hospital a month later. If he had gone to Hanover from Le Cateau he would be alive today in my opinion.

Elliott-Cooper died in hospital No. 1 at the prisoner-of-war camp at Lazaret in Hanover on 11 February.
Neville Bowes Elliott-Cooper was the third son and sixth child of Sir Robert Elliott- Cooper and his wife, Fanny. Sir Robert was a wealthy and successful Civil Engineer; his son's were educated at Eton where, more than five years after Neville's death, Sir Robert erected a memorial plaque that reads:

In loving memory of
Gilbert D'Arcy Elliott-Cooper
Major Royal Fusiliers
Died on March 7th 1922 from the result of
Wounds received in action on Aug. 13th 1915
Aged 42 years
At Eton 1893-1897
Also of Neville Bowes Elliott-Cooper VC DSO MC
Lieut-Col. Royal Fusiliers Died a prisoner of
War at Hanover on Feb. 11th 1918 of wounds
Received at Cambrai on Nov. 30th 1917
At Eton 1901-1907
Etonam nacti exornaverunt
Floreat Etona

Of all the things Sir Robert could have chosen to say about his son, Neville, it was the fact of his dying of wounds whilst a prisoner-of-war that he most wanted to record for posterity - both on this plaque and on his headstone. Neville may have been a lieutenant colonel with a VC, a DSO and an MC but to his father he was his twenty-eight-year-old son who died of wounds far from home as a prisoner of war.


REARED BESIDE
THE TUMMEL AND THE TAY
HE LIVED SIMPLY
& DIED BRAVELY

DRIVER ROBERT ALEXANDER DUFF


Robert Alexander Duff was born and brought up on a farm in Ballinluig a small community in Perthshire, close to the confluence of the rivers Tummel and Tay, just as his father, Duncan Duff, said on his inscription. It's a beautiful part of the world with its pastures and woodlands and distant mountains, all evoked very simply by just the two words Tummel and Tay.
Duff appears to have been mobilised on the outbreak of war, which would indicate that he was either a territorial or a regular soldier. However, he was discharged as medically unfit one month later. Nothing daunted, he re-enlisted in the Army Service Corps and served with the 3rd Army Auxiliary Horse Transport Company in France and Flanders from 4 September 1915.
At some point he volunteered as an observer with the Royal Flying Corps and was attached to 22nd Squadron based at Auchel. On 30 January 1918 Duff, with the pilot Second Lieutenant Godfrey Gleeson Johnstone a New Zealander, were on an offensive patrol when their plane was seen to fall in flames during aerial combat. Reports say that, Duff, without any flying training, tried to bring the plane down on the allied side but the plane crashed and he died soon afterwards from burns and injuries.
Whilst Duff's inscription evokes his home in Scotland, the pilot's ties him to the land of his birth:

Born Motuotaraia, Hawkes Bay
New Zealand


"VALE"

STAFF SERJEANT WILLIAM VAZIE LANGDALE SIMONS SIMONS


William Vazie Langdale Simons' inscription was signed for by his brother, Robert John Jermyn Simons (the brothers were known as Vazie and John). 'Vale' is the Latin word for farewell and it's possible that John was inspired by a poem written by the Roman poet Catullus, which he addressed to his dead brother who, like Vazie, was buried far from home.

By ways remote and distant waters sped,
Brother, to thy sad grave-side I am come,
That I may give the last gifts to the dead,
Since she who now bestows and now denies
Hath taken thee, hapless brother, from mine eyes.
But lo! these gifts, their heirlooms of past years,
Are made sad things to grace thy coffin shell,
Take them, all drenched with a brother's tears,
And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell!

The last line, 'Atque in perpetuam frater ave atque vale', is one of the most famous lines in Latin literature. And if John didn't know it from Catullus, he may have been aware of Tennyson's poem, Frater Ave Atque Vale, which Tennyson wrote in the year following his own brother's death, after visiting Catullus' villa at Sirmio.
Vazie and John were the sons of Vazie and Maud Simons. The parents married in Australia, where Maud was born and where their eldest child, Clara, was also born. By the time Vazie Jnr was born in 1893, the family had returned to Merthyr Tydfil for Vazie Snr to join the family law firm, Messrs Simons and Plews. In 1907, Vazie Snr committed suicide - shooting himself through the heart at his office desk.
Vazie Jnr joined the Royal Field Artillery in 1912 as a territorial. He was called up on mobilization and served with the BEF in France and Flanders from November 1915. In 1916 the battalion went to Egypt and served through the Palestine Campaign, taking part in the two battles of Gaza. Vazie was awarded a Military Medal for conspicuous bravery in the field during the first battle.
In late 1917, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and was killed during flying training on 25 January 1918. He is buried in Ismailia, a small town on the west bank of the Suez Canal.




AND LET
OUR ORDERED LIVES CONFESS
THE BEAUTY OF THY PEACE

PRIVATE THOMAS HARRIS FOOT


Private Foot's wife, Alma, quotes from the still very popular hymn, 'Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways', for her husband's inscription. The hymn, adapted by W. Garrett Horder (1841-1922) from John Greenleaf Whittier's poem, 'The Brewing of Soma', attempts to encourage us to live simpler, more sober lives, seeking out silence and selflessness in order to be able to hear God's 'still, small voice of calm'. The inscription comes from thee penultimate verse:

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.

Thomas Harris Foot was born in Exeter in 1883, the son of John Spettigue Foot, a fruit merchant, and his wife, Annie. He married Alma Florence Matilda Little at St Paul's Kensington and Chelsea on 10 February 1916, giving his occupation as grocer and his address as Oare, Faversham, Kent.
Foot served originally in the Royal Engineers and then with the Army Ordnance Corps at the O.K.D. railhead. He's buried in Baillleul, which was a large hospital centre until it was overrun by the Germans just over two months after Foot's death. There is no indication as to the cause of his death.


WHO PLUCKED THIS FLOWER?
THE MASTER
AND THE GARDENER
HELD HIS PEACE

PRIVATE NATHAN WHITEHEAD


This is an old epitaph, several versions of which appeared in a number of Victorian epitaph collections in the 1870s. The addition of some extra punctuation and a couple of words helps make the sense clearer:

"Who plucked this flower?"
"I" said the master
And the gardener
Held his peace

Later people felt the need to expand the story:

Once a gardener had a choice flower that he tended and valued above all the flowers of the garden. One morning it was missing. He thought a servant had taken it, and went about asking them all if they had plucked it.
Then a servant said: "I saw the master walking in the garden early, and he plucked it."
The gardener said: "It is well. The flower was his. For him I nursed and tended it, and as he has taken it, it is well."

As with the flower, so with a young life; God has taken it, it was his to take.
Nathan Whitehead was one of the three children of Jonathan and Mary Whitehead of Tebay in Westmorland. Father was a platelayer with a railway company and in 1911, sixteen-year-old Nathan was a shop assistant. He served with the 5th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers, not joining them until after they had been evacuated from Gallipoli in December 1915. They spent the rest of the war in Egypt and Palestine where Whitehead died of dysentery - as did so many soldiers in this part of the world - on 17 January 1918.


HIS LIFE INSPIRED IN ME
A JOY THAT SHALL OUTLIVE
ETERNITY

LIEUTENANT RICHARD LAUDER SALE SALE


Born and brought up in Atherstone, Warwicksire, Richard Lauder Sale was one of the four sons of Alfred and Gertrude Sale. In 1913, Richard married Dorothy Mary Northcott, the third daughter of the Vicar of Atherstone. She too had been born in the town. One imagines that the couple had known each other all their lives. This makes the inscription she chose for her husband all the more poignant.
It comes from the poem 'Missing' by Geoffrey Dearmer (1893-1996), which was published in 1918 in a collection of his verse. Dorothy Sale knew her husband wasn't missing, she knew he was dead, she'd placed an announcement of his death in the 22 January edition of The Times, but the words of the poem still rang true for her:

How should I grieve? His life inspired in me
A joy that shall outlive eternity,
Wrought out, complete, unsnared by time and age
My jewelled past my precious heritage.
Shall misery usurp my realm of years
And leave me drowning in self-pitying tears,
A derelict in my own whirlpool swirled -
Me - whom Love crowned an empress of the world?

When the war broke out, Richard Sale was in practice as a solicitor with his father, Alfred, and his brother, Edward. Early in 1915 he joined the Inns of Court OTC and that September was commissioned into the Household Cavalry. He served at the front from February 1916 until his death in January 1918. In June 1916 he became his regiment's sniping and patrol officer and early in 1917 was promoted to brigade sniping officer. It was his duty among other things to make daily reports about the location of sniper posts and to liaise with the artillery for their removal. Sale died of wounds received in a raid on 15 January 1918.


BEYOND THE SEA OF DEATH
LOVE LIVES
YESTERDAY, TODAY
AND FOREVER

RIFLEMAN HORACE TOPPS


This beautiful inscription comes from the last verse of a love poem, One Day, by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). The 'one day' is the day the lovers will be united when the second one dies.

When shall they meet? I cannot tell,
Indeed, when they shall meet again,
Except some day in Paradise:
For this they wait, one waits in pain,
Beyond the sea of death love lies
For ever, yesterday, to-day;
Angels shall ask them, 'Is it well?'
And they shall answer, 'Yea'.

In 1911 Horace Topps, aged 17, was living at home with his parents and six brothers and sisters, in Sutton Surrey: father, George Topps was a house painter, mother, Elizabeth was a charlady, Horace worked in a fishmonger's, sixteen-year-old Kate was a daily girl, Charlie, 14, Ethel, 10, twins Agnes and Helena 8, were at school, and three year old Ena was a 'baby at home'.
By 1918, three of the family were dead: George died in December 1917, Horace in January 1918 and Helena in December 1918. By the time Elizabeth chose Horace's inscription she had much to mourn.
The themes of undying love and meeting again are among the most popular of all personal inscriptions; Mrs Topps has chosen a particularly beautiful way of expressing this.
Horace Topps was a volunteer who entered France on active service on 27 August 1915. He served with the 21st Battalion Kings Royal Rifle Corps, which was sent to Italy in December 1917 to relieve the Italians on the Piave front. They were not involved in any particular military operations but in carrying out patrol work across the River Piave. Topps was the second battalion casualty of the tour.


THEIR MOUTHS ARE STOPT
WITH DUST

PRIVATE HORACE HOLTON


This is an unusual quotation from Edward Fitzgerald's the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. When other families have quoted from this beautiful but fatalistic poem they have tended to choose passages that lament the fleeting nature of life. The quotation comes from the 26th quatrain. The 24th makes the point that we will soon all be dust so we may as well make the most of our lives whilst we can.

Ah make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and sans End!

The 26th quatrain scoffs at those supposedly wise men who discuss the future, what do they know and what's more, what will anyone care when they're dead:

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss'd
Of the Two worlds so wisely - they are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scattere'd, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

Horace Holton's father, William Henry Holton, signed for his inscription. The family lived in Leicester where William was a boot finisher and in 1911, fourteen-year-old Horace was working in a wholesale chemists. His medal card shows that he was entitled to the 1915 Star having entered a theatre of war on 28 July 1915. It looks therefore as though he volunteered on the outbreak of war when he was 18. His medal card says he served with the 9th Battalion North Staffordshire Regiment. The War Graves Commission records say it was the 1st/5th. The 9th Battalion arrived in France on 29 July 1915, which would tie in with the date on Holton's medal card. However, neither of these battalion's war diaries give any indication of hostile activities on the day he was said to have been killed in action.
So, what could the Holton's have meant by their choice of inscription? Does it just mean that their son is dead - his mouth full of the dust of the earth he's buried in? That seems a bit literal. Did they mean that it is pointless listening to those who think they 'know' what they're talking about - politicians and opinion formers? It could. Or were they aware, as Fitzgerald must have been, that putting your mouth in the dust is an Oriental form of submission as when you prostrate yourself in obeisance before a superior being as a sign that you are prepared to accept their will? So is it just a superior way of saying, Thy will be done?


LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

PRIVATE HERBERT SALT


But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.
St Luke 6:27-8

It would appear to me that Mrs Sarah Ann Salt, Herbert Salt's mother, was making a statement against war when she chose her son's inscription. It was something she really wanted people to hear. The family were Welsh speakers. They filled in the census return in Welsh, yet Salt's inscription is in English. Many, many Welsh families composed Welsh inscriptions but filled the census up in English. With the Salts it was the other way around. The message was too important to limit to Welsh speakers.
The Salts lived in Cwm-y-Glo, a small slate-mining community in Caernarvonshire where father, Joseph Salt, was a quarryman. Herbert was his parents only son. He had three sisters, one was his twin, Hilda.
Salt served with the 19th Battalion Welsh Fusiliers and was killed in action on the 8 January 1918. At that time the battalion were in the trenches near Bullecourt. The war diary brackets the dates 5-9 January with the words: "Everything quiet during this tour. Fighting patrols were sent out each night".
Salt is buried in Mory Abbey Military Cemetery, as are four other soldiers of the 19th Battalion who were all killed on 8 January. It sounds to me as though some members failed to return from one of these fighting patrols. Nevertheless, in the terms of the diary writer everything was quiet during this tour. Relatively speaking, it probably was.


THOUGH COMPARATIVELY LITTLE
I DID MY BEST

PRIVATE THOMAS JAMES SKIPPER


Private Skipper was 5 ft 6 inches tall according to his medical records, not that little by the standards of the day. His brother, Michael John Skipper, his next of kin, chose his inscription. They sound like Thomas James' own words.
Thomas James Skipper was 43 when he enlisted in 1916 - comparatively old. His brother said he was an accountant, Skipper himself said he was a gold prospector. He had certainly been a prospector; there's a newspaper cutting from The Daily News, Perth, dated 21 September 1899, showing his claim to a parcel of land under the terms of The Goldfields Act 1895. There's no indication he made any money from it.
Skipper enlisted in February 1916 and embarked for France the following November. He served with the 51st Infantry Battalion and on 2 April 1917 was wounded in action with a gunshot wound in his knee. He was hospitalised in Britain he was never again fit for active service and in July 1917 was posted permanently to the No 3 Command Depot at Hurdcott, Wiltshire.
On 31 December 1917, he became seriously ill. Admitted to the military hospital at Fovant, he died on January 7th of phthisis, tuberculosis.
In his own words, he had done his best.

Much of this information comes from the Compton Chamberlayne War Graves site.


JESUS SAID TO HER
"THOUGH HE WERE DEAD
YET SHALL HE LIVE"

LIEUTENANT ALBERT NEAVE WESTLAKE MC


Army and Navy Gazette 19 January 1918
Information Required
Lieut. A.N. Westlake MC RFC missing Jan 4. Will relatives of prisoners of war in Germany kindly ask for news of him?
Mrs Westlake, Wayside, Warham, Dorset

A week later Mrs Westlake, Lieutenant Westlake's mother, put another, identical notice in the Army and Navy Gazette. Nearly three months later, Flight magazine carried the following article:

4 April 1918
In the Hands of the Enemy
The following is an official list, published in Germany, of British machines which the Germans claim fell into their hands during the month of January 1918.

Among the planes listed was Bristol No B 1542 and beside it the comment Lieut AW (sic) Westlake dead.

Westlake served with 27 Squadron RFC and on the morning of 4 January he and 2nd Lieutenant Ewart took off at 09.50/10.50 from the airfield. It was reported that they were then seen "gliding down from 13,000 feet south-west of Denain in combat with EA (enemy aircraft) on return from bomb run to Denain". It's possible that B 1542 was shot down by German ace Wilhelm Reinhard who claimed his seventh victory that day in the area.
Both Ewart and Westlake were buried by the Germans at Niergnies - where they are still buried, the only two allied servicemen in the cemetery.
Albert Neave Westlake was the only son of Albert and Agnes Westlake of Wareham in Dorset. Educated at Shrewsbury School, he was the classic 'golden' schoolboy: head boy, a member of the 1st XI for both football and cricket and stroke in the 1st VIII. Not only this but he won a scholarship to New College Oxford, where he took a first at the end of the first part of his degree. However, he abandoned his degree to join the army.
Commissioned into the North Staffordshire Regiment, he was in France by August 1915. His Military Cross was awarded in the summer of 1917:

"For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty as Battalion Intelligence Officer. When our attack was held up, he went forward under intense shell fire to the most advanced posts, and brought back accurate and valuable information. Later he passed through the enemy's barrage to obtain further information, and finally led a relieving company to the front line under heavy fire. His fearlessness and devotion to duty were beyond all praise."

This citation was published in the London Gazette four days after his death.
Mrs Agnes Westlake chose his inscription. It's a contraction of the words of St John Chapter 11 verse 25. Lazurus is dead and Jesus has just assured Martha that her brother he will rise again. She replies that she knows he will, in the resurrection at the last day:

And Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whoseoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.




AVE! MORITURI SALUTAMUS

LANCE CORPORAL EDGAR ALLAN BELL


Edgar Bell died in Queen Alexandra's Hospital, Millbank, London on 3 January 1918 of wounds he'd received in France in May 1917. The only indication as to the nature of his wounds comes from the letter his officer wrote to his parents: "You will be pleased to hear that he behaved splendidly, and did not so much as make a sign that he had been wounded until I turned and saw him".
The son of Alexander Brown Bell and his wife Agnes, Edgar Bell was born in Sheffield on 13 January 1894. His father was a journalist, at the time of his son's death on the Yorkshire Evening Post. On leaving school, Edgar began to train as an architect and in 1913 joined the Yorkshire Hussars as a territorial soldier. He volunteered for foreign service and went with the regiment to France in February 1915. In March the following year, he transferred to the 6th Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment and was serving with them when he was wounded.
Alexander Bell signed for his son's inscription. At one time it was firmly believed to be the greeting gladiators gave to the emperor on entering the arena before a fight - Ave Impuratur , morituri te salutant, Hail Emperor, we who are about to die salute you. George Bernard Shaw, in his 1913 play Androcles and the Lion, gave the line to the Christians who were about to be fed to the lions: 'Hail, Caesar! Those about to die salute you'. However, it is now thought to have been at a one-off event when a crowd of condemned criminals, who were about to be forced to kill each other in a mock sea battle, hailed the Emperor Claudius with these words in the hope that he might pardon them. He didn't.
Why did Alexander Brown choose this inscription, what did he mean? It's possible that he had in mind the same sentiment as that implied by Simonides' famous inscription to the Spartan dead killed at the Battle of Thermopylae: "Go tell the Spartans, passer by, that obedient to their orders here we lie". Edgar Bell had done his duty by his country and had known the risks he was taking in so doing. Interestingly, it is the only instance of this inscription that I've come across. I could have imagined it being much more popular among a generation where the classics played such a large part in their education.


ALL THIS SAD WORLD NEEDS
IS JUST THE ART
OF BEING KIND
DOLL

CAPTAIN HERBERT HENRY THOMPSON


'Doll', Mrs Kate Thompson, Captain Thompson's widow, quotes the words of the extremely popular American poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) for her husband's inscription:

So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.

First published in June 1895 in The Century, a popular American quarterly magazine, it was later republished as the first verse of Wilcox's poem Voice of the Voiceless, which pleaded for kindness to animals.
Herbert Henry Thompson, born in Aldershot in 1884, was the son of Sergeant Major Herbert Henry Thomson and his wife Isabella. By 1901 Isabella was a widow running a fancy goods shop in Aldershot and Herbert was a grocer's assistant. She herself was an army daughter. Her father, John James Harvey, had been an army bandsman who had served in India where her younger sister was born.
I lost track of both Herbert Henry and Isabella in the 1911 census but wonder whether Herbert had gone to Africa. His military record notes that he served in the West African Frontier Force followed by the 2nd Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment. His medal card shows that he was entitled to the 1915 Star having arrived on active service in Alexandria in August 1915. At some point he was mentioned in despatches but by the time of his death, cause unspecified, he was working for the Army Pay Department in Aldershot.
Scorned as a lowbrow, popular poet as opposed to a literary one, Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poems regularly appear in anthologies of bad verse, but I have rather a soft spot for her insouciant words of wisdom:

Laugh and the world laughs with you,
Weep and you weep alone;
The good old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
[Solitude]

One ship drives east and another drives west
With the selfsame wind that blows.
'Tis the set of the sails,
And not the gales,
That tell us the way to go.
[The Winds of Fate]

All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
...
Love, to endure life's sorrow and earth's woe,
Needs friendship's solid masonwork below.
[Upon the Sand]


I.H.S.
"ONE OF ENGLAND'S
GLORIOUS DEAD"

PRIVATE ALBERT BETHEL


'The Glorious Dead', these are the only words on the London cenotaph, the British Empire's memorial to its one and half million service dead of two world wars. Designed by Sir Edward Lutyens (1869-1944) in 1919, the cenotaph - an empty tomb to represent the absent dead - today receives universal approval. However, the inscription is often seen as 'problematic'. Why? Because we know there is absolutely nothing glorious about being killed in battle. It's a filthy, cruel, agonising and revolting business.
Yet, the word glorious is not meant to apply to the manner of death but to the dead themselves. The dead have acquired glory through their duty, courage and endurance. They have become glorious.
It's a clever choice of word combining Christian, classical and military associations. To the Christian, glory is associated with God; it's His magnificence, His majesty, in which the righteous all share at their own deaths. In the classical world, glory is renown, a good name acquired by noble actions. In Homer's Iliad, glory, kleos, is acquired on the battlefield, fighting bravely, risking death, dying. It's an intangible quality, something that only exists in the minds of others. It cannot be bought or awarded it can only be earned. And once a good name has been earned it bestows a form of immortality - their name liveth for evermore.
The Internet is confused as to who chose the words, some claim it was Rudyard Kipling, others Lloyd George but according to a document in the National Archives, it was Lutyens. In 1930 he wrote: "'The glorious dead', the words I put on my original sketch, also survived unchanged".
It's not an original phrase. The glorious dead had been used before to describe the illustrious dead. John Dryden, Pope, Shelley, Wordsworth all speak of the glorious dead, as did Laurence Binyon, whose poem The Fourth of August, published in The Winnowing Fan at the end of 1914, has the verse:

For us the glorious dead have striven,
They battled that we might be free.
We to their living cause are given;
We arm for men that are to be.

Albert Bethel's wife, Isabella, chose his inscription, no doubt influenced by the huge emotional attention the cenotaph attracted in the immediate post-war years. The couple had been married for four years and had two daughters. Albert, the son of Ralph and Hannah Bethel, was born and brought up in the town of Atherton, Lancashire. In 1911 he was a cotton piecer later becoming a spinner. He was still a spinner when his youngest daughter was baptised in June 1917.
Bethel served in the Mechanical Transport Company of the Army Service Corps. His company, attached to the 19th Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery, were responsible for hauling the heavy guns and keeping them supplied with ammunition. He died in a hospital in Rouen but it hasn't been possible to tell from what cause.
The initials I.H.S. are a sacred monogram based on the first three letters of the name Jesus in Greek.


ENLISTED SEPT. 2ND 1914
LOVE NEVER FAILETH

LIEUTENANT WILLIAM HEPTON


As William Hepton's inscription shows, he enlisted within a month of the outbreak the war and died two days before the end, serving for a total of four years, two months and eight days. Fate is cruel.
Hepton's medal card indicates that he was a serjeant in the Yorkshire Hussars in August 1914. This was a territorial regiment and its soldiers were under no obligation to serve abroad. However, within the first month many territorials volunteered for foreign service and it would appear that Hepton was one of them.
He served on the Western Front from his arrival in France on 15 April 1915 until he returned to England to take a commission in the Yorkshire Dragoons, remaining with them until February 1917. After this he was attached to the 5th Dragoon Guards and was serving with them when he died of pneumonia following influenza on 9 November.
The only son of Arthur Hepton and his wife Eliza, who died in 1914, William Hepton was born in Headingley in 1884. Educated at Shrewsbury School and Oriel College, Oxford, he joined the family firm of Hepton Bros. Mantle Manufacturers of Leeds. In 1914, the company were employing 1,996 workers in the manufacture of ladies' mantles (cloaks), costumes (suits), waterproofs and raincoats.
On 20 November 1918, the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer carried a report of Hepton's death. The paper recounted his war service, and relayed the praise of his senior officer: "he always did his duty to his country, as it was always his first thought, and the only course that such a gentleman as he could ever think of taking". But rather strangely, the passage is preceded by the comment, "It would be unkind of me" to tell you how well he always did his duty to his country, and is followed by the words: "Lieut. Hepton left a bed of sickness in response to an order to go forward, and being unable to ride on horse back, was wrapped up and travelled for over three hours in a lorry". It would appear to me that William Hepton, in "doing his duty to his country", responded to an order, to the detriment of his health, which contributed to his death. It would explain why he's buried in a small cemetery close to the front line.
Hepton's inscription closes with the words, 'Love never faileth'. The reference is to 1 Corinthians 13:8 and the words come from the 1881 Revised Version of the New Testament. Without love, whatever other qualities we have are as are nothing:

Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil; rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth.


DINNA FORGET

PRIVATE FRED WATSON


Dinna forget, the words mean do not forget, or rather more poetically, forget me not, and despite the Scottish dialect their use is not restricted to Scotland. In fact they appears regularly on sentimental postcards of the Victorian and Edwardian era, part of their love affair with all things Scottish.
It's impossible to attribute the words to any one source, there are so many instances of the phrase in poems, books and on keepsakes and jewellery. During the First World War there were even little silver pendants with entwined enamel French and British flags and the words 'Dinna Forget' sold as sweetheart necklaces and bracelet charms. Often exchanged as the soldier went off to war, they were meant to ensure that the girlfriend didn't forget him and remained faithful. But if the soldier died then they became a pledge never to forget his memory.
This is how the words are used for Fred Watson's inscription. But the young woman who chose them was his older sister, Hilda, not a sweetheart. Fred served in the Scots Guards so I wondered if the family had Scottish connections but no. They were all born and brought up in England, most of them in Yorkshire, where they all worked in the cotton industry, including Fred who at the age of 12 was a spinner piecer.
Fred served in the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards and died of wounds three days before the end of the war in one of the hospitals in Rouen. There is no record of where or when he was wounded but the regiment had taken part in most of the last battles of the war from the 27 September onwards: the crossing of the Canal du Nord, the crossing of the Selle, the battle of Cambrai and the crossing of the Sambre on the 4 November.


KISMET

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARCHIBALD HUNTER


The word kismet derives from the Turkish word 'qismet' or the Arabic 'qismat'. In these cultures it means the will of Allah. To the West it is a secular word meaning fate, chance, destiny. Archibald Hunter's inscription is not unique but its use definitely increases among the casualties of these last few weeks of the war. It's also the inscription on the grave of Lance Corporal Lenard, a veteran of the South African War and of the North West Frontier, who was killed in action on 23 August 1914, the day the British army first engaged with the enemy on the Western Front.
Archibald Hunter, the son of Archibald Hunter, a Grocery Manager, and his wife, Margaret Jane, was a schoolboy in Durham when the war broke out. He was only commissioned into the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry on 30 July 1918. He served with the 9th Battalion and was killed in action in the taking of the villages of Limont Fontaine and Eclaibes. These extracts from the war diary describe the day:

"08.45 hrs Success seemed certain, the weather was favourable - a heavy mist overhung the field of operations ... Despite this, however, the advance was held up, the objective could not be reached because of intense artillery and machine gun fire." Later that afternoon, at 15.50 hrs another attack was launched, led by the 9th K.O.Y.L.I. "From now onwards this Battalion, ably led, made excellent progress, and literally carried everything before it by sheer determination and will to win. A strong stand was made by the enemy, but all to no purpose. In the fierce fighting that took place in front and in the streets of the villages, men of the 9th K.O.Yorks. L.I. refused to be denied the victory, which they has set out to gain. Once again the enemy were entirely outmanoeuvred and outfought. By 21.30 hrs. so great had been the force of the assault, the villages of Limont Fontaine and Eclaibes - thoroughly cleared of the enemy, were added to the growing list of Allied gains."

The war had four days to run and Hunter, who had been at the front for only three months, was dead.
In 1911, Kismet, a very popular play written by Edward Knoblock appeared on the London stage, where it ran for two years and was then made into a film in 1914. It was only a very slight love story but it elevated the word in the public's consciousness, not as 'the will of Allah', and definitely not as the will of God, but as random chance.



JAMES HARGREAVES MORTON
"ARTIST"
DARWEN, LANCASHIRE

SERJEANT JAMES HARGREAVES MORTON


James Hargreaves Morton lived with his four older sisters: Rachel, Sarah, Fanny and Alice, all unmarried, who worked in the cotton and linen mills of Darwen Lancashire and supported him in his career as an artist. They were proud of him, as the inscription Rachel chose makes clear. They had every reason to be.
Morton received his first training as an artist in Darwen School of Art before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. After this he took a job teaching art at Darlington Technical School but decided before long that he couldn't concentrate on his painting whilst teaching. It was at this point that his mother and sisters decided he should come home and they would support him whilst he dedicate himself to his painting.
It seems he wasn't totally supported by his sisters. In the 1911 census Morton described himself as a decorative designer in wall paper, working on his own account. There were several wallpaper manufacturers in Darwen who would have bought his designs. But in the following years he became increasingly well known as an artist, exhibiting at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool and at the Royal Academy. One of his best-known paintings, Johanna, which shows a young Belgian refugee, was painted during the first years of the war, as was a rather haunting self portrait in which Morton seems to stare stoically but apprehensively into the future.
Morton was thirty-three when the war broke out. He did not enlist but in 1916 was conscripted. He served with the 5th Battalion East Lancashire Regiment and must have been a capable soldier since within two years he was a serjeant. He was killed in action on 6 November when the battalion launched an attack in the Forest of Mormal, which had to be withdrawn in the face of fierce machine gun fire and a threatened counter attack. The attack succeeded the next day.
After his death, the sisters kept all Morton's paintings, honouring his wish that they should be kept together. But after Alice's death in 1967 they were sold uncatalogued and with no record of the buyers. Recently there has been a revival of interest in his work and in 2013 James Hargreaves Morton A Short Colourful Life was published by the Friends of Darwen Library.


I LIE HERE MOTHER
BUT THE VICTORY IS OURS

LANCE CORPORAL ALEXANDER MACK MM


Alexander Mack died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station six days before the end of the war. His mother chose his inscription. Is it a last message from her son, or are they words she has put into her son's mouth?
Lance Corporal Mack could well have known that victory was in sight. Although the Germans were still putting up fierce resistance, the Allies were daily pushing them further and further back towards Germany. Mack may not have known this but, Austria-Hungary had signed an armistice with the Italians on 3 November, a month after the Germans had approached President Wilson to see if they could negotiate a truce. Two days after Mack's death, General Hindenburg, head of the German army, opened peace negotiations with the Allies.
So Mack could well have known that military victory was in sight, but is this what the words mean? When Christians talk of victory they mean Christ's victory over death.

Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 15: 54-56

This famous passage from the bible was the inspiration for a hymn by the Scottish-born presbyterian minister William H Drummond (1772-1865) of which this is the first verse:

Thanks be to God, the Lord,
The victory is ours;
And hell is overcome
By Christ's triumphant pow'rs!
The monster sin in chains is bound,
And death has felt his mortal wound.

It's not impossible to think that Mrs Mary Mack was conflating Christ's victory over death with the British victory over the Germans, and that to her the 'monster' was Germany.
Alexander Mack was the son of James and Mary Mack. Born in Edinburgh, as were both his parents, the family moved to London soon after Alexander's birth. James Mack was a printer's machine minder, as were at least two of his sons, including Alexander. This was the person who was responsible for the overall look of the printed sheet, for the flow of the ink and the pressure of the rollers. Mack served with the 6th Battalion Northamptonshire Regiment and from the position of the Casualty Clearing Station where he died, was wounded in the fighting for the Sambre-Oise Canal.


"SHALL LIFE RENEW
THESE BODIES?
OF A TRUTH
ALL DEATH WILL HE ANNUL" W.O.

LIEUTENANT WILFRED EDWARD SALTER OWEN MC


A hundred years after his death Wilfred Owen is one of the most famous casualties of the war, certainly the most famous poet to have been killed, even the most famous of all the war poets. However, at the time, few people had ever heard of him. Two weeks after his death, his parents inserted an announcement in The Times but there was no follow-up obituary. Whereas three days after Rupert Brooke's death a headline in The Times read, 'Death of Mr Rupert Brooke', the article accompanied by an appreciation written by Winston Churchill, then still First Lord of the Admiralty.
But as Brooke's reputation has diminished, somewhat unfairly as he died before his poetry could reflect his experience of warfare, Owen's has soared. Yet Owen too could write like Brooke in the early days; his first poem of the war concluding with the verse:

O meet it is and passing sweet
To live in peace with others,
But sweeter still and far more meet
To die in war for brothers.

Owen's post-war fame was fostered by those members of the literary world who saw his quality, people like Harold Munro, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edith Sitwell. Sitwell was the first person to publish a collection of Owen's work. The 1919 edition of Wheels, the magazine she edited with her brother, Osbert, not only carried seven of his poems but was dedicated to the memory of 'W.O.' By the late twentieth century his reputation had reached iconic status, where it remains. Owen is the anti-war poet of all anti-war poets, the man who portrayed war in its full repulsiveness.
Yet, when offered the ability to escape the war, as he was in the summer of 1918 following his treatment for shell shock at Craiglockhart, Owen decided he must return to the front. As he wrote in The Calls:

For leaning out last midnight on my sill,
I heard the sighs of men, that have no skill
To speak of their distress, no, nor the will!
A voice I know. And this time I must go.

Owen did not return to the front just so that he could give voice to the voiceless soldiery but to fight. The Military Cross he was awarded for his actions on 1st/2nd October 1918 was for not only assuming command when his company commander became a casualty but for personally manipulating a captured enemy machine gun and inflicting 'considerable losses on the enemy'. He was killed just over a month later, shot as he encouraged his men to face the German machine guns as they desperately tried to prevent the British army crossing the Sambe-Oise canal.
Wilfred was the eldest child of Tom Owen, Assistant Superintendent of the Joint Railways [the LNWR and GWR], and his wife, Susan. The news of his death reached the family home on 11 November, just as all the church bells were ringing to celebrate the Armistice.
When, some time later his parents were asked to choose an inscription, they chose a line from one of their son's own poems, The End. His father actually signed the form confirming the inscription although his mother is always blamed for curtailing the quotation and so giving it a meaning diametrically opposed to the one her son intended. The poem, which people have tried to see as a comment on the war, has to be a comment on the idea of resurrection, the Day of Judgement. Owen asks:

Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?

There are two questions here. The inscription, as chosen by the parents, contains a question and an answer:

Shall life renew
These bodies?
Of a truth
All death will he annul.

Owen questions the resurrection, his parents assert it. Their action is no different from the many other families who took lines out of context and in so doing altered their meanings. Mr and Mrs Owen could never have envisaged that their son's poetry would become the subject of such minute study, and in any case - it's what they wanted to say.


IS THIS THE END?

PRIVATE CHARLES JAMES BOLTON


It is unusual to see an inscription like this, this questioning of whether death is in fact the end or whether there is something that comes afterwards. It is far more usual to see families express the firm belief that they will all meet again: 'Thinking of you 'til we meet again', 'God will bind the golden chain closer when we meet again', and one of the most popular of all inscriptions, 'Until the day dawns and the shadows flee away'. But Private Bolton's wife, Eva, was not so sure - 'Is this the end?'
Charles James Bolton was a house painter from Norwich, one of the four sons and seven daughters of Alfred and Sarah Bolton, also of Norwich. He married Eva Lawton in 1908 and the couple had one son, Sidney George.
Bolton's medal card indicates that he didn't enter a war zone until 1916. He was a married man with a wife and child and it wasn't until May 1916 that married were conscripted. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, as a stretcher bearer with the 2nd Field Ambulance, part of the 1st Division. On 4 November the Division took part in the attack on the Sambre Oise Canal. Bolton was shot by a sniper.

'Is this the end?'


O WIND
IF WINTER COMES
CAN SPRING BE FAR BEHIND?

CAPTAIN HARRY DUNLOP MC


War Diary
102nd Battalion Canadian Infantry
Aulnoy
Saturday November 2 1918
The Hun started bombing and shelling at 04:00 hours. Our barrage opened at 05:30 hours ...
The Hun continued desultory shelling of the town and at about 09:00 hours, the Battalion Medical Officer, Captain Harry Dunlop MC (CAMC) was hit in the head whilst standing in the doorway of HQ and died shortly afterwards, to the intense sorrow of all.

Dunlop was working in Peru when the war broke out. He returned to Canada to enlist in March 1916 and went abroad that October. In March 1918 he married an American, Rachel Thayer, in London. In August he was awarded a Military Cross for his action near Beaucourt-en-Santerre when, "this officer followed close behind the attack, and attended to the wounded under heavy machine gun fire. He was untiring in his efforts to care for and evacuate the wounded, and undoubtedly saved many lives".
After the war, Mrs Dunlop returned to the United States. At the time she chose her husband's inscription her address was Eaton's Ranch, Wolf Creek, Wyoming, a 7,000 acre cattle ranch on the slopes of the Bighorn Mountain.
The inscription she chose comes from the last line of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. The poem is thought to express support for the people of Europe in their struggle against authoritarian regimes. Winter in this context being the re-establishment of reactionary governments after the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 and these governments' suppression of liberal protest; just as spring always follows winter so conservative repression will be followed by liberal reforms. However, in the context of Harry Dunlop's inscription it would appear to be a reference to death and resurrection: just as spring always follows winter so death is always followed by resurrection.



"BEHOLD, I TAKE AWAY FROM THEE
THE DESIRE OF THINE EYES
WITH A STROKE"
EZEK. 24.16

PRIVATE ROBERT GEORGE BISATT


The Bisatt's God was a fierce God, a jealous God, one who took away from the prophet Ezekial "the desire of thine eyes with a stoke": his wife. God then forbad Ezekial to either mourn or weep. It's a difficult biblical passage but it appears to be a graphic way of demonstrating to Ezekial the level of sorrow God's people should be feeling as they continue to disobey His ways. As a consequence of this disobedience the people will be punished: their sons and their daughters "shall fall by the sword" and then "ye shall know that I am the Lord God". In other words, you will be forced to acknowledge how powerful I am
George Bisatt chose his son's inscription; it would appear that he believed the war was God's way of punishing people for the callous decadence of early twentieth-century life. He wasn't alone in believing this, nor alone in believing that having purged the world of sin, the post-war world would be a better world, one where there was no more war and where mankind would live together in love and brotherhood.
Private Robert Bisatt was the eldest son of George and Sarah Bisatt of St Fagans, Cardiff. George Bisatt was a flour miller's clerk, Robert Bisatt had been a clerk with the Great Western Railway before he was called up. His nineteenth birthday was in the first quarter of 1918 so he cannot have been at the front long. He served with the 15th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers and was killed in action on 2 November 1918 as the British army tried to cross the Sambre-Ojse canal, a task they achieved two days later.


"I WAS EVER A FIGHTER
SO ONE FIGHT MORE
THE BEST AND THE LAST"

LIEUTENANT ARTHUR ROWLAND SKEMP


Yesterday's soldier, Ernest Cartright, enlisted on 23 August 1914 and entered a theatre of war on 15 July 1915. He was killed on 1 November 1918. Arthur Skemp too joined up on the outbreak of war, and he too was killed on 1 November but in Skemp's case he had been at the front for just eight days, since 23 October.
Skemp was not unwilling to go to the front but his employers were unwilling to let him go. He was the extremely popular and able Winterstoke Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Bristol of whom a friend wrote:

"His remarkable powers as a lecturer on his subject were well known, and he was idolised by staff and students alike for his intellectual gifts, strong and virile character, his energy and enthusiasm, and his geniality and unfailing kindness of heart endeared him to all."

Skemp served as a member of the Bristol Contingent of the Officer Training Corps until he got transferred to the 1st Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment and was posted to France. He arrived just as the battalion came out of the line for six days general cleaning up and training. On the 30th they took over the line NE of Mazinghein, holding posts overlooking the Canal de la Sambre. On the 31st the battalion repulsed an enemy attack, the next day the enemy attacked again:

"A Coy posts attacked by enemy. Enemy repulsed with casualties. Our casualties: Lieut A.R. Skemp and 6 O.R. killed 1 O.R. wounded. 4 O.R. wounded later."

Mrs Jessie Skemp chose her husband's inscription. It comes from Robert Browning's Prospice. The choice of author cannot have been difficult since Professor Skemp, the author of a study of his poetry, was a Browning expert. Nor can the choice of poem have been difficult either since in Prospice Browning expresses a bold determination not to hide from death but to meet it head on:

I was ever a fighter, so - one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.



ENLISTED AUG. 23RD 1914
"HE SLEEPS
WITH ENGLAND'S HEROES
IN THE WATCHFUL CARE OF GOD"

SECOND LIEUTENANT ERNEST CARTWRIGHT


When some families noted the date of enlistment in the personal inscription it was to show that the man had been a volunteer. There was pride, a cachet, in the fact that he hadn't waited to be conscripted but had volunteered. In the case of Ernest Cartwright, his wife will also have wanted to highlight the tragedy of her husband's death just ten days before the end of the war.
Cartwright had joined the West Riding Regiment as a private, going with them to France on 15 July 1915. He was commissioned in May 1918, serving, so the War Graves Commission's records show, with the 5th Battalion. But on 1 November, the day Cartwright was killed in action, the 5th Battalion's war diary makes no mention of any action. It wasn't even in the front line.

1 November: "Fine day. Battalion trained on ground west of Solesmes in morning. Recreation in afternoon. News was received that Austria-Hungary had concluded an Armistice with the Allies."

Cartwright's name isn't listed among the month's officer casualties either. He was, however, dead, the news reported in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph on 18 November.
The second part of Cartwright's inscription became very popular on headstones, war memorials and In Memoriam columns. You can see its popularity grow in the pages of local newspapers: it appeared once in 1916 and once 1917, eight times in 1918 and fifty times in 1919. The earliest mentions sometimes quote the full two-verse poem. The later mentions restrict themselves to the last two lines.

Gone without one farewell message.
Mangled by a German shell,
He, whose laughter still is ringing
In the home he loved so well.

Comrade's hands, by love made tender,
Laid our warrior 'neath the sod,
And he sleeps with England's heroes
In the watchful care of God.


"WE ALL LOVED HIM
AS A BRAVE SOLDIER
AND A STRAIGHT WHITE MAN"
EXTRACT OFFICER'S LETTER

PRIVATE THOMAS HARRY MANN


What a difference a hundred years makes: our understanding of the words 'straight' and 'white', especially in relation to men, has changed radically since Private Mann's officer described him as 'a straight white man'. To be straight meant to be honest and straightforward, and to be a white man meant to be decent and trustworthy.
Honesty might not, however, have been Mann's best quality. On the 2 October 1915, Thomas Harry Mann enlisted in the King's Royal Rifle Corps. He said he was 19. Four months later, on 6 February 1916, he was in France. But on 3 May 1916 he was discharged from the army. Why? Because he had lied. Thomas Mann was just 16 when he enlisted. His discharge form is marked, "Discharged having made misstatement as to age on enlistment". Yet, on the bottom of the form there's a space for a character reference and it says:

"A good brave lad who has been four months at the front and he is willing and hard working."

Honesty may not have been his strong point but his seniors all thought well of him.
Thomas Mann enlisted again in September 1917. This time in the 7th Battalion The Buffs (East Kent Regiment). The battalion were involved in the 3rd Ypres Campaign in the autumn of 1917. In the spring of 1918 they were in the eye of the storm of the German offensive at St Quentin, and then they were back at the front again for the final push across both the St Quentin Canal and the River Selle.
Mann was killed in action on 31 October. All the 7th Battalion's war diary says of the day is:

"During night our patrols active and a number of enemy machine guns located. A patrol under 2/Lt Gerard endeavoured to capture an enemy MG post but came under heavy fire. Bombs were thrown and the gun was afterwards inactive."

Was this how Private Mann met his end?
It is estimated that there was something in the region of 250,00 underage soldiers serving in the British army at the beginning of the war. Soldiers were meant to be 18 before they could enlist, and 19 before they could serve at the front. However, prior to the introduction of conscription you didn't have to be able to prove your age you just had to declare it. If you looked 18 the army took your word for it. Much has been written about recruiting sergeants turning a blind eye to the underage because they got a bonus for every man they enlisted. But the fact of the matter was that the army wanted men and not weaklings. Soldiers had to be able to carry their packs and march long distances. If you looked old enough and strong enough the army took your word for it.
I don't know the circumstances Mann's discharge. Did his parents track him down and tell the authorities how old he was or did Thomas himself ask to be released when faced with the reality of war?
Thomas Harry Mann was the eldest son of Thomas Henry Mann, a printer's machine assistant from Walworth in south east London, and his wife, Charlotte.


IN DUTY, VALOROUS;
IN ALL THINGS NOBLE;
TO THE HEART'S CORE, CLEAN

COMPANY SERJEANT MAJOR WILLIAM EDWARD MONTAGUE


Knighthood
To H.T.O.

In honour, chivalrous;
In duty, valorous;
In all things, noble;
To the heart's core, clean.
St Jans Capelle 1915

This four-line verse, a tribute to H.T.O. a soldier killed near Ypres in 1915, was written by the Canadian priest and poet, Frederick George Scott [1861-1944]. Aged fifty-three when the war broke out, Scott volunteered for war service in 1914 and served in France and Flanders until the Armistice. His memoir, The Great War As I Saw It, makes an interesting and detailed read. 'To H.T.O.' was included in a collection of Scott's verse called, 'In the Battle Silences Poems Written at the Front', published in 1917.
Knighthoods are bestowed on those who have done special service to their monarch. In times gone by this would have been military service. The knights of old were considered to have been a particular breed, their qualities summarised by Scott's verse. H.T.O. and Serjeant-Major Montague have both done special service to their king and have had the qualities of knighthood bestowed on them.
Montague originally served as a private with the 3rd London Regiment Royal Fusiliers. The regiment was in India when the war broke out but returned to England in December 1914 and by January 1915 was in France. Montague's medal card gives 6 January 1915 as the date for his arrival in France. This is rather early for a volunteer. Was he already a soldier? The 1911 census describes him a publisher's assistant, perhaps he was a territorial.
At the time of his death, Montague was serving with the 10th Battalion Royal Fusiliers. As he died of wounds in one of the base hospitals in Boulogne, it's not possible to tell when or where he was wounded, but during September and October 1918 the 10th Battalion had been involved in the Battle of Cambrai, the Pursuit to the Selle, the Battle of the Selle, and on the 27 October the Battle of the Canal du Nord and Bourlon Wood.
Montague was the son of Albert Edward Montague, Assistant Secretary to the Victoria Institute Philosophical Society of Great Britain. It was a deeply conservative organization committed to defending "the Great Truths revealed in Holy Scripture against the opposition of Science falsely so called". In other words it was opposed to Darwinism. However, it wasn't either of Montague's parents who chose his inscription but his wife, Alice.


WHATEVER IS, IS BEST

LIEUTENANT JOHN DOBREE BELL


This is no 'que sera sera' but a far more definite statement, not whatever will be will be but 'whatever is, is best'. The words are both the title and the last line of a three verse poem by the popular American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox [1850-1919]. This is the last verse:

I know there are no errors
In the great Eternal plan,
And all things work together
For the final good of man.
And I know when my soul speeds onward
In its grand Eternal quest,
I shall say as I look back earthward
Whatever is - is best.

Mrs Dorothy Bell chose the inscription for her husband, 'Jack', who died of influenza in hospital in Boulogne on 30 October 1918. They had been married for nearly two years and had an eighteen-month-old son. Bell originally served in the Royal Field Artillery but at the time of his death was attached to the Intelligence Corps.



THERE IS BUT ONE TASK
FOR ALL
FOR EACH ONE LIFE TO GIVE

PRIVATE LLEWELLYN MCNAMARA


The poem from which this inscription comes, For All We Have and Are, was written by Rudyard Kipling inthe first month of the war. It begins:

For all we have and are,
For all our children's fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The hun is at the gate.

Kipling warns that we shall all have to give up our comfortable lives in order "to meet and break and bind a crazed and driven foe". However:

No easy hope or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
But iron sarcrifice
Of body will and soul.
There is but one task for all -
One life for each to give.
What stands if Freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?

Most families chose the last two lines of the poem, but Private Mcnamara's mother, Matilda, chose the penultimate two. They seem to issue a stark message: it is up to each person to offer their life to the cause.
Mcnamara, who served with the 6th Battalion Welsh Regiment, a pioneer battalion, was killed on 28 October 1918 when "the companies were employed on the repair of forward roads and tracks, working as far forward as possible by day without direct observation". The war diary doesn't report any casualties but presumably something went wrong.
Mcnamara is buried in the cemetery at La Vallee-Mulatre, the village where the battalion had been billeted. It's a very small cemetery, only forty-seven burials. For this reason it features on Pierre Vandervelden's website, 'In Memory' designed to encourage people to venture off the beaten track and visit some of the smaller cemeteries along the Western Front. 'In Memory' has a Guest Book and in it 'Stephen' has written: "In memory of my great uncle Llewellyn Mcnamara, he never wanted to go died 28/10/1918 he nearly came home. You may be long gone but you are certainly not forgotten." -
"He never wanted to go", the great nephews's words; "There is but one task for all - one life for each to give", the mother's choice of personal inscription. Mcnamara was a conscript, although he was 31 in 1918 he didn't enter the war until at least 1916. Did his mother disagree with his holding back or was she acknowledging that her son had had to do his duty?
Llewellyn Mcnamara was the son of Robert Mcnamara, a County Council nightwatchman in Swansea, and Matilda his wife. In 1911, Mcnamara was working as a carter for the Steam Packet Company, which ran a ferry service between Swansea and Ilfracombe across the Bristol Channel.


ALL OUR BEAUTY
AND HOPE AND JOY
WE OWE TO LADS LIKE YOU

PRIVATE ROBERT T INGLIS


Robert Inglis was taken prisoner, unwounded, at Ploegsteert on 11 April 1918. The information comes from his file in the Red Cross Prisoners of the First World War ICRC Historical Archives. Inglis served with the 10th Battalion Cheshire Regiment, not the 19th as it says on his War Grave Commission record, and was captured when the Germans overran the catacombs at Hill 63 near Ploegsteert Wood as they drove all before them during their Spring Offensive.
Six months later, Inglis, who had been held at Friedrichsfeld bei Wesel prisoner of war camp, died of unrecorded causes - most probably influenza - on 28 October 1918. He was 19 and ten months.
Alexander Inglis, Robert's father, chose his inscription. It comes from the last lines of a poem written by the English-born Canadian poet Robert Service, Young Fellow My Lad, which was published in Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, 1916. In the poem, the son tells the father that he's going to join up despite the father's protestations that he's only a boy: "I'm seventeen and a quarter, Dad, and ever so strong you know". The son goes off to fight and after some time the father receives no letters from him. He's very afraid:

I hear them tell that we've gained new ground,
But a terrible price we've paid:
God grant, my boy, that you're safe and sound;
But oh I'm afraid, afraid.

The son has been killed: "They've told me the truth, young fellow my lad: You'll never come back again". But he is able to comfort himself with the thought that his son will live on:

In the gleam of the evening star,
In the wood-note wild and the laugh of the child,
In all sweet things that are.
And you'll never die, my wonderful boy,
While life is noble and true;
For all our beauty and hope and joy
We will owe to lads like you.

Robert Inglis was the son of Alexander Inglis, a stableman, and his wife, Margaret, of Newlands, Glasgow.


ELDEST TRIPLET SON
OF J.G. & E.E. DAVIES
OF FRODSHAM, CHESHIRE

PRIVATE ALGERNON SIDNEY DAVIES


John Gifford and Elsie Ellen Davies had five sons: Donald, Herbert and the triplets Algernon, Colin and Bertram. In that pre-technical medical era the survival of all three of them - and the mother - must have been quite rare. In 1849, Queen Victoria had introduced a bounty for multiple births of three or more children. A bounty that survived until 1957. However, the bounty was only for families in need and the Davies were relatively prosperous. John Gifford Davies was the founder and owner of J.G.Davies & Co. Builders and Contractors, Frodsham Cheshire.
Algernon's service papers have not survived, but Bertram's have. If Algernon followed his triplet brother, he enlisted on 27 June 1917 aged 17 and 11 months but didn't 'join for duty' until the following June, one month short of his 19th birthday. A report says that Algernon didn't go 'into the firing line' until 22 October 1918. Four days later he was wounded and admitted to a casualty clearing station suffering from gunshot wounds in the dead and neck. The sister, who wrote to his parents after his death, said there had been little hope of recovery but that she hoped it would comfort them to know that he had been given every care and attention.
Bertram and Colin Davies survived the war; Bertram dying in 1956 aged 56 and Colin in 1988 aged 88.


SON OF COL. G.C. ATKINSON
"IS IT WELL? IT IS WELL"

MAJOR OWEN DAYOT ATKINSON MC


Owen Atkinson's father, Lieutenant-Colonel George Charles Atkinson, Indian Army, quotes from a poem by Rudyard Kipling for his son's inscription. Called The Nativity, the poem compares the anguish of the Virgin Mary over her son's death with that of a mother whose son has been killed but who has no known grave, "she knows not how he fell", nor "where he is laid".
Published in the Daily Telegraph on 23 December 1916, the poem echoes the Kipling's own grief. John Kipling had gone missing during the Battle of Loos on 27 September 1915. His body was never found and his parents had to face the agony of having to believe he was dead but hoping against hope that he was alive.
George and Margarita Atkinson did know that their son was dead. Wounded on 21 October 1918, he died six days later and was buried in the grounds of the Hautmont Abbey; his body exhumed and reburied in Y Farm Military Cemetery in February 1920.
Atkinson had already followed his father into the army before the outbreak of war. He attended the School of Military Engineering in Chatham and was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 1 April 1914. He crossed to France with his unit, the 200th Field Company, on 15 November 1914 and served with them for one month short of four years, rising to the rank of major.
He was wounded on 21 October 1918 and died six days later. The Engineers were trying to bridge the River Scheldt near Helchin and according to the war diary, Major O.D. Atkinson was "wounded while making reconnaissance for bridge across Schelte near Helchin". The Allies didn't manage to cross the River Scheldt until the beginning of November and by then the war was virtually over.
Kipling's poem has an interesting number of religious references for a man who was generally considered not to have believed in a Christian God. The phrase in the poem, "Is it well with the child" is a quote from 2 Kings 4:26. One day the prophet Elisha has an unexpected visit from the Shunammite woman, a wealthy woman who has befriended him. He sees her from a distance and sends his servant to ask:

"Is it well with you? Is it well with your husband? Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well."

In fact the Shunammite woman's child is dead but her words indicate that whatever God does 'it is well', and that 'it is well' with those who are dead too since they are with God. The last verse of Kiplng's poem indicates that this is how this mother also feels. Her child has died in God's cause, so it is well with him:

"But I know for Whom he fell" -
The steadfast mother smiled,
"Is it well with the child - is it well?
It is well - it is well with the child!"



HIS LAST MESSAGE HOME
"MY PEACE I LEAVE WITH YOU"
JOHN 14:27

PRIVATE THOMAS L LINDSAY RATTRAY RATTRAY


The words in the inverted commas aren't Thomas Rattray's but those Christ used when he warned his disciples that he wouldn't be with them for much longer.

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
St John 14:27

Christ was comforting the disciples with the promise that he would leave them with his peace: the knowledge that through his death they would be assured of eternal life. This will have been the meaning of Rattray's last message, that he trusted in Christ words - presumably with the hope that they would be a comfort to his wife. As it was his wife, Mary Young Rattray, who chose the inscription, it would seem that they might have done.
Rattray came from Largo in Fife, where his father, Andrew, was a tailor clothier. He served with the 6th Battalion Black Watch, was not entitled to a 1914 or 1915 Star so can't have entered a theatre of war before 1916. He was killed in action on 26 October 1918 when the battalion, part of the 51st Highland Division, captured the village of Maing, which had been in German hands since the beginning of the war. He is buried in Maing Communal Cemetery Extension a small cemetery with only eighty-five graves, all belonging to soldiers killed between 11 October and 5 November, sixteen of them belonging to soldiers of the Black Watch killed between the 24th and the 27th.


LET NOT YOUR HEARTS
BE TROUBLED

PRIVATE WILLIAM FREDERICK GIBBS


Let not your hearts be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
In my father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
St John 14:1-3

The opening words of St John Chapter 14 offer instant comfort and most people at the time would have recognised them since the passage always was, and still is, a popular reading at funerals with its promise of a home in heaven for al- comers and its suggestion that there we shall all meet again.
William Gibbs was the son of Eli and Lizzie Gibbs of Buckland Common in Buckinghamshire. Eli described himself in 1911 as a farm servant, his sons William and Jesse as agricultural and farm labourers respectively. William served originally with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry before transferring to the 11th Battalion Royal West Surrey Regiment. He died of wounds in a casualty clearing station in Moorseele, 20 km east of Ypres, twelve days after the town had been taken from the Germans.


TREAD SOFTLY O'ER
MY DARLING SON'S GRAVE
FOR A MOTHER'S LOVE
LIES HERE

PRIVATE JAMES TONAR


Among the 3,879 graves in Terlincthen British Cemetery, this personal inscription seems to have a special tenderness. The graves on either side of Tonar's have very conventional inscriptions: 'Deeply mourned by his loving father, mother, brothers & sisters R.I.P.' and 'Rest in peace', which serve to highlight the informality of Tonar's.
James Tonar's father, a railway carter in Leith, was still alive but his mother, who chose the inscription, privileges herself on their son's grave.
Tonar died in hospital in Terlincthen, a town near the ports where there were a number of base hospitals. The War Grave Commission's register says he died of disease, the Leith Roll of Honour is more specific - he died of pneumonia, quite possibly a complication influenza.


DARLING BOY
GOD MUST BE RIGHT
MUM AND DAD

PRIVATE CHARLES B PARKER


Many families make their acceptance of God's will evident in their choice of personal inscription: 'Thy will be done', 'We cannot Lord Thy purpose see but all is well that's done by thee', 'Not my will but thine O Lord'.
Private Parker's inscription seems rather different: there's an air of desperation to it, as though Parker's mother is trying to persuade herself that God must be right ... but can't believe that he is because how can it be right for her to lose her only child, her darling boy.
Charles Parker's parents were in the theatre. Haidee Parker was a former dancer, Frank Parker the theatrical manager of the London Hippodrome. In the 1911 census, Charles Parker's occupation is given as Box Office Keeper.
Parker served with the 1st Battalion Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders and was killed in action on 25 October 1918.


HE LIKE A SOLDIER FELL

PRIVATE GEORGE HORNER


This heroic statement comes from a song from the ballad opera Maritana, written in 1845 by William Vincent Wallace and Edward Fitzball.

Oh let me like a soldier fall
Upon some open plain -
This breast expanding for a ball
To blot out every stain.
Brave manly hearts confer my doom,
That gentler ones may tell;
Howe'er unknown forgot my tomb
He, like a soldier fell.
He, like a soldier fell.

You can hear it sung here in unmistakably martial tones.
There is no soldier in the opera but a roguish hero, Don Caesar, who is about to be hanged for duelling. At the last moment he is offered a soldier's death - by firing squad - rather than by public hanging. He chooses the firing squad so that it can be said of him that - he like a soldier fell.
George Horner's father chose his inscription. I doubt that he was aware of the plot of Maritana, to him the song represented a soldier offering himself for heroic martyrdom, as his son had done. Taken out of context, the song had become a patriotic rallying cry and was included in publications like The New Army Song Book of 1917. It also featured on one of Bamforth's postcard series where in a deeply romantic and unrealistic image, a group of soldiers pay their respects at a comrade's grave.
Born and brought up in Kilmarnock, George Horner was the son of John Horner, a forge labourer, and his wife Jeanie. He served with the 1st Battalion Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) and was killed on 24 October 1918 - although I wonder if this is correct. On 21 October the battalion had taken part in an attack on Dados Loop and Gloster Lane. It met with intense machine gun fire and was hampered by uncut wire resulting in a number of casualties. Relieved on the night of the 22/23rd, the battalion spent the 24th cleaning up and reorganizing. Whilst Horner could have died of wounds three days after the battle, his body was at found at map reference K.16. B.9.5. and later reburied in Highland Cemetery, which is more in keeping with a battle casualty that someone who died at a medical facility.


PRO DEO ET PATRIA
"MOTHER DEAR I MUST GO"

GUNNER ARNOLD ALEXANDER MACULLY MACULLY


Macully was a volunteer, every Australian soldier was a volunteer as there was no conscription in Australia. But it was an issue that bitterly divided country. In October 1916 the Government held a referendum on the issue and was defeated by 72,000 votes. It held another referendum in December 1917 when it lost by 166,588 votes.
It may not look like it but Mrs Macully is referring to conscription in her son's inscription. Arnold Macully had recognised that he had a duty to fight for God and his country - the Latin 'Deo et patria' lending gravitas to the sentiment. But she hadn't forced him to do his duty: "Mother dear I must go" speaks of a tender but determined son and a mother who is unwilling to part with him. The implication is clear, Arnold Macully was no shirker and Mrs Macully had not forced her son to enlist.
Macully served with the 14th Brigade Australian Artillery. All the Australian divisions had been withdrawn from the Western Front for rest and recuperation after the Battle of Montbrehain on the 5 October. Not only were they exhausted having been in continuous action since August but there weren't enough Australian reinforcements to make up the casualties and some battalions were operating at less than half their strength. However, some artillery units remained to support the British and American infantry. The 14th Brigade was one of those that remained. On 23 October they were engaged at Le Cateau, providing a creeping barrage for a British attack.
Macully's Red Cross file states that he was admitted to the 55th Casualty Clearing Station on 23 October and died the next day. A witness told his mother:

"It happened at dusk one evening late in October, and Gunner Macully was in his dugout in the waggon lines when he was badly wounded by a shell in the thigh and side." His mate helped place "him on a stretcher, and carried him to an Ambulance by the road-side. He was quite conscious and chattered cheerfully to the Drivers Saunders and Edwards, telling them how to apply the Field Dressing. He was then taken away, and they learnt later that he has succumbed to his wounds."


LO, ONE WE LOVED

LIEUTENANT CHARLES EDWARD REYNOLDS


Lieutenant Charles Reynolds was a pilot with 55 Squadron, part of the Independent Air Force. If you've never heard of the Independent Air Force neither had I.
The Royal Air Force was formed on 1 April 1918, the Independent Air Force, or the Independent Force RAF, on 6 June. The RAF was intended as a tactical force, operating in support of the army on the ground, the Independent Air Force was to be a strategic force, attacking German railways, industrial centres and airfields. By the end of October, joined by French, Italian and American squadrons, it had become the Inter-Allied Independent Air Force. However, three days after the signing of the Armistice it was dissolved.
Charles Reynolds enlisted on the outbreak of war and was commissioned into the 1st Surrey Rifles on 14 October 1914. He was eighteen. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, getting his wings in June 1917. After this he received specific bombing training before joining 55 Squadron in March 1918. The squadron flew the new DH4s on daylight bombing raids over German targets. Reynolds was wounded on 18 May 1918 having taken part in a raid over Cologne when thirty-three bombers caused widespread damage and 110 casualties. He returned to his squadron in October and was killed on the 23rd when his plane crash landed on returning from a bombing raid.
Andrew Whitmarsh's British Strategic Bombing 1917-18: The Independent Force writes of the many difficulties day bombers faced. Forced to fly at very high altitudes with rudimentary oxygen equipment, oxygen deprivation was a real issue, as were extreme cold causing frostbite, headaches and temporary deafness - all contributing to debilitating exhaustion.
Reynolds' widowed mother, Annie Delesia Reynolds, chose his inscription. It is not a quotation from Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam but Mrs Reynolds will have been referencing it:

Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to Rest.
Quatrain XXI

Fitzgerald's melancholy verses, first published in 1859, perfectly capture the fleeting nature of life and the pathos of youthful death.

Mrs Reynolds says, "Lo, one we loved", but in fact she lost both her sons. James Reynolds also enlisted on the outbreak of the war. He did not take a commission but served as a private in the London Rifle Brigade and was killed in action on the 2 May 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres. He is commemorated on the Menin Gate.


THE BANNER
THAT HIS HANDS UNFURLED
STILL FLIES TRIUMPHANT
IN THE SUN

PRIVATE ELLIS JONES


Ellis Jones was the son of Ellis and Margaret Jones of Blaeneau-Festiniog and the husband of Katie Jane Jones of Port Talbot. This is all I can tell you with any certainty, other than the facts that he served with the 14th Battalion, Welsh Regiment, wasn't entitled to a 1914 or '15 Star and died on 23 October 1918. I am going to assume that he died of wounds because he's buried in a casualty clearing station cemetery, and I'm going to suggest that he was wounded in the 14th Battalion's attack on the 20th October when the war diary reported:

"Attacked and captured objectives from K10d 90 95 to K11a 30 00 stubborn resistance was met with. Prisoners taken about 75 including 2 officers. The enemy left a considerable number of dead our casualties slight. The battalion was relieved by 17 RWF & returned to Billets in Bertry. Remained in billets."

But I don't know.
Ellis Jones' wife, Katie, chose his inscription. It comes from a poem written by Claude Burton, who was a regular contributor to the Daily Mail under the pseudonym Touchstone. The poem is called Unknown Grave. Ellis Jones did not have an unknown grave but Claude Burton's son did. Captain Henry Charles Claude Burton was killed in action on 27 July 1916 in the fighting at Longueval and Delville Wood. He is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.
What does the inscription mean? In the poem, Claude Burton is saying that it doesn't matter if the soldier has no grave, we know his worth and our grief is the price we must pay for victory, to ensure that:

The banner that his hands unfurled
Still flies triumphant in the sun!

Taken out of context, as Mrs Katie Jones has done, the words are no longer the aim of victory but a statement that victory has been won.


SO HE PASSED OVER
AND ALL THE TRUMPETS SOUNDED
FOR HIM ON THE OTHER SIDE

PRIVATE ERNEST DAVISON


Ernest Davison's inscription describes the death of Mr Valiant-for-Truth in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. A good man, who has aimed to follow Christ's teaching, the trumpets sound as he crosses the river of death to the Celestial City, the New Jerusalem.

"When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the Riverside, into which as he went he said, Death where is thy sting? And as he went down deeper he said, Grave, where is thy victory? So he passed over, and all the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

And why do the trumpets sound? It's a sign that the dead man is one of those chosen by God. As it says in St Matthew 24, there will be a time of great tribulation, nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom after which Christ will "send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds ... ".
For Mr John Davison, Private Davison's father, the trumpets will sound at the death of his son to signify that he too is worthy of reaching the Celestial City because he has died in Christ's service - fighting the Germans.
Davison served with the 1st Battalion Cheshire Regiment and was killed in action on the 23 October during the Battle of the Selle. Originally buried in Contour British Cemetery in a single grave with a sergeant and three other privates, his body was exhumed and reburied in Amerval Communal British Cemetery in 1923.


REMEMBER THE LOVE OF THEM
WHO CAME NOT HOME
FROM THE WAR

SECOND LIEUTENANT MALCOLM WINSER WAKEMAN


The Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges (1844-1930), wrote these lines for his Eton Memorial Ode, 'In memory of the Old Etonians whose lives were lost in the South African War'. The words were set to music by Sir Herbert Parry and the piece performed when King Edward VII inaugurated the Memorial Hall on 18 November 1908. In 1912 Bridges published the poem in a collection of his works but it was never particularly well known.
At one time I thought Wakeman must have been an Etonian, which would explain how his parents knew the poem. But he wasn't, he was a former pupil of William Hulme's Grammar School, Manchester[ He is remembered on their War Memorial site]. However, Wakeman's inscription appears as a dedication on more than a few war memorials and this is probably attributable to the fact that it was one of the 'Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials', a booklet which the Victoria and Albert Museum thought it would be helpful to publish in 1919.
The story of Malcolm Wakeman's death features in Jay Winter's Sites of Memory Sites of Mourning. Wakeman was called up in 1917 when he was eighteen. He joined the Royal Air Force, trained as an observer and was posted to France in July 1918. He seems to have thoroughly enjoyed the excitement of it all, his letters to his parents full of tales of derring do. Then on 2 October his plane, an RE8 on a counter attack patrol was shot down and the pilot killed. Wakeman was taken to hospital with head wounds. The German pilot, Leutnant K Plauth of Ja51 claimed the victory.
When informed, Wakeman's parents immediately set out to visit him, paying their own fare, which cost them £8 12s 8d. Despite initial optimism, Wakeman's condition deteriorated and he died on 18 October.
When Wakeman's father asked the Air Ministry to reimburse him the £8 12 8d, something it was prepared to do for parents too poor to afford it themselves, he was told that didn't fit this category. But Mr Wakeman successfully argued that he was not a rich man and why should he be punished just because he had been prudent enough to have some savings to hand. It's difficult to say how much £8 was worth in 1918 but apparently the average male earned £94 a year.
In 1923, the Wakemans, taking advantage of the St Barnabas Society's organised tours to the battlefield cemeteries, visited their son's grave. The cost of the journey this time was £4.


HIS MEN USED TO SAY
"WE WOULD FOLLOW
TOMMY ANYWHERE"

CAPTAIN HOWARD VICTOR FRASER THOMAS MC


This is a lovely inscription, a real tribute to someone who must have been a natural leader of men. Howard Thomas left Winchester in the summer of 1915, just after his eighteenth birthday. In September 1915 he was commissioned into the Royal Scots and went with them to France the following May, just before his nineteenth birthday. Two years later, at the age of twenty-one, he was a captain with a Military Cross, which he won for his actions during the Battle of Arras in April 1917. The citation for the award reads:

"He led his platoon to the second objective with great courage, where he organised a party and outflanked the enemy, enfilading them, inflicting heavy losses. He was wounded but carried on throughout the day."

Thomas did not return to France until May 1918. Five months later, on 22 October, he was killed outright by a machine gun bullet in his head whilst leading his company in the capture of the village of Vichte.
I imagine that the quotation in Thomas's inscription comes from a letter of condolence written by a senior officer to his parents. The officer has passed on a great compliment - Captain Thomas's men would have followed him anywhere. What's more, they called him 'Tommy' without any seeming loss of respect.
The little book, A General's Letters to His Son on Obtaining His Commission (1917) offers this advice:

"In a well disciplined unit men find it almost impossible not to obey the commander's voice, however terrible the order."

But:

"Your men will obey you because you are their officer, but you will succeed in getting infinitely more out of them if you can win their love and respect.

And:

" ... it is as important to look after your men, and keep them fit, as it is to lead them well in action. If you look after your men, and if they know that in you they have a friend upon whom they may depend, you may rely on their never leaving you in the lurch."

It would appear that Howard Thomas, the only son of Harry and Mary Thomas of Cargilfied, Cramond Bridge, Midlothian, had learnt all these lessons.

[Much of this information comes from the Winchester at War website,. The accompanying photograph shows a whippet-thin young man with a face of earnest composure wearing a Glengarry and with his MC medal ribbon showing above his left breast pocket.]


HIS LAST MESSAGE
"I WOULD NOT HAVE MISSED IT
FOR ANYTHING"

PRIVATE HENRY JAMES HEWETT


James Hewett had been a member of the Berkshire Yeomanry since he'd served with it in the Second South African War 1899-1902. In civilian life he was a sugar boiler in a confectionery factory but he remained a member of the Yeomanry, which became a Territorial force in 1908. At the outbreak of the First World War he opted for imperial service and was posted to Egypt with the 2nd Mounted Division in April 1915. Four months later the regiment was sent to Gallipoli where it served dismounted until the evacuation in January 1916. In March 1916 the regiment became part of the 6th Mounted Division, and in April 1918 it merged into the 17th Squadron Mounted Machine Gun Corps.
Hewett served with the Division in Egypt and Palestine until his death, taking part in all three battles of Gaza and in the capture of Lebanon in October 1918. For those who served in this part of the world, it was a totally different war from the Western Front - for the most part it was a war of movement, hot, dangerous, dusty and exhausting, but presumably for someone like Hewett exciting too. As he told his family, "I would not have missed it for anything".
The information on his medal card says that Hewett 'died', as opposed to 'died of wounds' or 'killed in action'. Like so many soldiers who served in that part of the world he could have died of dysentery or heat exhaustion or from the flu pandemic that was sweeping the world at the time.
Born in St John's Wood in 1891, Henry James Hewett was the son of Charles Hewett, who died in 1890, and his wife, Mathilda. Before his father's death the family lived at Uxmore Farm, Ipsden, which was then in Berkshire. Perhaps this is where Hewett acquired his skills in horsemanship.


NO THOUGHT OF GLORY
TO BE WON
THERE WAS HIS DUTY TO BE DONE
AND HE DID IT

PRIVATE JOHN O'NEILL


It hadn't occurred to me that this was a quotation until I wrote up Second Lieutenant Andrew Bennet's inscription. Bennet's inscription comes from The Vision Splendid, a poem by John Oxenham, published in 1917 in a collection of verse of the same name. It was whilst looking through this book that I came across the poem Oxenham wrote in praise of sixteen-year-old John Travers Cornwell who, although mortally wounded, remained at his post on HMS Chester throughout the Battle of Jutland with the rest of his gun crew dead around him. The poem, called Promoted, begins:

There was his duty to be done, -
And he did it.

No thought of glory to be won;
There was his duty to be done, -
And he did it.

Wounded when scarce the fight begun,
Of all his fellows left not one;
There was his duty to be done, -
And he did it.

Why hadn't it occurred to me that this was a quotation? I'd seen other inscriptions that said, 'There was his duty to be done and he did it' and just assumed that the family were making a simple and direct statement since 'duty' was as great a motivator as patriotism - if not more so - when it came to people's reasons for joining the war. This inscription seemed to confirm it so I looked no further.
Oxenham, the pseudonym for William Arthur Dunkerley (1852-1941), was perhaps the most popular poet of the First World War. The sales of his wartime volumes, All's Well and The Vision Splendid, were phenomenal and one has to assume that the message he propounded was popular too. To Dunkerley, the outcome of the war depended on us - and he wasn't talking about whether we lost or won. Yes there had been huge material losses; yes many hundreds of thousands of men had been killed but after all the dead are only lost to us for a short while since we shall be reunited them when we too die. Despite these losses, to Oxenham the war will have been worthwhile, "if it brings us perforce to simpler living". He hoped that "the soul of the world has been shocked at last into true understanding of the inevitable and dire results of purely materialistic aims", the:

"wheels of life were skidding on the greasy ways of wealth and ease. We were leaving God out. This from which we are suffering is of our own incurring".

So that after the war:

"having paid, in blood and tears and bitterness of woe, - now with the spirit of God in us, with enlightened souls and widened hearts, we may look forward to The Vision Splendid of a new-made world".

Powerful stuff. This, however, is a view of the war that we have snuffed out. Rupert Brooke's Peace, has been much mocked for promoting a similar view:

Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!

It may not be a view that we can comprehend today but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a view held then. Nor was it a view imposed by Governments and elites; it was a view that emerged among some people as the spirit of the age. As we have recently learnt, the spirit of an age can have many faces.

John O'Neill was born in Liverpool, one of the two children of John and Marie Isabel O'Neill. The family lived in Birkenhead where father was a gas fitter at the shipyard. Private O'Neill served with the 9th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers and died on 20 October 1918. This is the day that the war diary reported:

"The Batt attacked at 02.00 hours. The object of the attack being to capture the high ground E of the River Selle. All objectives were gained. Gains were consolidated and held"
9th Battn Royal Welsh Fusiliers War Diary
20 October 1918

The battalion attacked from Montrecourt, a village on the River Selle. O'Neill is buried in Glageon, over 50 km further east. Glageon had been in German hands since the beginning of the war and wasn't liberated until early November. It's where the Germans buried their own soldiers and allied prisoners. Was O'Neill already a German prisoner or was he taken prisoner on the 20th and died of wounds that day?

Britain, be proud of such a son! -
Deathless the fame that he has won.
Only a boy, - but such a one! -
Standing for ever to his gun;
There was his duty to be done, -
And he did it.


HE FELL 'MIDST
BLANDAIN'S BATTLE ROAR
FAR FROM THE PEACE
OF HIS SHETLAND SHORE

SERJEANT JOHN BENJAMIN COUTTS


Serjeant Coutts went missing on 20 October 1918 - and remained missing until October 1990; his name carved onto the Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing in 1927.
I can't say how it came about that his body was identified but there's an asterisk in red ink beside his name in the Ploegsteert Memorial Register with a handwritten note dated 22.10.90, which says: *Known to be buried in Tournai Communal Cemetery Allied Extension*.
The date of the burial at Tournai was May 1930. This was the date when seven bodies, one of them unidentified, were exhumed from Blandain Churchyard and reburied in Tournai. Later, by whatever means, it became known that that unidentified soldier was Coutts and his family were contacted and asked to compose an inscription. The inscription record is very modern, which would match with it being created in 1990. And as with modern records, it doesn't say who signed for it. Coutts had been married to his wife Margaret for eight years when he died but I haven't come across a record of any children.
What happened to Serjeant John 'Bennie' Coutts? I can't really work it out but in October 1918 Coutts' battalion, the 11th Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers, were progressing though Flanders. At 10.00 on the morning of 19 October they reached Willems, fifteen minutes after the Germans had evacuated the town. At 15.30 on the same day they reached the village of Trieu de Warzon, four kilometres away, and by 17.00 they had taken it. By the 11.00 on the 20th they were in Houilly, another four kilometres further east, which they took after considerable hostile fire.
Blandain, where Coutts was originally buried, is halfway between Willems and Houilly - perhaps a casualty of the hostile fire.
Coutts wasn't buried in Blandain until September 1919 when his body was found at map reference N10c.95.45 and identified as a Sergeant Glott. As no British soldier with the surname Glott was killed in the First World War the identification was dropped and the body buried as an unknown sergeant. It would be interesting to know how the unknown Glott became Coutts but whoever did the research was able to convince the War Graves Commission, which amended their records and created a headstone for him.
Coutts' father, mother and wife were long dead. They had died in 1921, 1924 and 1971 respectively. In the absence of any known children perhaps it was a great-nephew of niece who chose the inscription. There is something slightly anonymous about it. Coutts may have been buried in Blandain but the location is not known for being the scene of any fighting. However, battle roar or no battle roar the location was certainly far from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands where Coutts had been born and brought up and where he had been a shoemaker like his father before him.


AS BRAVE AS A LION
& WORKED TO HIS LAST OUNCE
IN THE CAUSE
OF HIS WOUNDED COMRADES

PRIVATE HERBERT PERRY MM


Unless I am mistaken, this is an extract from a letter of condolence sent to Private Perry's parents by his senior officer, or perhaps by one of his friends in the Field Ambulance. There are no quotation marks around the words but they sound very immediate and very heartfelt as they mix a deeply conventional image - "as brave as a lion" - with the original, if slightly clumsy, image of someone working to their last ounce.
Perry had served with the Royal Army Medical Corps since he'd come to France in July 1915. At the time of his death he was with the 55th Field Ambulance under the command of the 18th Division. Field Ambulances were not vehicles but mobile medical units consisting of about ten officers and over two hundred men with responsibilities ranging from stretcher bearer to surgeon. There's a informative article about Field Ambulances on the Long Long Trail site .
We don't know what role Perry fulfilled but we do know that in September 1917 he was awarded a Military Medal 'for bravery in the field'. We don't know how or when he was wounded but we do know that he died of wounds in a base hospital in Le Havre.


SON OF
SIR GEORGE WHITEHEAD, BT.
AND LADY WHITEHEAD
DEUS VULT

LIEUTENANT GEORGE WILLIAM EDENDALE WHITEHEAD


George Whitehead and his observer, Reginald Griffiths were artillery spotting over Lauwe when they were shot down at 7.50 am on the morning of 17 October 1917. The town was still in German hands and the two airmen were buried together by the Germans in a communal grave. It was five years before their bodies were exhumed and reinterred in adjacent graves in Harlebeke New British Cemetery.
I am always dubious about the parents who used their own status as a personal inscription on their son's headstone, as the Whiteheads have done. But then you see the final words - Deus vult, God wills it - and you have to acknowledge that whether the family were rich or poor, grand or humble, whether the words were written in Latin or plain English, the pain was as great for the Whiteheads as it was for any of the many families who chose 'Thy will be done', or 'God knows best' as their son's inscription.
And the Whiteheads lost both their sons. James Whitehead, the eldest son, died of war related illness on 3 March 1919 meaning that, at his death, the title went to Sir George's younger brother.
So, having confessed to prejudice about people conferring status on their sons by referring to themselves, I noticed that Reginald Grifffiths' headstone had exactly the same type of inscription and the same Latin tag:

Son of Owen
And Hetty Griffiths
Aberavon, S. Wales
Deus vult

The parents must have conferred and this I found rather touching since the Whiteheads and the Griffiths came from different worlds. It is enough to tell you that the seven members of the Whitehead family - and their seven servants - lived in Wilmington Hall, Dartford, Kent a house with six drawing rooms and eleven bedrooms, whilst the nine members of the Griffiths household lived in Aberavon, Glamorganshire in a six-roomed house that was also their shop - Owen Griffiths and Sons Fruiterer, Fish, Game and Poultry Dealer.
After the war, the Whiteheads sold Wilmington Hall and moved to Oxford. Sir George died in 1930 and left a bequest of £10,000 to the University to be known as the James Hugh Edendale Whitehead and the George William Edendale Whitehead Memorial Fund for the promotion of the study of history and/or the literature of England and her colonies.


WHAT PEACEFUL HOURS
WE ONCE ENJOYED
HOW SWEET THE MEMORY STILL

PRIVATE JOHN SHARP


John Sharp's inscription comes from verse three of the hymn, O For a Closer Walk With God, by the poet and hymn writer William Cowper (1731-1800):

What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void
The world can never fill,

For John Sharp's family the words must have perfectly encapsulated their feelings - even though Cowper was not mourning the loss a loved one but the loss of God's love, which he felt he had forfeited through his own unworthiness.
Sharp came from Milesmark, a mining community near Dunfermline. His mother died in 1901 when he was five. His father, Frank Sharp, was a coal miner and it's possible to assume that John Sharp was too.
Sharp served with the 1st Battalion Cameron Highlanders, enlisting in 1916 when he became nineteen. He was a casualty of the opening day of the Battle of the Selle, 17 October 1918, in which the battalion took part as part of the 1st Division.


HAPPY HAVE WE MET
HAPPY HAVE WE BEEN
HAPPY DID WE PART
HAPPY MEET AGAIN

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR HANCOCK


This is a version of the final toast given at Masonic Lodge meetings. I haven't been able to discover whether either Arthur Hancock or his father, Thomas, a dairyman, were Freemasons but this is definitely a Masonic toast.
Hancock began the war in the Royal Navy and was entitled to the 1915 Star. At some point he was commissioned into the Machine Gun Corps, where he served with the 50th Battalion MGC (Infantry), part of the 50th Division, in turn part of General Rawlinson's Fourth Army.
During the period known as the Pursuit to the Selle, 9-11 October 1918, the Allied armies pushed the Germans back almost ten miles towards the River Selle, where they decided to make a stand. The Battle of the Selle opened at zero hour, 05.10, on 17 October, a day of dense mist which greatly complicated the situation.
Hancock was in A Company, of which the war diary records that their situation "had been very difficult". Ordered to cover the left flank of the 149th Infantry Brigade, they encountered very heavy shelling, causing many casualties, "including Lt. Hancock killed".
News of his death reached his home town, Liverpool, and five days later notices from family and friends began to appear in the Liverpool papers: from his 'chum' Ernest Waters with whom he had served in the navy; from his brother, Tom, serving in Egypt, and from Lillian:

Hancock - October 17, killed in action, Second Lieut. Arthur Hancock, M.G.C. My hero - Always remembered by his sorrowing Fiancee Lillian and all at 20 Vandyke Street.
LIVERPOOL ECHO 24 October 1918


WITH THE VISION SPLENDID
HE SHALL SMILE BACK
AND NEVER KNOW REGRET

SECOND LIEUTENANT ANDREW RUSSELL BENNET


Here - or hereafter - you shall see it ended,
This mighty work to which your souls are set;
If from beyond - then, with the vision splendid,
You shall smile back and never know regret.

John Oxenham (the pseudonym for the popular and prolific poet William Arthur Dunkerley 1852-1941) originally wrote this verse for his poem 'Christs All! Our Boys Who Have Gone to the Front'. Here he assures those who are fighting that:

You are all christs in this your self surrender, -
True sons of God in seeking not your own.

Oxenham then repeated the verse in a poem he wrote later, which was called 'The Vision Splendid', which was published in a collection of verse of the same name. The thrust of this poem is that those who are fighting have redeemed the world from the selfishness and sin into which it had fallen:

O, not in vain has been your great endeavour;
For, by your dyings, Life is born again,
And greater love hath no man tokened ever,
Than with his life to purchase Life's high gain.

What is the 'vision splendid'? It's that time when all the people of earth shall come together as one to worship God, as envisaged in the Book of Revelation 7:9-10:

After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;
And cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.

Mrs Agnes Bennet, Andrew Bennet's widowed mother, chose his inscription. To be able to envisage that your son had fought not just for victory but to contribute to the coming together of all mankind must have brought her comfort - enough comfort to cope with the fact that twelve days after Andrew's death her only other son Alexander died of wounds?
Andrew Bennet was an observer with 82 Squadron. The squadron flew Armstrong Whitworth FK8s on artillery spotting and photo reconnaissance duties. Bennet and his pilot, Captain Humphrey Flowers, were shot down over Ledeghem, some sources say in aerial combat, others by ground fire as no German fighter claimed a corresponding kill that day.


THIS GRAVE WAS VISITED
BY HIS PARENTS
SUNDAY SEPT. 30TH 1923
R.I.P.

CORPORAL THOMAS MCBRIDE


If Thomas McBride's headstone says that his parents visited his grave in September 1923 it means that his permanent headstone hadn't yet been erected since there was still time to have this statement carved on it. This means that five years after McBride's death his grave was still only marked by a temporary wooden cross. It's a good illustration of the the massive task that the War Graves Commission had undertaken.
McBride had originally been buried with twenty-six other members of his battalion in Quiery-la-Motte. Their bodies were all exhumed and re-buried in Orchard Dump Cemetery in June 1921 but their graves were not marked with permanent headstones until two years later.
There is no evidence for this but I'm going to suggest that McBride's parents made their visit to his grave under the auspices of one of the charitable organisations that offered free visits to the battlefields for families who would not otherwise have been able to afford it. My assumption that the family would not have been able to afford it is based on the fact that in the 1911 census John McBride, Thomas's father, was a cotton piecer in a cotton mill. This meant that he mended the broken threads during spinning. In 1911, fifteen-year-old Thomas was a scavenger in a cotton mill, someone who cleaned up the cotton fluff that accumulated under the machinery. Travelling on the continent was expensive, complicated and very rare for those without access to money. I think the family would have used an organization like the St Barnabas Society.
Strictly speaking, Thomas McBride's parents, John and Ellen McBride, did not visit his grave in 1923. Ellen McBride died before 1901. It was his father and his stepmother, Mary Jane, who came.


HE WAS A PRISONER
DEATH SET HIM FREE

PRIVATE JAMES GILES CROSS


Private Cross's wife means this literally; James Cross was a prisoner of war and death did set him free. Usually when inscriptions talk about the freedom of death they mean that the dead person has been set free from the cares of this world:

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
ADONAIS Percy Bysshe Shelley

But this is not what Evelyn Cross meant, her husband had escaped captivity by dying.
Cross died of pneumonia in a German hospital in Hautmont. The town had been in German hands since the earliest days of the war and wasn't captured by the British until 8 November. James Cross had been in German hands since the 16 April 1918.
Cross served with the 1st Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment. On the evening of the 12/13th April 1918 the battalion went into the front line in the Wytschaete Sector. The war diary gives up at this point and says that the ensuing period, 12-
16 April, is best described by reproducing verbatim the official account of the operation sent by Brigadier-General GH Gater to the Higher Command.
The battalion were to be responsible for holding the line from Bogaert Farm to Stanyzer Cabaret cross roads. On the night of the 15/16th this was extended to Scott Farm. At 4.30 am on the morning of the 16th the Germans subjected the line to a heavy and continuous bombardment until 5.45 am before attacking under cover of dense fog. They succeeded in breaking the line. The British found it impossible to tell what was going on until the Germans were at close quarters. However, the Lincolnshires stood firm,

"and fought it out to the last. No officer, platoon or individual surrendered and the fighting was prolonged until 6.30 am. ... The withdrawal was covered by the Adjutant, Captain McKellar, with revolver and bombs, firing into the enemy at close quarters."

James Cross was one of the many missing after the engagement. Eventually his wife was informed through the offices of the International Red Cross that he had been taken prisoner. His death on 13 October from pneumonia was probably a result of influenza.

[Gater's report is in turn reproduced virtually verbatim in The History of the Lincolnshire Regiment 1914-1918.]


NO KING OR SAINT
HAD TOMB SO PROUD
AS HE WHOSE FLAG
BECOMES HIS SHROUD

SAPPER JAMES JOSEPH LEONARD


This inscription comes from a very patriotic poem called Nationality, written by Thomas Osborne Davis (1814-1845). Verse one declares that a nation's voice is a solemn thing and should be respected. Verse two states that a nation's flag, unfurled in the cause of Liberty, should be guarded "till Death or Victory" - with the assurance that anyone who dies defending it will have an honoured grave:

No saint or king has tomb so proud,
As he whose flag becomes his shroud.

Verse three insists that God gave nations the right to defend themselves with the sword against a foreign yoke.

'Tis freedom from a foreign yoke,
'Tis just and equal laws,
Which deal unto the humblest folk,
As in a noble cause.

So far so good, this is England fighting for her liberty against the fear of a German 'yoke'. Except that it isn't. The nation entitled to her voice, entitled to just and equal laws, is Ireland, and the foreign yoke belongs to England.
Thomas Osborne Davis, the author of the poem, was an Irish nationalist whose nationalism was based on shared Irish culture and language rather than on Catholic Emancipation or full blown independence and republicanism. He was in any case a protestant, as were Charles Stuart Parnell and Roger Casement, two other Irish nationalist figures.
The Leonards were a Roman Catholic family from Brackaville, a rural community near Coalisland, Co. Tyrone. Who knows what the family's politics were but throughout the twentieth century Coalisland was an IRA stronghold. However, many Irish people were prepared to fight for Britain because they believed John Redmond who told them that English gratitude would ensure they were rewarded afterwards with independence. And many Irish people fought for Britain because they didn't want independence.
It's not possible to tell what motivated James 'Joe' Leonard to enlist - money, adventure, escape, principle. He was an early volunteer, his medal card shows that he was entitled to the 1915 Star having arrived in France on 29 September 1915. This was well before the British suppression that followed the Dublin Easter Rising in April 1916.
Leonard served throughout the war with the 157th Field Company Royal Engineers, part of the 16th (Irish) Division. The war diary exists and shows that in October 1918 the Company were based in Auchy constructing pontoons for crossing the Heutedeule Canal and attempting to stop a leak or a 'cut' in the canal bank. The diary for 13 October records:

"No. 3 [Section] in canal cut .Sprs Leonard and Dunnington killed and the stopping of the leak was not successful."

It sounds as though there was some kind of accident in which Leonard and Dunnington were killed. There is certainly no mention of any enemy action that day. By the way, the War Graves Commission gives the date of his death as the 12 October, the war diary as the 13th.
Mrs Sarah Ann Leonard, Sapper Leonard's mother, chose his inscription - or did she? In the 1901 census neither parent were said to have been able to read.

May Ireland's voice be ever heard,
Amid the world's applause!
And never be her flag-staff stirred,
But in an honest cause!
May freedom be her very breath,
Be justice ever dear;
And never an ennobled death
May son of Ireland fear!
So the Lord God will ever smile,
With guardian grace, upon our isle.
NATIONALITY verse four


HE JOINED THE FORCES
AT 15 1/2 YEARS
AND DID HIS DUTY
TILL DEATH

RIFLEMAN ALBERT KNOWLES


Born in January 1899, Albert Knowles would have been fifteen and a half in July 1914. By implication therefore he joined up immediately on the outbreak of war. in August 1914. He was far too young. In theory you had to be eighteen before you could join the army and nineteen before you could serve abroad but in practice, in the early days of the war, if you said you were nineteen, and looked nineteen, the army took your word for it. Much is made of recruiting sergeants wilfully turning a blind eye to obviously underage boys but in fact, the army didn't want weaklings.: you needed to be able to march long distances, carrying your own equipment. But as I said, if you looked nineteen the army took your word for it.
Knowles obviously managed to convince the authorities. His medal card shows that he went to France in September 1915 when he would have been just over sixteen and a half. It was January 1918 before he became nineteen, by this time he had been in the army for over three years.
In March 1918 his eldest brother, Ernest, serving with the 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards, died of wounds. Six months later, on 12 October, Albert was killed as the 16th Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps tried to cross the River Selle.
For all that the end of the war was only a month away, for all that the Germans were already putting out peace feelers, their soldiers were still fiercely resisting allied attacks so that by noon on the 12th the 16th Battalion, which had been charged with taking the line of the Le Cateau-Solesmes railway and the surrounding high ground, had been forced to withdraw 'disorganised' with very high casualties.
Albert Knowles may have deceived the army authorities about his age but his mother put that right on his headstone. There's a sense of pride in her choice of words, not so much pride in his deception but in the fact that even though he was only fifteen he had wanted to do his duty, and that he continued to do it "till death". There is no inscription on his brother Ernest's headstone.

[Richard Emden's 'Boy Soldiers of the Great War' is the book to read on this subject.]


IN FOREIGN SOIL SHE LAYS
AND IN THAT RICH EARTH
A RICHER DUST CONCEALS

SISTER SOPHIA HILLING


This might not be exactly what Rupert Brooke wrote but when Mrs Sarah Hilling chose this inscription for her daughter she had Brooke's poem, The Soldier, firmly in her mind:

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam ...

At one time this was the most famous poem in England and Brooke, who died in 1915 on his way to take part in the Gallipoli Campaign, the most famous war poet.
I wish it had been possible to find out more about Sophia Hilling - most records give her name as Sophie, including the War Graves Commission, but the record of her baptism and all the census returns give it as Sophia.
She was born in Deptford, South London. Her father, Samuel Hilling, was a rag cutter, someone who cut up rags for paper making. He died before 1901 when her mother, Sarah Hilling, was supporting herself as a charwoman. Sixteen-year-old Sophia was a general domestic servant. Ten years later she was a sick nurse working at the Birmingham Workhouse Infirmary.
According to the information her mother gave the Commission, Sophia Hilling had had four year's war service before she died. There is no information as to where but in 1917 she was awarded the Royal Red Cross Medal (Second Class) for "bravery, coolness and devotion to duty whilst on active service". At this time she was working at the Welsh Metropolitan War Hospital, Whitchurch, Cardiff where soldiers received both orthopaedic and psychiatric treatment.
By October 1918 Hilling was in France working at one of the general hospitals in Trouville, France when she fell ill. On 12 October E Maud McCarthy, Matron-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders, recorded in her official diary:

"Wired Matron-in-Chief, War Office, and reported to DGMS that Sister S. Hilling, QAIMNS reported on the "Dangerously ill" list with pneumonia."

And then the next day:

"Wired Matron-in-Chief, War Office, and reported to DGMS that Sister S. Hilling, QAIMNS on the "Dangerously ill" list yesterday, died at 10.30 p.m."

[E Maud McCarthy's war diary is a wonderful resource. It has been transcribed by Scarlet Finders and can be read here.]


ENLISTED AUG. 1914

SECOND LIEUTENANT HUGH MERCER DAVIES


Hugh Davies's wife, Laura, chose to make a very bald statement on her husband's grave - but it speaks volumes. Her husband was a volunteer, and a very early volunteer at that. He had joined up in the first month of the war, August 1914, had survived for over four years and then been killed in its last month, October 1918. Fate is cruel.
Davies had enlisted as a private, served in Egypt from November 1914, and then in Gallipoli. He had risen through the ranks until in June 1916 he was a sergeant. That month the London Gazette recorded his award of the Distinguished Conduct Medal:

"For exceptional ability and good work. He turned out a large quantity of grenades to meet an urgent demand."

In September 1917 Davies was commissioned into the Royal Engineers. He served with the 430th Field Company and was killed on 12 October during the Second Battle of Le Cateau, the first battle having taken place in August 1914.
On the day of his death sappers had been at work around Le Cateau diverting a railway line, filling craters and trying to fix up a water supply. There's no evidence as to what Davies had been doing but as a plumber in civilian life it would seem logical that he was involved in the latter.


HE SLEEPS
WITH THE UNRETURNING BRAVE

SECOND LIEUTENANT HAROLD EDWARD PRICE


It may have been relatively unusual and poetic to describe the war dead as the unreturning brave but it was not unknown. A handful of British towns dedicated their war memorials to them and Australian newspapers used the phrase to head their casualty lists. Nor was it a new phrase: Lord Byron, writing about the dead of the Battle of Waterloo (1815) described how:

... Ardennes waves above them her green leaves,
Dewy with Nature's tear drops, as they pass
Grieving, if aught inanimate e're grieves
Over the unreturning brave.

American Civil War songs and poems often used the phrase:

O my heart is filled with love
For the unreturning brave

Another song ends each verse with a reference to eyes dimming and lips quivering, or hearts aching and tears flowing, orphans watching and widows listening, for the unreturning brave. And John W Forney's poem, The Men Who Fell at Baltimore, a skirmish between a secessionist crowd and Union troops in April 1861 talks about those who,

"... fell for right at Baltimore.
As over every honoured grave
Where sleeps the "Unreturning Brave,"
A mother sobs, a young wife moans,
A father for a lost one groans ... "

Hugh Price was the son of Daniel and Kate Price of Whitley Bay, Northumberland. His mother signed for his inscription.
Price served with the 3rd Battalion Prince of Wales West Yorkshire Regiment. However, at the time of his death he was attached to the 1st/7th Battalion the Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment. He was killed in action on 11 October 1918 when the 49th Division took the village of St Aubert where he is buried.

"Zero hour 9 am. An advance of 1,000 yards was made the Bn. passing through the Canadians who were holding the line. Towards noon the enemy counter-attacked with tanks & we withdrew 500 yds to Sunken Road ... where enemy were held for the night. During the night 11th-12th the enemy withdrew ... "

On the 12 October the German Government followed up their first note to President Woodrow Wilson of 3 October with a second note expressing their willingness to seek an armistice. The war had a month to run.


IN LOVING MEMORY
OF OUR ONLY CHILD DAVID
MOTHER AND FATHER

PRIVATE JOHN DAVID MCLAREN


There is a world of pathos in this dignified inscription. David McLaren's parents have neither enhanced nor disguised their grief with either flowery imagery or a profound quotation - they have just made the simple statement that he was their only child.
John David McLaren was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia - New Scotland - Canada on 19 April 1895. Scottish families had been congregating here since the Highland Clearances of the late eighteenth century. He enlisted in March 1916 just before his twenty-first birthday, giving his occupation as 'clerk'.
After seven months basic training he left for Britain in October 1916 and underwent almost twelve months further training before going to France on 19 August 1918. He joined his unit - the 2nd Canadian Machine Gun Battalion - in the field on 1 September. From then until the time of his death forty-one days later, the Canadians were continually involved in fighting that saw them cross the Canal du Nord and take the town of Cambrai. McLaren died on 11 October of wounds received that day. His casualty record card gives the details - 'GSW L shldr legs hand' - gun shot wounds in his left shoulder, legs and hand.


WE FALL TO RISE
ARE BAFFLED TO FIGHT BETTER
SLEEP TO WAKE

CAPTAIN WILLIAM BOYD JACK MC


The 5th Leicestershire Regiment's war diary for Friday 11 October 1918 covers almost three pages whereas at some points in the war one page would have done for at least five days.
Starting at Zero hour - 05.30 - the passing hours and in some cases half hours chart the ebb and flow of the fighting. At 10.45 the Germans retook Retheuil Farm and at 11.00, "covering his advance with very heavy machine gun fire", they retook the Chateau they had lost an hour earlier. It was also at 11.00 that "The MO Capt WB Jack RAMC [was] killed while attending the wounded with great courage".
Captain Jack had gone out to attend to a machine-gunned stretcher bearer when he was hit himself. For a little while it was too dangerous for anyone to go out to him but when the German fire slackened he was brought. He died a few hours later.
William Boyd Jack was born and educated in Scotland but in 1911 was practicing medicine in Kendal, Westmorland. Married and with three children, he joined up in March 1917, spent six months with the 1/3 North Midland Field Ambulance before being appointed Medical Officer to the 5th Battalion Leicestershire Regiment. He was with them for the last year of the war, throughout all the fierce fighting around the St Quentin Canal where he was awarded a Military Cross for his actions at Pontruet on 24 September 1918.
Mrs WB Jack chose his inscription. It comes from verse three of Robert Browning's Epilogue to his final volume of poetry, Asolando, which was published on the day Browning died:

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

It is generally thought that Browning summarised own attitude to life in this verse: how adversity never defeated him, how he always believed that whatever happened was for the right, and that at the end of our lives on earth we would awake to a new life in heaven. It's a very positive inscription but I look at verse one and wonder how positive Mrs Jack felt:

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,
When you set your fancies free,
Will they pass to where - by death, fools think, imprisoned -
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,
- Pity me?


TO MEMORY DEAR
VENGEANCE IS MINE
I WILL REPAY SAITH THE LORD

RIFLEMAN FRANK EDMUND BROWN


This is a difficult inscription and on one level I am surprised the War Graves Commission accepted it. It was chosen by Rifleman Brown's mother, Henrietta, and it sounds as though she's saying that the Lord took vengeance on the Germans and ensured they lost the war as a punishment both for starting it and for killing her son.
Considering the circumstances of her son's death you can imagine that she had vengeance in her heart. Frank Brown was wounded on 30 November 1917 when the Germans made an attack on the trenches near Bourlon. For a long time it seemed as though they would break through the British lines but the Queen's Westminster Rifles hung on until the situation stabilised. They were relieved at 1 pm on 1 December by which time the regiment had suffered 117 casualties of which 25 were missing. Frank Brown was among the missing. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he died a month later in German captivity. Perhaps his mother assumed they had done nothing to save his life.
It's not possible to tell how Brown was treated but he died in Valenciennes, about 40km behind the front line, which would indicate that he was being cared for in a German medical unit and shows that he had not been shipped straight back to Germany to die in a prisoner-of-war camp.
Brown was buried by the Germans in Valenciennes, his body exhumed and reburied in February 1922. The War Graves Commission's 'concentration' records ask what evidence of identity there has been and the answer on the form is 'plate on coffin'. I find this very interesting, especially as I'm not sure that many British soldiers were buried in coffins. It would indicate that Brown and his fellow British casualties were buried with the same dignity as German soldiers.
So, did Mrs Brown have vengeance in her heart or was she more aware of the context of the words than many of us are today?

"Bless them which persecute you: bless and curse not. Rejoice with them that do rejoice and weep with them that weep. Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits. Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good."
ROMANS 12:14-21
New Testament King James Version


WE DO NOT FORGET HIM
NOR DO WE INTEND
WE THINK OF HIM DAILY
AND WILL TO THE END

PRIVATE ROBERT LONGDEN


Robert Longden's mother composed an unusually emphatic inscription for her son. Whereas other families might say, 'Gone but not forgotten', or, 'Too dearly loved to be forgotten', Mrs Longden - Longden's father died early in 1914 - his sister, Jessie, and his two half-sisters, Minnie and Nellie, state firmly their intention to think of Robert daily until the day they die.
I sometimes think that individuals get lost in the general lament for 'the dead' of the First World War. An inscription like this reminds us of the burden of grief so many families carried with them for the rest of their lives. Mrs Longden, although by the time she chose the inscription she had remarried and was Mrs Peatfield, died in 1962.
Longden was not entitled to the 1914-15 Star; from his age I would imagine that he went abroad no earlier than July 1916, which is when he became 19. He was killed on 11 October 1918 in an attack on the village of Regncourt. The war diary reports how early in the attack two serjeants and ten men were killed by enfilade fire whilst sheltering in a ditch. It's possible that one of these men was Longden. In March 1920, Longen's body, along with that of one serjeant, one lance corporal and seven other men were recovered from an isolated burial site and reburied in Busigny Communal Cemetery Extension.


WHAT HAPPY HOURS
WE ONCE ENJOYED
HOW SWEET THE MEMORY STILL

PRIVATE IRWIN PERCY LEHMAN


Private Lehman's inscription comes from a popular piece of memorial verse, which can still be found in newspaper In Memoriam Columns in 2017:

What happy hours
We once enjoyed
How sweet the memory still
But they have left an aching void
The world can never fill

I don't know who composed the lines but they made their first newspaper appearance in January 1896. Interestingly, unlike much verse of this type, the words make absolutely no attempt to console or ameliorate the family's grief by referring to eternal life or meeting again. Lehman's inscription may not actually get as far as mentioning the aching void but the implication is there.
Irwin Percy Lehman was twenty-four when he was conscripted under the Canadian Military Service Act on 14 January 1918. On 16 April he embarked from Halifax, arriving in Liverpool on the 28th. The new arrivals were kept segregated for two weeks in case they were carrying contagious diseases. The day after they were released Lehman went down with mumps and was hospitalised for the next twenty days.
On 14 September he arrived in France and on 2 October he joined the 21st Battalion in the trenches on the Hindenburg Line. On 11 October the battalion took part in the attack on the village of Avesnes-le-Sec where they met with severe resistance.

"Zero hour had been set for 0900 hours. From 0530 hours onward the enemy shelled the assembly area intermittently with HE and Gas but few casualties were sustained. The hostile shelling had no effect upon the jump off at 0900 hours. ... The enemy's retaliation was prompt, and his machine gun fire from the right caused many casualties in the first thirty minutes of the advance, but the attack continued unbroken until the advance of the whole line, right and left, was held up on the high ground south-west of Avesnes-le-Sec. The enemy's counter measure was an attack of Tanks, and the 21st Canadian Battalion after inflicting casualties, was forced to withdraw ... Fifty per cent of our Officers, NCOs and Lewis Gunners became casualties during the first half hour of the action."
21st Battalion Canadian Infantry War Diary 11 October 1918

Lehman was one of these casualties. He's buried in Niagara Cemetery, Iwoy, a battlefield cemetery where 156 of the 199 burials died on 11 October.


AND AFTER THE SUNSET
IN THE UNKNOWN NIGHT
JOY CANNOT CEASE
D.G.C. 5.4.16

PRIVATE DAVID GEOFFREY COLLINS


The initials at the bottom of the inscription are D.G.C. They are the initials of the casualty, David Geoffrey Collins, and since Collins' parents described him as a 'poet, botanist, mathematician and peace lover', this would suggest that Collins wrote the words himself - on 5 April 1916. I haven't been able to find anything else Collins wrote but his name is included on the Forgotten Poets of the First World War website.
Collins had an unusual upbringing. His father, Edwin Hyman Simeon Henry Collins, was a highly erudite man who spoke several languages and had a very original mind. Although his name is now unknown, he was quite well known at one time as the man who befriended the exiled Chinese nationalist leader, Sun Yatsen, and tried to help him get his work published in the English language. Edward Collins was even better known, however, as a radical educational thinker who believed fervently that children shouldn't begin formal edcation before they were nine or ten, that they should never be taught to read but should learn to read themselves when they were ready, and that all their lessons should be held outside at all times.
To Collins, the real object of education was not the acquisition of knowledge but the preparation of the mind to receive, assimilate and use knowledge. By this means children would acquire the ability to think and the power to express their thoughts and feelings in appropriate language, either spoken or written. Collins brought his children up according to these beliefs. He refused to let them go to school, which caused him to be prosecuted for child neglect. But Collins used the witness box to gain publicity for his ideas, claiming that his methods would make his children "more useful, more independent, more robust in character, better in physique and with greater powers of assimilating knowledge" than other children.
David was obviously something of a prodigy and by his late teens was teaching in a prep school. He was called up when he was 18 and sent to France in August 1918, just after his nineteenth birthday. He served with the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards and died three months later of wounds received in the capture of Delsaux Farm, a German strong point.
David Collins' headstone is inscribed with the Star of David. His father, who had been born a Jew, and had trained and practised as a rabbi, had then preached for some time as a Christian Unitarian minister before returning fully to the Jewish faith. It was Edwin Collins who chose his son's inscription, using his son's own words to express his belief that death is not the end:

And after the sunset
In the unknown night
Joy cannot cease

[Much of the information for this post comes from Patrick Anderson's 'The Lost Book of Sun Yatsen and Edward Collins' Routledge 2017.


HE SLEEPS
THE SOUL, FROM EARTH'S CONTROL
RELEASED
SEES HEAVEN'S LIGHT

PRIVATE JAMES EDWARD ALLEN


They do not die
Who fall
At freedom's call
In battle for the right.

The conflict o'er,
They rest
On Honour's breast.
Victor's by virtue's might.

In hallowed grave
The brave,
'Neath sod or wave,
Strife o'er sleep after fight.

They do but sleep:
The soul,
From earth's control
Released, sees Heaven's light.

We are the dead,
Who, bound
By earthly round,
See not horizons bright.

They live in fame,
Above,
Begirt with love,
Precious in memory's sight.

This inscription is based on the fourth verse of the above poem, The Glorious Dead, which was written by someone called Joseph Turner. The only place I have found the poem is on a website featuring one hundred poets from the town of Walsall in Staffordshire. I don't have a copy, but I think it might have originally been published in 'Songs from the Heart of England, an anthology of Walsall poetry' edited by Alfred Moss and published by T Fisher Unwin in 1920.
According to the poem it is we the living who are dead since we are unable to see the bright horizons that those who died in freedom's cause, fighting for the right, can see.
The poem having such a limited geographical circulation, it shouldn't surprise you to learn that James Edward Allen was born and brought up in Walsall, the third of his parents' four sons. Father, Herbert Allen, who signed for the inscription, was a police constable. James and his older brother worked in the town's leather trade.
James attested in August 1916 when he was 17 and a half. He was on home service until October 1917 when he was posted to France where he served with the 1st/4th Battalion Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment. He was killed in action on the 11 October 1918, exactly one month before the end of the war, when the Duke of Wellington's took the town of Rieux-en-Canbresis. James is buried in the town, in Wellington Cemetery where the majority of the casualties come from the Wellington Regiment and were killed on 11 October.


TILL GABRIEL
SOUNDS THE LAST RALLY

PRIVATE JAMES BELL HARVEY MM


One of the symbols traditionally associated with the archangel Gabriel is a trumpet with which to sound the last rally - the trumpet call heralding the arrival of the Day of Judgement. Rally is a military word, used most particularly by the cavalry for a trumpet or bugle call sounded to recall the troops after a charge - to bring them home. Gabriel also calls people home, home to their father in heaven. In this way he is considered the messenger of man's salvation. This will be why Private Harvey's mother chose the words, the implication being that those who die fighting for their country are assured of salvation. Mrs Harvey will also be hoping that at the last rally, when she too is dead, she will be reunited with her son.
The inscription is taken from the last line of The Trumpeter, a song originally written in 1904 by J. Francis Barron, which became very popular during the First World War, especially after 1915 when it was recorded by John McCormack. In verse one the trumpeter sounds reveille to rouse the sleeping soldiers from their tents. In verse two he sounds the charge, and in verse three the rally.
It's an interesting song, interesting in that for all its popularity and stirring military associations it makes no concessions to the fact that wars kill people. In fact, in the often omitted last line of verse two the Trumpeter describes the aftermath of a charge as 'Hell'. In this he is echoing the words of William Tecumseh Sherman, the American Civil War Union general who famously said, "War is hell".
It's well worth listening to the song, which can be heard here. This is not McCormack's version, I don't know who is singing but it's rather more melodramatic than his version.
James Harvey, the son of a tram conductor in Glasgow, served with the 1st/2nd Lowland Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps and died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Boisleux-St Marc on 9 October 1918.

Trumpeter, what are you sounding now!
(Is it the call I'm seeking!)
"Lucky for you if you hear it all,
For my trumpet's but faintly speakin'.
I'm callin' 'em home - come home! come home!
Tread light o'er the dead in the valley.
Who are lyin' around face down to the ground,
And they can't hear me sound the 'Rally'.
But they'll hear it again in a grand refrain,
When Gabriel sounds the last 'Rally',"


PEACE WITH HONOUR

LIEUTENANT JOHN CARMICHAEL YULE MC


It seems ironic that someone called Lieutenant Yule should die of wounds on Christmas Day, but that is the case.
Yule had been at war since 23 August 1914 when, as a corporal serving with the 2nd Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, he arrived in France as part of the original British Expeditionary Force. On 7 May 1916, Yule, now a serjeant major, was commissioned into the 7th Battalion Gordon Highlanders "for service in the field".
He must have been a valuable man. Twice during attacks in 1917 he served as an acting captain whilst still only a second lieutenant. On the second occasion he was awarded a Military Cross:

"2nd Lt. (A./Capt.) John Yule, Gord. Highrs.
For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in an attack. When the Tanks on his front were disabled and his company was exposed to close range fire he rallied his men in a most critical situation, and by his skilful dispositions undoubtedly saved many casualties. He sent in a most valuable report to his commanding officer, and showed the greatest coolness and courage throughout."
London Gazette 22 July 1918

In December 1917, the 7th Battalion were in France. They came out of the line on the 16th and marched to Fremicourt where they spent the next six days drilling, bathing and practicing bayonetting, rapid loading, wiring, bombing and bolt drill. On the afternoon of the 22nd they moved to Loch Camp, just west of Fremicourt. On the 23rd the war diary reported:

"Between 5.30 pm and 6.30 pm several enemy aeroplanes dropped bombs on Fremicourt and on the camp, wounding Lt. Yule, and four other ranks."

Lieutenant Yule died in a nearby Casualty Clearing Station at Grevillers two days later.
His wife, Jane Neilson Yule, chose his inscription - 'Peace with honour'. The phrase means peace secured or maintained without loss of national honour. It was used by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1878 when he and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, returned from the Congress of Berlin to a hero's welcome. Cheering crowds accompanied Disraeli and Salisbury from the train station back to Downing Street from where Disraeli addressed the crowd, telling them:

"Lord Salisbury and myself have brought you back peace, I hope, with honour, which may satisfy our Sovereign and tend to the welfare of the country."

It became a famous tag, not just for the Treaty of Berlin but for other international treaties, especially the Munich Agreement of 1938, which bought Europe a valuable year of peace before the outbreak of the Second World War. For Mrs Yule, her husband had secured his own peace - his death - with honour - by dying for his country
The War Graves Commission's records state that Yule served with the 2nd Battalion Gordon Highlanders but not only is Yule mentioned by name in the 7th Battalion's war diary but the 2nd Battalion were in Italy at the time of his death.






HOPE

RIFLEMAN WILFRED SMITH


Wilfred Smith died of wounds in Palestine on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1917. I can't tell when he received those wounds but it was most probably between 21 November and 8 December in the severe fighting that led to the Ottoman armies abandonment of Jerusalem, which General Allenby entered - on foot to show his respect for the Holy City - on 11 December.
What can Smith's parents have meant by their choice of the single word 'Hope' for Wilfred's inscription? They could have meant any number of things but I am taking a gamble that they were referring to GF Watts' most famous painting, which went by the name of 'Hope'. The painting didn't disappear into private ownership but was donated by Watts to the Tate Galley, in other words, to the nation. Here it could be seen by the general public and once it became possible to make cheap reproductions of paintings, it became the most popular of all prints. Interestingly, Nelson Mandela apparently had a print in his prison cell, and Barak Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, was inspired by Watts' painting.
Whatever the word 'hope' might conjure up for us today, I don't think it would be Watts' melancholy image of a dejected, blindfolded woman, sitting on a golden sphere in a swirling mist of blues and greens. The woman is plucking at the single remaining string of a broken lyre, her head bent close to try and catch the sound. As GK Chesterton said, the painting might as well have been called 'Despair'.
Yet perhaps this is what it's all about. We are alone in the universe, we don't know where we're going or what is going to happen to us but it is the human condition to hope, however slender the thread. By the end of the nineteenth century many people wondered where the world was going. As the old certainties faded - faith, the belief in progress, mankind's place in the great scheme of things - what would replace them? There wasn't much reason to hope but if we tried we might catch the faintest reverberations to encourage us.
And if people were discouraged by the situation in the world at the end of the nineteenth century, how much worse it must have been during the war years as Empires clashed and casualty figures mounted and hundreds of thousands of young men - including Wilfred Smith - were killed.
Many families chose inscriptions reflecting the Christian's "sure and certain hope of the Resurrection of the body unto eternal life". But Watts' painting doesn't reflect that kind of hope, and nor, I think, does Mr and Mrs Smith's inscription. Hope is something human's cling on to but there is no certainty about it.





HIS FATE AND FAME
SHALL BE AN ECHO
AND A LIGHT UNTO ETERNITY

SERGEANT JAMES GORE


Shelley's Adonais, his Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821), is not an unusual source for personal inscriptions but people tend to choose line 344: 'He hath awakened from the dream of life', or line 352, 'He has outsoared the shadow of our night'. James Gore's inscription comes from the last four lines of the first verse:

Say: 'With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!'

The inscription was chosen, or at least signed for, by Gore's younger brother John. The family lived in Liverpool where Gore had been born and where in 1911 James was working as a building lift attendant. However, at some point he must have gone to Canada because when he attested on 6 November 1916 he was working as a steward in Bellevue, Ontario, Canada.
Gore served with the 19th Battalion Canadian Infantry and arrived in France on 30 November 1917. He was killed in action on 9 October 1918 but that is not a day that the battalion were in action. In fact, all the war diary says for the 9th is that the companies were notified to move into new positions and that the move was achieved by 11.20 am. At 5.30 pm the battalion moved again to an area NE of Escaudouvees in preparation for an attack at 6 am the following morning, 10 October.
By the end of the 11th the battalion casualties amounted to one officer missing, four wounded and 139 other ranks either killed or wounded. Gore is the only person in the 19th Battalion to have died on the 9th - and it's not that he died of wounds in a hospital behind the lines because Sains-les-Marquion was a front line burial ground. His death was just part of the normal, unremarkable, wastage of war.


"LET ALL THE ENDS
THOU AIM'ST AT BE
OF THY COUNTRY'S, THY GOD'S
AND TRUTH'S"

SECOND LIEUTENANT HORACE NICKSON ELLIS MC


Horace Ellis's mother chose a quotation from Shakespeare's Henry VIII for her son's inscription. In the play, the time has come for Thomas Cromwell to say farewell to his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey. To Cromwell, Wolsey has been a good, noble and true master. But Wolsey has some advice for him - "fling away ambition: by that sin fell the angels":

Be just and fear not:
Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,
Thy God's, and truth's; then if thou fall'st,
O Cromwell,
Thou fall'st a blessed martyr!

For all their current obscurity, one wouldn't have to have known Shakespeare to know these lines. They featured in dictionaries of quotations, as mottos for newspapers, as dictation exercises for school children, passages to be learnt off by heart for elocution lessons or to be written out in handwriting copy books.
Before the outbreak of war, Horace Ellis was a lithographic artist working for a general printers. He was also a member of a territorial regiment, the Duke of Lancaster's Own Yeomanry. Serving with them, he reached the rank of acting sergeant before he took a commission in the Machine Gun Corps, serving with the 6th Squadron. He was killed on 9 October 1918 in the Second Battle of Le Cateau. The first battle had taken place on 26 August 1914, twenty-two days after he outbreak of war, and was part of the British army's fighting withdrawal. The town remained in German hands until the last month of the war..


THE NIGHT IS DARK
AND I AM FAR FROM HOME
LEAD THOU ME ON

PRIVATE PERCY BEALEY


Nineteen-year-old Percy Bealey was killed in action in the taking of the village of Forceville on 8 October 1918. It must have been his father who chose his inscription. The name on the War Grave's form is Mrs Bealey, but Mrs Emma Bealey, his mother, died in 1912.
The inscription comes from the second line of John Henry Newman's famous hymn, Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom, which he wrote as a prayer. Newman longed for the consolation of Christian certitude in an age of doubt. The Bealey family, and the many other families who chose quotes from this hymn, longed for consolation in their grief and hoped to find it in God.

So long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still
Will lead me on;
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.


O GOD OF BATTLES

CORPORAL WILLIAM EDWIN WINDSOR


William Windsor's younger brother, George, chose his inscription from Shakespeare's Henry V. It comes from the first line of Henry's prayer on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt:

O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts;
Possess them not with fear; take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposed number
Pluck their hearts from them.

It's a prayer for bravery in the face of a forthcoming battle.
Corporal William Windsor, served with the 20th Battalion Manchester Regiment, part of the 25th Division, and took part in the capture of Beaurevoir on 5 October 1918. He died in German hands the next day and was buried with eleven other members of the 20th battalion in Beaurevoir Communal Cemetery German Extension - eleven men: one sergeant, five corporals and eight privates all buried in one grave marked by two crosses. It wasn't until 1924 that the bodies were exhumed and reburied in Beaurevoir British Cemetery.
Windsor was born in Openshaw and grew up nearby in Gorton, Manchester. His father was a horsekeeper for the corporation and Windsor himself was a dental technician. He volunteered before the introduction of conscription, entering a theatre of war, France, on 9 November 1915, which entitled him to the 1915 Star. The battalion moved to Italy in November 1917 and only returned to France three weeks before Windsor was killed.


I AM LISTENING LORD FOR THEE
WHAT HAST THOU TO SAY TO ME

SAPPER GEORGE JACKSON TREWHELLA


What does Mrs Ada Trewhella hope she is going to hear?

Master speak! They servant heareth,
Waiting for Thy gracious word.
Longing for Thy voice that cheereth;
Master, let it now be heard.
I am listening, Lord, for Thee;
What hast Thou to say to me?

She hopes to hear words that cheer, that bring her peace and that help her to accept God's will. Her husband, George Trewhella, is dead and she has been left with four daughters: Vera 12, Violet 11, Ada 7 and Lilian 3.

Master, speak! I do not doubt Thee,
Though so tearfully I plead;
Saviour, Shepherd! Oh! without Thee
Life would be blank indeed!
But I long for further light,
Deeper love, and clearer sight.

The words come from a hymn by Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-79).
George Trewhella worked for the Great Western Railway from 1902 until he was called up in May 1916. He was a plate layer who, according to his employer's reference, "gave satisfaction and proved himself a good workman".
Until January 1917 Trewhella was on home service but that month he went out to Salonika with the 267th Railway Coy. Royal Engineers. In August 1917, he spent a month in hospital with dysentery. Just over a year later he was admitted to hospital in Thessaloniki on 4 October suffering from influenza. He died the next day. The War Graves Commission's records say that he died of malaria but all his medical record cards say it was influenza.

Master, speak! I kneel before Thee,
Listening, longing, waiting still;
Oh, how long shall I implore Thee
Thy petition to fulfil!
Hast Thou not one word for me?
Must my prayer unanswered be?


ALWAYS THINKING OF YOU
MOTHER

PRIVATE ALBERT SPRACKLAN


Mrs Alice Spracklan has written a very simple but affecting personal inscription for her son, and by personal I mean personal. Albert had a father, Theodore, two brothers, William and Walter, and a sister Hilda but the message is from her, his mother - she just wants to tell him that she is always thinking of him.
The Spracklans lived in Five Bells, Watchet, Somerset where father was a carter on a farm and Albert was a farm labourer.
Unlike his brothers, Albert was not an early volunteer; he was not entitled to the 1914 or 1915 Star.. He served with the 1st/5th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment, which after service in Italy, returned to the Western Front on 11 September 1918. The war diary records that on 5 October:

"The Battn. marched in fighting order to Lormisset (4 miles) coming under occasional salvos of 5.9s whilst passing Grandcourt & suffering 5 casualties."

Later in the afternoon, the battalion received orders to take Beaurevoir, "which 2 Brigades had failed to take". At 18.40, zero hour, they set off following a creeping barrage but "A. Coy. from over keenness advanced into our barrage, followed by B Coy on the left. Although suffering several casualties the Coys were thus able to surprise a M.G. nest holding the embankment whilst still taking cover from our barrage."

The battalion pushed on, meeting little resistance except from isolated machine guns and snipers. Casualties by the end of the engagement were one officer seriously wounded and one killed by the British barrage, nine other ranks killed, forty-two wounded and one missing.
Spracklan is buried in Beaurevoir Communel Cemetery British Extension, a battlefield cemetery, where 35 of the total 82 casualties were killed, like him, on 5th October 1918.


RECTE FACIENDO SECURUS

LIEUTENANT ROBERT INGLIS MC


Recte faciendo securus - by acting justly you need fear nothing - is the Inglis family motto.
Robert and Isabella Inglis of Lovestone, Girvan, Ayrshire had ten children: four daughters and five sons. I think you might be able to tell where this is going. The eldest son, Alexander, was killed in South Africa in 1901, the youngest son, David, was killed in France on 19 December 1914, Charles, the third son, on 25 September 1915, and Robert, the second eldest, died of wounds on 5 October 1918. William was the only one of the five sons to survive.
Prior to the war, Robert Inglis had been joint factor with his father of the Bargany Estate in Ayrshire and a sergeant in the Scottish Horse Yeomanry. In September 1914, he was commissioned second lieutenant and after a period of service in England embarked on 1 January 1916 to join the Egyptian Expeditionary Force on the Suez Canal. In October 1916 the Scottish Yeomanry became the 13th Battalion Royal Highlanders (Black Watch) and in June 1918 the battalion was moved to France. Inglis was wounded on 3 October 1918 when 'C' Company co-operated with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in an attack on Le Catelet and Gouy. The battalion war diary mentions that "there was considerable sniping causing several casualties". Inglis died the next day.
Recte faciendo securus - by acting justly you need fear nothing. The reference of course is to salvation rather than to having nothing to fear in this earthly life.


SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS GREEN

PRIVATE WILFRED LEWIS SIMMONS


'See That My Grave is Kept Green' is a sentimental American song that was written by Gus Williams in 1876. A blues version by Blind Lemon Jackson, based on Williams' original song but with the final word of the line changed to 'clean' not 'green', is world famous among jazz aficionados. So much so that the words 'See that my grave is kept clean' appear on Jackson's headstone. However, Jackson's version dates from 1927 so it's Williams' song that Wilfred Simmons' father was quoting from in his son's inscription.
In the song, the singer asks that when he's dead his wife - I'm presuming - will keep his grave green:

When from the world and it's hopes I go,
Leaving for ever the scene
Though others are dear, ah, will you then
See that my grave's kept green.

By asking for his grave to be kept green, the singer is not just asking his wife not to forget him, "will you keep me, love, in remembrance", but also that his wife will dwell on the happy times:

Tell me you'll think of the happy past
Think of the joys we have seen.
This one little promise keep for me
See that my grave's kept green.

Wilfred Simmons was a student at the Hamilton Normal School when he enlisted in March 1916. He left Canada for England in October 1916, and in January 1917 went to France. He was attached to the Canadian Forestry Corps, in effect a military lumberjack unit, cutting down forests in England, Scotland and France to meet the army's insatiable demand for timber. Simmons served in the MT section.
In August 1918 he became ill with appendicitis. He was admitted to hospital on the 24 August and operated on. His condition seemed to improve but later he became very ill very suddenly and died of what his records say was 'recurrent appendicitis'.

Oh the days will come to you darling
When no more on earth I'll be.
Oh the days will come to you darling
When no more on earth I'll be seen.
One sweet little wish darling grant me
See that my grave's kept green,
See that my grave's kept green.


THIS EARTH HAS BORNE
NO SIMPLER, NOBLER MAN

LIEUTENANT COLONEL EDWARD HILLS NICHOLSON DSO AND BAR


This inscription comes from the epitaph Tennyson wrote for his friend General Gordon, killed in the Sudan in January 1885:

Warrior of God, man's friend, and tyrant's foe
Now somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan,
Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know
This earth has never born a nobler man.

It is difficult to overestimate Gordon's fame; he was one of the Victorian era's biggest military heroes, his achievements summarised on his memorial in St Paul's Cathedral:

To
Major General Charles George Gordon, C.B.
Who at all times and everywhere, gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God.
Born at Woolwich 28 January 1833
Slain at Khartoum 26 January 1885
He saved an Empire by his warlike genius, he ruled vast provinces with justice, wisdom, and power.
And lastly obedient to his sovereign's command, he died in the heroic attempt to save men, women and children from imminent and deadly peril.

Tennyson's epitaph for his friend does not feature either on his memorial in St Paul's or on his memorial in Westminster Abbey but in the Gordon Boys' National Memorial Home, Woking, one of a series of boys' homes established throughout the country in his memory .
Edward Hills Nicholson was educated at Winchester College, and is remembered on their commemorative website. On leaving school he joined the regular army and fought in South Africa. After a period of service in India, he was posted to the Western Front in June 1915, and then to Salonika that November where he remained until he returned to the Western Front in July 1918. He was killed in the taking of Richmond Copse, a German stronghold, on the morning of 4 October.
Edward Nicholson was one of seven children; his parents had four sons and three daughters. Bruce Nicholson was killed on 3 May 1917 and Victor two months later on 9 August. Biographies of all three brothers appear on page 132 of the fifth volume of the Marquis du Ruvigny's Roll of Honour. The fourth brother, Walter, died suddenly in 1943 whilst serving with the RAF Volunteer Reserve.
In April 1912, Nicholson married Ethel Frances in Bombay Cathedral. She chose his inscription.


HONOUR HAS COME BACK
AS A KING TO EARTH
AND PAID HIS SUBJECTS
WITH A ROYAL WAGE

RIFLEMAN CHARLES GEORGE COX


Whilst pre-twentieth century poets dominate the authors quoted in personal inscriptions, with Shakespeare and Tennyson taking the lead in what is admittedly my very unscientific analysis based on impression rather than statistics, Rupert Brooke and John Oxenham are the most popular of the twentieth-century. Neither of their reputations have survived very well but Brooke is definitely better known than Oxenham who few people have heard of these days.
Charles Cox's mother chose his inscription. It comes from Brooke's The Dead in which the poet claimed that by dying, by being prepared to sacrifice themselves, the dead have "made us rarer gifts than gold": the restoration of the high, moral qualities that mankind seemed to have lost before 1914. But now, thanks to them, "nobleness walks in our ways again; and we have come into our heritage".
It's a deeply traditional, romantic and heroic view of war, and of fighting and dying for your country, which has helped Brooke's reputation slide to its current lowly state. But that is how many people felt then. It is however arguable that Brooke, who was an intelligent and sensitive man, wouldn't have continued to feel like this, or write like this, had he lived. As it was he died on 23 April 1915.
Brooke might have changed his view but by the end of the war it was still that of many next-of-kin, like Mrs Cox; it brought them comfort.
Charles Cox, born and brought up in Newport, Monmouthshire, served with the 1st Battalion Monmouthshire Regiment. He died of wounds on 4 October 1918. The battalion were in action on the 3rd, he could have been wounded then, or on the 4th itself when the war diary recorded:

"Orders received for "C" Coy to dispatch a strong patrol (1 platoon) at 6.30 am as far into Montbrehain as possible, under cover of our bombardment. Patrol moved off at 6.30 am but was driven back by concentrated M.G. fire from front and both flanks. Only 3 returned unwounded. The remainder of the day was comparatively quiet with the exception of enemy shelling & MG fire ... "

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, that dying has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.


NOT SINCE HER BIRTH
HAS OUR EARTH SEEN
SUCH WORTH LOOSED UPON HER

LANCE SERGEANT ALEXANDER LORIMER RIDDELL


I'm not sure what was going on here but it can have never occurred to Alexander Riddell that ninety-nine years after his death somebody would be looking at his attestation form and wondering what he'd been playing at.
Alexander Lorimer Riddell, army service number 706968, son of George and Margaret Riddell of Rosehearty, Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, was born in Scotland in 1885. In 1906, aged 21, he went to Canada and settled in Nanamo, British Columbia where he worked as a building contractor. He enlisted in the Canadian Infantry in February 1916, sailed from Halifax in July and joined his unit in the field in February 1917. He was wounded at Vimy Ridge in April 1917 and returned to Rosehearty in December where he married Jean Arthur. After two weeks leave he returned to the front and died of wounds received in action on 3 October 1918.
That, in brief, is the life of Alexander Lorimer Ridddell. It all comes from information provided by Riddell's family for his entry in the Marquis du Ruvigny's Roll of Honour. So why, on his attestation form, does he claim that he was born in New South Wales, Australia on 16 August 1877, which would have made him 44 when he was only 33. And why does he say that his next of kin is his step-father, Donald Riddell of Lincoln, Nebraska, when he didn't have a step-father. I don't have an answer.
His wife chose his inscription. It comes from Rudyard Kipling's poem The Children and is a savage indictment of the society that led its innocent children into war. Yes Kipling was probably moved to write it by his grief for the death of his own son, John, who was killed in action at Loos on 26 September 1915, but there is much more to the poem than the self-pity that one unsympathetic critic has accused Kipling of. Riddell's inscription comes from verse 3:

They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us,
Those hours which we had not made good when the judgment o'ercame us.
They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning
Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning
Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour -
Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her,

Never before has our earth seen 'such worth', such wonderful, valuable people thrown away, wasted in this manner. There is nothing at all heroic or triumphalist about this poem, no attempt at all to make death in war glamorous:

Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.
The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:
Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption,
Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marvelling, closed on them.

But, as Kipling acknowledges, we can rail against what has happened all we like, we can regret it, we can try to make amends, but in the end what's the point because nothing can bring our children back. "Who shall return us our children?" he asks, and the answer, of course, is no one.


I SAW THE POWERS OF DARKNESS
PUT TO FLIGHT
I SAW THE MORNING BREAK

LIEUTENANT BRUCE GARIE THOMSON


These lines come from a poem called Between Midnight and Morning, which is often said to have been found on the body of an Australian soldier killed at Gallipoli; the implication being that the soldier wrote it. Well, a copy of the poem could easily have been found on the body of an Australian soldier but he most definitely didn't write it because it was written by Owen Seaman, the editor of Punch, and published in December 1914 in King Albert's Book. However, the Australian story gave the poem great traction and it became known all over the world.

You that have faith to look with fearless eyes
Beyond the tragedy of a world at strife,
And trust that out of night and death shall rise
The dawn of ampler life:

Rejoice, whatever anguish rend your heart,
That God has given you, for a priceless dower,
To live in these great times and have your part
In Freedom's crowning hour.

That you may tell your sons who see the light
High in the heavens, their heritage to take: -
"I saw the powers of darkness put to flight!
I saw the morning break!"

Thomson was born and raised in Kapunda, South Australia. He began his career as an accountant but enlisted in November 1914 soon after the outbreak of war. He served with the 3rd Field Ambulance in Gallipoli from June to December 1915 and then transferred to France in March 1916. In January 1918 he returned to England and in May 1918 was gazetted Flying Officer (Observer) in No. 3 Squadron Australian Flying Corps. The squadron flew RE8s on reconnaissance, bombing and artillery spotting duties.
At 6 am on the morning of the 3 October 1918, Lieut Thomson and Lieut Gould Taylor took off from the airfield at Bouvincourt and never returned. Three days later a machine was found crashed at Folemprise Farm, 1,000 yards NW of Estrees. Beside the plane were two graves marked with the information that these were the graves of two unidentified Australian airmen. The plane could be identified by its number as Thomson and Gould-Taylor's and the bodies identified as their's. A year later their bodies were exhumed and buried in adjacent graves in Prospect Hill British Cemetery.
Thomson's father chose his inscription.

Rejoice, whatever anguish rend your heart,
That God has given you, for a priceless dower,
To live in these great times and have your part
In Freedom's crowning hour.



NOR ENGLAND DID I KNOW
TILL THEN
WHAT LOVE I BORE TO THEE

PRIVATE BERNARD MANNING BROWNING


This is a rather poignant inscription for an Australian soldier who was born in England in 1888 and only went to Australia in 1912 when he was 24. It was chosen by his wife Phyllis. She too was born in England although the couple married in Australia in 1913.
Browning volunteered in January 1918. There was no conscription in Australia; he must have wanted to go. However, January 1918 is quite late to be enlisting if you were someone who was keen to get to the war. This could be explained by his answer to the question on the attestation form - Have you ever been rejected for military service? Browning's answer is 'Yes - made fit by operation'. He had wanted to go, but he needed to undergo an operation before he could be considered fit enough.
Browning's inscription comes from Wordsworth's 'I Travelled Among Unknown Men' of which this is the first verse:

I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.

I don't think Browning regretted going to Australia. He must have liked it since he persuaded his older brother, James, with his wife and two children, to join him in the country in 1913. But when England was in danger he realised what he felt for the old country.
Browning was killed in action at Beaurevoir on 3 October 1918, six weeks before the end of the war. The news went to his wife in Australia and his family in England only learnt of his death through friends. His sister therefore wrote to the Australian Red Cross to ask if they could tell her how he had died and whether he had been buried. They were able to assure her that he had been killed instantly and buried properly but spared her the full details, which they had learnt from the stretcher bearer who was first on the scene:

"I saw the above (all of B Coy) and one other man whose name I think was Lionel killed by one shell near Beaurevoir about 7 am during the attack about 1/2 hour or less after we hopped over. I was stretcherbearing & was following up behind them and was not 8 yards from them. Browning (killed instantly) was hit through head, Clarkson (instantly) thigh to knee badly smashed and concussion, Sgt, Crockett (instantly) all over body, Lionel (instantly) head, Langley hit on left collar bone and the artery was cut he was the only one with any life and I tried to dress the wound and succeeded in stopping the bleeding but he was dead before I finished ... Browning, Clarkson and Langley were all late joined us at Cappy, first time in line."


HIS LAST WORDS WERE
AS HE FELL
"GO ON 'C' COMPANY

CAPTAIN WILLIAM MCCARTHY BRAITHWAITE MC


William Braithwaite was killed whilst charging a machine gun in an attack at Estrees on 3 October 1918. This was a preliminary action to the Battle of Montbrehain on the 5th; the Australians last engagement of the war on the Western Front.
Braithwaite served with the 22nd Battalion Australian Infantry and its Report of Operations gives a brief glimpse of the action on the 3rd October:

"There were several instances where determined resistance was offered by small groups of Machine Gunners, and an examination of the ground after the attack evidenced the fact that the bayonets had been used by our men to a greater extent than usual."

After school and university, Braithwaite joined his father's tannery, the largest employer in the town of Preston, Victoria. He enlisted in July 1916 and embarked for Europe that October, joining his battalion in France in January 1917. A collection of his private letters, now held in the Australian National War Memorial, shows that he took part in the the actions at Bapaume, Bullecourt, Ypres, Broodseinde, Villers-Bretonneaux and the August 1918 offensive. It was at Bullecourt that he was wounded in the arm and face during an action for which he was awarded the Military Cross:

"For conspicuous gallantry in leading his men into the enemy's trenches during the attack near Bullecourt on 3 May 1917. Although twice wounded he persevered with the work of consolidating the position and leading bombing parties against the enemy strongpoints."

Braithwaite was back in action by July and served throughout the Battle of Passchendaele. He was wounded again at Franvillers in June 1918, had two weeks leave in England in September and was killed soon after his return.
It was his father, also William Braithwaite, who chose his inscription. Although he and his wife had six daughters, William was their only son. William Braithwaite Senior died on 5 August 1922 whilst on a trip to Europe with his wife to visit their son's grave.


WE WHO LOVED HIM ONLY KNOW
HOW MUCH WE LOST
EIGHT YEARS AGO

SERJEANT WILLIAM H MARTIN MSM


This inscription has been chosen specifically to show how long it could take to build the permanent cemeteries, and how long it could be before the next of kin were asked for for a personal inscription. William Martin died of wounds on 2 October 1918, therefore it must have been 1926 when his wife, Harriett Martin, was asked what she wanted to say. However, I have come across inscriptions which refer to the death only being a year ago so it didn't always take this long.
Martin was born in Newhaven, Sussex in 1889. In 1911 he was a police officer boarding at a house in Camden Road, Eastbourne. Among the other residents of the house was a widowed dressmaker called Harriett Rose Lakey. William Martin and Hariett Lakey were married in West Derby the following year.
Martin's medal card shows that he was entitled to the 1914 Star having entered a theatre of war, France, on 19 August 1914. This means he was a member of the original British Expeditionary Force and that he had managed to survive until the last six weeks of the war.
A gunner in 1914, Martin was a serjeant in 1918 with a Meritorious Service Medal awarded in January 1918 "in recognition of valuable services rendered with the Armies in the Field during the present war".
Martin died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Grevelliers, 3 km west of Bapaume, on 2 October 1918. There is no record of what happened to him.


TERIBUS

MAJOR WILLIAM FRANCIS BEATTIE


By choosing this single Latin word, Teribus, William Beattie's father elegantly linked many aspects of his son's life. The word itself is said to have been part of the battle cry of the men of Hawick during the Battle of Flodden in 1513 - 'Teribus ye Teri-Odin'. A nineteenth-century song by James Hogg tells of the months after the battle when bands of English soldiers plundered the surrounding countryside, devastating the towns and villages. This continued until the following year when a group of brave men from Hawick turned the tide by attacking a band of English soldiers at Hornshole and carrying off their flag. The song claims that this action led to the turning of the tide against the English marauders who subsequently turned tail for home. The factual history of the event may be questionable but the legend has remained very powerful and the skirmish is still commemorated in Hawick to this day.
In June 1914, to mark the 400th anniversary, a bronze statue of a horseman holding the captured English banner was unveiled in the centre of the town. The sculptor was William Francis Beattie who had been born in Hawick, which made him a 'Teri', a Hawickman. Although the statue was unveiled in June 1914, the outbreak of war two months later meant that the final touches were not put to it until 1921, three years after Beattie's death.
Beattie had been a member of the Lothian and Border Horse since 1910, but in April 1915 he took a commission in the Royal Artillery in order to see some action. Four months later he was in France. Awarded a Military Cross in 1917 for the rescue of some wounded soldiers under a heavy artillery barrage, he was badly gassed in April 1918 and spent five months recovering before returning to the front on 20 September. He died of wounds thirteen days later in a Casualty Clearing Station in Tincourt.
On 29 July 1921 the Hawick News and Border Chronicle reported that a workman had that week finally cut the memorial inscription into the base of the 1514 monument:

"Erected to commemorate the return of Hawick Gallants from Hornshole in 1514, when, after the Battle of Flodden they routed the English marauders and captured their flag"

The work was carried out by William Beattie's father, Thomas, who also carved another inscription:

Merses Profundo Pulchrior Evenit
Sculptor: Major William F. Beattie MC RFA
A native of Hawick
Born 1886 Killed in France 1918

The paper reports that the Latin line is a quotation from Horace suggested as appropriate by Sir George Douglas, Bart, the meaning of which is - "You may overwhelm it in the deep; it arises more beautiful than ever".
William Francis Beattie was his parents' only child.


THE LORD BLESS THEE
AND KEEP THEE

LANCE CORPORAL JAMES KIRKPATRICK


Mrs Kirkpatrick has quoted from a beautiful blessing in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 6 verses 22 to 26, for her son's personal inscription:

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,
Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying, On this wise ye shall bless the children of Israel, saying unto them,
The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:
The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:
The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.

I haven't really been able to identify James Kirkpatrick, other than that he was the son of Mrs M Kirkpatrick, 116 Bonnington Road, Kilmarnock and that he was entitled to the War Medal and the Victory medal which means that he wasn't a 1914 or 1915 volunteer His medal card says he is James M Kirkpatrick, and the Kilmarnock war memorial lists a James McC Kirkpatrick. From this slight information I have concluded that he is the son of David Kirkpatrick, a journeyman tailor, and Mary Kirkpatrick nee McCutcheon, and that he had two brothers, David and George, and a sister, Mary. I could very well be wrong.
Kirkpatrick, who served with the 7th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Haringhe on 2 October 1918. There were three casualty clearing stations in the area known to the troops as Dozinghem, Mendinghem and Bandaghem, the soldiers' humorous Flemish names for what went on there - dosing them, mending them and bandaging them. Haringhe CCS was Dozinghem
The 7th Battalion had taken part the previous day in an attack on the village of Dadizeele when 73 other ranks had been wounded. There's no record of what happened to Jame Kirkpatrick but he may well have been one of those wounded that day.


HIS BODY TO FAIR FRANCE
HIS PURE SOUL
UNTO HIS CAPTAIN CHRIST

SECOND LIEUTENANT BERNARD RICHARD PENDEREL-BRODHURST


The name Bernard Richard Penderel-Brodhurst has a particular air about it, something that would seem to be totally appropriate for the heir to the perpetual pension settled on his ancestor, Humphrey Penderel, for his services in concealing King Charles II and aiding his escape after the Battle of Worcester in 1651.
Penderel-Brodhurst was the only surviving son of James George Joseph Penderel-Brodhurst, the editor of The Guardian. His brother, Charles, had died at the age of 17 in 1899. Educated at St Paul's, Bernard was articled to a firm of architects when the war broke out. He enlisted three weeks later and served in Britain until, having been commissioned into the Royal Engineers in July 1917, he went with them to France in April 1918.
On the evening of 1 October Penderel-Brodhurst was in an area of the front line that was not thought to be dangerous when he was shot by a sniper concealed in a pill-box no more than 40yards away. He died three hours later having never regained consciousness - three days before his 28th birthday and his first wedding anniversary.
His inscription comes from Shakespeare's Richard II. The words are spoken of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk by the Bishop of Carlisle who tells Bolingbroke that the exiled Norfolk is dead:

Many a time hath banish'd Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks and Saracens;
And toil'd with works of war, retir'd himself
To Italy, and there, at Venice, gave
His body to that pleasant country's earth,
And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long.

Penderel-Brodhurst may have been buried in France rather than Venice but his father, who chose the inscription, believed that his son too had been fighting for Christ.


A WARMER HEART
DEATH NEVER MADE SO COLD

PRIVATE JOHN OLIVER


Know thou, O stranger to the fame
Of this much lov'd much honour'd name!
(For none that knew him need be told)
A warmer heart Death ne'er made cold.
'For R.A. Esq.'
by Robert Burns

By choosing this lovely epitaph written by Robert Burns for one of his friends, Mr and Mrs Adam Oliver have managed not only to reflect their son's Scottish heritage - he was born in Jedburgh, Roxburghshire - but to simply and effectively convey an affectionate character sketch of their nineteen-year-old son.
John Oliver served with the 7th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, part of the 9th Scottish Division. On 29 September 1918 the Division captured the village of Dadizeele, 16km east of Ypres towards Menin. Three days later the Division pushed on towards the Menin-Roulers railway north of Ledeghem but the Germans put up a much fiercer resistance with particularly heavy machine gun and sniper fire.
Oliver was one of the twenty-three members of the battalion who were killed in action or died of wounds that day.


BABY OF FAMILY
BORN GREEN BAY, WISC. U.S.A.
MOTHER STILL ANXIOUS
FOR HIS RETURN

PRIVATE ALBERT KICK


Albert Kick was a Oneida First Nation Canadian, born on the Green Bay reservation in Wisconsin U.S.A. whose family moved to the reservation in Muncey, Ontario. He was 29 when he was killed, the baby of the family.
'Mother still anxious for his return' - I had in my mind's eye the image of a grieving mother unable to accept that her son was dead and still hoping that he was going to come home. However, I have a feeling that this is not what the words mean. It was Albert's mother herself, Katherine Kick, who chose the inscription and I think her concern was to do with her son's spirit, perhaps even his body.
The Oneida, as with all First Nation people, have very specific customs, practices and rituals associated with the dead, all designed to facilitate the successful passage of their spirit back into the spirit world from which it came. This should start with the return of the deceased person's body to the place where they had lived. Was Mrs Kick agitating for the return of her son's body or was it his spirit she hoped would return? Either way, Albert Kick's inscription reflects a Oneida concern for the afterlife of the dead man.
Kick and his brother, Ernest, briefly attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania and when I say briefly I mean from 13 August to 20 October 1904 when they 'ran from school'. The school have digitised their records and you can read letters from both the brothers, written several years after they 'ran away', in which they seem to talk appreciatively about the time they spent at the school so I wonder whether they went back again.
Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the flagship Indian boarding school founded on the principle that Native Americans were the equal of European Americans and that if their children were immersed in Euro-American culture, i.e. at one of these schools, it would given them skills that would help them advance in life. The school ran from 1879 to 1918.
Albert Kick attested on 28 January 1916. He served with B Company, 4th Battalion Canadian Infantry, the same company as his brother Ernest, and was killed in action in the taking of Sancourt during the battle for the Canal du Nord. He is buried in the same grave as an unidentified soldier.


GOD IS HIS OWN INTERPRETER

PRIVATE ALBERT ERNEST COPELAND


Private Copeland's father chose his inscription from a well-known hymn written by the poet William Cowper (1731-1800). Other relations chose to quote this hymn but most used the first line of the first verse - 'God move in a mysterious way' - whereas as Walter Copeland quoted from the last verse:

Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And he will make it plain.

One way or another they are all saying the same as those relations who chose: 'God knows best', or 'We cannot Lord Thy purpose see but all is well that's done by Thee'.

Walter Copeland had perhaps more reasons than most to hope there was a purpose in God's actions. In June 1916 his eldest son Vivian Marshall Copeland died at the age of 21, three months later his wife, Mary Jane Copeland died at the age of 49. On the 22 March 1918 his youngest son, Harold, went missing in action and it wasn't until 16 July that Walter heard that he was a prisoner of war. Then just over two months after this his middle son, Albert Copeland died of pneumonia in Salonika aged 21.


Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for His grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.


OH CANADA
HE STOOD ON GUARD FOR THEE

PRIVATE REGINALD GEORGE BOX


Private Box's inscription comes from a patriotic Canadian song that has become Canada's national anthem and is the source of the Canadian Army's motto - Vigilamus pro te: we stand on guard for thee. It was neither of these things when Private Box's father, William Box, chose it.
Originally written in 1880, in French, the words were translated into English several times before Robert Stanley Weir's version, which he wrote in 1908, was settled on. In 1939 it became de facto Canada's national anthem but was only officially adopted in 1980. Weir himself made various amendments to his original version and changes continue to be suggested and made. This is a version that Reginald Box would have recognised:

O Canada!
Our home and native land.
True patriot love in all thy sons command
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
We stand on guard, O Canada,
We stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, Glorious and free.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee!

It's an interesting choice of inscription for someone who was born in England and didn't go to Canada until after 1911 when the census showed him, aged 16, as a 'farm pupil' on a farm in Dymock, Gloucestershire. Box's father, William Box, a jeweller and silversmith in Gloucester, England chose it. Both his sons had gone to Canada and both of them served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force but his eldest son, Charles Henry Box, returned to England before the end of the war having been wounded. It may have been him who influenced his father's choice
Reginald Box served with the 16th Battalion Canadian Infantry and was killed on 1 October 1918 in the capture of the village of Sancourt during the battle for the Canal du Nord.
In 1921 Charles Henry Box and his wife had a son who they names Reginald in memory of Charles' brother.


A SON OF VENEZUELA
WHO FOUGHT AND DIED
FOR GOD'S JUSTICE ON EARTH

PRIVATE MANUEL BERMUDEZ


Manuel Bermudez attested in Montreal on 16 March 1916, giving his address as the Victoria Hotel, Montreal. Was he living and working in Montreal or did he come from Venezuela specially to enlist? He gave his occupation as 'Correspondence Spanish'. Was he perhaps a correspondent on a Spanish newspaper? I can't tell.
Venezuela was strictly neutral during the First World War, although its president, Juan Vincente Gomez, was widely suspected of being pro German. Bermudez's inscription does not sound as though it comes from a strictly neutral Venezuelan citizen ... far from it. A Mr JF Bermudez of Caracas, Venezuela chose it and was very specific that Manuel Bermudez had fought and died: 'For God's justice on earth'. JF Bermudez was not Manuel's father whose name was Manuel Bermudez Lecuna. However, it's possible that the family had pro-British sentiments since at one time the father had been the Venezuelan Consul in the British territories of Grenada and St Vincent.
Manuel Bermudez served with the 14th Battalion Canadian Infantry. He was killed in action during the battle of the Canal du Nord on day the Canadian Corps captured the village of Sancourt where Bermudez is buried in a joint grave with an unknown soldier.


WHY THEN, GOD'S SOLDIER BE HE!

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR STANNUS JAGGER


Arthur Jagger's inscription, chosen by his father the former headmaster of Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Mansfield, comes from Macbeth Act 5 Scene 8:

ROSS: Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier's debt:
He only lived but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm'd
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.
SIWARD: Then he is dead?
ROSS: Ay, and brought off the field: your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end
SIWARD: Had he his wounds before?
Ross: Ay, on the front.
SIWARD: Why then, God's soldier be he!
Had I as many sons as I have hairs
I would not wish them to a fairer death:
And so, his knell is knoll'd

Siward's pride in the manner of his son's death - his wounds were in the front of his body not in his back - overcomes any feeling of grief he may have had for his death. Could the Jaggers have been so insouciant about their own son's death; Arthur was their only child.
Jaggard was educated at Malvern College from where he went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in January 1917. That December he was commissioned into the 9th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers, joining them in France on 27 June 1918. He died on 1 October 1918 of wounds received the previous day, 30 September. The battalion war diary gives a perfunctory report of that day:

30 September 1918
A & D companies under light barrage took part in an operation and successfully advanced line taking 10 prisoners and 1 machine gun. Our casualties were 3 officers wounded (of whom 1 died of wounds) 11 other ranks killed & 38 other ranks wounded.

I am assuming that Jagger was the officer who died of wounds. He's buried at Chocques Military Cemetery, which in September 1918 was a field ambulance cemetery for casualties who hadn't got very far down the casualty evacuation chain.


TO YOU FROM FAILING HANDS
WE THROW THE TORCH
BE YOURS TO HOLD IT HIGH

SERGEANT HENRY LEGGO HAMMOND


For all that this is now one of the most famous poems of the war, and certainly the most famous Canadian poem of the war, it is not often quoted in inscriptions. John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields in May 1915, prompted by the death of a young friend killed at Ypres the previous day. McCrae, a doctor, served in France throughout the war, eventually dying of cerebral-meningitis following pneumonia in January 1918.
The inscription comes from verse 3, the last verse:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

In this instance 'the torch' is 'our quarrel with the foe', McCrae was exhorting his readers not to give up the struggle with Germany until the war was won. More usually, however, 'the torch' is used as a metaphor for 'the torch of life', the vitai lampada'. This refers to the duties and responsibilities to one's fellow human beings that should be passed on from one generation to another. This was the meaning Sir Henry Newbolt had in mind when he wrote his poem, Vitae Lampada.

The War Graves Commission has recorded Sergeant Hammond's name as Henry Leggo Harry Hammond but I feel sure that 'Harry' was a nickname since Hammond's father was also called Henry. Hammond, a bank clerk enlisted in Montreal on 4 October 1915. He arrived in France on 23 April 1916 and served with No. 4 Company Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. He was killed on 30 September 1918. The battalion war diary recorded the events of the day:

"The plan was that the P.P.C.L.I., having crossed the Railway, should swing to the East and South-East and make good the Railway Cutting, the village of Tilloy as far forward as the main Tilloy-Blecourt Road ...
At 6-00 a.m. the attack was made with Nos. 1, 2 and 4 Coys front line and No. 3 Coy in support. Rapid progress was made as far as the road running from 8.21.b.60.80. to 8.27.a.40.60. From this point the advance was still continued on the right by No. 4 Coy, who reached their objective at the juncture of the main Tilloy-Blecourt Road and Embankment. Nos. 1 and 2 Coys on the Left and No.3 Coy in Support were suffering very heavy casualties from Machine Gun fire from the village and from the high ground to the North ... By this time most of the Officers and N.C.O.s had been knocked out and the Coys were badly disorganized ..."

Hammond was a senior N.C.O. in No. 4 Company.
His parents were initially told that he was missing presumed wounded in action. A month later they received the news that he had been killed. He's buried in Mill Race Cemetery, Tilloy-lez-Cambrai. The name coming from a switch line on the Cambrai-Douai railway, which ran to a large German supply dump on the site of the cemetery. Corps burial officers began constructing the cemetery in late October 1918, which is when Hammond's body must have been discovered and his parents informed.


WE IN SPIRIT
STILL LIVE, LOVE AND COMMUNE
WITH ALL ON EARTH
MOTHER

PRIVATE HARRY WALTER EVANS


This inscription asserts a belief in Spiritualism, the belief that the spirit never dies and that it is possible for humans to communicate across the chasm of death. Whilst the world of Spiritualism was awash with cranks and charlatans there were many respected academics who felt convinced of it too. The best known being the highly respected British physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge, who played a key part in the development of radio.
After his son Raymond was killed in action in 1915, Sir Oliver wrote a memoir of his son in which he laid out his beliefs and his evidence, writing:

"Well, speaking for myself and with full and cautious responsibity, I have to state that as an outcome of my investigation into physical matters I have at length and quite gradually become convinced, after more than thirty years of study, not only that persistent individual existence is a fact, but that occasional communication across the chasm - with difficulty and under definite conditions - is possible.
This is not a subject on which one comes lightly and easily to a conclusion, nor can the evidence be explained except to those who will give to it time and careful study; but clearly the conclusion is either folly and self-deception, or it is truth of the utmost importance to humanity - "
'Raymond or Life and Death' by Sir Oliver Lodge Methuen & Co. 1916 p. 389

Mrs Mary Evans, Private Evans' mother, appears to seen it as truth.

Evans was born in Ramsgate, Kent on 12 August 1897. He attested on 4 August 1915 just after his eighteenth birthday. By this time both he and his widowed mother were living in Canada. Evans served with the 75th Battalion Canadian Infantry in France from 11 August 1916 - the day before his nineteenth birthday. He was killed in action on 30 September 1918 when the 75th led the attack on the Cambrai-Douai railway cutting on the sunken road that ran south from Blecourt.
His will, a perforated form torn out from the back of his pay book, left "£10 to Miss Agnes Patterson, Wright County, Cantley, Quebec, Canada, my friend".


"WHY?"

PRIVATE CHARLES PHLLIP WRIGHT


Charles Wright's father doesn't beat about the bush. Not for him the polite, "Some day we'll understand" which many families chose as an inscription, let alone the fatalistic acceptance, "God knows best". Charles Wright Senior simply asked "Why?" Why was my son killed, why did he have to die, why did he have to go and fight, why were we at war, why, why why?
Charles Wright Junior was born in Leeds to Charles and Helena Wright, the third of their seven children. By 1911 he had gone to Canada. When he attested in September 1916 he was living in Robsart, a tiny community founded in 1910 following the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway. He described his occupation as 'range rider', someone who rode the ranges looking after the cattle.
Wright served with the 10th Battalion Canadian Infantry, the Alberta Regiment, and was killed in its last major action of the war, the crossing of the Canal du Nord 27 September to I October. This opened up the way for the capture of Cambrai and its vitally important German rail centre; Germany's last fully developed line of defence.
Less celebrated than the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge, the Canadian crossing of the Canal du Nord, a sophisticated combined-arms assault in which engineer, artillery and infantry units were seamlessly combined, was a much greater tactical achievement. David Borys has written about it fully in this article for Canadian Military History.


A BROKEN MELODY

PRIVATE JAMES BLENCOWE KEATING


'A Broken Melody' is the title of an immensely popular musical play first performed in London in 1892. Although one of the first reviewers pronounced it 'feeble, tedious and commonplace', The Times declared that the combination of the music, the acting and the sentiment made it irresistible. The London Daily News attributed the play's success to Auguste van Biene, the musician who played the leading role. But, it said, touching though Mr van Biene's playing of the violoncello was, violoncellos alone will not make a successful play:

"The secret lies in the fact that the simple blend of pathos and humour goes home to the hearts of the unsophisticated spectators, who enjoy the eccentricities while they sympathise with the domestic sorrows of the poor deserted musician."

Van Biene is thought to have performed the role more than 6,000 times before he died in 1913. He and his wife also starred in the film version, which was made in 1896.
I believe the play was so popular that it gave rise to a figure of speech. The term 'a broken melody' came to be used to describe something that came to an end when it had been expected to keep running sweetly along. And the phrase even came to be parodied, as when a group of rowdy sailors were stopped by the police from playing their bagpipes in a public place. The photograph of the sailors in the newspaper appeared under the headline - 'A broken melody'.
For all its popularity it has been impossible to find out anything about the plot other than from the promotional strapline used by the cinemas showing the film. This described the film as, "A heart touching story of a struggle between love and duty". I have worked out that the story is about a musician, and that many different musical pieces were played during the evening. However, there was one piece that never failed to feature, it was called 'A Broken Melody' and you can here it played by Auguste van Biene.
James Keating was only 19 when he died. He served originally with the Yorkshire Regiment before transferring to the 1st Gun Carrier Company, Tank Corps. These were tanks that pulled guns into battle behind them. The idea was that the artillery could quickly set themselves up as the battle moved forward. However, it turned out not to be such a good idea and from May 1918 these companies were used to deliver ammunition not guns.
Keating died on 27 September 1918 when the British army was in action all along the front line. His parents announced his death in the Daily Gazette for Middlesborough on 5 October. The announcement says that Keating was "killed whilst on active service".


B.A. JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
SERVED AS
SECOND LIEUTENANT
13TH BN. MIDDLESEX REGT.

PRIVATE ERNEST GEORGE DE LATHOM HOPCRAFT


This may not seem like a very interesting inscription but there's a very interesting story that lies behind it - and rather a sad one too, not that all these stories aren't sad.
I've given Hopcraft the rank of private, which he was, but it doesn't say so on his headstone, the place where his rank should be is blank. And I've given his regiment as the 20th Battalion London Regiment, which it was, but again it doesn't say so in the normal place on his headstone. I can't imagine what force of character Hopcraft's father must have applied to achieve this with the War Graves Commission ... but he did. What lay behind it?
Ernest George de Lathom Hopcraft was gazetted 2nd Lieutenant on 29 December 1914, transferring from the Reserve to the 13th Battalion Middlesex Regiment on 15 May 1915. In April 1916 he went to France where he was a billeting officer. Some French people were very reluctant to have British officers billeted on them and one woman in particular was very uncooperative. In an attempt to get him out of her house she began hitting and slapping him ... and he retaliated. Hopcraft was arrested, court martialled and on 19 February 1917 dismissed from the service for "committing an offence against the person of a resident."
Hopcraft's father, also called Ernest, obviously found it very difficult to accept this, but despite appeals to the War Office his son was not reinstated. Ernest Junior therefore re-enlisted in the Rifle Brigade, transferred to the London Regiment and was killed in action on 27 September 1918.
His father told the story as he wanted it to be known on a memorial plaque in All Saint's Church, Middleton Cheney, Northamptonshire:

Ernest George de Lathom Hopcraft
Aged 32 years. The only son of Ernest Hopcraft J.P. Northants, of Brackley and
Middleton Cheney. Who answered duty's call and volunteered and was given a
Commission in the 13th Middlesex Regiment. He gave his life, his all, for his King and
Country.
After having fought in Palestine he fell in action, at the assault on the German
Hindenburg Line at Marcoing near Cambrai. September 27th 1918; 5 weeks and 4 days
Before the Armistice.
Gone but never forgotten.
At the Battle of Flesquieres near Marcoing he gallantly attacked, single handed a German
Machine gun post and was killed.

Strangely, had Ernest Hopcraft Senior not said what he did on his son's headstone I would never have bothered to see what was going on. And had he not insisted that neither his son's rank nor his regiment should appear on the headstone other people's curiosity wouldn't have been aroused either. I got much of the information for this inscription from a Great War forum for which I am very grateful.


THE BRAVE
REST IN A NATION'S LOVE
AND NEVER DIE

PRIVATE ROBERT SYDNEY GRAY


Robert Gray was born in Australia in 1883. In 1917 he was working as a book keeper in Fresno California whilst his wife was living in the Dominion Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia. On 12 September 1917 he joined the 7th Battalion Canadian Infantry, the British Columbia Regiment, and served with them in France from March 1918. He was killed in action on the 27 September. By the time his wife came to choose his inscription she was living in Australia, where his mother also lived.
If his wife hadn't lived in Canada she might never have come across his inscription. It comes from a poem, They Never Die by J.W. Barry, published in the 17 August 1917 edition of The Civilian, "a fortnightly journal devoted to the interests of the Civil Service of Canada" - hardly a mass circulation journal! And from my trawl of the Internet I can't see that it was published anywhere else.

The Brave! who says they die?
Their deathless story
Rings 'cross the emblazon'd sky
Of England's glory.

He fought, and fell, and met
No tearful eye
To wet his nameless grave - and yet
He did not die.

She fought a martyr's fight, and fell
Without a cry.
Ah, sweet Cavell, all, all is well -
You did not die.

Only cowards die. The Brave,
Seeing beyond, with piercing eye,
Rest forever in a Nation's love,
And never die.

Gray was killed on the day the 1st Canadian Division played their part in the crossing of the Canal du Nord by capturing the village of Sains-les-Marquion. He's buried in the cemetery there where 152 of the 228 burials belong to Canadians who were also killed on that day. Sains-les-Marquion is 15 km north west of Cambrai, a fact that is probably significant in Mrs Gray's post-war address. She lived at: Cambrai, Lone Pine Parade, Matraville, Sydney.


STAND FAST CRAIGELLACHIE

SECOND LIEUTENANT ALEXANDER GRANT


By choosing this motto for his only son, Alexander Grant Snr was establishing his kinship with Clan Grant whose motto and war cry this is. He may also have had in his mind a painting by Lady Butler called Stand fast Craigellachie, which shows a highland soldier standing guard over the wounded during an incident on the North West Frontier in India in 1895, thus claiming by association the same heroic qualities of the highland soldier for his son.
Stand fast may be understood today as an instruction but at one time it was a quality, a synonym for steadfast. Craigellachie, a hill with a commanding view of the Strathspey, is a symbol of strength and watchfulness for the Grants; it's the place where beacons were lit to alert the community to danger - to the need to stand fast, and to be steadfast.
In 1911, Alexander Grant KC of Lincoln's Inn, born in Bolton, Lancashire was living at 37 Hans Place, Chelsea with his second wife and his three children. Alexander Jnr, who was educated at Eton, would have gone to Trinity College, Cambridge when he left school in 1917. Instead he was commissioned into the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards in December that year. He went to the front on 29 April 1918 where he served continuously until he was killed in action on 27 September, the day the Guards crossed the Canal du Nord on the Hindenburg Line. Grant is buried in Sanders Keep Cemetery, which took its name from the German stronghold captured that day.
Grant's death was announced in The Times on 9 October; his father proudly quoting from a letter he'd received from his son's captain who wrote:

"I had seen a good deal of his conduct during the morning, and every time I saw him he was smiling and cheerful, moving about and encouraging his platoon to do their utmost in a most difficult attack ... He died upholding the great traditions of his school and his regiment ... He was a true Grenadier, and understood the full meaning of Vitae lampada traduit."

Vitae lampada traduit - they hand on the torch of life - a phrase forever associated with Sir Henry Newbolt's poem Vitae Lampada where at a desperate moment in a battle it's the voice of a schoolboy who rallies the ranks with his cry of 'play up, play up and play the game'.


HE TRIED

PRIVATE WILBUR WELLS BROWN


Private Wilbur Brown must have led a complicated existence. Why else would he have given his name as Frederick Wells Osbourne on his attestation form, signing an oath that all his answers were true when they weren't?
Brown says he was born on 7 July 1891. At his death in 1918 that would have made him 27. However, the War Graves Commission has his age as 23. It could be the Commission's mistake but by this time his mother has become involved in his commemoration whereas in all the form-filling prior to his death he made no mention of her. He gave 'a friend', Mrs Edna Lynn of El Centro, California, USA, as his next of kin but when the communication informing her of his death was sent there it was undelivered. He left real estate in Kansas to another 'friend', Miss Margaret Brown, however, I have a feeling that she was his sister. Miss Margaret Brown also received his separation allowance.
Brown was born in Manchester to William W and Mrs AE Brown. The family moved to the United States and by the time his mother signed for his inscription she was Mrs AE Huff of La Junta, Colorado.
I wonder what was going on. What was his reason for signing up under a false name? It could have been a bit awkward that having given his name as Frederick Wells Osbourne to the Attesting Officer, the Medical Officer recorded the letters W.W.B. (Wibur Wells Brown) tattooed onto his left fore-arm as one of his 'distinguishing features'. In the case of William Clarence McGregor, who served as Albert Murray, it was because the Army had decided that a bout of rheumatic fever on his medical record rendered him permanently medically unfit. Attesting as a totally different person meant that he could escape this decision.
It's interesting that Brown, who was living in Kansas City, USA, enlisted on 15 January 1918 in the Canadian Infantry when by this time he could have enlisted in the US army. Perhaps he still felt he was an Englishman and was happy to swear an oath of allegiance to His Majesty King George V. His active service began on 23 May 1918 and he was killed four months later on 27 September in the opening stages of the Battle of Cambrai.
His mother chose his inscription, the rather underwhelming tribute - 'He tried'. It's possible that she was quoting from a short poem written by an Old Etonian, 'Somewhere in France', and published in the Eton Chronicle of May 1916 but the circulation of the Chronicle is so limited that I doubt it ... but maybe:

To a Soldier
Say not of him "he left this vale of tears,"
Who loved the good plain English phrase
"He died,"
Nor state "he nobly lived (or otherwise)
Failed or succeeded" - friend, just say
"He tried".


GOD'S HUSBANDMAN THOU ART
IN HIS UNWITHERING SHEAVES
BIND MY HEART

DRIVER ALEXANDER APPLEBY


Driver Appleby's widow chose the final two lines of 'Laus Mortis' - In Praise of Death - by Frederic Lawrence Knowles (1869-1905) for her husband's inscription. Why should we praise death? Because it 'gives us life, and in exchange takes breath'; because 'Life lends us only feet, Death gives us wings', and because in death, whether we 'wear a crown or bear a yoke' we will all be equal, 'when once your coverlet of grass is spread'. Life is the sower and death is the reaper: 'God's husbandman'. Death has traditionally been portrayed as the reaper, Knowles takes the analogy further and portrays the dead as gathered corn, bound in 'unwithering' sheaves close to God.
Alexander Appleby, a horse driver in civilian life, came from Perth in Western Australia. He enlisted in March 1917 and served as a driver in the 3rd Australian Field Artillery Brigade. He died of wounds in hospital in Rouen on 25 September 1918. It's not possible to tell when he was wounded but the 3rd Artillery Brigade had been relieved on the 23rd and was resting at the 'Wagon Lines' on the 25th. Forty-five other ranks had been wounded during the month, Appleby may have been one of those. However, long term cases were nursed at Rouen so his wounds may have dated from earlier in the year. He is among 8,348 casualties buried in St Sever Cemetery Extension, all of whom died in one of the fifteen hospitals based in Rouen.


TRUE TO COUNTRY, KING AND MATE
LEAVING A SPOTLESS NAME

TROOPER ERNEST MCKAY


Trooper Ernest McKay was one of the fourteen 11th Australian Light Horsemen killed in the savage fighting at Samarkh on 25 September 1918. There's nothing to say whether he was killed in the cavalry charge or in the subsequent hand-to-hand fighting in the town. And nothing to say why the inscription refers to 'mate' in the singular rather than mates in the plural.
It's always interesting to see the cause or causes for which Australians fought. Today the idea that Australian nationhood was born in the First World War is commonplace, and is being fiercely promoted during the centenary. But McKay, Australian born, fought for his country and his King, and I would venture to suggest that by his country he meant Britain, or rather the British Empire for the terms were synonymous. Actually, to be accurate, the word most people would have used for Britain at this time, and for the whole British Empire, was 'England' but whichever word was used I don't think McKay was fighting just for Australia.
McKay was a carpenter from Brisbane. His mother chose his inscription and filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia. I love the way that, given the opportunity to say something that might "be of interest to the Historian of the AIF or of his regiment", she writes proudly that he was -

"One of the most popular boys in his regiment. Also a good footballer. In fact one of the best all round players over in Egypt."
[NB I have corrected some of the spelling a punctuation.]

Somehow I don't think this was the sort of information the historians were looking for!
As to the 'spotless name': McKay's service record shows that he embarked from Australia for Egypt on 30 September 1915; he spent from 3 January to 22 February in detention for an unspecified misdemeanour; in December 1916 he was punished for being absent without leave, and from 15 August to 22 December 1917 he was in hospital being treated for VD.
But none of this detracts from the fact that Ernest McKay, living in Australia where there was no conscription, volunteered to fight for King and country, an action that led to his death.




BORN TO KNOW NOT WINTER ONLY SPRING

SECOND LIEUTENANT SIR JOHN BRIDGER SHIFFNER


Sir John Bridger Shiffner, 6th Baronet, had been at the front for two days when was killed in action on the 24 September 1918, the day the 2nd Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment captured the high ground north of Gricourt. Later that day the Germans counter-attacked with some 400 men. The battalion war diary gives an unusually vivid description of what happened next:

"Captain Roberts ordered his company to open fire on the advancing enemy and when they were within 30 yards, the leading waves began to waver, on seeing this, Captain Roberts ordered his men to fix bayonets and then to charge the enemy. The men all rose from their positions in shell holes and charged with the bayonet and utterly routed the enemy, taking over 40 prisoners. The artillery in response to the S.O.S. signal, put down an intense fire on to the enemy, causing numerous casualties as they were running away. This action was specifically mentioned in Sir Douglas Haig's communique. It was a fine example of the use of Infantry weapons and the value of the dash and fighting spirit shown by all ranks who took part, as their total number was less than 80, thus being out-numbered by 5 to 1."

Shiffner was killed in the bayonet charge. He was 19 and had been married for six weeks. His younger brother, Henry, inherited the title and was killed in action in North Africa in 1941.

The Dowger Lady Shiffner, Sir John's mother, chose his inscription. It comes from 'In Memoriam F.A.S', written by Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos in 1881 to commemorate an eighteen-year-old boy, Francis Albert Sitwell, who died of consumption there that year. It's a beautiful poem, echoing Shelley's 'Adonais', his lament for the early death of John Keats (see stanzas XXIX and XL), and prefiguring Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen'. However, Lady Shiffner makes an interesting alteration: Stevenson wrote 'Doomed to know not winter, only spring', she changed the word 'doomed' to 'born', which gives a slightly less mournful feeling to her son's death.
I wonder why the new Lady Shiffner, as next of kin, didn't choose her husband's inscription, and what she might have wanted to say.

YET, O stricken heart, remember, O remember
How of human days he lived the better part.
April came to bloom and never dim December
Breathed its killing chills upon the head or heart.

Doomed to know not Winter, only Spring, a being
Trod the flowery April blithely for awhile,
Took his fill of music, joy of thought and seeing,
Came and stayed and went, nor ever ceased to smile.

Came and stayed and went, and now when all is finished,
You alone have crossed the melancholy stream,
Yours the pang, but his, O his, the undiminished
Undecaying gladness, undeparted dream.

All that life contains of torture, toil, and treason,
Shame, dishonour, death, to him were but a name.
Here, a boy, he dwelt through all the singing season
And ere the day of sorrow departed as he came.


IN MY LONELY HOURS
OF THINKING
THOUGHTS OF YOU
ARE ALWAYS NEAR

PRIVATE WALTER POTTS


I enter these inscriptions into a database and I notice that many of the post-August 1918 casualties are buried in cemeteries that I've never entered before, like Berthaucourt. Whereas once the front was stationary it is now moving forwards so fast that some of the cemeteries contain the dead of a brief few days before the battle has moved on. And there is another characteristic of these battlefield cemeteries, many are much smaller than the old ones. There are seventy casualties buried in Berthaucourt of whom three are unidentified. The rest of them were all killed between 18 September and the 5 October with sixteen being killed on 18 September and thirty-six on the 24th.
Walter Potts is one of the thirty-six. A married railway clerk whose wife lived in Wooler, Northumberland, his medal card shows that he didn't enter a theatre of war until after 1915, which indicates to me that, being the age he was, he was a conscript rather than a volunteer. He was killed when the 1st Battalion Northamptonshire Regiment took part in a successful attack on the village of Pontru, seven kilometres west of St Quentin.
The 1st battalion war diary comments that the village was strongly held and that the casualties were 'fairly heavy', not helped by the fact that the four tanks meant to have gone in front of the troops, behind the artillery barrage, proved to be 'quite useless': two were knocked out before starting, one never arrived and the fourth seemed to get lost. Two officers and forty men of the battalion were killed on the 24th, including Private Potts.
I don't know when Walter Potts got married; in 1911 he was still living at home with his parents and four of his brothers. There is no indication that there were any children of the marriage: his wife, Jane Anne Potts, would therefore have been left with many 'lonely hours' to think of him. It's an affectionate, unselfconscious inscription, addressed to the dead man with no care for who else might read it.


NEVER MORNING WORE
TO EVENING
BUT SOME HEART DID BREAK

PRIVATE GEORGE CASH


This is yet another quotation from Tennyson's In Memoriam, which is galloping away as the most quoted poem in personal inscriptions. And interestingly, it's not always the same quotation that people use, in fact, I haven't seen this one before. Tennyson muses on the fact that even whilst a father is toasting his far-away soldier son a shot can just have killed him, and while a mother prays for her sailor son's safety he can at that very moment be being buried at sea.

That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.

O father, wheresoe'er thou be,
Who pledgest now thy gallant son;
A shot, ere half thy draught be done,
Hath still'd the life that beat from thee.

O mother, praying God will save
Thy sailor - while thy head is bow'd.
His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud
Drops in his vast and wandering grave
IN MEMORIAM VI 2-4

However, I would be prepared to bet that it wasn't just the poem that influenced Mrs Annie Cash when she chose this for her son.
There's a rather beautiful painting by the Newlyn-School artist Walter Langley (1852-1922), which he called, 'Never morning wore to evening but some heart did break'. It shows a young woman sitting on a harbour wall, her face in her hands, whilst a much older woman sits beside her, a hand on her shoulder and a look of sorrowing despair on her face. Behind them is a calm sea, shimmering in the early evening light. The empty fish baskets beside them indicate that this young woman's fisherman husband will not be coming home but has perished at sea - the day has never dawned that didn't end in heartbreak for someone. It was one of Langley's most powerful works and I feel sure that it would have been reproduced in enough places for Mrs Cash to have seen it.
George Cash, her eldest child, served with the 4th Battalion South Wales Borderers. The battalion, which had been in Gallipoli during 1915, was ordered to Mesopotamia in 1916 where it spent the rest of the war. Cash's medal card indicates that he didn't join until after 1915. The fighting was largely over by the time Cash died so the presumption is that he either died of illness or of wounds received some time earlier.

Dark house, by which I once more stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp'd no more -
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here, but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
IM MEMORIAM VIII 1-3


NEARING THE GOAL
HE FELL GLORIOUSLY
LEADING HIS MEN

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR BURSTALL


It's all there - the sporting analogy, the exalted language, the noble death, all just as it should be for a heroic soldier. It was Sir Henry Newbolt in his poem Clifton Chapel who had a father tell his son that the son could wish for no finer 'fortune' than to have the words 'Qui procul hinc ... Qui ante diem periit: Sed miles, sed pro patria' (He died far away and before his time but as a soldier and for his country) written on his gravestone. I think that many a parent today could think of a better one; one that had their son living to a ripe old age.
I've written before about sporting analogies in inscriptions: 'He played the game' from the poem The Lost Master by Robert Service;'Well played lad' a tribute from a mother to her son, and 'Though a boy he played a man's game to the finish' from the soldier's Commanding Officer.
'Nearing the goal' carries the analogy a bit further. We know Second Lieutenant Burstall was leading his platoon in an attack on the German lines at Holnon on the 24 September 1918 so the 'goal' was presumably the German lines. Such an association is totally alien to us today but it was part of the culture of the era. Not that people thought war was no more than a game of football but that the qualities necessary to be a good member of a team were the qualities necessary for a good soldier. I can see their point.
Arthur Burstall was nineteen, the eldest son of a timber merchant in Kingston-upon-Hull. It looks as if he served originally as a private in the 16th London Regiment before being commissioned into the East Yorkshire Regiment. He was attached to the 1st Battalion the The Prince of Wales Own (West Yorkshire Regiment) at the time of his death.
Burstall is one of three young officers commemorated in a stained glass window in Holy Trinity Church, Kingston-upon-Hull, now Hull Minster. Two knights stand on either side of a robed figure above the words:

Comfort ye
Comfort ye my people
Saith your God
Speak ye comfortably
To Jerusalem
And cry unto her
That her warfare is accomplished


WE ARE YOURS
ENGLAND, MY OWN!

SECOND LIEUTENANT THOMAS EDWARD LAWRENCE


Thomas Lawrence's married sister, Hilda Sillavan, chose his inscription, quoting from verse three of 'England, My England' a poem written by W.E.Henley (1849-1903).
The poem begins:

What have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?

Verse three reads:

Ever the faith endures,
England, my England: -
'Take and break us: we are yours,
England my own!
Life is good, and joys run high
Between English earth and sky:
Death is death; but we shall die
To the Song on your bugles blown,
England -
To the stars on your bugles blown!'

'Take and break us, we are yours'; England certainly broke hundreds and thousands of young men between the years 1914 and 1918, including Thomas Lawrence. In 1914 he was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at Malvern College. In 1918, aged nineteen, he arrived in France on 31 July. Seven weeks later he was dead. Records say he served with 'C' Company, 7th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment but I can't see his name in the diary and there are lists of officer casualties throughout September 1918. The regiment attacked at Epehy on 18th and again on the 22nd. Lawrence is buried in a Casualty Clearing Station cemetery, which would suggest that he died of wounds.
This used to be such a famous poem, the epitome of British patriotism at a time when both Britain and her Empire were referred to simply as England. There is pride in English achievements: "Where shall the watchful sun ... match the master-work you've done?"; there is a belief that England has a duty to guard the world: "They call you proud and hard ... you with worlds to watch and ward", and a certainty that in all this England is doing God's work: "Chosen daughter of the Lord, spouse-in-chief of the ancient sword". The refrain, which varies slightly from verse to verse, became a rallying cry of Empire - "the song on your bugles blown" ... "round the world"; "down the years"; "to the stars"; "round the pit"; "out of heaven".



A CAMERON
IN THE SHOCK OF STEEL
DIES LIKE
THE OFFSPRING OF LOCHIEL

PRIVATE WILLIAM WHITE FRASER


I often wonder where people get the quotations they use from. I don't mean which poems or hymns but how they knew them. To my mind the whole point of a truncated inscription, like this one, is that people will recognise the allusion. These lines seem particularly obscure but they are not inappropriate.. They come from the Field of Waterloo by Lord Byron. The battle is over and many fine men are dead:

Thou saw'st in seas of gore expire
Redoubted Picton's soul of fire -
Saw'st in mingled carnage lie
All that of Ponsonby could die -
De Lancy change love's bridal-wreath,
For laurels from the hand of death -
Saw'st gallant Miller's failing eye
Still bent where Albion's banners fly,
And Cameron, in the shock of steel,
Die like the offspring of Lochiel;

The most famous Cameron of Lochiel was Bonnie Prince Charlie's loyal supporter in the 1745 Rebellion, who accompanied him into exile in France. The Cameron of the poem refers to John Cameron, a cousin of the Camerons of Lochiel. He fought with distinction at Waterloo and was killed leading a cavalry charge at Quatre-Bras.
This still left me wondering how Private Fraser's mother could be confident that people would pickup the allusion as it is not one of Byron's best-known poems. That was until I discovered that under 'L' in the turn-of-the -century editions of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is the word Lochiel, with Byron's lines by way of explanation of his heroism.
The quotation has a further relevance because William White Fraser served with the 2nd Battalion the Cameron Highlanders. The battalion had been fighting in Italy since November 1917. But on 22 September 1918, Private William Fraser died of influenza in a hospital in Genoa.


LOVE IS STRONGER THAN DEATH

LIEUTENANT WILLIAM VOIGHT THERON


William Voight Theron was a South African of Dutch ancestry. He was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in August 1917 but didn't join 205 Squadron until May 1918. 205 Squadron's role was to carry out bombing raids on ports and airfields flying DH4s, light bombers.
I haven't been able to find out exactly what happened on 20 September 1918 but 205 Squadron was based at Bois de Roche in Northern France, about 75 km from Proyart where Theron was originally buried. This would suggest that he was on a bombing raid over the German lines. Between August and September 1918 No. 9 Casualty Clearing Station was based at Proyart and Theron is reported to have died of wounds. 2nd Lieutenant JJ Rowe who was flying with Theron, whether as observer or pilot I haven't been able to tell, was also wounded but survived.
E. Theron Esq. of CapeTown, South Africa chose Theron's inscription. The War Graves Commission's Register doesn't have any details of Theron's parentage so I can't tell who E. Theron was. He has chosen to quote from the Old Testament Song of Solomon 8:6-8:

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy as cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned.


MAN'S INHUMANITY TO MAN
MAKES COUNTLESS THOUSANDS
MOURN

LIEUTENANT ERNEST CECIL STEELE


Ernest Steele's mother was German. She became a naturalised British citizen in 1894, the same year she married James Steele, a cardboard box manufacturer in London. It's not really possible to determine the sort of relationship someone like Rosa Koehne would have had with her native country, nor how she would have felt when the two countries were at war. But perhaps the fact that her son was a volunteer is a clue.
Ernest Steele enlisted in the 16th London Regiment; conscription was not introduced until March 1916. He went with the regiment to France on 17 August 1915 whilst he was still only 18. As he was not yet 19 he would have needed his parents' signed permission in order to be able to serve abroad On the 25 September 1916 he was commissioned into the Machine Gun Corps, serving from March 1918 with the 21st Battalion, part of the 21st Division.
On 18 September 1918, the day Steele was killed, the Division took part in an attack directed at outposts of the Hindenburg Line near the village of Epehy. A creeping barrage of 1,500 guns, and the presence of 300 machine guns greatly assisted the attack, which was a small but significant victory, indicating an encouraging weakening of German resistance.
Steele's father signed for his inscription. His son might have been a youthful volunteer, and gone abroad with his parents' support when he was still only 18, but by the time he came to choose his son's inscription James Steele's support for the war seems to have diminished.
The inscription comes from verse seven of 'Man Was Made to Mourn' by Robert Burns (1759-1796). To Burns, man has enough problems in his life without adding to them himself through his inhumanity to his fellow man.

Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves,
Regret, remorse and shame!
And man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, -
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!

The Steele's weren't the only family to choose this as an inscription and it's interesting that the War Graves Commission, which gave itself the power to censor inscriptions, didn't refuse to accept this one, despite its obvious criticism of war.


WOULD THAT THOSE
WHO MADE THE QUARRELS
WERE THE ONLY ONES TO FIGHT

PRIVATE LEONARD CECIL TAMS


From his choice of inscription you can see that Leonard Tams' father, James, was not a wholehearted supporter of the war. In his opinion, why couldn't those who caused them fight them and not drag everyone else in. This is not how his son felt, or at least this can't have been how his son felt originally since he was quite an early a volunteer. Leonard Tams attested on 24 March 1915, before the pressure to 'volunteer' began to be heavily applied.
Tams served with the 9th Battalion South Lancashire Regiment and embarked with them for France on 6 September 1915. The following month they embarked from Marseilles for Salonika. His service file is one of the few to have survived and from it we can see that he was admitted to hospital with influenza and a septic hand in March 1916, and that from 18 November 1916 he was in and out of medical units with 'N.Y.D.', a 'not yet diagnosed' complaint. Eventually on 18 April 1918 he was admitted to the hospital ship Valdivia, still with 'N.Y.D', and then on 17 May into hospital in Malta, his condition eventually diagnosed as malaria. He did not return to Salonika until October 1917.
On 18 September 1918 the battalion took part in the Allied attack on the strongly fortified heights of the Grand Couronne and Pip's Ridge. Their casualties were huge and the attack initially failed. However, it was the beginning of the end for the Bulgarians: three days later they abandoned the heights and eight days later they surrendered.
Leonard Tams was wounded in action on the 18th - his Active Service Casualty Sheet recording 'Shell wound penetrating abdomen'. He died the next day.


"BOY O' MINE"

CORPORAL DONALD EMSON


The speech marks are definitely there, as is the apostrophe after the letter 'o', which means that the chances are Donald Emson's mother intended us to understand that this is a quotation rather than simply a term of endearment. But a quotation from what? My best guess is a poem called Boy O' Mine written by the American poet, Edgar Guest (1881-1959) and published in a collection of his verse called When Day is Done. The last verse could have resonated with Mrs Emson:

Boy o'mine, boy o'mine, this is my prayer for you;
Never may shame pen one line of despair for you;
Never may conquest or glory mean all to you;
Cling to your honour whatever shall fall to you;
Rather than victory, rather than fame to you,
Choose to be true and nothing bring shame to you.

The poem was not published until 1921, which may seem too late to be used as a source for a headstone inscription. However, many war cemeteries were not constructed until the late 1920s so this is not necessarily a problem. A slightly bigger problem comes from the fact that there appears to be no evidence that either the poem or When Day is Done was ever published in Britain.
There are other contenders but they are equally American and even more unlikely. Soldier Boy O' Mine, written in 1919 by Elizabeth S Howe has a first verse that goes:

All my heart is with you o'er the ocean
In my dreams your dear face I can see
And I long for the day, when from far away
You'll come back to the homeland and me.

Somehow this doesn't sound like something that would appeal to a bereaved mother. And there's another poem with the title Boy O' Mine, words and music by Florence T Irving, which was written in 1918:

Just a song boy o' mine
Just a message of love
Just a prayer oh boy o' mine
To our father above ...

But the subject of the song is really the Stars and Stripes so that rules it out for me.

Donald's father having died when he was four, his mother supported herself as a school teacher. Donald, a farm labourer, volunteered and went out to France in September 1915. In September 1918 he was in Salonika with the 9th Battalion The King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, which took part in the costly assault on the Grand Couronne and Pips Ridge near Lake Doiran on 18-19 September. Emson was killed in action on the 19th.


ALAS THAT YOUTH'S
SWEET SCENTED MANUSCRIPT
SHOULD CLOSE

LIEUTENANT KENNETH CAMERON KIRBY


Edward Fitzgerald's translation of quatrains said to have been written in the 11th Century by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam was published in 1859 as the Rubayait of Omar Khayyam. Initially attracting little attention, by the 1880s the poems were extremely popular throughout the English speaking world, and their popularity only grew. Some of the quatrains perfectly capture the fleeting nature of life and the pathos of youthful death.
Lieutenant Kirby's father, Hector, was not the only relation to quote from the Rubayait; he chose a line from the 72nd quatrain:

Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose
That youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!

Kenneth Cameron Kirby was brought up in Norwich. His mother died in 1903 and his family lived with his mother's father, who was a master tailor. Hector Kirby was a tailor's cutter. They lived with Kenneth's two younger brothers, and two of Hector's sisters. This is totally irrelevant but one of the sisters went by the magnificent name of Alma Sevastopol Kirby. She was 56 in 1911, which means that she was born in 1855 during the Crimean War, I would imagine in September 1855 or shortly afterwards when the siege of Sevastopol was lifted.
After leaving school, Kirby worked in insurance for the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company, part of the Norwich Union group on whose Roll of Honour his name appears.
Kirby's medal card card indicates that he first arrived in a theatre of war on 10 August 1918. He was killed six weeks later, leading his men in a successful attack on the village of Epehy.
Epehy was a minor but significant victory in which the British took 11,750 prisoners and captured 100 guns. It was an early sign that perhaps the Germans were weakening.


WENT THE DAY WELL?
WE DIED -
AND NEVER KNEW

CAPTAIN WATSON TULLOCH DICK MC


Captain Dick's mother chose his inscription, quoting from an epitaph composed by J Maxwell Edmonds, a classics don at Cambridge. The epitaph was one of four originally published in The Times on 6 February 1918 under the heading 'Four Epitaphs'. Edmonds then composed five more. All nine were included in the Victoria and Albert Museum's 1919 publication - Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials.
The full inscription reads:

On some that died early in the Day of Battle.
Went the day well? We died and never knew;
But well or ill, England, we died for you.

Somehow the incomplete inscription, especially in the manner in which it is laid out, which was how Mrs Dick wanted it to be done, is all the more poignant for being incomplete.
Watson Tulloch Dick volunteered in 1915 and served as a private in the Highland Light Infantry. He served in France from September 1915 until 1917 when he went to Salonika. By this time he had been commissioned and was serving with the 7th Battalion South Wales Borderers.
Dick was killed on 18 September 1918 in the Third Battle of Doiran when the combined British, Greek and French forces tried to break the Bulgarian lines. Although the Bulgarians surrendered just ten days later this wasn't before they had put up a tremendous fight, causing the 7th Battalion South Wales Borderers terrible casualties. Dick was killed leading an assault on the Grande-Couronne, a rugged peak that rose to 1,977 feet to the west of Lake Doiran.


TO SAVE MANKIND
A WIDOWED MOTHER'S ONLY SON

GUNNER WILLIAM JOHN DANIELS


'To save mankind' seems like rather an unequal task for one widowed mother's son to achieve; where did the idea that this was the cause for which William John Daniels died come from?
The Mrs Maude Turner who chose his inscription - she was not his mother whose name was Catherine - was quoting a line from verse two of Sir John Arkwright's famous hymn, O Valiant Hearts:

Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war
As who had heard God's message from afar;
All you had hoped for, all you had you gave,
To save mankind - yourselves you scorned to save.

You can imagine the comfort such words would have given to the bereaved. They provide not only meaning for the deaths of their loved ones but the assurance that having fought in God's cause these men are assured of their place in heaven:

These were His servants, in His steps they trod,
Following through death the martyred Son of God.
Victor, He rose; victorious too shall rise
They who have drunk His cup of sacrifice.

I haven't been able to find out any personal details about William John Daniels, only that he was born in Landrake, Cornwall, enlisted in Saltash and wasn't entitled to the 1914 or 1915 Star. He served originally with the 4th Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment, transferred to the 260th Battery Royal Garrison Artillery, and was killed in action on 18 September 1918 when the battery was in support of the 4th Australian Divisions attack on the Hindenburg Line.


NOW LETTEST THOU THY SERVANT
DEPART IN PEACE

RIFLEMAN FREDERICK THOMAS MOON


Frederick Moon died as a prisoner of war in Germany. There is very little else I can tell you about him other than that he had been a professional soldier who in September 1914 was still on the reserve. In 1911 Moon was in Malta serving with the 2nd Battalion The Prince Albert's Somerset Light Infantry. Later in 1911 the Battalion went to China and then in 1914 to India where it remained until 1917. However, Moon earned the 1914 Star by entering a theatre of war on 21 September 1914. This is why I conclude he must have been still on the reserve when war broke out.
Moon is now buried in Cologne Southern Cemetery but he could have died in any one of the 180 different prison camps in the Hanover, Hessen, Rhine or Westphalia regions. After the war it was decided to gather all the British dead from these areas into the Southern Cologne Cemetery, which was to be one of four cemeteries in Germany into which the exhumed bodies of prisoners of war were reburied. There is no record of when Moon was taken prisoner and no record of his cause of death.
Born in Williton, Somerset to Edward and Emma Moon it was a Mrs E Cheshire of 11 Havelock Road, Wealdstone, Middlesex who chose his inscription. In the absence of any other information I would suggest that this was his mother, remarried, or a married sister. She chose an extract from the Nunc Dimittis, an ancient canticle that has been part of the Church of England's service of Evening Prayer for centuries, as well as part of the funeral service:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.


I MOURN FOR YOU IN SILENCE
BUT NOT WITH OUTWARD SHOW

LIEUTENANT WILLIAM CLARENCE MCGREGOR


This seems a very guarded inscription; it made me curious to know whether there was anything behind it and the more I looked into William Clarence McGregor the more dark thoughts I began to have about him.
His entire eight-eight-page service file has been digitised and for some time it made confusing reading.
The War Graves Commission record says that he was the son of Mrs Jessie McGregor and the late Dugald McGregor and that he served as Murray. According to the documents in his file, he enlisted on 17 September 1914 giving his name as William Clarence McGregor, his birthplace as Bellingen, New South Wales, his profession as motor driver, and his age as 21 and one month. In answer to the question had he ever been apprenticed he answered no. The next document in the file is his discharge paper. There is no information on it, no date of discharge and no information as to why he was discharged.
However, on 2 July 1915, the file contains the attestation form for Albert Murray. There is a note in red ink at the top of the form, 'Real name William Clarence McGregor'. 'Albert Murray' said he was born in Aukland, New Zealand, and that he was a motor mechanic who had been apprenticed for four years to his father in Aukland. In answer to the questions, 'Have you ever been discharged from HM Forces?', 'Have you ever served in HM Forces' and 'Have you ever been rejected as unfit?', his answer to every question was 'no'.
You can see why I was having dark thoughts about McGregor/Murray. Albert Murray received a commission in June 1916, embarked from Australia in January 1917 and served with the 49th Battalion Australian Infantry. However, he didn't get to France until the 17 November that year.
He seems to have been a bold soldier as testified by the manner in which he won his Military Cross on 17 August 1918:

"For conspicuous daring in dealing with a troublesome hostile machine-gun. Crawling over No Man's Land, he entered the enemy's trench & worked up it for about 150 yards, until he located the sentry mounted on the gun. He killed the sentry & captured the gun. After bombing a dug-out & killing an officer & four men, he made good his way back with two prisoners."

Note, citations usually read 'for conspicuous gallantry' not 'daring'. A month later whilst out on patrol he was hit by a machine-gun bullet and killed instantly.
At this point he was still known as Albert Murray. However, a year after his death his mother wrote to the military authorities to say that "as the mother of the above-named soldier, who was killed in action in France on the 16th September 1918, I desire to take the necessary steps to have his correct name recorded". This is the story she had to tell:

"My son enlisted to leave with the first lot of men to go and was very disappointed when he contracted rheumatic fever and instead of sailing with his camp comrades he had to go into hospital for 9 weeks and as a consequence received his discharge.
Later on when he considered that he had removed all trace of the [disease] he endeavoured to re-enlist but was advised that his former illness which had to be disclosed would come against him.
Not to be defeated in this worthy object he enlisted in a name other than his own and sailed as if Lieut Albert Murray in the troopship Ayrshire in 1916 ... "

Mrs McGregor obviously convinced the authorities, which is why his file has 'Correct name William Clarence McGregor' written over all his forms. She also got his correct name carved onto his headstone. However, it's interesting to note that the War Graves Commission told her that they would also include the name under which he served, reasoning:

"If the correct name only appeared in view of the fact that he served under the assumed name there would be danger of his identity being lost sight of."

So, my dark thoughts about McGregor were totally unfounded. His reasons for disguising his identity far from being nefarious were down to the fact that he was keen to join the action and feared that his medical history, if suspected, would prevent him doing so.


FEAR NO MORE
THE HEAT O' THE SUN
NOR THE FURIOUS
WINTER'S RAGES

MAJOR JOHNSTON HUGHSTON


These words, from Shakespeare's Cymbeline, are spoken by Guiderus over the body of Cloten who he has just killed:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldy task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Guiderus' brother, Arvirargus, speaks the next lines and together they complete what is now best known as a poem, without the separate speaking parts.
Long before Shelley assuaged his grief for the death of John Keats in his poem Adonais with the assurance that 'He hath awaken'd from the dream of life':

He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again.

And Binyon attempted to comfort those mourning the dead of the First World War with the thought that:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grown old:
Age shall not weary them or the years condemn.

Shakespeare was assuring those who mourned that at least nothing could ever hurt the dead again and that they would now never have anything to fear.

Johnston Hughston, also known as John and Jack, was an Australian doctor, a former pupil of Scotch College, newly qualified from the University of Melbourne. Scotch College have a detailed biography of him on their website from which I shall quote.
Johnston and his brother Edward, also a doctor, were among a group on one hundred Australian doctors who went to England in 1915 to help support Kitchener's New Armies. They were all on one year contracts. Johnston joined the 68th Field Ambulance and went with it to Salonika in October 1915. In April 1916 his contract with the army came up but he signed on again.
In May 1918 he went home to Australia for a few weeks in order to recover from malaria. He returned to the Salonika front and on 3 August was wounded in the chest by a shell fragment. He spent a month in hospital before returning to the front when he was again hit by shrapnel whilst visiting some advanced dressing stations. Although he was with another doctor who immediately did what he could, and was despatched to hospital as quickly as possible, he died nineteen hours later.
His mother chose his inscription, but added to the War Grave Commission records the comment that he was 'A young Australian who freely gave his life when duty called'. Johnston Hughston was one of eight of the original hundred doctors to die.




HE LOVED TO DO A KIND ACTION

SECOND LIEUTENANT HARLEY BENTHAM


I have just watched a television programme where one of the commentators was spitting with rage at the fact that officers got a clothing allowance and extra pay despite the fact that they were already all so much better off than the soldiers. The commentator was wrong; all officers weren't necessarily better off.
Harley Bentham was the son of a Midlands Railway Company signalman who had begun his working life as an assistant railway porter. The family lived in a small terraced house at 7 Thorndale St, Hellifield, Yorkshire.
Bentham attended Giggleswick Grammar School and left work to become a clerk in the Bank of Liverpool in Settle. He enlisted in January 1916 as a private in the Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment. In December 1916 he was recommended for a commission and in August 1917 was gazetted second lieutenant.
On 13 September 1918 Bentham was wounded in action by shellfire "whilst gallantly leading his men" in a successful attack, which captured the town of Havrincourt. Bentham's lieutenant colonel reassured his parents that their son had not suffered and that he'd died shortly after reaching the Casualty Clearing Station. There's always been a suspicion that such reassurances were mere words, especially as we know that Bentham didn't die until the third day after he'd been wounded.
Thomas Bentham chose a very gentle inscription for his son, who was his parents' only child - 'He loved to do a kind action'. One such action was a letter he wrote to the sister of one of the men in his regiment. This was whilst he was still a private so it was not his job to do so but as he says to her: "I have been asked by some of the lads to write to you and tell you how sorry we are and how we sympathise with you in your great loss". Bentham tells the sister how her brother was killed when a shell burst on the parapet right beside him. He assures her that death would have been instantaneous and that he wouldn't have suffered. In this instance it's possible to believe him.


TO HAVE, TO LOVE
AND THEN TO PART
IS THE SADDEST PAIN
OF A MOTHER'S HEART

SAPPER JOHN DALLY


This may not be great literature but it is very heartfelt, and very affecting. Mrs Sarah Dally chose the words for her son, John's inscription. John had been married since early 1914 but his wife, Elizabeth, was dead.
There is very little information about John Dally but what there is can be pieced together to tell a story. He was born in Smoketown, USA, the only one of his parents' five children not to have been born in Wales. Smoketown is a minute and remote farming community in Pennsylvania. Did John's parents try to escape from the mining life of South Wales but find they couldn't manage it? They returned to Wales where James Dally, a coal miner, died in 1896.
In the 1901 census Sarah Dally, a widow, is living with her five children, her widowed mother, a widowed sister and her two children, and three spinster sisters in a single house in Aberdare. Her son Thomas aged 13 is a coal miner, a hewer, despite the fact that he is so young. In 1911 Sarah Dally and four of her children are living in their own house. John and Thomas are both coal miners, both hewers.
John joined up early earning the 1915 Star. He went to France in July 1915, serving with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He later transferred to No. 1 Water Boring Section, Royal Engineers. This was formed in March 1917 and served in France with the 3rd Army from 1 July 1917. Made up of one officer and 40 other ranks with a variety of different skills, these sections were responsible for drilling wells and pumping the water.
There is no information about how John Dally died but on 15 September the 3rd Army was taking part in the assualt on the Hindenburg Line. Dally is buried in a Casualty Clearing Station cemetery 12 km south east of Bapaume.


AS YESTERDAY

PRIVATE ROBERT ILLTYD FRENCH


Sometimes next-of-kin choose inscriptions that are impenetrably enigmatic, like this one - "As yesterday" - or Lieutenant Horace Collins', "Yes Dad" which I wrote about in May. I admire their originality, especially as I always suspect I might have chosen something deeply conventional. However, is it possible to get an inkling of what Robert French's mother, Mrs Martha French, meant by her choice of inscription?
There's a memorial in Linthorpe Municipal Cemetery, Middlesborough Yorkshire that gives a hint. The dedication reads:

My dearly loved husband Robert French
Died on active service Aug. 18th, buried at sea
August 19th 1916
Also my dearly beloved only son Robert Illtyd
Aged 23 yrs 10 mths killed in action Sept 12th 1918
Buried at Bertincourt, France

Robert French was a time-expired naval petty officer who rejoined the navy on the outbreak of war. He served on board HMS Moldavia, an armed merchant cruiser on patrol in the North Sea. French is variously said to have 'died of disease', 'died of haemorrhage', died of a 'burst blood vessel'. However, someone has transcribed Moldavia's log book and this gives chapter and verse:

18 August 1916
At sea
Various courses for patrol
4.00 pm: In 56 26N, 11 27W, departed this life, PO Robert French, RFR, ON 138240, from haemorrhage following cancer of the stomach
19 August 1916
Various courses for patrol
At sea
9 am: Stopped and committed to the deep the body of the late PO 1c Robert French, in Lat 56 22N, Long 11 17W. RIP.

There is not the same level of detail known about his son's death. Robert Illtyd French's medal card shows him to have been entitled to the 1915 Star having first gone to France and Flanders on 17 April 1915. He served originally with the Yorkshire Regiment before being transferred to the 2/4th York and Lancaster Regiment. This was part of the 62nd (2nd West Riding) Division, which on 12 September 1918, the day French was killed, successfully took the town of Havrincourt; the first breach in the German Hindenburg Line.
Does any of this tell us what Martha French meant by her inscription? I would suggest perhaps that she was declaring that her love and her grief for her dead husband and son were the same 'as yesterday'; they had not diminished.

After I posted this, one of my followers suggested that the reference could be to Psalm 90 verse 4:

"For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."

I think he could be right but I still can't really understand what Mrs French meant by her choice of words.







SUCH A SLEEP THEY SLEEP
THE MEN I LOVED
R.I.P.

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM EDWARD GILLESPIE


This beautiful inscription is from Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur, which begins:

So all day long the noise of battle roll'd
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur's table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonesse about their Lord,
King Arthur:

The dying Arthur tells Sir Bedevere, 'the last of all his knights':

The sequel of today unsolders all
The goodliest fellowship of famous knights
Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep
They sleep - the men I loved. I think that we
Shall never more, at any future time,
Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,
Walking about the gardens and the halls
Of Camelot, as in the days that were.

These are such haunting words, which must have resonated with many people who felt that life would never be the same again now that so many of their menfolk were dead, as was the case with Mrs Gillespie, William Gillespie's mother, who chose the inscription. Mrs Gillespie's husband Denis died in October 1915, her son William was killed on 11 September 1918 and another son, Daniel, was killed seven days later.
William served with the Rifle Brigade but at the time of his death was attached to the 12th Battalion London Regiment, part of the 58th London Division. On 11 September they were in the front line near Epehy. That night the Germans put down a box barrage and attacked Tattenham Post. According to the war diary, "D Coy were surrounded and the post taken". Was this when Gillespie was killed? His body was discovered in an unmarked grave a year later.
His older brother, Daniel, a Lance Corporal with the 58th Division Signal Company Royal Engineers, was killed on 18 September. One of his other brothers, a Mr J Gillespie, chose his inscription. It comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth:

After life's fitful fever
He sleeps well


HE CROSSED THE BAR
FOR HIS COUNTRY
IN THE GLORIOUS CHARGE
OF BEERSHEBA

CORPORAL JOHN FIELDING


On 31 October 1917 the British (at the time the term British would automatically have included Empire and Commonwealth soldiers) secured the capture of the Ottoman-held town of Beersheba with a magnificent Australian cavalry charge that has gone down in legend. The capture of the town, important though it was, was perhaps of less importance than the capture of its wells since the British soldiers and their horses had been short of water for days.
Some parts of the town had been captured during the day but the British wanted total possession and the day was getting late. The commanders therefore decided to gamble on a full-scale cavalry charge and the task was entrusted to the 4th and 12th Australian Light Horse regiments. Much has been written about this famous charge, which rode off at 4.30 pm just as the sun was beginning to set. Armed only with their bayonets, the cavalry was organised into three lines, each line 300 yards apart, and each man keeping a distance of five yards between him and the next to minimise the impact of enemy artillery. As the Ottoman lines came into view the Australians spurred their horses into a gallop and rode straight into a hail of artillery and machine-gun fire. Within in an hour they had achieved their objective and although the Ottoman commander tried to destroy the wells all but two were saved.
It was a magnificent achievement but amongst all the hyperbole that has been subsequently written about the event, I love the 12th Light Horse's laconic war diary entry:

October 31 1917:
"The Regiment moved on Beersheba at the gallop. Heavy enemy rifle and machine gun fire developed on the left flank ... This fire was silenced by artillery. The leading Squadron came under very heavy rifle fire and machine gun fire from the trenches, ... On reaching a point about 100 yards from these trenches, one Troop of A Squadron dismounted for action, and the remainder of the Squadron galloped on ... The Regiment, less 1 troop, kept straight on to Beersheba."

John Fielding was in A Squadron. Eight hundred men began the charge in which 31 were killed, mainly in the hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches.
Fielding was born in Rawtenstall, Manchester and arrived in Australia in 1908 when he was 13. He enlisted in January 1915 and served in Gallipoli from August to December that year. His father chose his inscription. He began it with a reference to Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, a euphemism for dying:

Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea

And concluded it by indicating his pride in his son's participation in this legendary event. There's one other point about the inscription. John Fielding's father says, 'he crossed the bar for his country', which country? I'm going to say Britain, and by that I mean the British Empire because at that time many Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians and South Africans thought of themselves as British, despite the fact that so many episodes, like the 'glorious charge at Beersheba', have now become building blocks in the construction of their various nationhoods.


NATION WITH NATION
LAND WITH LAND
UNARMED SHALL LIVE
AS COMRADES, FREE

PRIVATE ARTHUR EDMUND LATCHFORD


This wonderful Utopian world where men will live at peace, guided by science and reason, where woman will be man's 'mate and peer' and art and music will blossom, is envisaged by John Addington Symonds in his poem, The Vista (1880). However, it's far more likely that Arthur Latchford's mother, who chose the inscription, knew the lines from the shortened version, which was published as a four or five-verse hymn, rather than from the poem.
Symonds, a literary critic and cultural historian, was a fairly controversial figure. An advocate of homosexuality even perhaps verging on pederasty, Symonds admired the Greek world where relationships between men and youths were not frowned on, and looked forward to a time when homosexuality would no longer be a sin. That's why the hymn is a far more likely source. It's called, 'These things shall be: a loftier race', and it looks forward to the time when:

These things shall be: a loftier race
Than e'er the world hath known, shall rise
With flame of freedom in their souls
And light of knowledge in their eyes.

Latchford's inscription comes from verse three:

Nation with nation, land with land,
Unarmed shall live as comrades free;
In every heart and brain shall throb
The pulse of one fraternity.

This is the Utopian world that Mrs Latchford was looking forward to.
Arthur Latchford was his parents' eldest child; his father, William was a brickmaker in Boxmoor, Hertfordshire. Arthur is commemorated on the McCorquodale and Co Ltd war memorial. McCorquodales were printers based in Cardington St, London and in Milton Keynes, which is where Latchford was probably based. He served with the 38th Field Ambulance, part of the 12th Division, and died on 8 September 1918. There are no records of what happened to him.


BROTHER OF
EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN
KILLED IN ACTION
25TH SEPT. 1918

RIFLEMAN BENJAMIN GOLDSTEIN


There's a story here quite beyond the one of two brothers being killed within twenty days of each other.
Benjamin and Emmanuel Goldstein were the sons of Morris and Milly Goldstein. Morris was born in Chachinow, Plotzk a town now in central Poland but at the time of his birth in Russia. The town had a huge, vibrant Jewish community estimated at one time to have made up 40% of the population. However, by the end of the Second World War, after decades of varying degrees of anti-semitism culminating in the Plotzk Ghetto, there were thought to be no more than thirty Jewish residents in the city. Milly, Amelia Bernberg, was born in Kuldiga, a town in western Latvia, which had had a similarly thriving Jewish community. Many of them were German, which is how Milly identified her nationality in the 1911 British census. In 1941, the Jews of Kildigas were imprisoned in the synagogue before being taken out into the forest in small groups and shot.
Morris Goldstein, who was a tailor, came to Britain in about 1894 when he was 36, and became a naturalised British subject in December 1902. There is no evidence that Milly ever became a British subject. All their six children were born in Britain, of whom five survived to adulthood.
The three eldest boys all served in the British army, the second and third sons both being killed in 1918 within weeks of the end of the war.
The boys' father, Morris Goldstein, chose Benjamin's inscription, whereas their eldest brother chose Emmanuel's: "Brother of Ben Goldstein died of wounds Sept. 6th 1918". However, the eldest brother, Samuel Reuben Goldstein, was now calling himself Stanley Robert Golding. And later on I can see that the youngest brother, Louis, had changed his surname to Golding too.
It seems a shame that a family who came to Britain to escape prejudice, two of whose four sons died fighting for Britain, should have felt the need to change their name from Goldstein to the less Jewish sounding Golding - but this was the story of the twentieth-century.


"THEY NEVER FAIL
WHO DIE IN A GREAT CAUSE"
BYRON
"MY DEAR, MY BETTER HALF"

LIEUTENANT HARRY WILLIAM FRANCIS PONTER


The first part of the inscription comes from Byron's play 'Marino Faliero'. Faliero was a fourteenth century Doge of Venice and against all the historical evidence, in fact in contradiction of all the historical evidence, Byron creates a revolutionary hero. In the play, two fellow revolutionaries, Calendro and Israel Bertuccio discuss a third, Bertram, whom Calendro thinks has 'a hesitating softness', which will be fatal to their cause. Bertuccio assures him that:

The truly brave are soft of heart and eyes.
And feel for what their duty bids them do.
I have known Bertram long; there doth not breathe
A soul more full of honour.

In this Bertram appears to share the same characteristics as Wordsworth's Happy Warrior - see yesterday's inscription and also this earlier one. But the quality that made the Happy Warrior more than usually brave was that he was a married man with much to love, which he risked losing by fighting, whereas Bertram was alone:

CALENDRO: [...] Yet as he has no mistress, and no wife
To work upon his milkiness of spirit,
He may go through the ordeal; it is well
He is an orphan, friendless save in us:
A woman or a child had made him less
Than either in resolve.

So Bertram is not as brave as the Happy Warrior who, despite the fact that he has much to love, can be relied upon to do his duty. Lieutenant Ponter also has much to love: the wife who called him her "dear one, her better half", a son born in January 1918 and a daughter who was born posthumously in February 1919.
Ponter had joined up in September 1914 but poor eyesight kept him on home duties, training soldiers and guarding the east coast. However, by some means he got himself to France in July 1918. He was killed in his first action, his company commander assuring his parents that he had died "gallantly and well", leading his platoon and dying instantaneously when hit by rifle fire.

Blanche Ponter chose her husband's inscription. Just after Bertuccio has defended Bertram he goes on to assert:

We must forget all feelings save the one -
We must resign all passions save our purpose -
We must behold no object save our country -
And only look on death as beautiful,
So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven, -
And draw down freedom on her evermore.
CALENDRO: But if we fail.
BERTUCCIO: They never fail who die
In a great cause:


MORE BRAVE FOR THIS
THAT HE HATH MUCH TO LOVE

LIEUTENANT JAMES MCDONALD MC


James McDonald was a married man, a fact which provides a clue to his inscription. It comes from Wordsworth's poem 'Character of the Happy Warrior'. The poem asks the question - "Who is the happy warrior? Who is he that every man in arms would wish to be?" - before enumerating all the noble and honourable qualities that make a man a good soldier, describing him as someone who can withstand the 'storm and turbulence' of warfare but:

Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans
To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes;
Sweet images! which, whereso-er he be,
Are at his heart; and such fidelity
It is his darling passion to approve;
More brave for this, that he hath much to love: -

And 'much to love' meant he had much to lose, which explains why in Wordsworth's eyes he was 'more brave' than those who were not family men.
More than one inscription quotes from Wordsworth's poem, and the term 'happy warrior' had passed into general usage as a description for an all-round good sort. Presumably none of the people who quoted from Wordsworth's Happy Warrior were familiar with Herbert Read's poem of the same title:

His wild heart beats with painful sobs
His strain'd hands clench an ice-cold rifle
His aching jaws grip a hot parch'd tongue
His wide eyes search unconsciously.
He cannot shriek.
Bloody saliva
Dribbles down his shapeless jacket.
I saw him stab
And stab again
A well-killed Boche.
This is the happy warrior,
This is he ...


McDonald had been born in Scotland in 1878 but by the time he enlisted in September 1915 he was a grocer in Vancouver, British Columbia. He served with the 72nd Battalion Canadian Infantry and arrived in France in August 1916. Severely wounded in his right foot and right temple, he was out of action for the early months of 1917. In July 1918 he went home on leave to Dumbarton in Scotland, returning to the front on 17 August. He was killed just over a month later.


AN O.L.
HE BECAME
A PROFITABLE MEMBER
OF THE KING AND COMMONWEALTH

SERGEANT FRANK NICHOLLS KNIGHT


On 1 November 1918 Frank Knight came home on leave from France to stay with his mother's brother at Severn Street in Leicester. Nine days later he was dead. The cause of his death: pneumonia following influenza. He was buried in Leicester's Welford Road Cemetery after a full military funeral that included buglers and a firing party.
Knight's family lived in Australia, where they had gone in 1912 when he was 17. He had been born in Witherley in Leicestershire and grown up in Rugby, Warwickshire where his father, Isaac Knight, ran the Queen's Head pub. Knight attended Lawrence Sherriff School in Rugby. This makes him an Old Laurentian, an O.L. as it says on his inscription.
Knight, a draughtsman, enlisted in Melbourne in March 1916. It would appear that he spent some time training to be a machine gunner and then training machine gunners at the Machine Gun Training Centre in Grantham, Lincolnshire. In January 1918 he went to France, from where he came on leave on 1 November 1918 to die two days before the end of the war.
I find the the syntax of his inscription rather curious: 'He became a profitable member of the King and Commonwealth'. It has rather a seventeenth-century ring to it. However, by Commonwealth Isaac Knight wasn't referring to the kingless government of England following the civil war, nor to the British Commonwealth of Nations but to the Commonwealth of Australia the country's official name following the federation of the six self-governing colonies on 1 January 1901. Isaac Knight was stating that his son was both a valuable subject of His Majesty King George V and a useful member of the Commonwealth of Australia.

This inscription will feature as part of the Global War Graves Leicester project, which aims "to explore and bring to light how the 298 First World War casualties came to be buried in the cemetery, how their identities were negotiated in death; and how even the British burials alongside them also had connections throughout and beyond the UK. The purpose of this research will be to challenge and expand our understandings of the relationship between local and global in terms of Leicester and the First World War".


"TO THIS END WAS I BORN"

PRIVATE HERBERT HENRY SOMERSET MARKS


This sounds rather a harsh inscription for a parent to chose for their son: "To this end was I born". It comes from St John's gospel and was chosen by Private Mark's father, Major Herbert Beaumont Marks. In St John, Christ has been brought before Pontius Pilate to be tried.

"Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
St John 18 v. 37

The inscription implies that Major Marks was one of those who believed war with Germany to be inevitable, the logical conclusion of the growth of German militarism. And this being the case, that he knew his son was in line to be sacrificed in the forthcoming war. In 1910, Major HB Marks had been appointed Area Officer for the town of Townsville in Northern Queensland. This put him in charge of the local militia and of recruitment, making sure that even the young men of Townsville were prepared for war.
His son enlisted on 20 May 1916 when he was 18 and 9 months. Prior to this young Marks had been working as a station hand. He embarked from Australia in September 1916 and served with the 41st Battalion Australian Infantry. This took part in the Australian attack on Peronne on 1 September 1918. It was a terrible battle, the machine-gun fire, especially the enfilade, the greatest the battalion had ever experienced causing many casualties. The war diary is unusually descriptive:

"This fire also prevented us from removing some of our casualties from the front line as the Boche fired on stretcher bearers, killing and wounding a whole team. We took a large number of prisoners, some two hundred and fifty, together with five Field Guns, the teams of which "D" Coy. Lewis Gunners shot on reaching their objective, while the enemy was trying to withdraw them."

Marks was one of the 120 casualties suffered by the 41st battalion that day.


FOR YOUR TOMORROW
WE GAVE OUR TODAY

LIEUTENANT CHARLES ARNOLD GRANT


When you go home, tell them of us and say
"For your to-morrows these gave their to-day"

The most famous use of this inscription is on the Kohima Memorial which marks the point at which the Japanese advance into India was halted in April 1944. The words were composed by a Cambridge Classic's don, J Maxwell Edmonds, and included in a 1919 HMSO publication titled, 'Suggested Inscriptions for War Memorials'. However, the words on the Kohima Memorial are slightly different, which is how they are usually found:

When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today.

A Miss M Grant chose Charles Grant's inscription. His parents were both dead and it's not possible to tell whether this was an aunt or a sister.
Grant was a barrister, a partner in the firm of Parker, Grant, Freeman and Abbott, when he enlisted in December 1915. Badly wounded on the Somme in September 1916, he didn't return to the front until early in 1917. He was wounded again in June 1917, but less seriously less time. He was wounded again on 28 August 1918 in the Canadian action at Jigsaw Wood. (The diary entry for the action has been transcribed and can be read here).
It wasn't until 4 September that Mrs James Grant received a telegram informing her that her step-son had been wounded. This was quickly followed a few hours later by one saying that he was dangerously ill and within hours another one to say that he had died on 2 September.


ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN
TO DO HIS DUTY

PRIVATE ALBERT EDWARD HARROP


I think a lot of people will recognise this inscription; it's the message Admiral Lord Nelson ordered to be sent from his flagship HMS Victory on the morning of 21 October 1805 just before the British fleet engaged with the French at Trafalgar. Nelson knew this was to be a momentous battle, Britain's freedom of the seas depended on it; he wanted to say something that would stiffen his sailors' hearts. He can't have realised just how successful a message it would be - and he never did realise it as he died that day.
Apparently Nelson selected the word 'confides', in other words, England is confident that every man will do his duty. However, the signals officer said that he would have to spell out the word 'confides' whereas there was already a signal for 'expects' so could he use that instead, it would be much faster. Nelson agreed and the saying, 'England expects that every man will do his duty' has sunk deep into the nation's cultural memory.
So what is it doing on the grave of an American serving in the Canadian army? The answer isn't difficult to find. Albert Harrop was an Englishman, born in Birmingham in 1898 to English parents. In 1891 the family were living in Birmingham, Aston, where father James was a chandelier caster. But they must have moved to the United States before the 1901 census where there is no sign of them. Certainly by the time Albert joined up on 15 December 1917 they were living in Rhode Island. By this time the United States had entered the war. It's interesting that Albert Harrop should have enlisted in the Canadian army, was this a sign of the family's continuing feeling of loyalty to the old country where recruiting posters were exhorting young men to join the army by using the phrase - 'England expects every man to do his duty'.
Harrop served with the 13th Battalion Canadian Infantry and was killed at Upton Wood eight months later, just after the Canadians had captured Hendecourt-les-Cagnicourt.


HE WAS A FATHER TO HIS MEN
THE END OF THE UPRIGHT MAN
IS PEACE

LIEUTENANT FREDERICK GEORGE LEWIS


The paternal relationship officers had with their men has often been commented on and here it is confirmed by one officer's mother. Of course an officer was concerned that his men had the correct equipment, were on time for parades and duties and remained fit, but there was more to it than that. Lieutenant Ewart Alan Mackintosh expressed it most powerfully in his poem, In Memoriam, written in 1916. This is verse 5:

Oh, never will I forget you,
My men that trusted me,
More my sons than your fathers',
For they could only see
The little helpless babies
And the young men in their pride.
They could not see you dying,
And hold you while you died.

Mackintosh was 23 when he wrote the poem - he was killed the following year. Lewis was nearly ten years older.
The second part of Lewis's inscription references Psalm 37, which is much concerned with the just deserts of the virtuous and the wicked man. The inscription comes from verses 37/8:

Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.
But the transgressors shall be destroyed together: the end of the wicked shall be cut off.

Frederick Lewis's mother not only chose his inscription but also filled in the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia, making an unusually thorough job of it. Beside the request for 'Unit and number if known' she has replied, 'In Command D Company, 42 Battalion, 3rd Australian Division'. And asked for where he was killed she has put, 'Peronne Sector, N.E. Mont St Quentin, Near Clery sur Somme'. She also tells us that he was 'a valued officer - staff - of the Bank of New South Wales, Brisbane Branch' and that he had been a scholarship boy at Brisbane Boys Grammar School.
Lewis was killed in action on the 1 September 1918 in the Australian attack on Peronne.


INDIAN-TRIBE 6 NATIONS
DIED FOR HONOUR OF EMPIRE
EVER REMEMBERED
BY WIFE AND CHILDREN

SAPPER LEWIS WILSON


The place of indigenous peoples in the armies of the British Empire is a very interesting one. Dominion Governments were reluctant to arm and train them fearing the consequences for the stability of their post-war rule. New Zealand never prevented Maoris from joining the army but originally it only envisaged them in noncombatant roles. Australia was very reluctant to enlist Aborigines at all, some did manage to join up but there was never a policy of recruiting them. The Canadian Government too was initially reluctant to enlist any of the indigenous people, this despite the fact that many of them were very keen to do so. Timothy C. Winegard's book, 'Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and the First World War, explains why many native North Americans were so keen to take part in the war. Money, employment and adventure all played their part, as they did with all recruits of whatever nationality, but in addition many North American Indians were keen to revive the warrior tradition of their ancestors, which they felt had stagnated after their years of living on the reserves, receiving Western schooling and religious education.
However, whilst many North American Indians were willing to put their warrior heritage at the service of the British Crown, it was the British Crown they wanted to serve rather than the Dominion Government. And the Dominion Government was equally reluctant to have them serve it, despite the fact that many Indians were already serving in militia units. But this changed in October 1915 when the British Government made a direct appeal for the recruitment of indigenous people.
All this fits Lewis Wilson precisely. His inscription asserts his race, which the physical description on his attestation form confirms: complexion - dark, eyes - brown. hair - black. He enlisted in May 1916 having already served three years with a militia unit, the Haldimand Rifles. And his wife states specifically that he 'Died for the honour of the British Empire'.
But, however much Wilson might have wanted to be a 'warrior', he served in the Canadian Engineers. On 30 August 1918 the 3rd Battalion Canadian Engineers were engaged in work on a tramway that ran from somewhere between Beaurains and Neuville Vitasse to Wancourt. That night an 'E.A. bomb' fell on their billets killing two other ranks and wounding seven. Wilson died the next day in a Casualty Clearing Station in Aubigny-en-Artois.



HIS LAST MESSAGE
"I DIED DOING MY DUTY"

PRIVATE NORMAN JOHN WARREN HOFFMEYER


What is duty? For some people today it has become synonymous with the word chore, but that is not how men like Private Hoffmeyer saw it. To them 'duty' was something you owed, in this case to your country, something you felt to be morally right despite the fact that it might involve self-sacrifice. There was no conscription in Australia so those who volunteered did so for any number of reasons, which in Norman Hoffmeyer's case amounted to a sense that it was his duty to do so.
Hoffmeyer, a farmer from Bendigo in Victoria, enlisted in September 1916, admitting that he had previously been rejected on the grounds of 'bad feet'. He served at the front from March 1917 except for two weeks in June 1917 when he was wounded, and two weeks in Britain in March 1918 when he was on leave.
On the 31 August 1918 at 4.20 am, the 38th Battalion took over the front line near the Canal du Nord prior to an attack. The war diary reported that at 3.15 pm the 37th Battalion moved through to continue the attack and the 38th went into reserve. 'Moved through' gives a hint as to how the fighting in August had changed from the trench warfare of the past four years, so do the diary's references to 'semi-open' and 'rapidly moving' warfare.
There is no indication as to how Hoffmeyer met his death. His family did not request information from the Australian Red Cross perhaps because, as his inscription suggests, someone was with him when he died who passed on the information. This suggestion is supported by a chance discovery in 2007. Two cousins, sorting out a shed in the family property on the outskirts of Bendigo, came across a collection of First World War photographs that had been taken by their fathers, Jack and Bert Grinton. The brothers served with the 38th Battalion and among the images in the collection is one of Hoffmeyer's grave, marked with a wooden cross. Evidence perhaps that Hoffmeyer was among friends when he died.


HE TRIED TO DO HIS DUTY

PRIVATE HARRY RUSHWORTH


This is a very famous inscription or should I say it was a very famous inscription, not because it belongs to Harry Rushworth but because these are the words Sir Henry Lawrence is said to have asked to have inscribed on his tombstone. Lawrence was the Chief Commissioner of Oudh in May 1857 when the Indian Rebellion broke out. On the 30 June the residency at Lucknow came under siege. More than 1,280 civilians, many of them women and children, had gathered within the grounds of the residency for protection. Lawrence tried to organise the defence with the 1,700 British and Indian soldiers and civilian volunteers he had at his disposal. However, Lawrence was badly wounded by a shell on 2 July. He died two days later having apparently said, "Put on my tomb only this; Here lies Henry Lawrence who tried to do his duty". As was the way with 'heroic' Victorian deaths, the death scene and Lawrence's dying words became famous, especially as they echoed the dying words of another great hero Admiral Lord Nelson, which were not "Kiss me Hardy" but "Thank God I have done my duty". Lawrence's tombstone in St Mary's churchyard Lucknow reads:

Here lies Henry Lawrence
Who tried to do his duty
May God have mercy on his soul

Sir Henry Lawrence was a fifty-one-year-old soldier and statesman born into a military family in India. Harry Rushworth was an eighteen-year-old boy whose father was an engine driver in Huddersfield. Rushworth, who served with 'C' Company 8th Battalion King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, was killed near Ecoust. As the Germans withdrew in front of the British advance they left behind teams of machine gunners hidden in the folds of the rough terrain who wrought havoc on the advancing British. Rushworth was one of the many casualties.


OH! IT'S QUIET DOWN HERE
BUT GOD IS VERY NEAR

SECOND LIEUTENANT EDWARD STONEY ARMITAGE


This seemed to be rather an rather blunt inscription - where is "down here" meant to be - the grave"? The words come from a song by an Australian composer, May Hannah Brahe (1885-1956) with the lyrics by PJ O'Reilly. But, even if I give you the lyrics you will still wonder where "down here" is meant to be. Here they are:

Oh! it's quiet down here
Yes, as quiet as a mouse
Save the sigh of the wind
And the clock in the house
Oh! it's quiet down here!

Oh! it's quiet down here
If a bird-note should break,
All the easy going folk
In the village would wake -
Sure, it's quiet down here.

Oh! it's quiet down here,
And thro' the long day
To the great God of Peace
I feel I must pray
Oh! it's quiet down here,
But God is very near.

You can hear it sung here.
The only clue I have been able to discover is a contemporary print in a New Zealand collection called 'Down Here'. This shows a clearing in a forest. However, I can't help feeling that Edward Armitage's parents were referring to the quiet of the grave.
Armitage was commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in June 1917 when he was 19. However, he didn't get to the front until June 1918. Two months later he was killed in action serving with the 76th Army Brigade Royal Field Artillery.


FATE RULES OUR DESTINIES
ROUGH HEW THEM AS WE MAY

RIFLEMAN RICHARD TILDESLEY BRATT


This isn't exactly what Shakespeare's Hamlet says in Act 5 Scene 2 but I'm sure that Mrs Elizabeth Bratt had Hamlet's words in mind when she chose her husband's inscription.
Hamlet, speaking to his friend Horatio, says that however much we might attempt to 'rough hew' our destinies, control them ourselves, it is God who in fact does so:

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will

I wonder whether Mrs Bratt mis-remembered Shakespeare's words or whether she made a conscious decision to ascribe fortune to fate rather than to God. But, had Mrs Bratt seriously not believed in God, she would have told the War Graves Commission that she didn't want a cross on her husband's grave; it was only a matter of saying 'yes' or 'no' beside the question on the Family Verification Form. There is a cross on Richard Bratt's grave, which would suggest that Elizabeth Bratt was no atheist. It could be that she preferred to think that 'fate' had removed her husband from her, not God. The popular headstone inscription, 'We cannot Lord Thy purpose see but all is well that's done by Thee' was not for her.
The couple had been married for nine years and in the 1911 census had a ten-month-old daughter, Elizabeth. Richard was a letter-press printer and the couple lived in Islington. His medal card indicates that he didn't join a theatre of war until 1916. In August 1918 he was serving with the 5th Battalion London Regiment. On the night of the 26th/27th August the battalion made a frontal attack on the German trenches in front of Croisilles. The battalion war diary speaks of heavy casualties from machine gun fire. Bratt died of wounds on the 27th.


SLEEP LIGHTLY, LAD
THOU ART KING'S GUARD
AT DAYBREAK

LIEUTENANT WILLIAM GODFEY CHARLTON


This is an inscription of unknown origin about which there has been a certain amount of curiosity on the Internet. The words appear on several memorials in the North East of England and although it is not unknown elsewhere it is more commonly found here. And 'here' is where William Charlton came from. His father, John Charlton, was the head teacher at the Council School in Seaton Delaval, a village in Northumberland, eleven miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
In November 1917 an article appeared in the journal, The United Methodist, written by the Rev. Ernest FH Capey, a Methodist minister. He told of going for a walk one Sunday afternoon to the church in Ford, which overlooks Flodden Field. The church was locked but,

"On the inner door was suspended an artistic card 'in memoriam' of the brave boys of the village who had lost their lives in the war. It was headed:
Fought and died for Freedom
Sleep lightly, Lad,
Thou art for King's Guard at daybreak;
With spotless kit turn out,
And take a place of honour."

In other words, prepare yourself, for tomorrow, as a reward for dying for your country, you will part of the honour guard around God.
Searching the newspaper archive I came across an earlier mention of the inscription in an article in the Newcastle Journal of 9 October 1916. Reporting on the dedication of a memorial plaque in St Luke's Chapel, Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, it mentioned an accompanying Roll of Honour, 'delicately executed, the gift of an anonymous friend'. The inscription on the Roll of Honour read: 'Pro Patria: Freely they served and died', followed by the same inscription as that on the door of Ford Church. The article finished with the information that, 'The roll is the work of Mr J.H. Binks of Ford, and is chastely and ably done'.
That certainly doesn't mean that Mr JH Binks composed the inscription, although he may well have done, but it does link the two locations. I don't imagine that it was the card in Ford Church that popularised the lines however, rather I should image it was its use by the Royal Infirmary, and the mention in the local paper. The North East War Memorial Project records several places where the inscription has been used on a war memorial. None of these places are more than 12 miles from Newcastle, except for Ford which is over 50 miles away.
John and Ann Charlton had four children, two sons and two daughters. William was the youngest. Before being commissioned into the Durham Light Infantry in January 1916, he was a pupil barrister at the Inns of Court in London. Serving with the 15th Battalion London Regiment, he went to France in July 1916 where he was severely wounded on the 7th. It was June 1918 before he returned to the front. He was killed two months later.
'Sleep lightly, Lad' is not the inscription on the Seaton Delaval war memorial. This carries the dedication 'To the Motherland', followed by the words on the next-of-kin memorial scroll. The memorial was unveiled on 2 September 1922 by Mr John Charlton "whose two sons were killed in the war"
And what is the personal inscription on the headstone of Captain George Fenwick Hedley Charlton, South Wales Borderers, killed in action on 6 October 1916?

Sleep lightly, Lad
Thou art King's Guard
At daybreak.


GOD, MOTHER, ENGLAND

PRIVATE JOHN ALBERT NADON


This is the fourth night in succession that the epitaph has identified a soldier's reasons for fighting: 'To uphold British prestige"; "for England's honour"; "To end all wars" and now for "God, Mother, England".
If I'm not much mistaken, John Albert Nadon was really Jean Albert Nadon since the family were French Canadians hailing from Quebec. Nadon was born in Mattawa, Ontario where his parents, Joachim and Exilda, had married in 1885 and where his father was a farmer. This makes Nadon's inscription all the more interesting. It was signed for by his mother and it's not only the order of priorities that makes it interesting, nor the fact that his father was still alive, but that this French Canadian should identify England, not Canada or the Empire as a reason for fighting, which some Canadians, especially French Canadians, would have done. Today England is a very specific place but at one time the word was loosely used for the whole of Great Britain. And England was the motherland, the heart of the world-wide Empire.
There is very little personal information on John Albert Nadon, just that he served in the 52nd Battalion Canadian Infantry and that he died on 28 August 1918. On the 27th and the 28th the battalion took part in an attack on the village of Bois-de-Vert and Artillery Hill. It was a successful operation but a costly one, the war diary noted that at the end of the day, "our four companies only numbered one hundred".


TO END ALL WARS

PRIVATE H MARTIN


To Private Martin's father's, his son had died in the war to end all wars. The phrase, which became one of the catchphrases of the war and is always associated with the American president Woodrow Wilson, in fact owes its origins to the title of a book by HG Wells, published in late 1914, containing a number of newspaper articles he'd written in August 1914. The title of the book was, 'The War That Will End War'. And how would it end war? By smashing German militarism.

"We are fighting Germany ... we have to destroy an evil system of government and the mental and material corruption that has got hold of the German imagination and taken possession of German life. We have to smash Prussian Imperialism" which "has been for forty years an intolerable nuisance in the earth. Ever since the crushing of the French in 1871 the evil thing has grown and cast its spreading shadow over Europe. Germany has preached a propaganda of ruthless force and political materialism to the whole uneasy world. "Blood and iron," she boasted, was the cement of her unity, and almost as openly the little, mean, aggressive statesmen and professors who have guided her destinies to this present conflict have professed cynicism and an utter disregard of any ends but nationally selfish ends, as though it were religion."

I think you will have got the picture by now. It's worth following the link to have a look at the book as it certainly illustrates what some people thought they were fighting for and why it would be the war to end war. It wasn't, as we know, but then Wells himself said:

"There can be no diplomatic settlement that will leave German Imperialism free to explain away its failure to its people and start new preparations. We have to go on until we are absolutely done for, or until the Germans as a people know that they are beaten, and are convinced that they have had enough of war."

And that of course didn't happen until after 1945.
I have been able to find out virtually nothing about Private H Martin, except that his father was Mr JJ Martin, that he lived at 3 West Beech Road, Wood Green, London, and that he was killed in action on 27 August 1918 when the 3rd London Regiment Royal Fusiliers, with which he was serving, took the village of Maricourt.


HE DIED FOR ENGLAND'S HONOUR

GUARDSMAN ARTHUR JAMES WILLIAMS


May the heavenly winds blow softly
O'er that far and silent grave,
Where sleeping without dreaming
Lies one we could not save.
He answered duty's call,
He lies among the slain,
He died for England's honour,
He has not died in vain.

Arthur Williams' father quoted from a piece of memorial verse of the kind to be found in the In Memoriam columns of local newspapers. Arthur's father, James, was a former Life Guards' trooper. The concept of England's honour would have resonated with him.
Williams' army number indicates that he joined up in February 1917. He served with the 1st Battalion the Welsh Guards. On 25 August 1918 the 1st Battalion were in the trenches at St Leger when they took part in an attack on the German-held town of Ecoust St Mein. Initially things went well, the heavy mist shrouding their attack. However, the supporting tanks got lost, the German wire was discovered to be uncut, and when the mist lifted the guardsmen were sitting ducks for the German machine guns. The war diary tells how they were forced to withdraw, emphasising that they took their wounded with them. However, Arthur Williams and four other Welsh Guardsmen, who all died on 25 August, were buried approximately ten kilometres behind the German lines in Dury German Cemetery. Their bodies were exhumed in 1924 and buried in Vis-en-Arois British Cemetery.


TO UPHOLD BRITISH PRESTIGE

PRIVATE HARRY WRIGHT


Upholding British prestige throughout the world has always been a matter of concern for British politicians and diplomats. Was it one of the factors that took us to war in 1914? Probably. Did Harry Wright's father, Walter Wright, who chose the inscription, think it a cause worth fighting for? I'm going to say again - probably. Just as concern for British sovereignty played its part in the vote for Brexit in 2016, so upholding British prestige will have played a part in Britain's decision to go to war in 1914.
Harry Wright joined up on 23 August 1915 when he was 17. He didn't get to France until 13 February 1917, presumably by which time he was 19. Promoted Lance Corporal on 22 May 1917, he was demoted on 5 August 1918 for "when on active service failing to relieve a sentry".
According to his surviving service record, Wright was wounded on the 22 August and died on the 24th. According to the war diary the battalion was resting on the 21st and 22nd August so it seems more likely that he was wounded on the 20th when the Germans attacked the British lines just south of the River Scarpe and secured a footing in the Loyal North Lancashire's trenches, forcing them to withdraw to the lines they had originally held on the 18th. A total of five other ranks were killed and twenty-four wounded during thi three-day period. One of them being Harry Wright, who died 'to uphold British prestige'.


THOU O'ER LOOK'ST
THE TUMULT FROM AFAR
AND SMILEST, KNOWING
ALL IS WELL

SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT CHARLES EVANS


This is yet another inscription from Tennyson's In Memoriam. It comes from section CXXVII, the section that begins:

And all is well, tho' faith and form
Be sunder'd in the night of fear;

The poem goes on to describe an apocalyptic scene before asserting that even in the midst of all this chaos, even while "compass'd by the fires of Hell",

Thou, dear spirit, happy star,
O'erlook'st the tumult from afar,
And smilest, knowing all is well.

The smiling person is Tennyson's dead friend Arthur Hallam, and the implication is that once we are dead and with God in heaven, we can be assured that all will be well whatever is happening on earth.
Robert Evans was a solicitor. He served initially as a serjeant with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Commissioned in March 1917, he served with the 57th training reserve battalion before going to France in 1918. He was killed during the Battle of Albert; shot dead by a German prisoner.
A married man with one child, I think it was his wife, Edith, who chose his inscription. The War Graves Commission's records say Mrs AC Evans but that's probably a mis-type for Mrs RC Evans.


REMEMBER, WHATEVER HAPPENS
IT WILL HAVE BEEN
WORTH WHILE

LIEUTENANT ARTHUR GRANVILLE SHARP, MC


Arthur Granville Sharp earned the 1914 Star. This means that he entered a theatre of war before 22 November 1914. Sharp was born on 27 October 1897. He joined Thring's Horse on 24 October 1914, which means that he was just three days short of his seventeenth birthday.
Thring's Horse took part in the suppression of the Maritz / Boer Rebellion after General Maritz allied himself with the Germans and declared that "the former South African Republic and Orange Free State as well as the Cape Province and Natal are proclaimed free from British control and independent". The war, Maritz claimed, was South Africa's chance to free itself from British control and become independent.
Although born in the Orange Free State, Sharp was one of the many who did not agree with Maritz. By the end of the year the rebellion had been suppressed. At which point Sharp transferred to the 1st Mounted Brigade (Sharpshooters) and took part in the German-South-West African Campaign. By December 1915 he had taken a commission in the Royal Field Artillery and spent the rest of the war in France, Flanders and Italy.
Sharp was serving with D Battery, 72 Army Brigade attached to the Guards Division Artillery when he was killed in action on 23 August 1918, the same action for which he was awarded his Military Cross. On the day he was working as a forward observation officer near Hamelincourt, sending back accurate and valuable information to the guns despite the fact that he was under constant and relentless fire.
His mother chose his inscription. These have to have been Arthur Sharp's own words, this must have been his philosophy. Interestingly it's not the same thing as 'Thy will be done', or 'Whatever is is best' but 'Whatever happens it will have been worthwhile'. Sharp served throughout the war until his death in August 1918 but was still only 20 when he died.


HIS LAST WORDS AT HOME WERE
"I SHALL BE ALRIGHT MOTHER"

PRIVATE PERCY COLE


You can imagine the scene at 33 Maple Road, Blackheath, Birmingham as Percy Cole prepared to leave for the front: Mrs Ellen Cole fussing and fretting whilst her son tried hard to reassure her, "I shall be alright mother". Did he mean I'll be able to look after myself, I've got everything I need, or don't worry I won't get killed; all three I expect.
Percy Cole was nineteen when he died. He would have been conscripted at 18 and allowed to go to the front at 19 so he wouldn't have been there for long before he was killed. He served with the 1st Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment and died of wounds 30 km from Beaumont-Hamel where at 3 am on 21 August the 1st Lincolnshires,

"formed up in their preliminary assembly positions in Wagon road (the road between Beamont Hamel and Serre), B and D formed the first wave, C and A the second wave. By zero, companies were formed up in their assembly positions, i.e., Serre road, due east of Wagon road.
At zero the battalion advanced and reached a ravine (probably the Puisieux road) without opposition: a few prisoners were taken en route. But now hostile machine-gun fire came from a line of German trenches ahead."
[History of the Lincolnshire Regiment 1914-1918]

The 1st Lincolnshire's objective had been to take a sunken road running north-west from Baillescourt Farm, north-east of Beaucourt. Lost to the Germans earlier in the year, Beaucourt was successfully retaken, thus the Lincolnshires played their part the Second Battle of Albert, which restarted the stalled Allied advance and really was the beginning of the end. However, by the end of the month the Lincolnshires had suffered three officers and twenty-nine other ranks killed, one officer and two other ranks died of wounds, together with twenty missing and a total of 171 wounded.
Percy Cole was one of the two other ranks who died of wounds; his final words to his mother tragically belied.


BY THE WILL OF GOD
HERE THE WEST MEETS THE EAST

LANCE CORPORAL HERBERT CARPENTER


This inscription must reference Rudyard Kipling's poem The Ballad of East and West, but whether Lance Corporal Carpenter's father, Charles Carpenter, used the idea as Kipling intended or as critics have assumed it does not seem possible to tell. The poem begins and ends with the same four lines:

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!

There are those who argue that Kipling's poem is racist and asserts the superiority of the white races. However, without wishing to be too rude, I would suggest that these people haven't read the poem since Kipling in fact describes how two men from completely different religious and cultural backgrounds, one from the east and one from the west, come to respect each other's courage, and tells how this mutual acknowledgment of bravery results in the swearing of a solemn oath of brotherhood:

They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault,
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt:
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and fresh-cut sod,
On the hilt and the haft of the Khyber knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.

Lance Corporal Herbert Carpenter died on 19 August 1918 in Mesopotamia. I don't know whether he was killed in action, died of wounds or disease, or of heatstroke as many men did. He's buried in Baghdad North Gate Cemetery which took men who had died in the hospitals and casualty clearing stations there, or were gathered in after the war from graves in northern Iraq and Anatolia. The enemy was the Ottoman Turk. Did Charles Carpenter's choice of inscription reflect a respect for these representatives of the east, or scorn?
Herbert Carpenter was the eldest of his parents' four children. Father was a commercial traveller in groceries and in 1911 Herbert was a draper's assistant in Marshall and Snelgove, a big department store on Oxford Street. He served with the 1/6th Hampshire Regiment, which served in India before arriving in Basra on 16 September 1917. His youngest brother, Carl, was killed in action on 15 February 1915. Carl's body was not found until 1928 so although he now has a grave in Sanctuary Wood Cemetery, his name had already been carved onto the Menin Gate.



DIED TO SAVE AN ENEMY

PRIVATE SAMUEL BREW


Samuel Brew's brother, Captain Henry Brew, chose his inscription, and confirmed this statment when he filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia by saying: "Killed while succoring [sic] wounded enemy". Interested to see if I could find out any further details, I looked up 16 August 1918 in the 6th Field Ambulance's war diary and this is what it said:

15th August: ... At about 12 noon the driver of a Ford Car stationed at Quarry X.4.s.8.3. (No. 2294 Dvr F Connolly No. 2 A.M.T. Coy att. 6th Field Amb.) and the orderly No. 9806 Pte. S Brew 6th Field Amb. were just about to commence their midday meal when an enemy shell exploded 5 yards from the car. The driver was standing just in front of the car & the orderly had stepped into the car to get his mess utensils when the shell exploded, the driver was killed instantly & the orderly severely wounded (sh.wd avulsed right arm sh. wd right knee, right foot). He died at No. 55 CCS on 16th & was buried at Daours Communal Cemetery Extension."

On 12 August, the 6th Field Ambulance moved forward from St Achuel. By the end of the 13th it had established itself in its new location and at 8.30 pm received its first patient. There would definitely have been German soldiers among those treated by the 6th Field Ambulance, those it succoured, but Brew's inscription does give a slightly misleading idea of the exact circumstances of his death.
Samuel Brew was born in Britain, in Great Crosby near Liverpool. He emigrated to Australia in 1899 when he was 23. His brother, Henry, also went to Australia, as did another brother, John. John served with the 38th Battalion Australian Infantry and was killed in action on 8 June 1917. He is commemorated on the Menin Gate. The death of two brothers, and also of a cousin - Lieutenant Thomas Brew was killed in action on 4 October 1917 - could explain why Henry Brew, from the comments he makes about his brother's death, sounds like a bitter man.
I'd like to make two comments about the diary entry before I finish, firstly it's interesting that a Field Ambulance diary names and describes the death of other ranks in this way, other units tend only to name officers. And secondly, as a Field Ambulance, the diary writer has given very specific details about the wounds Brew suffered. I had to look up 'avulsed'. It means a partial or complete tearing away of skin and tissue.


"'TISN'T LIFE THAT MATTERS
'TIS THE COURAGE
YOU BRING TO IT"
WALPOLE

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN FRANCIS ASHLEY HALL


"'Tisn't life that matters! 'Tis the courage you bring to it" ... this from old Frosted Moses in the warm corner by the door." ... "A little boy, Peter Westcott, heard what old Frosted Moses had said, and turned it over in his mind."
FORTITUDE Hugh Walpole 1913

John Francis Ashley Hall's father chose his inscription, taking it from the opening words of Hugh Walpole's 1913 novel, Fortitude. The main character is Peter Westcott whose life is tested by one personal catastrophe after another, in the face of which he shows great personal fortitude.
Hall originally served with the East Yorkshire Regiment, being commissioned from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in August 1916. However, at some point he transferred to the Royal Air Force where he served with 21 Squadron, a strategic reconnaissance and bombing squadron.
I don't know how Hall met his death on 14 August 1918 but he's buried beside a fellow member of 21 Squadron, Second Lieutenant Hugh William Savage, who also died on 14 August. This suggests to me that they were the observer and pilot of one of 21 Squadron's RE-8s. Savage's record says that he was killed in action rather than being accidentally killed. I would imagine that this was Hall's fate too.


HE WAS ONLY A BOY

PRIVATE FRANK WESTBY


Frank Westby was 20 when he died. We've become so used to the idea of boy soldiers being 17 and under that we've almost forgotten how young soldiers were at 20.
Frank Westby was born in 1898 in Long Eaton in Derbyshire. The War Graves Commission's records state: "Son of Mrs Jane Westby of Sheffield", yet in the 1901 census Frank Westby is described as the adopted son of John and Agnes Hibbs of Long Eaton. The Hibbs already had three children. Aged 14 in 1911, Frank Westby was a farm boy boarding with John and Elizabeth Middleton, also in Long Eaton. Aged 17 and 24 days on 9 October 1914, Westby enlisted in the 6th Battalion Sherwood Foresters.
Westby's medal card shows that he was not entitled to the 1914-15 Star so he didn't enter a theatre of war until 1916. Two years later he was in the front line at Noreuil on 21 March 1918 when the Germans launched their Spring Offensive. The 2nd/6th Battalion Sherwood Foresters took the full force of the German onslaught with resulting very heavy casualties: on 1 March 1918 their fighting strength had been 53 officers and 883 ORs; on 1 April 1918 it was 18 officers and 364 ORs.
Westby, along with both the regiment's Commanding Officer and Second in Command, was taken prisoner. Five months later he died whilst a prisoner of war. Some sources says he died of wounds but many prisoners died of overwork, malnutrition, harsh treatment or illness. Westby would have been buried at the time wherever in Germany he had been imprisoned, but after the war prisoners' bodies were gathered up from 180 different burial grounds and reinterred in four permanent cemeteries, of which the Cologne Southern Cemetery was one.
Mr Joseph Westby, a cutlery manufacturer of Goole Green Farm, Fulwood, Sheffield, chose Frank Westby's inscription - "He was only a boy". However. not only was Westby 'only a boy' but he was also one who appears to have had no real family. Joseph Westby was definitely not his father but he could have been his uncle.


HE SHALL MASTER & SURPRISE
THE STEED OF DEATH
FOR HE IS STRONG

PRIVATE JOHN PERCIVAL OSMOND MM


During her lifetime the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was more popular than her husband Robert Browning, but this hasn't been reflected in this headstone inscription project. Robert Browning is one of the most popular poets quoted whereas this is the first quotation from one of Elizabeth's poems that I've come across. It's a difficult poem too, and not a popular one. The poem is called A Drama of Exile. It recounts the events of Adam and Eve's first day in exile from the Garden of Eden, and their conversations with Gabriel, Lucifer, various angels, spirits, phantasms and Christ in a vision.
On the Day of Judgement, when the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised up, who will control Death, the pale horse of Revelation 6: 7-8? The second semichorus promise that, "A Tamer shall be found ... He shall master and surprise the steed of Death for He is strong ..." He, of course, will be Christ who will overcome death for, as it says in the bible, "as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" [I Corinthians 15:22]. This is the meaning of Osmond's inscription: there is no death.
John Percival Osmand was born and brought up in South Molton Devon where his father was a domestic groom and coachman. He served in the 2nd/4th Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment and died of wounds in Aire, a hospital centre behind the lines. The battalion had been in action that day in the Neppe Forest Sector where their casualties, particularly from gas, had been very heavy but it's not possible to say if this was the day Osmond was wounded.


MY TASK ACCOMPLISHED
AND THE LONG DAY DONE

PRIVATE ROY DOUGLAS HARVEY


Roy Harvey's inscription comes from WE Henley's poem, Margaritae Sorori, Sister Margaret, which he wrote after the death of his five-year-old daughter, Margaret, in 1894. The poem likens death to the end of a day:

... The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night -
Night with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.

So be my passing!
My task accomplished and the long day done,
My wages taken, and in my heart
Some late lark singing,
Let me be gathered to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death.

It's a beautiful image which can bear no resemblance to Harvey's death except for the fact that it was the end of his day.
Harvey was a pupil at Hillhead High School in Glasgow and his war service is covered in their war memorial volume. According to their account:

"Three days after the sweeping British advance on the 8th August, in a gallant and successful attack by his battalion, the 5th/6th Royal Scots, he was struck by a bullet, and killed instantaneously."

This wasn't quite how the battalion's war diary saw it. The 5th/6th were certainly part of the attack on Parvillers that day but the attack failed, according to the diary writer:

"for the following reasons, (a) the tanks were half an hour late and were all put out of action before crossing our front line (b) barrage line 400 yds too far advanced and missed German front M.G. positions (c) wire almost impenetrable."

Initially prevented from joining the army, as the Hillhead volume put it: "by a physique which fell below the standard then required", it was October 1917 before he got to the front. Harvey must have been about 5' 2", the minimum height requirement varied between 5' 3" and 5' 6" during the early months of the war before settling on 5' 2" in February 1915. Although men as small as 4' 10" were accepted by the bantam battalions.
The school described Harvey as a reserved, thoughtful boy, noted for his thoroughness, accuracy and precision. For this reason they found it totally in keeping that on his body should have been found both a diary, written up to the previous day, and a Collins Gem dictionary.


"CURST GREED OF GOLD
WHAT CRIMES THY TYRANT POWER
HAS CAUSED"
VIRGIL

PRIVATE VICTOR LIONEL SUMMERS


Virgil didn't say this precisely; he used the word 'attest' rather than 'caused', not that it makes much difference. Virgil's point was that many crimes attest to, are evidence of, the power not of gold itself but of the greed for gold. The sentiment is similar to the biblical words from Timothy 6:10: "For the love of money is the root of all evil".
If that was Virgil's point, what was the point of W de V Summers, Victor's cousin, who chose the inscription? It sounds very much as though W de V was one of the many people who held the socialist view that the war was the result of imperialist tensions caused by world capitalism: "What was responsible for these wars was the whole world system of capitalism with its competitive struggle for profits and its collection of competing armed states".
It's strange that W de V Summers, the de V representing the family name de Vere, who lived in Berkeley, California should have been his cousin's next of kin but then Victor Lionel's parentage is something of a mystery. Aged four in 1891 he was living with his grandparents, and aged 14 in 1901 he was a pupil at St Saviour's College, Ardingly in Sussex. When he enlisted in Watrous, Saskatchewan on 28 October 1916 he named his grandmother, Elizabeth Summers, as his next of kin. She died in 1923 and perhaps this was before the War Graves Commission sent out the request for inscriptions.
Victor Summers served with the 28th Battalion Canadian Infantry and was killed on 9 August 1918 when the battalion was ordered up from the reserve to go to the assistance of the 31st Battalion in their attack on the village of Rosieres on the second day of the Amiens offensive..


HIS LAST WORDS
"I PRAY TO GOD
TO KEEP MUM AND DAD
HAPPY AND WELL" RIP

PRIVATE FREDERICK CHARLES RIVERS


At 1 pm on 9th August 1918, the 6th Battalion the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment received orders that they were to attack at 5.30 pm that evening. The battalion war diary recorded:

"Attack completely successful after hand fighting. 12 machine guns captured 10 others destroyed, 4 Trench Howitzers & 1 granatenwerfer [grenade thrower] & about 40 prisoners taken. Attack penetrated about 2000 yards into enemy positions."

Two days later the war diary counted up the casualties the regiment had incurred between 12 noon on the 9th and 12 noon on the 11th August. They amounted to 165 including two officers and 24 other ranks killed. Fourteen members of the regiment are buried with Rivers in Ville-sur-Ancre Communal Cemetery Extension; Rivers is the only one to have died on the 11th. I don't like to think about it but, there was no Regimental Aid Post or Field Ambulance attached to this cemetery so Rivers would not have received any particular medical attention. However, he obviously knew he was dying and lived long enough to be able utter his last affecting words. I wonder who passed them on.
Frederick Rivers was the seventh of his parents' ten children. Father, Charles William Rivers, had served in the army between 1883 and 1894 - as a butcher in the Commissariat Transport Corps. In 1911 he was a labourer in the naval dockyards in Portsmouth. Two of Frederick's elder brothers served in the Royal Navy and one in the Royal Marine Artillery, all three survived the war.


WILL YE NO COME BACK AGAIN

PRIVATE WILLIAM ALEXANDER LOGAN


This song has such strong associations with Scotland that I assumed William Logan was a Scotsman. But no, he was an Englishman, born and bred in the Home Counties. Nor was his father a Scotsman, having been born in Liverpool. But then I saw where his mother came from - Alvah in Banffshire - so that was the Scottish connection.
The song's best-known words commemorate 'Bonnie Prince Charlie', the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), following the 1745 Rebellion. It's possible however that the tune belonged to a traditional Scottish song of farewell long before Carolina Oliphant (Lady Nairne 1766-1845) added the Bonnie Prince Charlie dimension. The words come from the chorus:

Will ye no come back again?
Will ye no come back again?
Better lo'ed ye canna be,
Will ye no come back again.

William, the son of a nurseryman in Enfield, Middlesex, served with the 1st Battalion The Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment. In August 1918 the regiment were in Flanders and whatever was happening in France, where the British had just launched the Battle of Amiens, it was business as usual in Flanders. The regiment were based near Erie Farm where the war diary reported that on the 6th they were "Called upon to furnish a party to proceed to La Lovie Chateau & line the avenue to cheer H.M. the King as he passed along ... The party got very wet". There were no casualties on the 7th, nor on the 8th but on the 9th it reported "hostile artillery active on front left during night 3 ORs killed". The 10th was another quiet day. Was Logan one of the three ORs killed on the night of the 9th. It looks like it.


STATE NOT
"HE NOBLY LIVED OR OTHERWISE;
FAILED OR SUCCEEDED"
FRIEND JUST SAY "HE TRIED"

CAPTAIN CHARLES POOLEY MC


To a Soldier
Say not of him "he left this vale of tears,"
Who loved the good plain English phrase
"He died,"
Nor state "he nobly lived (or otherwise)
Failed or succeeded" - friend, just say
"He tried."
O.E. (Somewhere in France.)

The above verse was published in the Eton Chronicle on 11 May 1916 just four days before its author, Captain Henry Platt Coldstream Guards, was killed in Flanders whilst out on a wiring party. Mrs Platt quoted from it for her husband's inscription just as Mrs Pooley did for hers. But I wonder how Mrs Pooley came across it as it seems that Eton played no part in the lives of the Pooleys and I can't see that the lines were published anywhere else.
In 1891 at the age of 18, Pooley was a private in the 5th Dragoon Guards stationed at Aldershot. Twenty-three years later he was the Regimental Serjeant Major and the 5th Dragoons were back in Aldershot. From here they were immediately mobilised for war and crossed to France ten days later, 15 August. Within six weeks Pooley had been commissioned Second Lieutenant "for services in the field". The following January he was awarded one of the very first Military Crosses for "meritorious service", was promoted Lieutenant and appointed Adjutant in May 1915 and by February 1918 was an Acting Staff Captain attached to the 2nd Cavalry Brigade Headquarters.
On 8 August 1918 the Brigade took part in the opening day of the Battle of Amiens. The war diary gives an almost hour by hour, sometimes a minute by minute account of events between the 8th and the 10th, reporting that at 2.55 pm on the 9th:

"The valley from Caix to the station was being heavily shelled by 5.9s. One of these landed in the midst of Bde. H.Q. killing Capt. Pooley MC (Staff Capt.) Lieut. H. Fry (Signalling Officer), Lieut. G. Hulbert 18th Hrs (Galloper tot he G.O.C.) and two O.R.s and wounding Major Walter(O.C. 2nd M.G.S.) and Lieut. Frere 2nd M.G.S. besides causing about 10 casualties to the horses."

Charles Pooley sounds like a valuable man to have around, an excellent soldier from the very beginning of the war to just within sight of victory. I like to think that his inscription suited him - don't say fancy things about me, just say I tried.


HE TOOK MY PLACE
FATHER

LIEUTENANT EDWARD FOX THAIRS


No other hope, no other plea;
He took my place, and died for me;
O precious Lamb of Calvary!
He took my place, and died for me.

This is the chorus of a hymn by Eliza Edmunds Hewitt (1851-1920) an American hymn writer. The 'he' who 'took my place' is Christ who died on the cross to save mankind.
I have to say that when I first saw this inscription I assumed that 'Father' was saying that it should have been him that died, not his son. It should have been him who went to war and got killed. The background fitted, father, Colonel George Thairs, the bursar of Ridley College, Ontario, had founded the embryo OTC, the Ridley Volunteer Cadet Corps, in his very first term there in 1889. And, when the Cadet Corps came into being in 1907, Thairs continued as the Contingent Commander, fostering in the pupils a martial spirit and a respect for drill.
His son, Edward Thairs, had been a pupil at the school. In 1916 he was working as a bank clerk when he joined the newly formed 176th Infantry Battalion, the Niagara Rangers, on 7 October 1916. The regiment was based in Thairs' home town, St Catharines, Ontario. The battalion left for Britain on 24 April 1917 where it became absorbed into the 12th Reserve Battalion, which provided reinforcements wherever they were needed. At the time of his death Thairs was serving with the 3rd Battalion Canadian Infantry, which took part in the capture of the town of Demuin on 8 August 1918, the day Thairs was killed.
Despite the fact that I can see that "He took my place" is a quote from a hymn, I don't discount the fact that Colonel George Thairs did actually feel that it should have been him that died rather than his son. After all, why wouldn't he?


"IF ONLY" FROM MUM

PRIVATE RCHARD BURR


This is not a wistful regret for a time that has gone – although it could well be – but the title of a sonnet by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) 'If Only':

If I might only love my God and die!
But now he bids me love Him and live on,
Now when the bloom of all my life is gone,
The pleasant half of life has quite gone by.
My tree of hope is lopped that spread so high,
And I forget how summer glowed and shone,

Mrs Emily Burr chose the inscription for her son, Richard, the third of her six children. John, his older brother, had been killed three years earlier at Loos on 27 September 1915 whilst serving in the 1st Battalion Scots Guards. He has no grave and is commemorated on the Loos Memorial.
Born in October 1898, Richard Burr was called up in October 1916 and deployed to France in October 1917. He served with the 4th Battalion London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) and was killed in the trenches on 8 August 1918.

Battalion War Diary 4th-8th August
Bn in front line trenches. The period passed unusually quietly, there being very little artillery activity by the enemy. Our patrols were very active during the hours of darkness. Defences were strengthened and trenches improved.


HE GAVE HIS LIFE
THAT WE SHOULD LIVE

PRIVATE ALBERT WELLINGTON JARMAN


Albert Wellington Jarman was born in Leicester and died in Leicester thirty years later. In the intervening years he had gone to Canada to live and work, returned to Europe to fight, and come back to Leicester to die. He is buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's section of Leicester's Walford Road Cemetery, which is less than a mile from his father's home in Havelock Road.
Albert's parents were William and Priscilla Jarman. William Jarman was a shoe maker - as was much of the population of Leicester. Priscilla died and in 1896 William remarried. Eleven-year-old Albert was still living at home with his father and step-mother in 1901, but by 1911 he had gone to Canada. He settled in Londesborough, a small community in Ontario, from where he enlisted in February 1916, describing himself as a farmer.
Jarman joined the 161st Huron Battalion, part of the Western Ontario Regiment. On the night of the 9 October 1916 the 777 Huron County men of the 161st Battalion dined, drank and danced at the Bedford Hotel and the Oddfellows Hall in Goderich before marching to the station the next day and embarking for Europe - 551 of them would not return.
Jarman died on 1 April 1919, almost five months after the end of the war. His death is described in the cemetery register as 'following wounds'. Unfortunately that is all I have been able to discover about his death. There is no indication as to where or when he was wounded, nor the nature of the wounds. However, for general purposes the war was deemed to have ended on 31 August 1921. This meant that those who died of wounds incurred during their military service before that date are counted as having died during the First World War.
I don't imagine that Jarman died at home. Leicester was the location of the 5th Northern General Hospital, which had more than 2,600 beds and occupied several buildings in Leicester and North Evington. It admitted more than 95,000 casualties during its existence, of which 514 had died. Some of these will be among the 344 casualties buried in the Walford Road Cemetery; perhaps one of them was Alfred Jarman.
Alfred's father chose his inscription - 'He gave his life that we should live'. This is very close to the opening line of a poem by someone who was probably the most popular poet of the First World War, and is probably someone you have never heard of - John Oxenham, the pseudonym for William Arthur Dunkerley (1852-1941).

They died that we might live,
Hail and Farewell!
- All honour give
To those who nobly striving nobly fell,
That we might live!

The poem is a strange combination of the Roman poet Catullus's lovely tribute to his brother's grave, Ave Atque Vale, and the Christian concept of sacrifice. Christ's sacrifice for mankind was equated in many people's minds with the sacrifice the hundreds of thousands of young men made who died for the safety and security of the British Empire. According to the narrative, they 'gave' their lives so that people might be able to live - to live free from the threat of German militarism.

This inscription will feature as part of the Global War Graves Leicester project, which aims "to explore and bring to light how the 298 First World War casualties came to be buried in the cemetery, how their identities were negotiated in death; and how even the British burials alongside them also had connections throughout and beyond the UK. The purpose of this research will be to challenge and expand our understandings of the relationship between local and global in terms of Leicester and the First World War".


HE OBEYED
WENT OUT NOT KNOWING
WHITHER HE WENT

CORPORAL JOHN MCNEILL


There's a scene in Hislop and Newman's Wipers Times where General Mitford informs Captain Roberts that Madame Fifi, owner of the local brothel, has just been executed by the British as a German spy. General Mitford hopes that Roberts never imparted any military secrets about the war to her. Roberts replies that he couldn't, he doesn't know any secrets, he just sits in his trench and has no idea what's going on.
I wondered whether this was the implication behind Corporal McNeill's inscription, a covert criticism of the fact that so many soldiers went blindly to their deaths not knowing what was going on. However, I wasn't sure that McNeill's father would have used the old-fashioned word 'whither', so I looked the sentence up and discovered that it comes from Hebrews Chapter 11 verse 8:

"By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went."

Abraham put his trust in God, he had faith in Him, he obeyed His instructions just as Noah had done, and Moses, and numerous other characters from the Old Testament. None of these people knew what God had in store for them but their faith had brought them to a "better country, that is an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God for he hath prepared for them a city".
This is therefore not an unusual inscription for a God-fearing Scot to choose, but I'm still not one hundred per cent convinced that there's no hint of criticism in it. Many people did use the words of the bible and the prayer book to make covert criticisms of the war. For example, Lieutenant Robert Carpenter's inscription: An only son / "To what purpose is this waste?" / S. Matt. 26.8.
John McNeill was born in Gargunnock, Stirlingshire, where his father was the gardener to the Stirling family of Gargunnock House for forty years. McNeill was a bank apprentice when he joined up in February 1916 at the age of 18. He served with the 11th Battalion Royal Scots and was killed in action on 12 October 1917, the opening day of the Battle of Passchendaele.


IN LIFE I FEAR FOR MYSELF
IN DEATH
I FEAR FOR MY MOTHER
MOTHER

GUNNER THOMAS HANSON


Thomas Hanson's mother wanted to demonstrate her son's consideration towards her in the inscription she chose for his headstone. Presumably he had expressed these fears to her, fearing how she would cope with his death.
Hanson, a sheep overseer whose family emigrated to Australia sometime after the 1901 census, enlisted in October 1916. He reached Britain in July 1917, embarked for France in September and was killed in October.
On 22 March 1918, Driver FJ Brophy told the Red Cross Enquiry Bureau:

"I did not see the casualty, but I saw his dead body soon after it happened. He was unloading a waggon just in front of Zillebeke, when he was caught by a piece of shell, which entered his back and went through his heart, death was instantaneous. I knew him very well, he was the only man of this name in the battery."

Gunner AS Miller reported on 8 March 1918:

"I saw him killed at the Half-way House, near Ypres. He was caught by pieces of shell which hit him about the chest, death being instantaneous. He had not been with the battery very long, as he was a new reinforcement."

And how did Thomas Hanson's mother cope with his death? In May 1920 she sailed to England from where she went to France to visit his grave, something very few Australian mothers would have been able to afford to do.
It's strange how you can build up a picture of a person - and be wrong. I had Mrs Hanson down as a poor widow and Thomas as her only son. Thomas was her only son but Mrs Hanson was a remarried divorcee. The information comes from a reply to a letter the army authorities had written asking for clarification about Thomas Hanson's father. Her new husband replied:

"I have to inform you that the father of the late soldier is still alive, as far as I know, but am absolutely ignorant of his address. I also have to inform you that Mrs Hanson divorced her husband some years ago and has been married to me since then."
Mr FW Gregory 24 May 1920


HOW PEACEFUL
IT ALL LOOKS NOW

PRIVATE WILLIAM FOSTER MILNER


What a strange inscription. I wonder what Private Milner's wife had in mind when she chose it. I can only imagine that it was her reaction to a photograph of her husband's grave, probably still with its original wooden grave marker since by the time the permanent headstones were erected she would have chosen her inscription. Gaza was far away and received very few visitors, even the St Barnabas Society didn't organise battlefield pilgrimages there, apparently there was no demand. However, the Graves Registration Unit and the War Graves Commission tried to send a photograph of a grave to the next of kin if they requested it, and since the Commission's aim was to make their cemeteries look peaceful, well-cared for places, unlike the surrounding battlefields, Mrs Milner's comment would not be surprising.
Before the war William Foster Milner had been a civil servant working in the Inland Revenue. His medal card shows that he was not entitled to the 1914-15 Star so he was not a volunteer, or not one who entered a theatre of war before 1916. But the records do show that he had served with the Kings Royal Rifle Corps before being transferred to the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.
Milner was killed on 7 November 1917 the day the ruined and deserted city of Gaza eventually fell to the Allies at their third attempt.
I can't tell how long William and Alice (Olga) Milner had been married but, as his wife, Alice was entitled to choose her husband's inscription. I wonder what his parents might have wanted to say - William was their only child.


J T'AIME

SERJEANT GEORGE WILLIAM CLOUGH


Je t'aime - I love you. I've seen declarations of affection on headstones before but I've never seen such a plain declaration of love. And the fact that it is in French means that Mrs Clough, assuming few English speakers would ever visit Tyne Cot Cemetery, decided to write it in the language of the country where her husband was buried. Not of course that Tyne Cot Cemetery is in France, but it's close, 16 kilometres away, and everyone would have known what she meant anyway, just as we do.
Serjeant Clough was a Yorkshireman, and from what I can tell so was his wife, Mabel. He served with the 9th Battalion London Regiment (Queen Victoria's Rifles), a territorial battalion, and is commemorated on the Hendon, Middlesex war memorial, so must have been living in London when the war broke out. His army number indicates that he was a September 1914 volunteer but his medal card says that his period of service in a theatre of war - France and Flanders - only spanned 21 March to 16 August 1917.
Clough was one of the many casualties the 9th London Regiment suffered on 16 August when the Fifth Army's offensive operations in the Ypres Sector were resumed. The battalion war diary describes how:

"In spite of big progress at the outset under cover of a terrific creeping barrage, the 169th Infantry Bde was compelled to withdraw to the original front line at dusk. The casualties in the Bn were severe."

After the war, when the battlefields were cleared, Clough's body was found at map reference J7G80x40 in June 1920. George William Clough is also commemorated on the Moor Allerton memorial in Leeds, Yorkshire


SHE CALLED
MY COUNTRY CALLED ME
AND I WENT

CAPTAIN WILLIAM HOPE WALKER


There are only two First World War servicemen buried in Laillang Communal Cemetery and the record states that they are both buried in the same grave. I have come to recognise what this means - they were airmen whose plane crashed and burnt with them inside, making their bodies indistinguishable from each other.
At 08.05 on the morning of 18 August 1917, Second Lieutenant Louis Harel and his observer Captain William Walker, serving with 11 Squadron and flying a Bristol F2b A7191, were shot down by Lieutenant Viktor Schobinger, a victory that gave Schobinger his 3rd 'kill'.
William Hope Walker had been born in Earlston, Berewickshire in 1892. At some point after 1901 his parents emigrated to Canada. Walker enlisted on 14 July 1915 and originally served with the Canadian Infantry before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps.
His mother, Helen J. Sinclair, formerly Walker, chose his inscription. It comes from a very obscure prayer (piece of verse) so obscure that it only appears twice on the Internet, both times in an Australian newspaper in December 1915. It must however have been better known for Mrs Sinclair, living in Canada, to have known of it. I feel that like many emigrants both she and her son must have felt the pull of the mother country following the outbreak of war.

God, who art love, be kind, be kind to all
Thy children, who must hear the sudden call;
Hot from their haste, their hate, their lust, their din,
Must open wide Thy door and enter in.
Cleanse from their feet the stains of dust and wear;
Take from their hearts what is not pure and fair;
For they, Thy children, they have trusted Thee
In death to save. This is their only plea -
"She called, my country called me, and I went" -
With this much, God of love, be Thou content.
PRAYER FOR THOSE KILLED IN BATTLE
Edith A. Talbot, in the 'Christian Guardian'

It may be fairly appalling verse but can you see what Edith Talbot was saying to God? Forgive these young men who are coming straight into your presence from hating and killing people, their justification for their behaviour being, "She called, my country called me, and I went".


GONE FOR EVER

GUNNER GEORGE FARLEY


This is a fairly bleak inscription - no, let's be frank - this is a very bleak inscription. There is no comforting mention of meeting again, no reference to everlasting life, no honour, no glory, no pride, just the hard fact - gone for ever. George Farley's grandmother chose it; she was his next of kin. Was she being phlegmatic? I don't think so; it sounds bitter and angry to me.
I can see that in the 1901 census George Farley lived with both his parents and his grandparents in Caister-by-the Sea, Norfolk. In 1911 he still lived there but only with his grandparents, Walter and Elizabeth George. I can't find any trace of his parents.
Farley served with A Battery 276th Brigade Royal Field Artillery. He is buried in a Field Ambulance cemetery in Vlamertinge, 4 kilometres to the west of Ypres.


WHERE SING
THE MORNING STARS TOGETHER
AND ALL THINGS ARE AT REST

PRIVATE NORMAN BOYD


The Internet kept trying to persuade me that these words came from the Book of Job Chapter 38 verse 7. But this is what Job says:

"When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy".

It's close but it's not exact. Nor is this:

"Where sing the Morning-stars in joy together,
And all things are at home."

But nevertheless I think that this is the source of the inscription and if so it's rather interesting. The lines are close to those in The Open Secret, a poem written by Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and published in 1905 in the fourth part of his book Towards Democracy. Carpenter was an extraordinary man: a radical free thinker and socialist writer, a vegetarian and a teetotaller, and a defender, even a proponent of, homosexuality, who lived openly - if remotely - with his homosexual lover for many years at a time when it was illegal to do so. The Open Secret promotes his other great passion, the simplification of life, living in the open:

Sweet secret of the open air -
That waits so long, and always there, unheeded.
Something uncaught, so free, so calm large confident -
The floating breeze, the far hills and broad sky,
And every little bird and tiny fly or flower
At home in the great whole, nor feeling lost at all or forsaken,

To Carpenter it is only man who hides himself away behind walls:

He, Cain-like from the calm eyes of the Angels,
In houses hiding, in huge gas-lighted offices and dens, in ponderous churches,
Beset with darkness cowers;

While man surrounds himself with 'ramparts of stone and gold',

... still the great world waits by the door as ever,
The great world stretching endlessly on every hand,
In deep on deep of fathomless content -
Where sing the morning-stars together,
And all things are at home.

Norman Boyd's father chose his inscription, changing the last word from 'home' to 'rest'. His son now rests in the wide open world, in eternity.
Norman Boyd was born and brought up in Burley-in-Wharfdale in Yorkshire where his father was an insurance agent. In 1898 he emigrated to Canada, from where he enlisted in February 1916. He served with the 2nd Canadian Infantry the Eastern Ontario Regiment. On 6 October 1917 the regiment went into the trenches at Lievin where working parties undertook repairs to the trench system and where they were periodically shelled and bombed. The war diary makes no mention of casualties. Boyd is buried at a Field Ambulance burial ground a few kilometres from Lievin.


THE DAUNTLESS HEART
THAT FEAR'D NO HUMAN PRIDE

CAPTAIN LESLIE OLDERSHAW


O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains,
Draw near with pious rev'rence, and attend!
Here lie the loving husband's dear remains,
The tender father, and the gen'rous friend;
The pitying heart that felt for human woe,
The dauntless heart that feared no human pride;
The friend of man - to vice alone a foe;
For "ev'n his failings lean'd to virtue's side".
ON MY EVER HONOURED FATHER
Robert Burns 1784

Burns composed this beautiful epitaph for his father's headstone in Alloway Kirkyard in Ayr, Scotland. Dr George Oldershaw quoted from it for his son's personal inscription in Coxyde Military Cemetery, Belgium.
Like his father, Leslie Oldershaw was a doctor, as was his older brother, George Francis Oldershaw. Leslie Oldershaw, who had qualified as a doctor by the age of 21, took a commission in May 1915 in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served for six months in the 1st Western General Hospital in Liverpool before being posted to Gallipoli in November 1915. After the evacuation he served in Egypt and then returned to Europe in the spring of 1917. Whilst home on leave in April 1917 he married Ruby Gorman whose sister, Elsie, was married to George Oldershaw Jnr. Six months later he was killed by a piece of shrapnel that struck his head. A fellow officer related to his parents how:

"He and I were walking down the road from the trenches in Nieuport, and when we had gone about a mile the accident occurred. All I remember is a flash, and then I was lying in the road and Leslie was lying by me. He never moved or spoke, and I think was killed instantaneously ... I have since been told that it was an aeroplane bomb that dropped close to us that did it."

Six days later Ruby and Elsie's brother, Howard Gannon, was killed in Salonika. Ruby served as a VAD in Western Europe from August 1918 to January 1919. In 1927 she married William Penman, a fifty-year-old widower. He died three years later. She died in 1969.


"SCATTER THOU THE PEOPLE
THAT DELIGHT IN WAR"
PSALM 68.30 VERSE

PRIVATE LEONARD STANLEY BLACKWOOD


I wonder which people Mrs AM Blackwood had in mind when she chose this inscription for her son? Was it warmongers in general or did she have some specific people in mind? I have a feeling that it was the latter. The reading of the psalm implies that God's people are people of peace and that it is only necessary for the people of war to be crushed for there to be no more war. This was the reasoning behind the claim that the 1914-18 war was the war to end all war. In other words, it was only necessary for German militarism to be utterly crushed for there to be no more war. For this reason I believe that to Mrs Blackwood the people who delighted in war, the people who needed to be scattered, were the Germans - the people of peace of course being the people of the British Empire!
Leonard Blackwood had been a boot clicker before the war, the person who cut the uppers from the leather skins. He enlisted on 26 January 1916, embarked from Australia in April and left Britain for France that August. Blackwood was wounded in the Australian attack at Broodseinde Ridge on 4 October 1917. According to the records of No. 2 Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek he had a fractured skull and gun-shot wounds to his face. He died of his wounds three days later.


GIVE UNTO ME ...
THE SPIRIT OF SELF-SACRIFICE

PRIVATE EDMUND CULLINGFORD


What is self-sacrifice? It's giving up one's own interests, happiness and hopes for the sake of duty. This inscription is a salutary reminder that the men who fought in the First World War weren't naive enthusiasts for war but were doing their duty - and some men had to submit themselves to it. At the distance of a hundred years many people today can comfortably assume that those who fought were in some way different from themselves, they wanted to go, they wanted to fight, they were happy to give up their current lives, they were even happy to give up their lives. But this inscription shows the firmness with which some men had to speak to themselves in order to do their duty.
The lines come from Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. The poet claims that there are some people who just naturally do their duty - "Who do thy [duty's] work, and know it not". And then there are other's, like him, who "deferred the task, in smoother walks to stray". But now, recognising the peace that comes from knowing that you are doing your duty, he asks:

Unto thy guidance from this hour;
Oh, let my weakness have an end!
Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;

Edmund Cullingford was a volunteer. He served with the 9th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, which was raised in York in September 1914. According to his medal card, he went with the Battalion to Egypt in December 1915. In July 1916, it returned to Europe and on 9 October 1917 it took part in the attack at Poelcappelle.
The British barrage was terrific, it moved at a rate of 100 yards in four minutes with the soldiers advancing behind it over ground that had been churned into an endless mass of shell holes and mud so as to be almost impassable. However, despite the fierce barrage the German gun emplacements remained virtually impervious and the British troops were met by murderous machine gun fire from these 'pill-boxes', which relentlessly thinned their ranks. At the end of the day the 9th West Yorkshires had lost 12 officers and 203 other ranks killed, wounded and missing. Cullingford was one of the missing, his body located at map reference V.20.a.3.8 in September 1919 and identified by his disc. Think of what he faced and think again about the inscription his father chose for him, "Give unto me ... the spirit of self-sacrifice".


THOUGH LOST TO SIGHT
TO MEMORY DEAR

GUNNER ROBERT SAMUEL BARBER


Until I did the research for yesterday's inscription, it would never have occurred to me that this was a quotation. 'Though lost to sight to memory dear' is so popular on both civilian and military headstones, and it appears so regularly on In Memoriam cards and the In Memoriam columns of newspapers that I had just assumed it was something that you said, no author required. But this appears not to be the case. The words are in fact the first line of a song written by George Linley (1798-1865) who wrote it originally for Augustus Braham (1819-1889). This is the first of its seven verses:

Tho' lost to sight, to memory dear
Thou ever wilt remain;
One only hope my heart can cheer -
The hope to meet again.

Some have argued that Linley didn't compose the first line he just quoted from what was already a popular headstone inscription. It is possible that this was the case. Certainly there's another poem, strictly speaking I suppose it's verse rather than poetry, where it's the final line of both of the two verses - the authorship is disputed but it postdates Linley. This is the second verse.

Sweetheart, good bye! One last embrace!
O cruel fate, two souls to sever!
Yet in the heart's most sacred place
Thou alone shall dwell for ever.
And still shall recollection trace,
In fancy's mirror ever near.
Each smile, each tear, that form, that face,
Though lost to sight to memory dear.

However, I am perfectly prepared to admit that the many hundreds of people who chose this inscription, and it is one of the most popular, had no idea that they were quoting either Linley or anyone else. To them it was just a conventionally popular headstone inscription.
In this instance it belongs to Gunner Robert Samuel Barber, who before the war had been helping his father on his dairy farm in Yandina, Queensland, Australia. Barber enlisted on 23 September 1915, embarked from Australia on 11 May 1916, arrived in Britain on 10 July and embarked for France on 24 November. He was killed by a shell on 3 October 1917.
A witness (Sergeant H. Canfield 18849) who described Barber as "about 5 feet 6 inches high, nuggety build, clean shaven, fair complexion, aged about 25", told the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing File what happened:

"Informant states that they both belonged to the 25th Battery, 7th Field Artillery Brigade, Barber being a lumber gunner and under Informant's charge. On or about 3.10.17 the Battery was in front of Ypres in action, firing at different targets. Barber was working with him and left him to go over to his gun, No. 1, and went into a little dugout that he was building alongside the gun. He had only been there about a minute when a stray shell came over and killed him instantly. Informant was only a few yards away at the time and saw his body. He was buried not far from the Battery and informant made a cross for his grave."

The cross survived and after the war it was found with Barber's body at map reference I. 6. b. 8. 1. just as Sergeant H. Canfield had made it, inscribed with the words:

In memory of
No. 18641 Gunner Barber R.S.
C of E
Killed in action 3-10-1917





EVER OF THEE
AM I FONDLY DREAMING

PRIVATE HARRY SMALL


Harry Small's inscription, chosen by his wife Ethel, comes from an old love song composed in 1858 by Foley Hall with lyrics by George Linley. This is the first of its two verses:

Ever of thee I'm fondly dreaming,
Thy gentle voice my spirit can cheer;
Thou wert the star that mildly beaming,
Shone o'er my path when all was dark and drear.
Still in my heart thy form I cherish,
Ev'ry kind thought like a bird flies to thee;
Ah! never till life and mem'ry perish,
Can I forget how dear thou art to me;
Morn, noon and night where'e'er I may be.
Fondly I'm dreaming ever of thee,
Fondly I'm dreaming ever of thee!

Although more than 50 years old at the time of the First World War, the song's popularity was revived in 1915 when Edison recorded it as a duet beautifully sung by Elizabeth Spencer and Thomas Chalmers, which you can listen to here.
At the time of the 1911 census, Harry Small was an assistant at Affleck and Brown a large drapery store, later a department store, in Manchester. He lived in Ardwick Hall Residence for Shop Assistants where he was one of its 156 residents. I am assuming that he was a territorial soldier as he served with the 1st/4th a territorial battalion of the Royal Scots. He went with them to Gallipoli in June 1915. After the evacuation the 4th Royal Scots served in the Suez Canal region before going to Palestine. Small was killed during the Third Battle of Gaza.
I have found no trace of his wife Ethel, who chose such a loving inscription for her husband.

Ever of thee when sad and lonely,
Wand'ring afar my soul joy'd to dwell;
Ah! then I felt I lov'd thee only;
All seem'd to fade before affection's spell.
Years have not chill'd the love I cherish;
True as the stars, hath my heart been to thee;
Ah! never till life and mem'ry perish,
Can I forget how dear thou art to me;
Morn, noon and night where'e'er I may be.
Fondly I'm dreaming ever of thee,
Fondly I'm dreaming ever of thee!


MASTER, CAREST THOU NOT
PEACE, BE STILL

CORPORAL GEORGE RICHARDSON


"And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm."
MARK Chapter 4 37-9

"Master, carest thou not that we perish"? This is the question the disciples woke Christ to ask when they were caught in a storm on the Sea of Galilee. Mrs Ellen Richardson, Corporal Richardson's mother, must have wondered whether Christ was 'sleeping' when so many hundreds of thousands of people died during the war - did neither he nor God care? Mrs Richardson will have chosen her inscription well after her son's death, and well after the end of the war. Is "peace be still" a plea for a lasting peace, one that Christ will oversee?
In 1911 Mrs Richardson was a widow working as a charlady. George, her fifteen-year-old son, one of her six children, worked in a shoe factory in Olney, Buckinghamshire where most of the population were involved in the shoe trade.
George served with the 5th Battalion Bedfordshire Regiment and went with it to Gallipoli, disembarking on 10 August 1915. His service with the 5th indicates that he had been a territorial soldier before the war. Evacuated with the rest of the British forces in January 1916, the 5th Bedfordshires served in the Suez Canal region until March 1917 when they went to Palestine. Here it took part in all three battles of Gaza. Richardson was killed in the Third.


READY IN HEART READY IN HAND
TO MARCH TO DEATH
FOR HIS NATIVE LAND

CORPORAL FREDERICK THOMAS GOLDING


Frederick Golding's eldest sister created a rhyming couplet from some lines in Tennyson's poem 'Maud'. In the poem the narrator hears Maud singing in a meadow:

"A passionate ballad, gallant and gay
A martial song like a trumpet's call
...
Singing of men that in battle array
Ready in heart and ready in hand
March with banner and bugle and fife
To the death, for their native land.

Maud was written in 1855 at the time of the Crimean War (1853-56) when Tennyson could write that Maud was "Singing of death, and of Honour that cannot die". Tennyson, the most popular of the nineteenth century poets, seems from the evidence of this project to be the most popular of the poets quoted in personal inscriptions too. You can see how deep the association of war and honour and death must have run in British society, contributing to a culture that associated the concept of fighting and dying for your country with a noble death.
Frederick Thomas Golding was the son of a wheelwright in Chelmsford, Essex. In 1911 Golding was working in an ironmongery warehouse. Four years later he entered a theatre of war on 12 August 1915. He was killed in the 3rd Battle of Gaza whilst serving with the 1st/4th Battalion Essex Regiment.


ONE OF THAT INCOMPARABLE
BROTHERHOOD
THE BRITISH SUBALTERN

LIEUTENANT WILLIAM STEELE YOUNG


The dictionary definition of a subaltern is a junior army officer below the rank of captain. In other words a First or Second Lieutenant. However, in the context of the First World War that does not capture the full meaning of the word.
In his book, 'Six Weeks - the Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War', John Lewis-Stempel admitted how much he had come to admire these young subalterns during the time he spent researching his book and quoted one former soldier, Private AM Burrage, who wrote, "I who was a private, and a bad one at that, freely own that it was the British subaltern who won the war" [War is War by Ex-Pte X Gollanz 1930]. So who were these subalterns and how did they 'win' the war?
In the early days of the war many young officers were volunteers or territorial soldiers, in other words not professional soldiers, and almost all of them had been to public or grammar schools. RC Sherriff, author of Journey's end, claimed that early in the war you had to have been to a public school in order to qualify for a commission, saying that he himself was turned down because he had been to a grammar school. But I have heard Gary Sheffield say that it wasn't the fact of the public school that mattered but whether or not your school had had an OTC of which you had been a member that counted. Public schools were much more likely to have had an OTC pre-1914 than many grammar schools.
But to Sherriff:

"these young men never turned into officers of the old traditional type. By hard experience they became leaders is a totally different way and, through their patience and courage and endurance, carried the Army to victory after the generals had brought it within a hairsbreadth of defeat". [The English Public Schools in the War, RC Sherriff in Promise of Greatness ed. George A Panichas, Cassell 1968].

Later in the same article Sherriff wrote:

"Without raising the public school boy officers onto a pedestal it can be said with certainty that it was they who played the vital part in keeping the men good-humoured and obedient in the face of their interminable ill treatment and well-nigh insufferable ordeals".

Unlike junior officers in the German army, British subalterns lived with their men in the trenches, cared for them, shared their hardships, led them into battle and died with them. As EA Mackintosh says in his extremely powerful poem, In Memoriam, inspired by the letter of condolence he was writing to the father of one of his soldiers killed in the recent fighting, :"You were only David's father but I had fifty sons". Aware of the responsibility he had for them, Mackintosh writes:

Oh, never will I forget you,
My men that trusted me,
More my sons than your fathers'
For they could only see
The little helpless babies
And the young men in their pride
They could not see you dying
And hold you while you died.

Happy and young and gallant,
They saw their first-born go,
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men brought low,
The piteous writhing bodies,
They screamed "Don't leave me sir",
For they were only your fathers
But I was your officer.

"My men that trusted me" - there's a lovely letter quoted in Laurence Housman's War Letters of Fallen Englishmen from Lieutenant HM Butterworth, which illustrates this trust beautifully:

"... no digging or wiring party party ever goes out without an officer, that is the way to get the men along. If one takes out a party of men somewhere they don't know - in the open probably - to dig, they'll go like lambs as long as they've got an officer with them. The curious thing is that in civilian life they've probably cursed us as plutocrats, out here they fairly look to us. The other night some time ago, I had some men and had to get somewhere I'd never been before in --; as a matter of fact it wasn't difficult and we had ample directions so before we started I was told to send the men with a sergeant. Said the sergeant to me, 'I wish you were coming sir, I don't know the way.' I said, 'My dear man, nor do I.'To which he made this astounding reply, 'Very likely not, sir, but the men will think you do and they know I don't'."

In a deferential age the soldiers expected their officers to come from a higher social class. But as Sherriff concluded, this didn't mean they were toffs:

"It had nothing to do with wealth or privilege. Very few of the public school boys came from the landed gentry or distinguished families. For the most part they came from modest homes, the sons of local lawyers, doctors and schoolmasters - hardworking professional men."

This was just the class that William Steele Young came from. His father, Archibald Young, was a cutter and surgical instrument maker. William and his elder brother, Archibald, were educated at George Watson College a fee-paying day school in Edinburgh. Archibald, a territorial soldier serving with the Royal Scots, was mobilised on the outbreak of war. William, studying engineering at Edinburgh University and a member of the University OTC, volunteered and was gazetted second lieutenant on 1 September 1914. Archibald was killed in action in Gallipoli at Saghir Dere on or about 28 June 1915. He is commemorated on the Helles Memorial. William, who also served in Gallipoli and then Egypt and Palestine, was killed in action on 2 November 1917 during the Third Battle of Gaza.
Arthur Young was proud of both his sons, proud that they had both been members of that "incomparable brotherhood the British subaltern".


"SO HERE SHALL SILENCE
GUARD THY FAME"
TENNYSON'S IN MEMORIAM

LIEUTENANT HUGH TREHERNE BARRETT, MC


According to the War Graves Commission, 'Iringa is on the top of a mountain, 505 kilometres west of Dar-Es-Salaam' in what is now Tanzania. It's a long way from England and all things English. The cemetery holds 131 graves from the Empire forces. Many of them belonging to Africaaners, Dutch Boers, with inscriptions like 'Ono dink aan jou', which I have an idea means I think of you, probably the equivalent of 'not forgotten'. And many of them belong to British South Africans born and brought up in the country. But some of them belong to men who were born and brought up in Britain as Sergeant JM Evan's makes plain: '1, Alban Square, Aberayron, S. Wales'.
A Mrs VH Flemming chose Barrett's inscription, perhaps his married eldest sister whose Christian names were Violet Helen. She quotes a line from Tennyson's In Memoriam, giving the reference as if to make sure that anyone reading it in that faraway place would know where it came from:

So here shall silence guard thy fame;
But somewhere, out of human view,
Whate'er thy hands are set to do
Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.

Hugh Treherne Barrett was born in Cheshire in 1883. His father, a commercial traveller, was dead by the time of the 1891 census. The next time Hugh Barrett appears in the record it's in the London Gazette of 9 June 1916 with the announcement that as from 23 March 1916 he has been granted the temporary rank of lieutenant in the Nyasaland Field Force. This newly formed force was made up of soldiers from various South African and Rhodesian military and police forces. Barrett's medal card shows that he joined a theatre of war on 5 September 1914 indicating that he had been in some form of military service before the formation of the Nyasaland Field Force in which he served as Chief Intelligence Officer.
Barrett's next appearance in the record is again in the London Gazette. The 26 April 1917 edition records the award of a Military Cross for an action on 27 October 1916 during fighting near the border of German South West Africa:

"For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He reconnoitred the enemy's position, and subsequently guided a column three miles by night, enabling them the deploy unobserved between picquets of the enemy to within 250 yards of the position"

The three miles was over swampland that the Germans had thought impassable but through which Barrett found a way.
Barrett died on 6 November 1917. His body was originally buried in Mahenge but after the war the graves from here were concentrated in Iringa.


ALSO IN MEMORY
OF 23202 L/CPL R GARDNER
AND 30264 PTE A.V. GARDNER
KILLED IN ACTION

PRIVATE JAMES GARDNER


I said in yesterday's inscription that 'Also' was a very ominous way to begin an inscription because it always meant that another brother had been killed. Today's remembers two brothers killed in addition to the one on whose headstone they are remembered.
I don't know how James Gardner died but his two brothers were both killed in action: his elder brother, Alfred, serving with the 2nd/4th Battalion East Lancashire Regiment, at Passchendaele on 10 October 1917, and his younger brother, Reginald, of the 8th Battalion King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, in the Battle of Arras on 9 April 1917. Neither brother has a grave. Alfred is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial and Reginald on the Arras Memorial. I like the way the parents have included the brothers in the order in which they died rather than in order of seniority; Alfred was 30 and Reginald 20.
James, the middle of the three Gardner brothers, died a month after Alfred. He was a member of the 49th Battalion Training Reserve. So many men were called up following the introduction of conscription in January 1916 that the army couldn't cope with them. The reserve battalions of the various regiments couldn't incorporate them all either so a Training Reserve was created, which was not attached to any of the regiments. Men were trained up and then placed wherever they were needed, rather than as before waiting to be placed in the regiment they had joined. James died whilst with the Training Reserve, whether from illness or accident I haven't been able to find out. All I do know is that John and Annie Gardner lost all three of their sons between April and November 1917. They had five surviving daughters.


ALSO 8903 L/C ROBERT NEY
2ND CAMERON HIGHRS
KILLED HILL 60
23RD APRIL 1915

PRIVATE JOHN NEY


"Also ..."; it's a horribly ominous way to begin an inscription because it always means that another brother has been killed - and it usually means that the other brother has no known grave, which is why the parents commemorate him on the headstone of the one whose grave they do know.
Robert and John Ney were the two oldest sons of Robert and Mary Ney who lived in Overgate, a densely populated area of Dundee where Robert Ney senior was a street lamplighter. Both sons look as though they enlisted on the outbreak of war, although Robert's medal card gives 19 February 1914 as his date of entry into the war, which looks as though it's a mistake. John's says 10 January 1915.
Robert Ney, who served with the 2nd Battalion Cameron highlanders, was killed in action on 23 April 1915. The 2nd Battalion diary records that at "About 1.30 am the Battalion relieved the 1st Devon Regt in trenches 38 to 45" at Hill 60 just south of Ypres. All was fairly quiet until 10 am when, "enemy commenced firing minenwerfer & howitzer on right & centre of line. Many casualties, much damage ...". Among the 'many casualties' the diary lists 44 men killed, including Private R Ney. He was 24.
Eighteen days later his younger brother, John Ney, died of wounds in hospital in Boulogne. There isn't any documentary evidence as to when he was wounded but I would suggest it was on 9 May 1915 when the 1st Battalion Cameron Highlanders took part in the attack on Aubers Ridge. The fact that John Ney died of wounds two days later is circumstantial but persuasive. He was 19.
Mr and Mrs Robert Ney senior had four sons and five daughters. It looks as though their son Allan, born in 1907, chose his brother John's inscription. He would have been eight when his brothers were killed.


AGE 17.
DIED FOR
KING AND COUNTRY
WITH HIS BROTHER

PRIVATE ROLAND THOMAS WHITEHORN


There are several puzzling things here. Firstly, despite what his father put on his headstone, I don't think Roland Whitehorn was 17 when he died. In fact I'm sure he wasn't as his birth is recorded in the second quarter of 1898. This would mean he was 19 when he died in October 1917.
I came across a story on a family history site, which said that Whitehorn's wife brought their six-week-old daughter to visit him in hospital in France before he died. I thought this unlikely if he was only 17 when he died, even though you could legally be married at 16. The records show that he married Elizabeth Collins in the second quarter of 1916, at which time he would have been 18. It's not unlikely that his wife was allowed to visit him. It wouldn't have been possible if he had been in a Casualty Clearing Station closer to the front but Roland Whitehorn was in one of the base hospitals near Boulogne and the authorities did allow next-of-kin to visit. Perhaps the 'Age 17' on his headstone refers to how old Roland Whitehorn was when he enlisted.
His brother, Albert John Whitehorn, was also very young when went to war. His medal card shows that he qualified for the 1915 Star having entered France on 19 March 1915. He'd been born in the fourth quarter of 1896 so that means he was 18. Albert Whitehorn died of wounds two months later on 11 May. But there's something strange here too: Albert served under an alias, he called himself Albert Whitehall. Was this because at 18 he would have needed parental permission to serve abroad and he didn't believe his parents would grant it?
Albert Whitehorn's inscription in Boulogne Eastern Cemetery is identical to his brother's except for the age:

Age 18. Died for
His King and Country
With his brother


A MAN SHALL BE
AS AN HIDING PLACE
FROM THE WIND

SERGEANT RONALD DANIEL WALLACE


It may not be immediately obvious but this inscription is one of the numerous ways that next-of-kin declared their trust in God. The words come from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, 32:2 and were chosen by Sergeant Wallace's fiancee, Ruth Wright.

"And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

In other words, this man, who will be our shield from the wind, our shelter from storms, who will be like refreshing water on dry land or shade from the burning sun, will be the Messiah, Jesus Christ. And it is in Jesus that Sergeant Wallace's fiancee will find her 'hiding place from the wind', her comfort in her grief. It's a very beautiful image.
According to a letter in his Red Cross file, Wallace died from gas poisoning:

"His dug-out at Hill 40 was blown up by a gas-shell on the 19th. He not only got himself out but he managed to get his mate Serg. Murray out as well and this is what killed him; he had no business to do it when he was gassed. The flesh was blown off Murray's feet and Wallace dressed him and then noticed the gas; but it was too late then. He came over to my dug-out about 2 am. I had two tubes of ammonia and gave him that and some tea and kept his mask on (you get more gas from the clothes than from the air) and kept him there the rest of the night and then sent him to the D/S [dressing station] in the morning. He died in Hosp. on the 27th but I do not know what Hosp. and I was too sick myself with the gas to make much enquiry at the time.
He was a School-teacher at Greenbushes; his people live at Jarradale Junction. He was engaged to Miss R. Wright; I have just got her address (Kenilms, Shenton Road, Claremont, W Aus) from his brother and I will write to her myself. "Ronnie' Wallace was a 'white man'; he would have had a commission but got on too well with his men. He was thoughtful for everyone. He had said to me 'I would not call you up; you have done your bit and there are plenty of big Sergts to do the work!
I was a Rifleman at that time; now S/B. He was C Co.
H.V.Sforcina
Calais 6.4.18

Ronald Wallace's eldest brother, Corporal Stephen Hubert Christian Wallace, was killed in action at Bony on 29 September 1918. His body was never found and he is commemorated on the Villers Bretonneux Memorial.


I SWEAR HE IS TRUE-HEARTED
AND A SOUL NONE BETTER
IN MY KINGDOM

PRIVATE WILLIAM WALLS


People often ask me if there's a difference between the inscriptions chosen by the families of officers and those chosen by the families of soldiers. In answer I say that it would be less usual for an officer's family to choose something like, "Too dearly loved to be forgotten", or "A silent thought a secret tear will keep his memory of ever dear" but that doesn't mean that the more literary inscriptions come from officers' families. Private Walls' is a case in point.
Mrs Mary Jane Walls chose her husband's inscription and it comes from Shakespeare's Life of King Henry VIII, Act 5 Sc. 1. The King says of Archibishop Cranmer, in his presence, that:

"He's honest, on mine honour. God's blest mother!
I swear he is true-hearted; and a soul
None better in my kingdom."

The context is not relevant to Private Wall's inscription, which doesn't alter the fact that the choice of this quotation is not only very appropriate but also very original.
William Walls was a coal miner, a hewer of coal, so someone who actually worked underground at the coal face. He volunteered when he was 37, before the introduction of conscription, and entered a theatre of war on 25 September 1915. He served with the 20th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers. This was originally a bantam battalion, one that was formed from men below the minimum height requirement for a soldier. This varied over the first few months of the war, originally being 5'3" before settling on 5'2". Many of Walls' fellow soldiers were also miners.
Walls was killed in action on 22 October 1917 in the British attack on Poelcapelle.


A MAN
WHEN HIS COUNTRY NEEDED HIM
HE MADE NO APPEAL

PRIVATE THOMAS HUGH MILLER


William Taylor was proud of his brother. How can I tell? Look at the inscription he chose for him. Thomas Hugh Miller was 33 when the war broke out, a self-employed, married man whose household consisted not only of his wife and at least one child but his widowed mother too. His commitments prevented him from volunteering but once conscription was introduced in January 1916 "he made no appeal", meaning he didn't make an appeal to a tribunal to try to get himself excused military service but obeyed the call. He was "a man when his country needed him".
William Taylor himself was 45 when the war broke out. The upper age limit for conscription was 41 until April 1918 when it was extended to include men up to the age of 50. By this time William Taylor was 49; he would never have been expected to serve abroad.
Thomas Miller joined the 7th Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment on their return from the Mediterranean theatre of war in July 1916. The battalion took part in the Somme Campaign before moving to Ypres. I can't be sure but he could have been wounded on 4th or 5th October when the battalion war diary recorded: "Attack carried out on enemy positions round Poelcapelle". On the 7th the diary summarised the casualties: 5 officers killed and 2 wounded; 41 other ranks killed and 169 wounded. Miller's name however isn't among the list of wounded. Instead, the Nominal Roll records his death (died of wounds) on the 21st, a day when all the war dairy says is:

Noeux-les-Mines. Battalion relieved 14th D.L.I. in reserve in the AUGUSTE sector. QM stores, 1st line Transport etc. proceeded to MAZINGARBE. 2/Lieut H.W. Ford joined the Battn for duty & posted to B.Coy.


'TIS BETTER
TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST
THAN NEVER
TO HAVE LOVED AT ALL

GUNNER WILFRED READ EIDT


Stratford, Ontario
Daily Beacon
6 November 1917
"A gloom was cast over the city this morning with the announcement of the death in action on October 18 of Wilfred Read Eidt, eldest son of Dr and Mrs E Eidt of Cambria Street. The young soldier was one of Stratford's popular young men, with a bright and promising career, but he sacrificed all in the cause of King and country ..."

The Eidt family originally came from Germany. Dr E Eidt, a dentist, was a well-known local politician, an Alderman of the city of Stratford, Ontario. Wilfred Eidt was training to be a teacher when the war broke out. He joined up in November 1916 and served with the 1st Canadian Siege Battery in France. On 18 October 1917 the battery's war diary recorded:

"Oct. 18th 3.50 pm 335007 Gr Eidt WR was killed by a stray shell of 4.2 calibre. Two other men who were alongside of him, at the time, were untouched.
Oct. 19th 3.00 pm The above mentioned was buried in Bully Cemetery where a service, attended by the reliefs off-duty, was held."

Further, rather gruesome, information comes from the diary of a fellow gunner in the battery, Gunner Frank Byron Ferguson, who reported that Eidt had been walking up to the guns at Philosophe with the preacher, a man called Wilson, when a shell hit him, leaving the preacher "with little other than a shrapnel helmet and a cloud of red mist".
Dr Eidt chose his son's inscription. It comes from Tennyson's 'In Memoriam A.H.H.', his extended meditation on life and death, which followed the death of his friend Arthur Hallam in 1833, when Hallam was 23. The relevant canto, no. 27, reads:

I hold it true, what'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most:
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.


YOUR LAST FAINT WHISPER
WE THEN SHOULD HAVE HEARD

PRIVATE JOHN EDWARD HAWORTH


This is an inscription about the pain of not being present when the person you love dies. To begin with I couldn't imagine what one earth it meant but a search of the In Memoriam columns in early twentieth-century local newspapers provided the context:

Could we have been there at the hour of your death
To have caught the last sigh of your fleeting breath,
Your last faint whisper we then should have heard
And breathed in your ear just one loving word.
Only those who have lost are able to tell
The pain of the heart at not saying farewell.

Twenty-year-old John Haworth's wife, Sarah, chose his inscription; not only could she not be with him when he died but she may never have known how he died and she could neither attend his funeral nor visit his grave. 'The pain of the heart at not saying farewell' must have made 'closure' very difficult.
Haworth had been married in Padiham Parish Church during a leave in July 1917, three months before his death on 17 October. On the 31st, the following appeared in the Burnley Express:

Haworth: In loving memory of Pte. John Ed. Haworth, East Lancashire Regiment, killed Oct. 17th. aged 20 years.
He marched away so bravely
His young head proudly held
His footsteps never faltered
His courage never failed.
From his sorrowing wife and sister Betsy 6, Back Guy Fold, Padiham

John Haworth had been 17 and 6 months when 'he marched away so bravely' with the 1st/5th Battalion on 10 September 1914, not just young but too young to serve abroad. The battalion joined the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in Egypt, its initial task to guard the Suez Canal. In May 1915 it got drawn into the Gallipoli Campaign, was withdrawn in January 1916, returned to Egypt, and then in March 1917 was sent back to Europe. Frederick Gibbon, the author of the 42nd Division History, of which the 1st/5th were a part, noted that:

"The voyage westward across the Mediterranean was made under conditions widely different from those of the outward journey of September 1914, when "the glory of youth glowed in the soul," and the glamour of the East and the call of the unknown had made their appeal to adventurous spirits. Familiarity with war had destroyed illusion and had robbed it of most of its romance."

In September 1917 the battalion was at Nieuport, marking a waterlogged, 6 km line from Nieuport to the sea. The ground was too flooded for either side ever to attack but both sides' artillery kept up a constant bombardment. I don't know how Haworth met his death but an entry in the Marquis du Ruvigny's biographical register of the war dead, which ran out of steam after he'd recorded about 25,000 biographies, says Haworth was killed in action. It also says:

"A letter written on behalf of three of his friends stated: 'He was one of the most popular lads in the company for his cheerfulness and willingness in every work he undertook, and he will be greatly missed by his comrades'."




VESTIGIA NULLA RETRORSUM

LIEUTENANT MALCOLM BARTLETT BEATTIE


I can give you the literal translation of these Latin words - footsteps do not go backwards - but I can't tell you exactly what Cyril Beattie, Malcolm Beattie's father, meant by them. To the 5th Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, whose motto it is, the words mean 'we do not retreat'. To the Earls of Buckingham, whose motto it also is, the words mean, 'we never go backwards'. To some it means that you've taken a step you can't go back on, to others, rather more romantically, that you can't call back time. Looking at Cyril Beattie's family history, I rather wonder whether he meant don't look backwards.
Cyril Robert Beattie was born in Britain but in 1871, aged 7, he and his elder brother Malcolm Hamilton Beattie, 8, were boarders at a school in Kingston, Surrey. This suggests to me that their parents lived abroard, I would guess India. Nine years later Cyril began four years indentured service with the Merchant Navy. In 1893, he emigrated to New Zealand and in 1901 founded Beattie, Lang and Co, dairy and general produce merchants which did a huge trade with Britain. His brother Malcolm went to India where he served with the Bengal Pilot Service on the Hooghly River. Both brothers married and both had sons who they each called after the other.
Malcolm Bartlett Beattie, born in New Zealand in 1896, was educated at Wanganui Collegiate School, which he left in 1914. He sailed for England in February 1915 with the intention of studying medicine but he joined up instead. Commissioned second lieutenant in the 5th Royal Berkshire Regiment on 5 September 1916, he went with it to France the following month. Awarded the Order of the Crown of Belgium and the Belgian Croix de Guerre in August 1917 for rescuing a soldier from the German lines, he was wounded two months later on 15 October and died the next day.
There is another possible explanation for Cyril Beattie's choice of inscription, perhaps he had in mind a poem by the Scottish born, Australian poet William Gay (1865-1897) called Vestigia Nulla Restorum. If so, Cyril Beattie meant that however dark the road you can only keep going forward:

O steep and rugged Life, whose harsh ascent
Slopes blindly upward through the bitter night!
They say that on thy summit, high in light,
Sweet rest awaits the climber, travel-spent;
But I, alas, with dusty garments rent,
With fainting heart and failing limbs and sight,
Can see no glimmer of the shining height,
And vainly list with body forward bent,
To catch athwart the gloom one wandering note
Of those glad anthems which (they say) are sung
When one emerges from the mists below:
But though, O Life, thy summit be remote
And all thy stony path with darkness hung,
Yet ever upward through the night I go.


OH REDMOND
TO MEET SOON IN HEAVEN
IS THE DESIRE OF YOUR
FOND MOTHER, MARY MAGUIRE

LANCE CORPORAL REDMOND MAGUIRE


Redmond Maguire was his mother's eldest son; she had two other sons and three daughters but you can see the effect Redmond's death had on her. The comforting belief that families would be reunited in heaven is obvious in many many inscriptions but somehow Mrs Maguire's is particularly affecting.
The family came from Co. Cork. The Irish census is interesting because, unlike the English one, it asks your religion - the Maguires were all Roman Catholic. It also asks whether you can read and write; Michael and Mary Maguire, Redmond's parents, could both read and write. And it asks what languages you speak; Michael and Mary both spoke English and Irish. All the children, those who were old enough to speak, only spoke English.
Redmond doesn't appear with the rest of the family in the 1911 census. Aged 15 he was away working somewhere. Three years later he joined the army on the outbreak of war - his army number, 6308, indicating that he joined before January 1915. He served with the newly formed 2nd Battalion Irish Guards and went with them to France on 17 August 1915. He died of wounds in 2 Canadian General Hospital, Le Treport on 15 October 1917. I would imagine that these were received during the 2nd Battalions's participation in the Third Ypres Campaign at Poelcapelle. When it came out of the front line on 13 October, having been there since the 9th, the Battalion had suffered one officer and 20 other ranks killed, and 89 other ranks wounded.


TONY AND LEILA'S
DARLING ONLY CHILD
LOVED AND MOURNED BY MANY

LIEUTENANT ANTHONY PERCIVAL


Well, this wasn't what I was expecting. From his personal inscription, which his mother chose, I had created an image of a cherished only child at the heart of a loving family. Instead of which I found that Leila Percival had divorced her husband (Tony) in 1909 for "adultery coupled with cruelty".
In 1901, at the age of 9, Percival was living - the census says nephew not visitor - with his uncle, Arthur Strauss, at 1 Kensington Palace Gardens, even then one of the best addresses in London. Arthur was married to Leila's sister Minna Cohen. 'Tony', a photographer, and Leila lived in Maida Vale. By the time of the 1911 census Anthony Percival had emigrated to Canada. At which time his mother, now a widow, was living alone in London. Hardly the happy family I'd envisaged from the inscription.
From Canada, where he worked in a bank, Percival enlisted on 24 October 1914. From information Leila Percival gave to the Imperial War Museum when she sent it a photograph of her son for their collection, she says that he served initially with the 28th Saaskatchewan Battalion, Canadian Infantry, then in August 1915 received a commission in the 14th Battalion Middlesex Regiment before transferring in March 1916 to the Machine Gun Corps. He went to France in August that year, served with the 95th Company and died of wounds in hospital in St Sever on 15 October 1917. There is no information as to where, when or how he was wounded.


ADSUM

LIEUTENANT CYRIL SHAKESPEAR BEACHCROFT


"At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat a time. And just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, "Adsum!" and fell back. It was the word we used at school, when names were called; and lo, he. whose heart was as that of a little child, had answered his name, and stood in the presence of The Master."
The Newcomes 1855
William Makepeace Thackeray 1811-1863

This is a very touching and many-layered inscription. The fictional Colonel Thomas Newcome, who died at The Charterhouse, was educated at Charterhouse School, just as Thackeray had been - and Cyril Beachcroft too. 'Adsum' is the word Carthusians answered and still answer to their names at registration. It means 'present', and on a gravestone it implies still living and present with Christ.
The name Colonel Newcome became a byword for a virtuous man, a gentle, even perhaps a literary, soldier. So much so that when in 1906 the playwright Michael Morton adapted The Newcomes for the stage under the title 'Colonel Newcome', there was much public speculation about which actor might be worthy enough to play the role - and much dubious criticism when Herbert Beerbohm-Tree was chosen. Some people thought his German ancestry made him unsuitable; the idea of his 'guttural accents' uttering the famous 'Adsum' was too much for them to contemplate. In the event, Tree was a triumph in the role. The play was even more popular when it was revived during the First World War. Tree, still in the title role, toured with it through the United States and Canada during the winter of 1916-17. The ostensible aim of the tour was to raise money for Britain's wounded soldiers, but presumably it was hoped it might also raise support for Britain's war.
In 1914, Cyril Beachcroft, a solicitor with the family firm of Beachcroft, Thompson, Hay and Ledward, was married with two daughters. Having been a member of the Inns of Court OTC between 1909 and 1912 he rejoined it immediately on the outbreak of war. By October 1914 he had been commissioned into the Dorset Yeomanry where he spent the three years on home service, training troops. In July 1917 he requested a transfer to the Household Battalion, an infantry battalion drawn from reserve units of the Household Cavalry, so that he could be sent to the front. Within six weeks of his arrival he was dead, killed leading his men into an attack at Poelcapelle, his body not recovered from the battlefield until December 1919.
It was his wife who chose his inscription, linking him through a single word with Charterhouse, the Resurrection and a fine, even though fictional, English gentleman.
Beachcroft, who had managed to survive for the junior officer's classic six weeks, also earned a classic tribute from one of his fellow officers:

"We all feel we have lost a man who can never be replaced ... Quite fearless, and always cheerful; he is an example of all one loves best in a man."

There you have it - fearless and cheerful, it's what soldiers most admired in each other.
Cyril Beachcroft's elder bother, Eric, served with the Dorset Yeomanry in Palestine where he was severely wounded in November 1917. Invalided home, he remained in hospital and then convalescent until discharged from the army in 1919.


"SECOND TO NONE"

SECOND LIEUTENANT RALPH VIVIAN BABINGTON


Second to none, in other words, in a class of his own, unmatchable. It's a lovely inscription for a father to choose for his son. As it's in inverted commas, I thought it must have been a quote from something like a letter of condolence but then James Kerr (@JamesKerr125) pointed out to me that it is in fact a translation of the Coldstream Guards' motto 'Nulli Secundus'.
Ralph Babington was the youngest of five sons. One gets the feeling that he was not robust. In fact one of the reports following his death refers to the fact that "In that small body there was a giant heart". He seems to have been intended for a career in the navy but after spending some time as a cadet at the Royal Naval College, Osborne his health broke down when he was 14 and it was a year before he recovered enough to be sent to Eton. In 1916, when he was 17, he went to Sandhurst, all the time desperate that the war might be over before he'd had a chance to take a part in it. His chance came soon enough and unfortunately it was his life that was over before the war was.
Babington's medal card says that he first entered a theatre of war on 9 October 1917 and that he was killed in action on the 9 November but the 9 October was the date of his death so it's not really possible to say how long he'd been at the front. He was killed when the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards took part in an assault near Ypres between "Broembeke and Houlthoulet Forrest". According to a report in the Eton Chronicle: "He was leading his platoon to the forming-up area on the night of October 8-9, when a German shell burst close to him, killing him instantaneously, and many of his men".
Babington was one of the 5 officers and 35 other ranks killed that day.


WORTHY THE NAME
OF AN ENGLISHMAN

PRIVATE JOHN EDWARD SCHOLES


There are no quotation marks round this inscription, nevertheless it is a quotation. However, I think the saying must have had a life of its own separate from the book in which it appears as the context is humorous rather than noble. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), in his book, Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), describes how, losing patience with his donkey's slow pace, he decides to hit her. After the third attempt, the others having had no effect, he declares, "I am worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes against my conscience to lay my hand rudely on a female". So feeling extremely guilty, especially as the donkey is exhibiting signs of distress, he stops beating her at which the donkey goes slower and slower. Eventually they are overtaken by a peasant who initially sympathises with Stevenson and then falls about laughing saying that the donkey has fooled him. The peasant picks up a stick and beats the donkey soundly whereupon it picks up its heels and trots along happily, showing no signs of distress and never slowing down. You can see why I think the quotation must have had a life of its own separate from Stevenson's book.
John Scholes' sister chose his inscription, both parents were dead. Scholes was a volunteer; his medal card shows that he entered a theatre of war on 5 May 1915, which would fit with him having enlisted in the 2nd/5th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers in September 1914. On the day Scholes died of wounds, the 2nd/5th had been out of the front line training and resting since 23 September when they came out of action on the Menin Road, which is probably when Scholes was wounded.


IN THAT RICH EARTH
A RICHER DUST CONTAINS

SAPPER STANLEY REES EDE


This may not be its most famous line but it certainly comes from one of the most famous poems of the First World War, Rupert Brooke's The Soldier, of which this is verse 1:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Lines two and three are, not surprisingly, a popular inscription. Stanley Ede's father chose line four, changing the word 'conceals' to 'contains'. When relations change words it's difficult to know whether they've just misremembered the original or whether they meant it. I think Mr William Edward Ede meant it - the earth should be proud to contain his son's 'richer dust', whereas there could be something furtive about concealing it.
The poem is full of nostalgic melancholy:

And think this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

William Edward Ede emigrated to Australia with his wife and three children in 1912. Having been born and grown up in Devon, is there a longing for the old country and the old days concealed in his choice of inscription? The family are Australians now, that is why his son's grave cannot be 'forever England'.
And there could be a deeper regret too. When Stanley Ede joined up on 1 May 1915 he declared he was 18 and 3 months. A handwritten note beside this answer says, "Parents consent attached". However, according to the British records, Ede was born in the first quarter of 1898. He was therefore only 17 and 3 months. A fact confirmed by his father on the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia when he gives his son's age at death as 19 and 9 months.
Ede, a plumber, served with the 12th Field Company Australian Engineers. Sturdy and of fresh complexion, Ede was, according to his comrades, "full of fun and almost invariably singing". A witness told the Australian Red Cross that he "was killed at Zonnebeke by a piece of shell which hit him in the neck and killed him outright".


TO GREET THE SUN
UPON THE UPLAND LAWN

LIEUTENANT VICTOR JOSEPH WOODCOCK


Victor Woodcock's father chose a lovely image of death for his son's inscription. It makes it sound as though Woodcock just flew into the rising sun as it appeared above the grassland hills; an beautiful image for a Royal Flying Corps pilot. As it was, Woodcock and his observer crashed to the ground during a formation-flying training session, Woodcock having only joined the Squadron eight days earlier.
The inscription is based on a line from Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; there's just one word different, Gray wrote to meet the sun, not greet the sun. Not that that makes any difference to the sense of the inscription. However, whatever sense Mr Woodcock intended was not what Gray meant by the words. To Gray they were just part of a description of an old countryman:

"Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn."

Victor Woodcock was the son of a Master Grocer from Leeds. Ultimately destined for the Methodist Ministry, he spent two years at Leeds University studying Engineering. In January 1916 he took a commission in the Northumberland Fusiliers and served with them throughout 1916. In January 1917 he got his aviator's certificate and a commission in the Royal Flying Corps. In September 1917 he joined 3 Squadron eight days before he was killed.


IN THAT
GREAT CLOISTER'S STILLNESS
HE LIVES
WHOM WE CALL DEAD

GUNNER HARRY SAMPSON SAMPSON


The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) is the author of a surprising number of headstone inscriptions of which this is one. It comes from his poem, Resignation, composed following the death of his daughter Fanny. Longfellow holds out the consolation that "oftentimes celestial benedictions / assume this dark disguise", and what seem to us "but sad, funereal tapers / may be heaven's distant lamps".

There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.

It is in the 'life elysian'

In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion,
By guardian angels led,
Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution,
She lives, whom we call dead.

Harry Richards was a gunner serving with the 46th Battery 12th Australian Field Artillery Brigade at Zillebeke when he was killed near the Menin Road. A witness told the Red Cross Enquiry Bureau:

"He was dark, cleanshaven, slim, about 5'6", and about 21 or 22. He was killed whilst mending our telephone wire on 1st Oct. on the Passchendaele front. I was told this by Sig. Norman Potts, who was with him at the Dickebusch and a cross put over his grave."

Richards' South Australian Division Red Cross file can be read here. Unusually, it not only names his mother as his next-of-kin, but also his fiancee, Miss Doris Baldwin.


THY WAY, NOT MINE, O LORD
HOWEVER DARK IT BE

LIEUTENANT ERNEST LAWTON HARGRAVE


Just six graves down from Ernest Hargraves's, Walter Pawson's mother chose 'Thy will be done' for her son's personal inscription. These words from the Lord's Prayer are those most frequently used on war-grave headstones. However, Ernest Hargrave's mother makes an even more emphatic statement of submission to God's will with her choice from the first verse of a mid-nineteenth-century hymn by Horatius Bonar:

Thy way, not mine, O Lord,
However dark it be;
Lead me by thine own hand,
Choose out the path for me.

Mrs Hargrave's was a widow who kept a boarding house in Clapham. Ernest was the eldest of her two children; Arthur, her other son, would have been 8 when Ernest died. God's 'way' must have felt very dark to her.
There are twenty war graves in East Boldre Churchyard, nineteen of them relate to accidents at the Flying Training School there. According to a newspaper report, Hargrave's was one of two fatal accidents within twenty-four hours of each other. In Hargrave's case:

"On Saturday, Second Lieutenant Ernest Hargrave ascended, but when at height of 200 ft his machine nose-dived and crashed to the earth, resulting in his death from fracture of the skull."

The verdict of a subsequent inquiry concluded that it had been 'death by mis-adventure'.


TODAY AND YESTERDAY
BUT LESS THAN TOMORROW

GUNNER NORMAN ALGERNON BURGESS


This inscription is a contraction of the best-known lines - I could say the only known lines - of the French poet Louis-Rose-Eiennette Gerard, known as Rosemonde Gerard (1871-1953). They come from L'Eternelle Chanson, (The Eternal Song), which she dedicated to her husband, Edmond Rostand (1868-1918):

Car, vois-tu, chaque jour je t'aime davantage,
Aujourd'hui plus qu' hier et biend moins que demain.

For, you see, each day I love you more,
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

Gerard intended it as a declaration of ever-growing love for her husband; Mrs Burgess as a declaration of undying love for hers.
Norman Algernon Burgess was born in Robertsbridge, Sussex in 1883 where his father ran a corn and seed merchant's business. At some point he emigrated to Canada from where he enlisted, in Winnipeg, on 17 December 1914.
Burgess served with the 2nd Canadian Division Ammunition Column and came back to England to be married to Joan Frances Hodson in Salehurst on 2 September 1915. Just over two years later, in the middle of a mass of adminstrative details the war diary reported:

22 September 1917: "4 OR on leave. No 367 Gnr Burgess, N.A. died. Medical Officers report obstruction of Glotles [glottis?]. 5 OR to First Army Rest Camp ... "


SWEET FLOWERET
OF THE MARTYR'S BAND
SO EARLY PLUCKED
BY CRUEL HAND

GUNNER JOHN JOSEPH HAWKSWORTH


Gunner Hawksworth's inscription comes from the first two lines of a hymn written by the Revd John Dykes (1823-1877).

Sweet flowerets of the martyr band,
So early plucked by cruel hand;
Like rosebuds by a tempest torn,
As breaks the light of summer morn;

The hymn is based on a line from a poem by the Roman poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (c.348 - c.413). Clemens' poem writes graphically about the slaughter of the children by King Herod's 'cruel hand' on Holy Innocents' Day, 28 December, describing the children as, 'salvete, flores martyrum', 'torn by the storm on earth but now flowers in heaven'.
Hawksworth's mother chose his inscription. Martyr isn't a word that relations often used, sacrifice, yes, martyrdom, no - perhaps it's too Catholic a concept for a Protestant nation. John Joseph was her only child. Born in Edensor, Derbyshire where his father farmed, mother was living in Walcot, Shropshire when she chose her son's inscription, just 10 miles from Dawley where she had been born.
Hawksworth, a volunteer, served with 81st Battery, Royal Field Artillery. According to his medal roll, he arrived in France on 16 March 1915, which means that he was a volunteer. He died of wounds in a base hospital in Etaples on 19 September 1917.


FORGIVE MY GRIEF
FOR ONE REMOVED
THY CREATURE
WHOM I FOUND SO FAIR

PRIVATE JOHN PORTEOUS HILL


John Porteous Hill's inscription quotes the ninth stanza of Tennyson's In Memoriam, his extended lament on the death of his friend Arthur Hallam:

Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.

John Hill's father, a commercial traveller, chose it for his eldest son who joined the army in Edinburgh on 10 July 1916 when he was 18 and 9 months. By June 1917 Hill was in France, serving with the 15th Battalion Royal Scots. On 28 August he received gun shot wounds in his back and arm and was admitted to No. 6 General Hospital , Rouen. On the 29th his condition was described as 'serious', two days later it was upgraded to 'dangerous'. He died that day.


O ENGLAND
LET THY WEALTH BE COUNTED
NOT IN GOLD, BUT SOULS

GUNNER ERNEST ROBERT ROUNCE


Ernest Rounce's father references 'Non Angli Sed Angeli', a poem by the Revd Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy published in More Rough Rhymes of a Padre (1919). An inspirational Church of England padre, Studdert-Kennedy was probably better known by his nickname, Woodbine Willie, which came from his habit of generously dishing out cigarettes (Woodbines) along with his religious homilies. During the war he ardently encouraged soldiers to battle, but afterwards he became an equally ardent pacifist and socialist. 'Non Angli Sed Angeli' hints as this.
The title refers to a story Bede (672/3 - 735) related in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It dates from 590 when Pope Gregory the Great came across some faired-haired, fair-skinned people being sold in a slave market in Rome. When he asked what they were he was told they were Angles. He is reported to have replied, 'Non Angli sed angeli', not Angles but angels.
Studdert-Kennedy's poem is a plea that the men who died for freedom should not be betrayed by the new slavery of capitalism, "the minotaur of Mammon":

"Shall wealth still grow and woe increase to breed
In filthy slums the slaves of poverty?"

If this happens:

"Then blessed are the dead who die in war,
Their bodies shattered but their souls untouched
By slime of sin, unpoisoned by the snake.
For war is kinder than a Godless peace.
O England, let this message from the past
Ring down the ages like a trumpet call,
Not Angles these but angels, souls not slaves.
Let thy wealth be counted not in sov'reigns
But in souls .... "

What did Ernest Rounce's father, a Metropolitan police constable, mean by his choice of inscription? He hasn't quoted the poem exactly but it's definitely the source. I think he was at one with Studdert-Kennedy, make England a country fit for those who fought and died for it not just a rich country that benefitted the wealthy.
Rounce served with C Battery, 76th Brigade Royal Field Artillery. He is buried in a dressing station cemetery just outside the village of Vlamertinge not far from Ypres. My assumption would be that he died soon after he'd been wounded, on the same day - 23 August 1917.


A NATIVE OF MOSCOW, RUSSIA
ENLISTED IN NEWFOUNDLAND REGIMENT
24/11/16

PRIVATE DOMINIC FOALEY


There's a problem with the personal inscriptions belonging to members of the Newfoundland Regiment - every single one of them was signed for by Lt. Colonel T. Nangle, Director of Graves Registration and Enquiries, 39 Victoria St, London SW1. I have always assumed that Nangle simply dealt with the British end of the paper work, that families having chosen an inscription left it to him to see it through. However, now I'm not so sure, or certainly not sure that it was true in all cases.
The Newfoundland Regiment's records have been digitised and can be found online. From Foaley's attestation form we can see that he gave his full address as 1 Cave Street, Moscow, that in answer to the question "Are you a British subject?" he replied "No, Russian", and to the question, "Have you ever served in any Branch of His Majesty's Forces, naval or military, if so, which?" his answer was, "No (was in Russian Army)". The form was dated 24 November 1916, the date that appears on his headstone.
Foaley's Newfoundland draft arrived in France on 12 June 1917. His active service Casualty Form records that he was wounded in action a month later, on 10 July, in his left hand. Discharged to duty on 31 July, he rejoined his battalion on 4 August. Ten days later, on 14 August, he was wounded in action again. Admitted to No. 6 Casualty Clearing Station with shell wounds in his face and abdomen, he died nine days later.
Foaley named his brother, Stanisloff Foaley, 1 Cave Street, Moscow, as his next-of-kin. The word certainly looks like 'brother' anyway. However, when the time came to dispose of his estate, the Newfoundland authorities had a problem. As the Department of Justice wrote on 29 November 1918:

"I think an effort should be made to ascertain if his given next of kin, his brother, is still in Moscow. Owing to the unsettled condition of Russia at the present time, and the prospects that its condition will remain unsettled for a long time yet, it may be difficult to get in touch with the brother of the decesased."

The same problem arose over despatching Foaley's medals in 1922. Enquiries had been made at his last known address in Newfoundland where "his landlady and friend", Mrs William Hollett, 1 Duckworth Street, St John's, told them that Foaley's father died before Foaley came to Newfoundland, that his mother had died after they had been here about three months and that one brother had been killed fighting for the Russians. None of this helped with the disposal of his medals, which were returned to the War Office.
You can see why I wonder who chose Foaley's inscription, and why I doubt that it was his brother and think that it might have been composed by Lt Colonel T Nangle himself. If so, he did a good job of giving Dominic Foaley an identity.


LATE OF CEYLON

CAPTAIN RICHARD POWELL


Yesterday's casualty came from Siberia to fight, today's returned from Ceylon. I don't know what he was doing in Ceylon but it's a fair guess that he was a tea planter.
Richard Powell - his name was Richard despite the fact that the War Graves Commission has him as Captain C Powell - was born in Munslow, Shropshire, the eldest son of the rector George Bather Powell whose family had held the living since 1776, and continued to hold it until Richard Powell's brother, Edward, resigned it in 1965.
It's a curious inscription for a rector to choose for his son - 'Late of Ceylon' - no mention of God, no quote from the bible, nor from a hymn. It crossed my mind that perhaps Richard Powell, his father's eldest son, had made it clear that the religious life of his ancestors was not for him. If he did it doesn't appear to have caused any lasting animosity since a brass plaque in St Michael's Church, Munslow, links him firmly to his home:

Richard Powell, Captain RFA
And of Ceylon, Eldest son of
Rev GB Powell, Rector of this Parish
Was wounded in Flanders 4th August 1917
And died in hospital at Le Trepot
France, 22nd August 1917


HE CAME FROM SIBERIA
TO FIGHT

LANCE CORPORAL LESLIE ADRIAN DESPREZ


I can't tell you what Leslie Desprez was doing in Siberia but I think I can guess. Both his father, Philip Victor Desprez, and his older brother, Rene Victor Desprez, were commercial travellers so the chances are that Leslie Adrian Desprez was one too. The opening up of Siberia, following the building of the Trans-Siberian railway, presented huge commercial opportunities to the industrialised nations. It was seen a region of 'vast promise', a 'land of limitless possibilities', Russia's Canada. The British had been slow into the field and not only the Americans but the Germans, Austrians and Swedes were well ahead of the game during the first decade of the 20th Century. However, this is probably why Desprez was in Siberia when the war broke out.
Some men saw the outbreak of war as a commercial opportunity for Britain since, they argued, the Russians were not likely to want to do business with an enemy country. However, Desprez obviously didn't feel he could remain in the region to exploit this opportunity; he came home "to fight". He served with "D" Company, 2nd Battalion Middlesex Regiment and died of wounds in a casualty clearing station at Lijssenthoek on 16 August 1916. It's not possible to tell exactly when he was wounded but the battalion war diary summarises its August casualties as, "3 killed, 7 wounded, all privates", whereas among its July casualties were, "1 officer killed and 5 ORs killed, 3 corporals wounded and one lance corporal". That one lance corporal was probably Leslie Desprez, wounded when "D" Company were in the front line near Blangy between 27/28th and 30/31st July.


AN EDWARDIAN
OF UPRIGHT LIFE
AND STAINLESS PURITY

PIONEER ARTHUR FREDERICK PERCY ELD


Arthur Eld was a very particular kind of Edwardian; not a subject of King Edward VII, although he had been one of those, but a former pupil of King Edward VI's Five-Ways Grammar School in Birmingham. He had been a star pupil, consistently coming among the top in his class, particularly in science. He left school in 1914 and began working as a chemist. Having attested on 11 December 1915, he was not called up until March 1917. He went to France on 25 May 1917.
On 14 July 1917, Eld was posted to No. 4 Special Company Royal Engineers. I would suggest that his skills as a chemist had been recognized since these special companies were gas warfare units; No. 4 was a gas mortar unit, firing gas shells from 4-inch Stokes mortars. Eld did not last very long. He was dead a month later.
His parents established the Eld Memorial Prize at King Edward's Five-Ways in their son's memory. First awarded in 1919, it was initially intended as a prize for science. However, by 1925 it had been divided into two prizes, one for science and one for sport. Both prizes are still awarded.


HOW I MISS THE SUNSHINE
OF YOUR SMILE
MOTHER

RIFLEMAN FREDERICK THOMAS MILLER


Frederick Miller's mother referenced a popular love song, The Sunshine of Your Smile, for her son's inscription. Written in 1913 with lyrics by Leonard Cooke and music by Lilian Ray, the song was recorded several times during the war years - you can hear this 1916 recording by John McCormack here.

Dear face that holds so sweet a smile for me,
Were you not mine, how dark the world would be!
I know no light above that could replace
Love's radiant sunshine in your dear, dear face.

Refrain:
Give me your smile, the love-light in your eyes,
Life could not hold a fairer Paradise!
Give me the right to love you all the while,
My world for ever, the sunshine of your smile!

Shadows may fall upon the land and sea,
Sunshine from all the world may hidden be;
But I shall see no cloud across the sun;
Your smile shall light my life, till life is done.

Refrain:

Frederick Miller was the eldest of his parents' seven surviving children - six boys and one girl. At the time of the 1911 census the family - parents, children and grandmother - lived in four rooms in Poplar where father, Henry, was a house and ship painter. Frederick served with the 21st Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps and died of wounds in a casualty clearing station on 14 August 1917. The battalion war diary records:

"On the morning of the 14th August a raid was attempted against enemy dugouts. The heavy condition of the ground and the heavy enemy machine gun fire prevented the party from reaching their objectives and they returned with slight casualties."

Was Miller one of the 'slight casualties'?


OF WHOM THE WORLD
WAS NOT WORTHY

SECOND LIEUTENANT GEORGE SINCLAIR SMILLIE


George Smillie's mother chose his inscription. To begin with I thought it sounded rather defensively bitter - the world was not worthy of my son who was killed for you undeserving lot. Then I discovered it was a quote from the bible, Hebrews 11:38:

"And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth."
Hebrews 36-38

The meaning here is that these men, who suffered all these hardships, were good men who did not deserve it. They were not worthy of this fate because they were among the best of men, and yet this happened to them. I imagine that this is what Mrs Smillie meant to imply by her choice.
George Smillie's medal card shows that he was commissioned from the rank of Warrant Officer in May 1917. He had first entered a theatre of war on 12 December 1914, serving in both India and France, latterly with the 121st Brigade Royal Field Artillery. He died of wounds received near Ypres.




HAD HE ASKED US, WE WOULD CRY
OH SPARE HIM LORD
WE LOVE HIM
LET HIM STAY

PRIVATE WALTER MELLING


'Had he asked us'; had who asked us? The answer is God. Had God asked Walter Melling's family they would have pleaded with Him to spare Walter, to let him stay because they loved him. This is not an unusual inscription, nor can it have been an uncommon sentiment, but it is far more usual to come across inscriptions that accept God's will - 'We cannot Lord Thy purpose see but all is well that's done by Thee'.
Walter Melling's mother, Elizabeth, chose the inscription. She would have been particularly keen for her eldest son to be allowed to live as her husband, Walter's father, had died at the age of 50 just a few months earlier and she still had a six-year-old son to look after.
Walter enlisted on 8 December 1915 when he was 19. He didn't go to France until 7 February 1917, when he was 20. He was wounded 'in the field' on 10 August 1917, the casualty form, which has unusually survived, baldly recording - gun shot wounds scrotum, forearm and leg. He died in a casualty clearing station the next day.


OF KILLARA, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

CORPORAL WILLIAM ALAN MASCHWITZ


Corporal Alan Maschwitz was a long way from home when he died of 'penetrating' shrapnel wounds to his left thigh on 11 August 1917. He came from Killara, a leafy suburb of Sydney, where his parents had recently built themselves a house, Lyttleton, close to the golf course. I suspect that golf was an important part of the family's life; Alan is listed on the Killara Golf Club Roll of Honour, which at one time awarded a Maschwitz Cup - and perhaps still does - and Mr William Percy Maschwitz, Alan's father, served as both president and vice-president of the club.
Maschwitz left school in 1913 and went to work on a sheep station as a jackaroo, someone who was learning the business in order to become an owner, overseer or manager. He joined up in 1915 and sailed for Suez on 18 December 1915. In March 1916 he became a member of the newly-formed 104th Howitzer Battery, Australian Field Artillery and served with them from May 1916 until his death in August 1917.
Alan Maschwitz was his parents only child. Born on 24 November 1896, he was still only 20 when he died.


OF 52, POLLOK ST
POLLOKSHAWS

PRIVATE JAMES FREER


There's something about this inscription: Mr James Freer, who chose it for his son, didn't give his son's Christian name (I got that from his medal card), didn't give his age (I worked that out from the census), didn't provide any of the usual family information for the War Graves Commission's records, but did give the family's address as his son's personal inscription. A precise inscription, but quite anonymous too as I can't be the only person not to know where Pollokshaws is. And why didn't Mr Freer provide any other information about his son? Pollokshaws, by the way, was once a separate community but is now a suburb of Glasgow.
Yesterday's casualty lived at 51 Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington, today's at 52 Pollok Street, Pollokshaws, two very different residencies although unfortunately I can't tell you exactly what Pollock Street was like since the whole area was redeveloped in the 1950s and very little of it remains. I know enough to be able to say that it was a tenement, a flat, probably built in the early 20th century. It won't have been grand since James Freer senior obviously made money where he could: in the 1881 census he was an umbrella maker, in 1891 a coal salesman and 1901 a wood merchant who sold firewood, whereas the owner of 51 Evelyn Gardens was the Senior General Manager of the National Provincial Bank. But the two fathers had the same instinct - in using the family address for their son's personal inscription they were bringing him back home where he belonged.
Freer served with the 1/6th Black Watch and was most likely wounded on 31 July / 1 August when the battalion took part in the opening attack of the Third Ypres campaign at Pilckem Ridge. I say most likely because the battalion had spent most of July in training for the attack and, having been relieved on 1 August, it spent the rest of August resting, cleaning kit and training again.
The 1901 census shows there to have been three Freer brothers: Hugh, Andrew and James. Andrew Freer, serving with Drake Battalion Royal Naval Division, was killed in action on 23 March 1918 in the German Spring Offensive. His body was never identified and he is commemorated on the Arras Memorial.



OF 51, EVELYN GARDENS
SOUTH KENSINGTON

CAPTAIN ARTHUR CECIL ESTALL


I find it strange when families choose to use their home address as a personal inscription. The casualty's address was automatically recorded by the War Graves Commission, there was no need to make it the inscription. But perhaps it was a way to bring the dead man home, to reclaim him from the battlefield. The repatriation of bodies having been forbidden, this was a way to tell the world, or at least any one who walked past his grave, where he belonged, where he'd come from.
Number 51 Evelyn Gardens was quite a grand address; a large, eleven-roomed house in a very smart part of London where in 1911 Mr and Mrs Thomas Estall lived with their 20 year-old son, Arthur Cecil, and three members of staff - a cook and two parlour maids. Mr Thomas Estall was Senior General Manager of the National Provincial Bank, Arthur Cecil was a clerk at the Bank of England. Yet I don't think it was the status of the address that made his father chose it as the inscription, plenty of other relations chose very humble addresses as inscriptions, I do think it was a matter of bringing the dead man home to where he belonged.
Cecil, as he was known, had been a member of the Honourable Artillery Company since 1909. On the outbreak of war he volunteered for foreign service and went with the 1st Battalion to France in October 1914. He was invalided home on 29 December 1914. There is no information as to what happened to him but page 25 of 'The Honourable Artillery Company in the Great War' relates how appalling their conditions had been:

"Our trenches had been made by the French, and were nothing but ditches full of liquid mud; there was no wire in front, and no material of any kind, nor were there any communication trenches. The only way the front line could be approached was over the open through a sea of mud, and across a bullet-swept area. Bullets came though the parapets as though they had been butter. In some of the trenches, the parapet was only breast high, and in order to get cover the men had to sit in the mud on the floor of the trench, and very often a man would find himself sitting on the chest of a mutely protesting Frenchman who had been lying there for a month or six weeks."

By the end of December, "a great number of men were suffering from exhaustion, exposure and frostbite. It turned out afterwards that this turn in the trenches cost the Battalion 12 officers and 250 men".

In March 1915, Estall received a commission in the Army Service Corps and in August joined the newly formed HQ Company Guards Division Train, a unit of the Army Service Corps. On 15 February 1917, The Times announced the news of his engagement to Miss Brenda Perronet Sells and then on 11 August, almost exactly six months later, the news of his death:

ESTALL - On the 8th Aug. of wounds received in action on the 6th Aug. Captain Arthur Cecil Estall, 51 Evelyn Gardens, SW, aged 26.

Every 8 August for the next twenty-six years, Cecil's mother remembered his death in The Times:

ESTALL - In memory of my only son A.C. Estall, "Cecil", who was wounded at Ypres 6th August 1917, died on the 8th, 7th Stationary Hospital, Boulogne, and was buried at the Eastern Cemetery, Boulogne.


A SACRIFICE TO RIGHT
AGAINST MIGHT
OUR BERT

PRIVATE HERBERT CLARENCE WRIGHT


"They are members of a team playing together in the greatest game of all. Their common heroism, their common sufferings in a common cause binds them with a tie such as never before been forged.
We British are not fighting merely to defend our commerce or even our homes from aggression; you Americans have not crossed the Atlantic merely to protect your shores; it is a higher cause that has brought us into the field together.
It is to protect the weak, to insure the reign of freedom and justice among future generations.
It is to defend right against might.
These are the highest ideals that men can live for. Those men at the front are sacrificing themselves for this ideal and for the good of the coming generation.
So you younger citizens owe a pretty big debt to your fathers and brothers who are standing for you at the front today. It is up to you to make their sacrifice worth while by yourselves playing the game in turn."
'Playing the Game' by Lt General Robert Baden-Powell
published in Boys Life The Boys Scouts [of America] Magazine July 1918


This article may have been published in an American magazine but you can see how Mr and Mrs Wright got the idea that their son Bert had sacrificed himself for right against might. It wouldn't have been the first time such sentiments had been expressed; they must have been commonplace in the Boy Scout movement throughout Britain, the Empire and Commonwealth - and not only in the Boy Scout movement.
Herbert Wright served with the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards and was killed in action near Boesinghe on 14 September 1917. His body was found two years later, six months after the death of his father.


GOD GRANT THE SACRIFICE
BE NOT IN VAIN

SECOND LIEUTENANT THOMAS GEORGE MAY


This is another quotation from one of John Oxenham's poems. It comes from Epilogue 1914 published in All's Well Some Helpful Verse for these Dark Days of War. Oxenham blames the Kaiser for the war:

Thy slaughterings, - thy treacheries, - thy thefts, -
Thy broken pacts, - thy honour in the mire, -
Thy poor humanity cast off to sate thy pride; -
'Twere better thou hadst never lived, - or died

After several verses of accusation Oxenham asks, in capital letters, 'AND AFTER .......... WHAT?'

God grant the sacrifice be not in vain!
Those valiant souls who set themselves with pride
To hold Thy ways ... and fought ... and died, -
They rest with Thee.

So Mrs May, who chose her son's inscription, is taking comfort from Oxenham's assurance, that, 'no drop of hero's blood e'er runs to waste' because God, in His acknowledgeably obscure ways, will use it to ensure 'nobler doings', 'loftier hope' and 'all-embracing and enduring peace'.

Thomas May originally served as a private with the Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps, a volunteer reserve regiment based in Kandy, Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, which was made up of European tea and rubber planters. As, apart from his birth in Chertsey in 1891, there is no mention of either him or his parents in any of the census records, I am assuming that he grew up in Ceylon. He served with the Planters, guarding the Suez Canal, from 7 November 1914 until they were then sent to Gallipoli the following summer. In July 1916 he was commissioned into the Machine Gun Corps and was serving with the 143rd Company when he was killed in action on the 6 August 1917.


DIED FOR CIVILISATION
HUMANITY
AND FOR KING AND COUNTRY

PRIVATE ALEXANDER CORRALL


Private Corrall's widowed mother chose his patriotic and idealistic inscription, these were the causes for which her son had served and died - civilisation, humanity, King and country. We don't see it like that today but as John Humphreys said recently on the Today programme, perception is everything. Mrs Corrall was one of the vast number of people who 'perceived' the war this way.
What will have influenced her thinking? Well, having been born in 1851 the popular culture she imbibed from newspapers, fiction and the music halls, would have been full of patriotic stories of heroism and valour, and dying in the service of the crown. It's what made John Oxenham's poetry so popular. In fact the foreword to his best-selling book of verse, All's Well, quite possibly influenced Mrs Corrall's thinking:

"Those who have so nobly responded to the Call, and those who with quiet faces and breaking hearts, have so bravely bidden them 'God speed!' - with these, All is truly Well, for they are equally giving their best to what, in this case, we most of us devoutly believe to be the service of God and humanity.
War is red horror. But better war than the utter crushing-out of liberty and civilisation under the heel of Prussian or any other militarism."

Alexandra Corrall had joined the army, the 2nd Battalion Middlesex Regiment, in 1907 when he was 18. He was certainly still serving with it in 1911 but I have a feeling that he must have been on the reserve when the war broke out. According to his medal card, he entered a theatre of war on 20 September 1914. However, the 2nd Battalion Middlesex Regiment didn't return from Malta until November 1914 so he couldn't have still been with them.
Corrall served with the 9th Battalion Royal Scots, part of the 51st Highland Division. In reserve on the 31 July, they went into the frontline trenches on 2 August where they remained until the 4th. They did not take part in any attacks, raids or counter-attacks but as the war diary recorded:

August 2nd: Enemy heavily shelled front and support positions day and night ...
August 3rd: Enemy continued to shell front and support positions at times heavily ...
August 4th: Enemy artillery fire not as heavy or as continuous as on previous days ...

Corrall died in a casualty clearing station on 5 August, presumably wounded by the enemy shelling.

I'll finish by quoting this passage from the popular, music-hall star Harry Lauder's war-time memoir, A Minstrel in France. His son John, his only child, was killed in France in December 1916.

"John died in the most glorious cause, and he died the most glorious death it may be given to a man to die. He died for humanity. He died for liberty, and that this world in which life must go on, no matter how many die, may be a better world to live in. He died in a struggle against the blackest force and the direst threat that has appeared against liberty and humanity within the memory of man. And were he alive now, and were he called again to-day to go out for the same cause, knowing that he must meet his death - as he did meet it - he would go smilingly and as willingly as he went then. He would go as a British soldier and as a British gentleman, to fight and die for his King and his country. And I would bid him go."
A Minstrel in France Harry Lauder page 77
Andrew Melrose Lts 1918


"HOW MANY HOPES
LIE BURIED HERE"
OUR ONLY SON

PRIVATE RICHARD COX


It has been difficult to track down the source of this quotation, "How many hopes lie buried here". It's not an uncommon inscription on a child's grave and the words do appear in The Little Robe of White, a poem about the funeral of a baby girl , which was published in an American journal in 1865. But somehow this poem didn't seem an appropriate source for a soldier's grave, yet the quotation marks indicate that it is a quotation. Then I found it. It comes from A Night View of the Battle of Raisin and was written in 1813 by an obscure American poet called William Orlando Butler (1791-1880) who was wounded in the battle of Raisin in January 1813 when the United States was at war with the British and Native American Alliance.
The poem appears to have remained in manuscript form until 1912 at which point it came to modest prominence. The poet surveys the field in the aftermath of the battle:

The battle's o'er the din is past!
Night's mantle on the field is cast,
The moon with sad and pensive beam
Hangs sorrowing o'er the bloody stream.

The inscription comes from verse seven of this thirty-one verse poem:

For sad's the Dirge the Muse must sing
Fallen are the Flowers of the land.
How many hopes lie buried here?
The Father's joy, the Mother's pride.

You might wonder how Richard Cox's mother came by the poem and the answer probably lies in the fact that for all that he served in the Canadian Infantry, Richard Cox was an American, born in New York, whose parents lived in Long Beach, California. He was one of the many American citizens who joined the war long before their country did.
Cox served with Princess Patricia's Light Infantry, Eastern Ontario Regiment. On the morning of 30 October 1917 the regiment attacked at Meetcheele Ridge. Conditions were appalling, as their Commanding Officer made clear in a letter:

"The condition of the ground beggars description. Just one mass of shell-holes, all full of water. The strongest and youngest men cannot navigate without falling down. The people we relieve tell me in the attack, a great many of their men drowned in shell holes for want of strength to pull themselves out when dog-tired."

Major Papineau, Officer Commanding No. 3 Company, looking at the Ridge they were about to attack, and at the German defences, remarked to a fellow officer that the attack was suicide - Papineau was one of the first to be killed. We don't know at what point Cox was killed but his body was found at map reference v.30.D.2.1. almost exactly two years later.


WITH FLAG UNFURLED
THE HEIGHTS OF DEATH HE TROD
INTO THE PEACE OF GOD

GUNNER JOHN ERNEST SALTER


Death is Swallowed up in Victory

Take comfort, ye who mourn a loved one, lost
Upon the battle-field,
Thank God for one, who, counting not the cost
Faced death and would not yield;
Thank God, although your eyes with tears are dim,
And sad your life and grey,
That howsoe'er the battle went for him
'Twas Victory that day.
With armour buckled on, and flag unfurled,
The heights of death he trod,
Translated from the warfare of the world
Into the peace of God

Sometimes I just don't know where people got their inscriptions from. Lines from this verse can be found on a number of war memorials all over the country and in death announcements and In Memoriam colums but the only place I've seen the whole poem, Death is Swallowed up in Victory, printed out is in 'Wycliffe and the War a School Record', and I'm pretty sure John Salter didn't go to Wycliffe.
Salter was the son of John Hambling Salter who ran a tailoring business in the High Street, South Brent Devon. He served with the 1st/1st (Warwick) Battery Royal Horse Artillery and was killed in action near Langemarck on the 4 August. On 17 August, The Western Times reported:

"The sad news has just been received by Mr JH Salter outfitter, that his eldest son, Sigr. JE Salter Warwickshire Regiment., has been killed in action in France. The greatest sympathy is felt for Mr ad Mrs Salter the deceased being a very bright young man, who was a great assistance in the business, and a favourite among all who knew him. He was a member of the Church choir in recognition of which the Dead March was played at Sunday's services."



PREVIOUSLY PRIVATE & CAPTAIN
IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS CORPS

LIEUTENANT WILFRED JAMES DASHWOOD


Wilfred Dashwood was the fourth of Sir George Dashwood's seven sons - three of whom were killed in the war. From his inscription you can see that he had a fairly unorthodox military career: first a private, then a captain and finally a lieutenant. But you can also see that the fact of him having been a private was something his father was proud to record in his inscription.
Dashwood was, of course, no ordinary private but rather he was one in the Public School Corps.
On 26 August 1914 The Times published a letter signed 'The eight unattached', eight men who had tried but failed to get commissions.

"We are between thirty and thirty-five, absolutely fit and game for active service ... We have applied for commissions in the new Regulars but find we are too old. We have offered our services as musketry instructors, and we are informed we are too young ..."

The men's solution was to join the ranks but with this suggestion:

"Many advantages would result if we all joined the same regiment and all public school men of similar age and qualifications are invited to attend a formal meeting on Thursday next ..."

The meeting was convened at Claridges Hotel, which tells you something about the sort of men who planned to meet there. But as The Spectator tried to protest:

"There is no suggestion that the public school men are better than others, but it is natural to wish to spend possibly many weary months or years with people of one's own upbringing."

The months or years weren't necessarily to be spent fighting the war but waiting for a commission. Dashwood, having joined as a private, was obviously fairly quickly promoted to Captain but when in September 1916 he eventually got a commission in the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards it was as a lieutenant.
On 31 July 1917, Dashwood led his company in a mopping up exercise just behind the first wave of attackers. He was wounded within the first two hours of the attack and died two days later. His elder brother, Ernest, aged 35, had been killed in 1915, as had his younger brother Lionel, aged 27. At one time the family had lived at Kirtlington Park in Oxfordshire but Sir George Dashwood, the boys' father, sold it in 1908.


BONNIEST OF BOYS
HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR OTHERS

SAPPER NORMAN CHEETHAM


It won't surprise you to learn that Norman Cheetham's mother chose his inscription; her description of him has such a proudly informal, affectionate tone. She spoke no less than the truth. There's a photograph of Cheetham on the Australian War Memorial site and he is indeed a good looking boy.
It was his mother too who filled in the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia. Here she states that he was precisely 20 and 6 months old when he was killed on 31 July 1917. This means that he can't have been 19 when he embarked from Australia on 6 July 1915 as it says on the embarkation roll. He must have been only 18 and six months. If you look at the information at the bottom of the photograph you can see that it says that at 19 he was underage. Well he wasn't, at 19 you could serve abroad without parental permission, but not at 18, which was his true age. However, there is also a copy of a note from his parents: "Dear Norman, Father, mother give consent to enlist. We commit you to God's care."
His parents' comfort was that he had given his life for others. How did people rationalise this? According to this argument, the Germans, and their allies the Ottoman Turks, were a threat to the stability and safety of the civilised world. They were murderous barbarians. This poster, warning the women of Queensland that the Germans would treat them worse than they had treated the women of Belgium shows the thinking. It also demonstrates how Mrs Cheetham was able to console herself with the idea that her son had given his life for others.


THOU HAST ALL SEASONS
FOR THINE OWN O DEATH

PRIVATE ARCHIBALD SANDILANDS


War Diary 6th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders
31 July 1917
Trenches: map reference St Julien 28. N.W.2.
The Fifth Army attacked the German lines North of Ypres this morning at dawn and the Battalion took part in the attack, jumping off at 3.50 am. The objective - Mon du Basta and Mon Bulgare - were reached but the fighting still continues.

The 6th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders were part of the 51st Highland Division whose divisional history summed up the battle over the two days 31 July and 1 August as:

"the neatest and cleanest performance which the Division had carried out. It was delivered against the Germans while their fighting efficiency was still unimpaired, and while their numbers were still unappreciably diminished. Moreover, it was delivered against a position hidden from view, which had been deliberately fortified during the preceding years with every artifice the ingenuity of the Boche could devise, and contained the concrete barrage-proof farms and the entirely unexpected concrete blockhouses.
The success, indeed, was so complete that, even after the battle was over, nothing which could have been an improvement in the plan of attack suggested itself."

The action was considered to have been a success. However, over those two days the Division suffered 1,515 other-rank casualties - killed, wounded and missing. Private Sandilands was one of them. It's a figure that is incomprehensible to us in 2017; fifteen would be too many let alone ten times that. But as the eminent historian, Jay Winter, comments in his most recent book, War Beyond Words, this was an era when people considered war to be a legitimate tool of political life. It's not how people see it in Western Europe today, in part as a consequence of the First World War's gigantic casualties. We can hope that in another hundred years perhaps the whole world will see it this way

Private Sandiland's father, Robert Sandiland, chose his inscription. It comes from The Hour of Death by the early Victorian poet, Felicia Hemans. Everything in the world has a time - for sleeping, eating, sun rise, sun set, autumn, spring, summer, but death can come at any time:

Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set - but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, oh! death




HE PLAYED THE GAME

PRIVATE JAMES CLOUSTON


On 31 July 1917 the British launched an attack along the whole of the Ypres front, from Boesinghe in the north to Wytschaete in the south. The 6th Battalion Black Watch, with which Clouston served, was part of the 51st Highland Division. Their divisional history records:

"Of the battalions engaged on the Divisional front, the 6th Black Watch sustained most casualties, 9 officers and 292 other ranks. This battalion had suffered considerably in the half hour before zero while lying assembled immediately in rear of the old British front line, and again while waiting for the barrage to move forward from in front of the Black outpost line. In this position the men were swept by a machine-gun firing from Gournier Farm."

Clouston's father, a bank teller from Glasgow, chose his inscription. It may seem highly inappropriate to us for someone to describe fighting as playing the game, but that's not what it meant. Playing the game means doing what is expected of you, as a member of a team, enthusiastically and to the best of your abilities. It's what the schoolboy meant in Newbolt's much derided poem, Vitai Lampada, when it was his voice that rallied the ranks with the cry of 'Play up, play up and play the game'.
However, Clouston's inscription does not come from Newbolt's poem but from The Lost Master by the Anglo-Canadian poet, Robert Service (1874-1958). The 'master', who I read as an officer, tells his men that when he dies he doesn't want any elaborate rituals or praise, "But just the line ye grave for me: 'He played the game'"

So when his glorious task was done,
It was not of the fame we thought;
It was not of his battles won,
But of the pride with which he fought;
But of his zest, his ringing laugh,
His trenchant scorn of praise or blame:
And so we graved his epitaph,
"He played the game."


HOW COULD I STAY

DRIVER TALBOT PRESTON ROBERTSON


Talbot Robertson Preston had the signed permission of both his parents when he joined up at the age of 18 and 3 months on 26 August 1916. He needed it as without this permissio, he would not have been able to go abroad until he was 19. This means that he was still only 18 and 7 months when he embarked for Britain on 23 December 1916. But as his headstone inscription asks - How could I stay? This wasn't just a simple statement but the last line of a very patriotic piece of verse written by James Drummond Burns who, like Talbot Robertson, was a former pupil of Scotch College in Melbourne.

The bugles of England were blowing o'er the sea,
As they had called a thousand years, calling now to me;
They woke me from dreaming in the dawning of the day,
The bugles of England - and how could I stay?

The banners of England, unfurled across the sea,
Floating out upon the wind, were beckoning to me;
Storm-rent and battle torn, smoke stained and grey,
The banners of England - and how could I stay?

O England, I heard the cry of those that died for thee,
Sounding like an organ-voice across the winter sea;
They lived and died for England, and gladly went their way -
England, O England - how could I stay?

Robertson arrived in Britain on 17 February 1917 and on 22 August went to France. He was wounded barely a month later, on 29 September. Evacuated to a Casualty Clearing Station, he was operated on the next day for 'severe gun shot wound of left thigh'. On 1 October he was admitted to No. 26 General Hospital at Etaples where he died six days later.
James Drummond Burns, the author of the verse, had been killed in Gallipoli in September 1915. Although Burns' words are quoted relatively frequently one way or another on headstone inscriptions, Burns' own headstone quotes Henry Newbolt's Clifton College:

Qui ante diem periit
Sed miles sed pro patria.

Who died before his time but as a soldier and for his country.


THE REST IS SILENCE

PRIVATE WILLIAM WILKIE GIBSON


This is a very bleak inscription however you look at it. These are Hamlet's dying words from Shakespeare's play of the same name. Of all the possible meanings the words could have they certainly mean that for Hamlet, once he's dead, the voices in his head, the guilt, the anguish he has felt ever since his father's death, will be over. What did Private Gibson's father intend them to mean?
Gibson served with the 6th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment which attacked from an assembly line NE of Naves at 9 am on 11 October 1918. The war diary notes the initial lack of resistance and the number of German prisoners that flocked back. However, at mid-day the Germans counter-attacked with tanks, forcing the British to withdraw 500 yards to the sunken road. But overnight the Germans withdrew to a new position.
There are 53 casualties of the 11 October 1918 in Iwuy Communal Cemetery, all but three of them from the West Riding or West Yorkshire Regiments. By this stage in the war the number of German soldiers giving themselves up was very notable and, despite the fact that they were able to mount a counter-attack, the German withdrawal to a new line meant that the end was nearing. There was just exactly one month more of the war to go.
So what might Mr John Gibson, a railway worker from Newcastle on Tyne, have meant by his son's inscription? That death was the end - certainly; that there was nothing after it, no eternal life - perhaps. Perhaps it was also a reference to spiritualism, a refutation that there was or ever could be any contact with the dead, his son was gone and forever. As I said at the beginning - it's a bleak inscription.


AS THE GLORY
OF A SETTING STAR
THE LIGHT OF HIS BRAVE LIFE
WENT DOWN

CAPTAIN LAURENCE MINOT, MC


The light of her young life went down,
As sinks behind the hill
The glory of a setting star,
Clear, suddenly, and still.
GONE 1845
John Greenleaf Whttier 1807-1892


Laurence Minot's father may not have quoted the words exactly as Whittier wrote them but Whittier's poem on the death of his sister is the inspiration for Minot's inscription.
After a phenomenal month in which he achieved six aerial victories between the 1st and the 27th July 1917 (qualifying as a flying 'ace'), Minot was himself shot down on the 28th - one week after his 21st birthday. Initially listed as missing, Flight magazine reported on the 7 March 1918:

"Captain Laurence Minot RFC, who was reported missing on July 28th 1917 is now, from information obtained from German sources by the British Red Cross Society, officially concluded to have been killed in aerial combat on that date near Heuelbeke."

Buried by the Germans, Minot's body was reburied in Heulebeke Communal Cemetery in 1923. In May 1926, the Air Ministry announced:

"A new trophy, to be known as the Laurence Minot Memorial Trophy, has been presented by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous in memory of the late Captain Laurence Minot, MC, Royal Flying Corps, who was killed on July 28 1917, in air combat whilst serving with No. 57 Squadron Royal Flying Corps. Competition for this trophy, which will be awarded annually to the crew of the bombing aeroplane which obtains the highest degree of accuracy in individual classification bombing practices for the current year, will be open to all bombing squadrons under the command of the Air Officer Commander in Chief, Air Defence of Great Britain."
Flight on 26 May 1926

The anonymous donor was, of course, Minot's father. The trophy, a magnificent silver eagle with wings outstretched, is no longer awarded but has been presented for safe-keeping to No. 57 Squadron, Minot's own squadron, which also owns his Military Cross.
Laurence Minot, the child of his second marriage, was his father's only son. For many years he put an In Memoriam announcement in The Times on the anniversary of his son's death. The last time on 28 July 1937:

"In proud and ever-loving memory of my gallant son, Captain Laurence Minot MC, RFC, killed in aerial engagement near Meulebeke, Flanders, July 28 !917, aged 21."


NOTHING'S WORTH WHILE
BUT THOUGHTS OF YOU
MOTHER

GUNNER JAMES SUMNER


This is a real cry of despair from Mrs Rose Sumner, a widow whose husband had died in 1913. It must have been an emotion felt by many of the bereaved but no one has articulated it quite so plainly as this. The 1901 census shows there to have been a nine-year-old daughter, May. But there is no trace of her later.
James Sumner's father had been a stone mason, as his father had been before him, but James became a professional soldier. The 1911 census shows him to have been serving in India with the 64th Battery, 5th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. He was with the same battery when he died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station on 27 May 1917.
There is no individual information about Sumner's death but the 5th Brigade's war diary records it as being in Cite de Caumont where hostile planes, hostile balloons and hostile shelling are a daily occurance.


OH GOD WHY DID YOU
TAKE MY ALL
MY HEART HAS A WOUND
THAT WILL NEVER HEAL

PRIVATE ALBERT RENAUD


It is unusual to see an inscription like this. Most people do not rail against God, rather they say they are prepared to accept His will: 'Not my will but thine O Lord'; 'God knoweth best'; 'We cannot Lord thy purpose see but all is well that's done by thee'. This won't do for Mrs Augusta Renaud. Married in 1911, her inscription challenges God and declares that her heart will never heal. And perhaps it never did. Augusta Renaud did eventually remarry but not until 1957, forty years after her first husband's death. She died in 1978 aged 84.
Renaud originally served with The Queen's Royal West Kent Regiment but at the time of his death was with the Labour Corps. This suggests that he had been wounded, reducing his medical fitness from A1. However, whilst this might mean that you were not fit enough to be a front line soldier it didn't keep you away from danger. Renaud is buried in Canada Farm Cemetery, a front line dressing station cemetery.


HE DIED FOR US
IN OUR HEARTS
AND THE VALHALLA OF HEROES
HE LIVES

CORPORAL HERBERT HENRY RENSHAW MM


The destination of dead British soldiers tended to be heaven, or some Classical haven of heroes and gods where they would achieve immortality. I've not seen Valhalla mentioned before. It's an appropriate place since it's the Nordic destination of those who have died in combat, a place to which they are led by Valkyries. However, as the nineteenth century progressed Valhalla became increasingly associated with Germanic heroes, especially after the operas of Richard Wagner brought both Valhalla and the Valkyries into greater prominence in Germany.
Herbert Henry Renshaw was the second of his parents' seven children. His younger brother, Arthur Edwin, signed for his inscription. Father Renshaw was an insurance agent, Herbert Henry Renshaw was an assistant in a furniture shop. He joined the East Anglian Cycle Corps in May 1915 and served with them in France and Flanders from August 1916. He later transferred to the 11th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment and was with them when he was killed on 25 September 1917.
The 11th Battalion war diary does not make any mention of casualties on 25 September:

"Battalion moved up to assembly position in Tower Hamlets sector relieving the 12th Royal Sussex Regt. Relief complete 11 pm."

The next day the entry reads:

"Bn attacked at 5.50 pm and captured all objectives and about 40 prisoners"

Renshaw's body, together with those of two other soldiers from the Royal Sussex Regiment, was not found until April 1919. Renshaw was identified by his disc and his paybook. The other two soldiers were never identified.


VALIANT FOR TRUTH
MY COURAGE I GIVE TO HIM
THAT SHALL SUCCEED ME

SECOND LIEUTENANT THOMAS FRANCIS HALFORD FREMANTLE


Mr Valiant-for-Truth is a character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who, when he knew his death to be imminent, called his friends together and told them:

"I am going to my Father's; and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage; and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought his battles who will now be my rewarder."

Thomas Fremantle's mother, Lady Cottesloe, chose his inscription. As you can see, it's not an exact quotation from Pilgrim's Progress but it is close enough for the association to be made. I wonder whether there is a hidden message here. Thomas Fremantle was his father's eldest son and the heir to the title, Lord Cottesloe. Therefore in a very real sense there would be someone to succeed him in this position after his death - his younger brother, John, who did indeed become the 4th Lord Cottesloe on the death of his father in 1956.
Fremantle was a King's Scholar at Eton when he insisted on leaving school in September 1914, whilst he was still only 17, to take a commission in the 5th Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He went with the battalion to France in May 1915. He was now 18 but without his parents' signed permission he would not have been able to go. Four months later, on 25 September, he was wounded in the head and back by shrapnel when a shell burst over his trench. Evacuated to a base hospital near Boulogne, where his parents were able to visit him, he died three weeks later.

There is more information about Thomas Fremantle on the Swanborne History site


REMEMBER WHAT HE WAS
THE BRIGHT, THE BRAVE
THE TENDER AND THE TRUE

PRIVATE JAMES HOLLANDS ROBERTSON


James Robertson, born in Jedburgh, Scotland on 23 July 1888, was a baker in Woodstock, Ontario when he enlisted in the Canadian Infantry on 10 July 1916, giving his mother, Christina Robertson, in Jedburgh as his next of kin. She chose his inscription. It comes from an anonymous piece of memorial verse. The earliest I've seen it quoted is in the Brisbane Courier in December 1888. It became popular on funeral cards, In Memoriam columns in newspapers and in death announcements. The two verses of the poem read:

Remember what they were, with thankful heart,
The bright, the brave, the tender, and the true.
Remember where they are - from sin apart,
Present with God - yet not estranged from you.

But never doubt that love, and love alone,
Removed our loved ones from this trial scene:
Nor idly dream, since they to God have gone,
Of what, had they been left, they might have been.

Robertson served with the 18th Battalion Canadian Infantry. On 18 August 1917 the battalion came out of the front line and spent the 19th and the 20th resting at Bully-Grenay. The war diary recorded that at 9.30 am on the 21st the battalion:

"proceeded to Bouvigny Huts going into Corps Reserve. On the road 'D' Coy sustained 52 casualties, 23 of which were fatal, by the bursting of an enemy shell (high velocity). This bringing our casualties to approx 220 during the tour."

Robertson must have been one of the 23 fatal casualties. It was two days before his 29th birthday.


HE WAS A MAN OF HONOUR
OF NOBLE AND GENEROUS NATURE

GUNNER JOHN RIPLEY


This is a tribute from a sister to her brother, John Ripley, a butcher from North Cowton near Darlington in Yorkshire. Called up in 1916, Ripley served with the 9th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery and died of wounds at a Field Ambulance Dressing Station in Dikkebus on 7 August 1917, a week into the Third Ypres Campaign.
I have no doubt that Mary Ripley believed the words she chose to describe her brother: that he was honourable, noble and generous, but they are very much the qualities of an idealised type. However, it shows how important these qualities were considered to be. Yesterday, William Hadley Frank Redgate was described by his wife as 'the most unselfish and loveable natured man". This definitely has the ring of individuality to it, but Mary Ripley has done her brother proud.


IN LOVING MEMORY
OF THE MOST UNSELFISH
AND LOVEABLE NATURED MAN

LANCE CORPORAL WILLIAM HEDLEY FRANK REDGATE


What a lovely tribute from a wife to her husband - unselfish and loveable natured. I'm always very impressed when the next-of-kin say what they want to say rather than feel constrained into saying something conventionally formulaic.
Maude Ethel Redgate had been married to her husband for seven years when he was killed at Passchendaele. At the time of the 1911 census they had no children. However, when Mrs Redgate died in 1957 - 40 years after her husband and still living at the same address - probate was granted to Daisy Beatrice Cant, married woman. I'd like to think this was a daughter.
William Hedley Frank Redgate was a waiter before he joined up. He served with the 10th Battalion Essex Regiment, which, at the time of his death, was in the trenches at Bulow Farm. The war diary for 14 October records that the battalion moved into the line, holding the front from: - V.26.a.2.4 to V.19.d.9.9. The next day, the day Redgate was killed, it simply says, "Holding line. Patrols pushed forward during the night 15/16th Oct. 1917".
Redgate's body was not found until September 1919 at map reference V.25.b.4.7. There were three other members of the Essex Regiment found at the same spot. This looks to me like one of the patrols.


REST SOLDIER REST

PRIVATE HERBERT RAMSDEN


William Ramsden, Herbert's elder brother, signed for this inscription. The parents were both still alive but perhaps their literacy was uncertain. The words come from the chorus of a popular song written in 1916 by an Australian singer, song writer called Alfred Morley.

Rest, soldier rest,
In thy grave on the hill-side,
Far from the ones you have left o'er the foam.
Rest till God's trumpet shall call you from slumber,
To meet once again in your heavenly home.

Despite the fact that it's a very Australian patriotic song:

Let all the world know Australia's story,
How her brave sons faced that curtain of shell,
"Boys fix your bayonets, charge! for Old England,"
Into the jaws of death, into that hell

And that it's concerned with the dead of Gallipoli:

Sweet be their rest on Gallipoli's hillside
Calm be their sleep in a soldier's last grave

The song must have circulated in Britain for the Ramsdens to know it.
Herbert Ramsden, 35 years and 10 months old, and 5' 4" tall as itemised on his attestation form, was a coal miner, born and bred in Yorkshire. In 1911 he was boarding with his sister-in-law, Jane, whose husband, Tom Ramsden, had been killed in a mining accident in 1910. Herbert joined up on 11 January 1915 and arrived in France on 1 May that year. He served with the 1st/4th Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment, part of the 49th West Riding Division, and was killed in an attack near Potijze Chateau, one of the 160 casualties - killed, wounded and missing - that the battalion suffered that day.


OUR BRAVE AND ONLY CHILD
AT REST

PRIVATE HERBERT DICKINSON QUICK


Herbert Quick volunteered in May 1915 when he was 18 and 10 months old. If they were under 19, soldiers had to have their parents' signed consent to serve abroad. Quick's attestation form notes that he has his father's consent. Quick did not have to enlist, there was never any conscription in Australia; how bitterly his parents must have regretted this when he was killed - their "brave and only child".
Quick served with the 3rd Australian Pioneers. He died in a general hospital in St Sever. There's no indication as to when he was wounded but from 21 October to 12 November 1917 the battalion were out of the line, billeted in the village of Wavrens resting and undergoing training. Prior to 21 October, the battalion had been engaged in building a mule track from Zonnebeke to Seine Road. Work began on 1 October and from then until the 21st between 1 and 12 ORs (other ranks) were wounded every day, except for the 11th, 12th and 17th when there were 'nil' casualties. This is probably when Quick was wounded.


GOOD WAS HIS HEART
AND IN HIS FRIENDSHIP SOUND
PATIENT IN PAIN
AND LOVED BY ALL AROUND

GUNNER ALBERT JOHNATHAN PURNELL


This is a fairly standard piece of memorial verse found during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on headstones, funeral cards and In Memoriam columns. However, when found as the personal inscription of a soldier who died of wounds in a base hospital I always wonder whether the reference to pain might not be more relevant than usual.
Albert Purnell, a money-lender's clerk from Mile End in East London, served with the 62nd Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery. Equipped with heavy howitzers, their target was the enemy artillery, their strong points, ammunition dumps, roads and railways. And of course, they in turn were the enemy's target. A direct hit on a gun pit was devastating
The 62nd Siege Battery had been in Flanders since June 1917, fully involved in the Third Ypres Campaign. Purnell died of wounds in a base hospital in Wimereaux. Casualty Clearing Stations took the lesser wounded or those who were likely to die more quickly, base hospitals were for the severely wounded. In these circumstances, "patient in pain" has an ominous ring to it.


NO HATE WAS HIS
NO THIRST FOR FAME
WHEN FORTH TO DEATH
IN HONOUR WENT

PRIVATE WALTER PENFOLD


Walter Penfold's inscription is occasionally seen in In Memoriam columns and as a dedication on war memorials. It's not poetry but nor was it ever intended to be. It's anonymous author, signing himself 'Cambrensis', included it in a letter he wrote to The Spectator, which was published on 27 November 1915:

Sir, - In our universities, and everywhere, older men are thinking daily of the spirit in which our gallant youths, one after the other, have said farewell to their teachers and friends when leaving England for the field of battle, where many of them have bravely fallen. There were no loud heroics when they went: simply, "I know I ought to go, and I am going"; or, "I want to do my bit." The following four short lines (they are not poetry, nor even polished verse) attempt to suggest in the fewest and plainest words some faint shadow of the feeling graven deep on many a mind by the remembrance of those who have thus gone, and most especially of those who will not now return: -
No hate was theirs, no thirst for fame,
When forth to death by honour sent.
Life beckoned sweet; the great call came;
They knew their duty, and they went.

Walter Penfold served with 'C' Coy, 1st/4th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment, a territorial battalion drawn from East Grinstead and Crawley in Surrey. The battalion served in Gallipoli until the evacuation in December 1915; Penfold's medal card shows that he first entered a theatre of war - the Balkans - on 2 December 1915. In 1917 the battalion were in Palestine where Penfold was killed in the battle for Tell Khuweilfe, 3-7 November.


IF I TAKE THE WINGS
OF THE MORNING
THERE SHALL THY HAND LEAD ME

LIEUTENANT EDWARD HORACE PEMBER


This lovely inscription comes from the Book of Common Prayer version of Psalm 139 verses 8 & 9:

"If I take the wings of the morning: and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there also shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me."

It was chosen for nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Pember by his father, Francis Pember, Warden of All Souls College, Oxford.
Pember, who went to Harrow with a Classical scholarship, won a Mathematics exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford in December 1914 when he was still only 16. He never took up his place at Oxford but rather took a commission in the Royal Field Artillery in July 1915, when he was 17. He served in Gallipoli and Egypt and then joined the Royal Flying Corps in the autumn of 1916, aged 18. In May 1917 he joined 5 Squadron in France. Five months later he was killed when:

"On the morning of September 30th he was flying over enemy lines taking photographs when he was attacked by four enemy scout machines, who came down on him suddenly from a great height. His machine was brought down, and both he and his observer were killed."
Flight magazine 11 October 1917

"If I take the wings of the morning ..."


THE VALIANT
NEVER TASTE OF DEATH
BUT ONCE

GUNNER JAMES ALFRED MOORE


The words of this inscription come from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, begs him to stay at home because she fears for his life. Caesar replies:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

The inscription, chosen by Gunner Moore's father a fisherman from Gravesend in Kent, is a literary way of saying that his son was a brave man, who knew the risks he was taking when he enlisted in November 1915. Moore wasn't an original volunteer but by November 1915 he knew conscription was coming and joined up before he was called up.
I'm curious about this inscription, or rather about the Moores. They weren't obviously educated people - both father and son were fishermen, sister was a servant, mother was 'at home', yet they have chosen an eloquent, original and appropriate inscription that I haven't noticed before.
Moore served with the 96th Battery Royal Garrison Artillery, which went to France in May 1916, whether Moore was with it at that date is never easy to ascertain but he was certainly with it when he died of wounds on 16 August 1917. The Battery had newly transferred to the Canadian Corps and in mid-July was at Lievin. The Historical Record of 96th Siege Battery R.G.A. records the circumstances of his death:

"On the night of August 14th, the eve of the assault [on Hill 60], the Battery was heavily shelled with gas and H.E. In spite of this, 120 rounds were fired and many lorries of ammunition unloaded. Bombardier Staines, Gunner Wain, Gunner Neill, and Gunner Moore were killed on this most unpleasant night, and Gunner Taylor was wounded."

According to the CWGC records, Gunner Moore died of wounds, which is born out by the fact that he's buried in a Casualty Clearing Station Cemetery and that his date of death is given as the 16th, not on either the 14th or the 15th, the night of the heavy shelling.


'TIS NOT IN MORTALS
TO COMMAND SUCCESS
BUT HE HAS DONE MORE
DESERVES IT

DRIVER ALBERT JESSE MCDOWALL


This is a rather mangled, though still recognisable, quotation from Joseph Addison's play, Cato (1712). The words are spoken by Cato's son, Portius, to Sempronius, one of the senators:

"Tis not in mortals to command success; but we'll do more Sempronius, we'll deserve it."

The play was a favourite of George Washington's who quoted from it regularly, particularly these lines.
McDowall's father, a painter and decorator in Maida Vale, chose the inscription, although by the time he chose it he and his wife were living in New Zealand.
McDowell was entitled to the 1915 Star having arrived in France on 5 October 1915. He survived for almost exactly two years, serving with the 7th Divisional Ammunition Column throughout the Somme campaign and the Arras Offensive before the Division moved to Ypres in the summer of 1917. Here it took part in the Third Ypres Campaign: Polygon Wood, 26 September to 3 October; Broodseinde 4 October; Poelcapelle 9 October, 1st Passchendaele 12 October. McDowall died in a Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek on the 13th.


BRITAIN BE PROUD
OF SUCH A SON
DEATHLESS THE FAME
THAT HE HAS WON

SERGEANT HAROLD WILLIAM MASTON


Maston's inscription comes from John Travers Cornwall, a poem by John Oxenham, published in 1917 in his book The Vision Splendid. Oxenham, the pen name of William Arthur Dunkerley, was, as Connie Ruzich has persuasively argued, the most popular poet of the First World War. He was certainly extremely popular with families at home, the next-of-kin who chose the personal inscriptions. Maston's inscription comes from verse 3:

Britain be proud of such a son!
Deathless the fame that he has won
Only a boy, but such a one!
Standing forever to his gun;
There was his duty to be done,
And he did it.

Fourteen-year-old Cornwall won the Victoria Cross at the Battle of Jutland by staying with his gun and awaiting orders whilst the rest of his gun crew were dead and, as Oxenham put it, 'mounded around him'.
Harold William Maston did not win a Victoria Cross but he had been awarded a Military Medal. This proved useful when it came to identifying ten soldiers found in unmarked graves on the old battlefield north of Ypres in March 1920. Three still had their identity discs but Maston could only be identified by his medal ribbon and his sergeant's chevrons. He had been killed in action in the attack on Broodseinde Ridge.
On Friday 7 March 1930 The Singleton Argus reported:

"Mr William Maston, a prominent Sydney businessman, died on Sunday while travelling to France to visit the grave of his son, Sergeant Harold Maston. The funeral took place at Aden on Tuesday."


HE DIED ON HONOUR'S FIELD
FOR GLORIOUS LIBERTY
'TWAS HARD TO PART
BUT GOD KNEW BEST

PRIVATE THOMAS FREDERICK MARTIN


Private Martin served with the 58th Battalion Canadian Infantry, which was 'In the Field' 10 km north-east of Arras on 13 September 1917. The entry in the battalion war diary for that day reads:

"1 O.R. killed. Wind west ten miles per hour. Situation quiet."

That one O.R. was Thomas Frederick Martin from North Bay, Ontario who had enlisted in North Bay on 5 April 1916. There is no indication as to what caused this one O.R.'s death but Martin is buried in Beehive Cemetery, so called after a German machine-gun emplacement in the area that was known as The Beehive.
Martin's father chose his inscription, describing his son's place of death as 'honour's field, and 'glorious liberty' as the cause for which he died. Both of these deeply romantic phrases seem rather at odds with the rather brutally matter-of-fact report of Martin's death - '1 O.R. killed'.
The inscription finishes with a sentiment that is often found expressed in one form or another in the war cemeteries whether it takes the form 'Thy will be done' or as here, 'God knew best'.


FOR COUNTRY, HONOUR TRUTH
PROUD TO HAVE PAID THE PRICE

SECOND LIEUTENANT PERCY INGRAM MARSTON


What a difference a hundred years makes. That may sound strange but just look at what Percy Marston's widowed mother and sisters thought the war was about - 'country, honour, truth' - and how much do we now think that all that was at stake a hundred years ago? And how much could we now all say that it was worth the price - the price of hundreds and thousands of young men losing their lives, their health and their sanity, let alone the collapse of empires, the displacement of millions of people and etc etc? And yet, that IS how many people saw it - it's just how it was. Not, of course, that they knew what they were letting themselves in for when the war began.
And who was it who was proud to have paid the price - does Mrs Marston mean she and her daughters were, or was it her son she was referring to? Whichever it was, the conviction would have brought with it consolation as Mrs Marston mourned her only son.
Percy Marston, educated at Ripon Grammar School and a clerk at the National Provincial Bank in Knaresborough, enlisted in October 1915. He served on the Western Front from March to September 1916 when he was invalided home. On recovering, he took a commission in the Durham Light Infantry, was gazetted 2nd Lieutenant on 15 July 1917, returned to France in August and died on 20 September of wounds caused by a bomb dropped from an enemy plane.


WHERE THE LINES
SWEPT ON IN TRIUMPH
AND THE HEROES STAYED BEHIND

SECOND LIEUTENANT CLARENCE JOHN LOVELL


Lines of soldiers don't sweep on any more, whether in triumph or otherwise, that's just not how fighting occurs these days. Nor is it how it occurred during much of the First World War, the soldiers were stuck in trenches and when they tried sweeping out they were usually mown down by machine guns or caught by artillery. Eventually they developed the technique of snatching and holding and it was only at the very end, after 8 August 1918, that any triumphant 'sweeping' could be said to have taken place. By this time Clarence John Lovell had been dead for ten months - one of the heroes who 'stayed' behind.
The inscription sounds as though it's a quotation but it doesn't appear to be. It was composed by Lovell's father, John Charles Lovell, a baker and confectioner in Leamington Spa whose wife, Clement John's mother, is one of the very few women I've come across in my research for this project who also had a job. She was described in the 1911 census as 'manageress confectionary'; I would imagine in her husband's business.
Clement John Lovell, a teacher at Rugby Road School, Leamington was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery in February 1917. He served with the 274th Siege Battery, part of 62nd Brigade. The Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser announced his death on 27 October 1917, quoting how a fellow officer told his parents: "He was a splendid officer, capable and full of courage, and we feel his loss deeply". As would his parents - Clement John was their only child.


THEY ASKED FOR VOLUNTEERS
FOR FRANCE
OF COURSE I WAS ONE 8.9.14

PRIVATE FRANK LOKER


In the twenty-first-century there's a danger that this inscription might be taken the wrong way; it could sound as though the speaker was implying that he was a muggins for volunteering - "of course I was one". I am absolutely sure that this is not how Frank Loker's father, who chose the inscription, meant it. After all, Frank Loker wasn't the only one to volunteer in September 1914, his father, also called Frank Loker, volunteered on the 20 September, twelve days after his son.
Father had previously been a member of the 1st Volunteer Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment, so he was a returning soldier, which explains why the day after he volunteered he was promoted Company Quartermaster Sergeant.
The son, crossed to France on 14 February 1915 with the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment. The Cambridgeshires served in France and Flanders throughout the whole war, acquitting themselves with distinction in the capture of the Schwaben Redoubt in October 1916. In September 1917 the battalion were in Flanders, they moved to Hill 60 on 2 September and Private Frank Loker was killed the next day.
Sergeant Major Frank Loker went to France with the 7th Battalion Leicestershire Regiment in July 1915. He remained in France until he was transferred to the reserve in February 1919. But I'm not sure that he came home even then because his address after the war was C/O War Graves Commission, St Omer, France. He may have become a gardener with the Commission, many old soldiers did, and why not when your son was buried in one of its cemeteries.


HE KNEW NO FEAR

LIEUTENANT JAMES ECKERSLEY KINNA


Something about this inscription piqued my interest, what had Lieutenant Kinna done that made his mother want to choose 'He knew no fear' as his inscription? Kinna had been awarded a Military Cross, gazetted on 31 July 1916. The citation read:

"When in command of an assaulting party [he] showed conspicuous courage and initiative in leading his men and repelling counter attacks. By his cheerfulness and confidence he inspired his men in critical situations."

This could explain his mother's choice. Then I came across another website which said that shortly after winning his MC, Kinna's health had broken down and he had returned to England. By June 1917 he was able to take up light military duties and on 8 September he returned to France. He died of wounds four days later.
However, that was not the end of the story. A website run by David Kinna filled in the details. At the end of May 1917 Kinna was admitted to hospital suffering from delusions. According to his Commanding Officer, Kinna was suffering from alcoholism. Nevertheless, he was declared fit enough to return to the front on 8 September. Four days later he walked out of the mess tent and shot himself in the head in front of several witnesses. Kinna did die of wounds but the wounds he died from were self inflicted.
His mother was given the idea that he had died of wounds received in action but she was not satisfied and wanted to know more. Eventually, on 1 November 1917, she was told the truth - and knowing the truth she still chose this inscription. 'He knew no fear' takes on a different meaning when you know what happened.


KINDLE THY HOPE
PUT ALL THY FEARS AWAY
LIVE DAY BY DAY

GUNNER THOMAS ERSKINE KERSHAW


I often wonder how people come across some of the poems from which they quote. Thomas Kershaw's inscription is from a gentle piece of verse written by a fairly obscure American teacher and occasional poet called Julia Harris May (1833-1912), Live Day by Day. There is no evidence it was published in Britain. The poem begins:

I heard a voice at evening softly say:
Bear not thy yesterday into tomorrow,
Nor load this week with last week's load of sorrow;
Lift all thy burdens as they come, nor try
To weight the present with the by and by.
One step and then another, take thy way -
Live day by day.
Live day by day.

And ends:

Watch not the ashes of the dying ember.
Kindle thy hope. Put all thy fears away -
Live day by day.

Perhaps the fact that Mrs Mary Ellen Kershaw, Thomas Kershaw's mother, was a Canadian, or at least, was born in Canada, explains how she came across it.
The Kershaws had two children, a son and a daughter. Thomas, a teacher, joined up in September 1915 and disembarked in France on 18 November 1915, which entitled him to the 14-15 Star. He served with the 19th Heavy Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, which in October 1917 was just north of Ypres. Kershaw is buried in Canada Farm Cemetery, the site of a former dressing station, so it would probably be safe to assume that he died of wounds he'd received that same day.






SPEED, FIGHT ON, FARE EVER
THERE AS HERE

SECOND LIEUTENANT CLEMENT PERCY JOSCELYNE


Joscelyne's inscription comes from the last verse of Robert Browning's final poem, Epilogue, from his final volume of verse, Asolando. The poem is not an uncommon source for inscriptions but they are usually lines chosen from verse two:

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

The poem is thought to be Browning's summary of himself, a man whose optimism about life never failed. The final verse carries that optimism to death:

"Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed, - fight on, fare ever
There as here!"

Clement Joscelyne was a thirty-one-year-old married man with two children when he returned from Argentina in September 1916 in order to join up. I'm pretty sure the long arm of conscription couldn't have reached him there but he must have felt it was his duty. Commissioned into the Suffolk Regiment in June 1917 he went with it to France in July and was killed three months later. The battalion went up to the front on 9 October to repair the roads immediately behind the front line. The working party was under continuous enemy bombardment and Joscelyne was hit by shell fragments. He died the next day. Whilst he was in France, his wife gave birth to a son who he never saw. She chose his inscription.


AND THE SENTRY'S WORD
RINGS CLEAR AND LOUD
GOOD NIGHT, ALL'S WELL

PRIVATE FREDERICK JOBLING


Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette
Saturday 24 November 1917
Mr William Jobling, 7, Mulgrove Street, has been officially informed of the death of his son, Pte. Frederick Jobling, D.L.I., which occurred on October 8th. An officer of the regiment writes that Pte. Jobling, who met his death by an enemy shell exploding when on his way to a rest camp, was always bright and cheerful, highly respected, and devoted to his duties. The deceased joined the Army in March, 1915, prior to which he was a wireman at Messrs Craven's Ropery. He had also been wounded on a previous occasion. Another son, Pte. Joseph Jobling, West Yorks Regiment, was killed in action on October 30th, 1916, while a third son, Thomas Jobling, late of the D.L.I., has been discharged from the Army after having his left leg amputated through wounds received in action.

There were five Jobling brothers, Frederick, Thomas and Joseph were the three youngest. Joseph, who was not killed in action but died of wounds in a hospital in Etaples, does not have an inscription. Frederick's inscription was signed for by his mother. It's a quote from a patriotic poem, 'Sergeant, Call the Roll', written by J. Smedley Norton during the South African War. Both poem and author are very obscure, so obscure that the Internet has hardly heard of either of them. However, that wasn't the case at the time. The poem was written in the style of a music hall monologue and permission was needed from the publisher, the Black and White Budget, before it could be recited in public. The Budget reported in 1904 that more than 600 such requests had been received.
M. Van Wyk Smith, in his book 'Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902' (Clarendon Press Oxford 1978) expresses the opinion that the poem has "no poetic merit, but [that] as a skilful pastiche of sentiment, patriotism, and melodramatic heartache as appreciated by a Victorian music hall audience, it stands as a supreme example of its kind".
A sergeant is given the task of calling the roll after the battle:

Show us the price of victory,
Just tell us what it cost;
Say what the Motherland has gained,
And also what she's lost.

The sergeant's son is among the dead:

Though his heart is well-nigh breaking,
Tears in his eyes are seen,
He ends his task of sorrow
Like a soldier of the Queen.

Frederick's inscription comes from the last verse:

They have answered God's field order
Given Death the last salute,
The guns are now unlimbered,
And the cannon's roar is mute,
The curfew note has sounded
Its sad and mournful knell,
The sentry's word rings clear and loud,
"Good night! All's well!"


WE CAN'T FORGET

SERJEANT JOSPEH JOHNSTON


Joseph Johnston was a reservist with the King's Own Scottish Borderers, which means he had already had a career in the regular army and was serving his time in the reserve, normally five years. He had married in 1912 and was working with the firm of Barr and Stroud, optical engineers in Glasgow, when the war broke out. He rejoined immediately. In his capacity as a returning soldier, probably an NCO, he went to the 16th Battalion Highland Light Infantry, a New Army battalion often known as the Glasgow Boys Brigade Battalion.
After helping to train them, Johnston went with the battalion to France in November 1915. He was killed on the eve of the Somme attack, one of two soldiers killed whilst the battalion were still bivouacking in Bouzincourt. At the end of the following day the battalion had suffered 20 officer and 534 other rank casualties out of the 25 officers and 755 other ranks who had gone into action.
Johnston's brother, Lance Corporal John Douglas Johnston, was on the reserve of the Scots Guards. He returned to his regiment when the war broke out and crossed to France with the 2nd Battalion, landing in November 1914. He was killed in action in an attack on the German trenches at Fromelles on 18 December 1914.
Joseph Johnston's inscription was chosen by Mrs M Mills, 18 Sheppard Street, Springdown, Glasgow. I don't know who she was. Johnston's wife remarried and became Mrs Gilmartin, but she must have been dead before the inscription was chosen as she is referred to as the late Mary Ellen Johnston. However, John Johnston's inscription, 'Memories dear', was chosen by his mother and she too lived at 18 Sheppard Street, Springburn, Glasgow. I would suggest therefore that Mrs M Mills was a sister and that she and her mother chose the inscription - 'We can't forget' - not, as most people said one way or another, we'll never forget but we can't forget.


FOR MANY ARE CALLED
BUT FEW ARE CHOSEN

PRIVATE HORACE WEBSTER


The quotation comes from St Matthew Chapter 22 verse 14. This is the parable of the wedding feast where a king, having sent out invitations to his feast, ejects the man who doesn't turn up wearing the appropriate garments. The meaning of the parable is that all are invited to partake of the feast - invited to partake of God's grace - but if you aren't prepared to play your part through faith and repentance - wear the correct attire - then you will be ejected - you will be found wanting on the day of judgement.
I wonder what Horace Webster's brother, John, meant to imply by his choice of inscription - that Horace would be one of the chosen - that he would be accepted on the day of judgment because he did believe? I expect this is the sense he intended it but many, many men were 'called' between 1914 and 1918. They either answered the call of the recruiting posters and volunteered, or they were called by conscription. The chosen could be those who died, having been 'chosen' by God.
Webster's medal roll card shows him to have been entitled to the War and Victory medals not the 1914 or 15 Star so he was probably not a volunteer. He served originally with the Yorkshire Regiment and then with the Welsh Fusiliers. This is either a sign that on your arrival in France, or on your recovery from illness or wounds, you were sent where you were most needed despite your original regiment.
On the day Horace Webster was killed in the fighting on the Somme, I October 1916, a total of 1,442 members of the British Empire's fighting forces were similarly 'chosen'.


MOVING UNRUFFLED
THROUGH EARTH'S WAR
THE ETERNAL CALM TO GAIN

MAJOR JOHN FREDERICK GRAHAM


John Frederick Graham was an Irishman, born in Rathdown, County Dublin, a mathematics medallist from Trinity College Dublin, who was the Accountant General in Madras, India. He was also a lieutenant colonel in the Madras Artillery Volunteers. On leave in England in September 1915, he offered himself to the War Office and was appointed a major in the Royal Field Artillery. He was killed in action, 'directing his artillery' on 1 July 1916, the opening day of the Battle of the Somme.
His inscription comes from a hymn by Horatius Bonar called The Inner Calm. The hymn asks in the first verse:

Calm me, my God, and keep me calm,
While these hot breezes blow;
Be like the night-dew's cooling balm
Upon earth's fevered brow.

The hymn goes on to enumerate the various situations in which the supplicant requires this 'calm': in solitude and in the busy street, in health, pain, poverty, wealth, when wronged, taunted or shamed. And the sort of 'calm' asked for is outlined in the final verse:

Calm as the rays of sun or star
Which storms assail in vain,
Moving unruffled through earth's war,
The eternal clam to gain.

Graham's inscription was chosen for him by his widow, Mrs FM Watt Smyth, who married Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald James Watt Smyth in January 1917. Their son, Major Brian James Watt Smyth, was killed in action in Burma in February 1945. His inscription reads: Blessed are the pure in heart.


WEEPING MAY ENDURE
FOR THE NIGHT
BUT JOY COMETH
IN THE MORNING

PRIVATE ALBERT SYDNEY ALEY


Private Aley's inscription was chosen by his brother, Archer, and comes from Psalm 30 verse 5 in the King James' Version:

"For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."

The version in the Book of Common Prayer is rather more poetic:

"For his wrath endureth but the twinkling of an eye, and in his pleasure is life: heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning"

Is the night referred to a single night or a period of darkness? And is the morning simply the next day or perhaps death, as in the very popular inscription: "Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away?

Albert Ayley was a tailor from Sydney. He enlisted in December 1916 and embarked from Australia a month later. On 4 October 1917 his battalion attacked at Broodseinde Ridge. Aley was wounded. A witness to the Australian Red Cross and Wounded Enquiry Bureau reported:

On Oct. 4th during the attack on a ridge at Ypres Aley was with me on a carrying party. We had gone up and taken our position and were returning for ammunition when I saw Aley walking towards the D/S [Dressing Station].He had his arm bandaged but did not seem to be wounded elsewhere. I afterwards heard he D/W [died of wounds] Oct. 9th. Aley was about 22, delicate looking, 5' 4, and had relatives in England ...

Others agree with this witness as to the nature of Aley's wounds, which seems a bit strange as the report from No. 3 Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek states that Aley "died of shrapnel wounds on right leg".


BORN 12TH MAY 1894
PROMOTED ON THE
FIELD OF ACTION
FROM 2ND LIEUTENANT

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ERIC GORDON BOWDEN MC


This is not all its says on Eric Bowden's headstone; his inscription runs to 140 characters, more than twice the War Graves Commission's recommended limit (and with the link, more than Twitter will allow, which is why I've only included part of it in the Tweet):

Promoted on the
Field of action
From 2nd Lieutenant
He was one of the
Youngest colonels in
The British Army
"He has at all times
Set a fine example"
(Gazette)

'Promoted on the field of action', this means that Eric Bowden did not return to Britain to pass an exam before achieving his promotion, it was granted to him whilst at the Front. It was undoubtedly a mark great confidence in your abilities and something for Bowden's mother, who chose his inscription, to be proud of, as she undoubtedly was.
Bowden was indeed one of the youngest colonels in the British army, although at 23, John Hardyman, the subject of yesterday's epitaph, was younger. However, it's not quite accurate to say that Bowden was promoted from 2nd Lieutenant to Lieutenant Colonel. At the time of his death Bowden was a major. The battalion war diary for 23 July 1918, not the 22nd as his headstone claims was the date of his death, reports that "Major E.G. Bowden MC [was] killed about 12 noon riding through Steenvoorde".
How could Mrs Bowden claim that her son had been promoted straight from 2nd Lieutenant? I'm not absolutely clear on this issue but I would suggest that perhaps all Bowden's promotions had been to acting ranks. I can see that in February 1917 he had been promoted from an acting Major to a temporary Major. It would seem that sometime close to his death he must have been promoted acting or temporary Lieutenant Colonel.
This was something the army did to ensure that once the war was over, or circumstances in some way changed, it didn't have too many officers for its needs. It was an emotionally controversial subject as seen when the subject of recognizing promotion in the field was brought up in a debate on the Army Act in the Australian Parliament on 18 September 1917: "surely these men had passed the toughest examination in being promoted at the front"; "there is no man more deserving of consideration than he who has won his spurs and has been promoted on the field of battle"; "all civilized countries, with the exception of Germany, recognise the principle that where men are promoted for deeds of gallantry on the field, they should not be required to undergo any examination"; "a man who has been promoted on the field of battle, and in a school of instruction behind the lines, has received all the training necessary to make him a leader of men, and has a perfect right to retain the rank he has won overseas".
The problem never arose for Eric Bowden and for so many men like him, they died before they returned home and therefore took their acting ranks with them to the grave.
When Mrs Ellen Bowden filled in the Family Verification Form she said that her husband was dead. George Howlett Bowden died in 1934. This shows how long it took to construct the war cemeteries. The Bowdens had had two children, two sons. Percy Leslie Bowden, Eric elder brother died at the age of 21 in 1910.


SCHOLAR, POET, ORATOR
JUSTIFIED BY FAITH
IN JESUS CHRIST

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN HAY MAITLAND HARDYMAN DSO MC


Have you registered John Hardyman's age and his rank? It's not a mistake; he was a lieutenant colonel, in charge of the 8th Battalion Somerset Light Infantry, at the age of 23. This despite the fact that he had only been in the army four years, since enlisting straight from university in August 1914.
Hardyman's father chose his inscription. The description of his son is true - but it appears it wasn't the epitaph he would like to have had. Hardyman was a scholar having won an open scholarship to Edinburgh University in 1911. He was a poet - a volume of his verse, A Challenge, having been published in 1919. The reference to orator is probably a reference to the fact that Hardyman was a member of council and a keen advocate of the Union for Democratic Control, a British pressure group formed after the outbreak of the war that made its criticism of the war very clear. Among its members were the names of many well-known opponents of war - E.D. Morel, Norman Angell, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald ... and John Hay Maitland Hardyman who was a lieutenant in 1916, promoted captain and then major in April 1917, awarded a Military Cross on July 1916, promoted lieutenant colonel in May 1918, awarded a DSO on 11 August 1918 and killed in action on the 24th. His friend, Norman Hugh Romanes, in a brief memoir published in the front of A Challenge, wrote:

"It must not be forgotten that during the whole of his military career he was in constant correspondence with those at home whom it was most dangerous for him, from a military point of view, even to agree with, which he did openly, with no regard for consequences."

How did he square these beliefs with his military career? According to Romanes:

"He always professed strongly that his actions were absolutely consistent with his beliefs. While admiring the moral courage of many conscientious objectors, he was convinced that their attitude as a whole was tantamount to a refusal of the Cross."

A fervent Christian, as the second part of his inscription makes clear, Hardyman's poem, On Leave, expresses his belief, "That through sacrifice the soul must grow". Mankind must face the cross - but expect nothing on earth in return. In answer to the question in Australia's Prayer, "Is it in vain Lord, is it in vain?"

Out of the rending silence God replied:
'You ask the triumph I My Son denied.
Have faith, poor soul. Is not all history
Triumphant failure, empty victory?'

So what was the epitaph Hardyman would have chosen for himself? According to Romane it would have ended as follows:

"He died as he lived, fighting for abstract principles in a cause which he did not believe in."


"NEITHER SHALL
THEY LEARN WAR ANYMORE"
ISA. II. 4.

LANCE CORPORAL ALEXANDER GIBBON STRACHAN


Yesterday's inscription expressed the hope/belief that this would be the war to end all wars. But this was a hope that was as old as the hills, certainly as old as the Old Testament book of Isaiah, which dates from the 8th Century BC.

Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

More than 2,500 years later man was and is still 'learning war'.
Alexander Strachan, born in Islington the son of a former artillery man, enlisted in York and served with the 1st/8th Battalion West Riding Regiment. He was killed in action on the opening day of the battle of Poelcapelle. His mother chose his inscription.




WHO GAVE HIS LIFE
IN THE BELIEF
THAT HE WAS MAKING
FUTURE WAR IMPOSSIBLE

LIEUTENANT OWEN ELLIS AUGUSTUS ALLEN


Today the description 'the war to end war' is used of the First World War with patronizing cynicism. How could people have been so naive to think this was possible. Well people did, and one of these people was Owen Ellis Augustus Allen - or his mother.
Although the phrase is always associated with Woodrow Wilson, the US President, it was in circulation long before Wilson rose to prominence. The War to End War, published in 1914, was the title of a collection of writings by HG Wells known pre-1914 for his pacifist views. Wells was someone who believed that the war was the result of the build up of German militarism, which needed to be stamped out. He thought that the war would be terrible but that as a result mankind would realise the imperative of working for peace - hence this would be the war to end war. "Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war - it is the last war!"
Owen Allen was just about to take up a teaching job at an elementary school in Essex when the war broke out. He joined up immediately and was commissioned into the 9th Suffolks in September 1914. He went with them to France in August 1915 and after ten months in and out of the front line around Ypres and the Somme, Allen transferred to the Royal Flying Corps.
It was whilst he was acting as an instructor at RFC Brattleby that his plane collided with another one as they came into land, the pupil pilot broke his leg, Allen and the pilot of the other plane was killed.
Allen was buried in his home town of Cambridge. His mother chose his inscription.


"TOO SAD FOR WORDS"
OUR DEAR GORDON
FATHER AND MOTHER

GUNNER THOMAS GORDON OWEN BAKER


All next-of-kin were asked to check the details of their dead relation on the Family Verification Form before sending it back to the War Graves Commission. They were also invited to add a short personal inscription in the space indicated. Mr EO Baker, Gordon's father, wrote - "Too sad for words" Our dear Gordon Father and Mother. Gordon's parents may not have felt that words could express their sorrow but the words they have chosen speak it eloquently. 'Our dear Gordon' was their only child.


IT WAS FOR VISIONS
THAT WE FELL

CAPTAIN GEORGE HUGH FREELAND BARTHOLOMEW


Hugh Bartholomew's siblings compiled a charming memoir of their brother for their parents, which has been digitised and can be read online. The publication includes copies of the diaries he kept whilst at the front, his letters home and some of the letters of condolence his parents received. One friend, Alan Smith who was himself killed in September 1918, told them that Hugh had been standing in a trench at 9.30 pm on the night of 30 September when he was hit above his left eye by a piece of shell. By 2 am on the morning of 1 October he was in a Casualty Clearing Station where he was operated on. Friends visiting him that day found him by turns lucid and delirious but the next day he lapsed into unconsciousness and died at 1.15 pm.
Educated at Merchiston College, Edinburgh, Hugh had spent one term at Corpus Christi College, Oxford before taking a commission in the 14th Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders where he served with distinction being Mentioned in Despatches and achieving the rank of captain at the early age of 21.
His mother chose his inscription; his father, the distinguished cartographer John George Bartholomew of the map-making firm, having died in 1920. It's a line from a poem by Alfred Noyse, The Victorious Dead. This was first published in a special souvenir edition of the Daily Mail on 30 June 1919 to commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, and later included in a collection of Noyes' verse called The Elfin Artist and Other Poems.
Noyse claimed that Britain's hills and valleys, crags and glens reverberate with the presence of the dead:

There's not one glen where happy hearts could roam
That is not filled with tenderer shadows now.
There's not one lane that used to lead them home
But breathes their thoughts to-day from every bough.
There's not one leaf on all these quickening trees,
Nor way-side flower but breathes their messages

But the heart. of the poem comes at the end of verse 4 - "Make firm, O God, the peace our dead have won":

For folly shakes the tinsel on its head
And points us back to darkness and to hell,
Cackling, "Beware of visions," while our dead
Whisper, "It was for visions that we fell".


TRULY A NOBLE SPIRIT
MOTHER

PRIVATE WILLIAM DANIEL BARTLETT


I wonder if Private Bartlett's mother was familiar with the writings of Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)? His definition of a noble spirit would have pleased her:

"Every man rises superior to that which he can neglect or give up, when the good of his country requires it; but he who is incited by anger or revenge to war, is inferior to his own passion; and he whom ambition allures to battle, is previously subdued and made captive to the object of that ambition, while the man who prefers the public good to the indulgence of any of these mean passions, he is the man of a truly great and noble spirit."
The Compliant of Peace ... or The Plea of Reason, Religion, and Humanity Against War.

William Bartlett was a professional soldier who enlisted in January 1913 aged 18 and 4 months. He served with the 2nd Battalion the South Lancashire Regiment, part of 7th Brigade, and crossed to France on 14 August 1914, a week after the very first troops of the British Expeditionary Force had landed. Two weeks later, 23/4 August, they engaged with the enemy near Ciply a village just south of Mons. The 7th Brigade war diary reports that it was the South Lancashires that sustained the heaviest losses in the fighting.
It's possible that this is when Bartlett went missing. He is one of the few soldiers whose record file still exists and it includes two letters from his mother. Burnt, torn or nibbled, you can just make out that on 5 September 1914 she's enquiring for news of her son who she says she hasn't heard from for over 3 weeks, that his last letter came from Southampton, that she is very anxious about him, and that the suspense of waiting is terrible. Presumably she learnt that he was a prisoner of war because it was as a prisoner of war that he died three years later in a camp in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. After the war, his body was reinterred in Hamburg Cemetery.
The Bartletts had three children, one daughter and two sons - William and Arthur. Arthur joined the Royal Navy and served on HMS Natal. On 30 December 1915, whilst it was lying at anchor in Cromarty Firth, a spontaneous explosion in one of the ammunition stores tore open the rear of the ship causing it to capsize and sink with the loss of 390 lives. Arthur Bartlett was 18. His body was never recovered.


THEY WHO LEAVE THEIR
VALIANT BONES IN FRANCE
SHALL BE FAMED
HENRY V

SAPPER HENRY JAMES BAYLEY


Sapper Bayley's mother has contracted a speech from Shakespeare's Henry V to make an appropriate and original inscription for her son. Montjoy, the French herald, has just taunted Henry with the image of his soldiers poor dead bodies, which will soon lie festering in the fields of France. Henry retorts that he's quite sure many of his soldiers will return home to die in the fulness of time in their English beds:

And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be famed;

Bayley, a clerk in a brewery at the time of the 1911 census, was the son of a tool maker in a nut and bolt works. His medal card indicates that he didn't enter a theatre of war until 1916 even though he served with the 9th North Midland Field Company, a territorial company of the Royal Engineers.
Bayley was killed on 9 August 1917 in the continuing Battle of Arras. He was originally buried on the outskirts of the town at St Laurence Blangy . His body was moved to Cabaret Rouge British Cemetery in 1924.


"HE WAS A VERAY
PARFIT GENTIL KNIGHT"

SAPPER GUY MARTIN BERRY


Yesterday's inscription introduced Chaucer's knight, today's summarises his qualities - he was a perfect example of masculine nobility and refinement. Such was the lure of medieval chivalry in the late nineteenth century that the families of many soldiers referred to it one way or another in inscriptions - the same reason so many people and institutions chose stained-glass, bronze or stone knights in armour for war memorials. Interestingly, despite the inverted commas and the archaic spelling, this isn't an accurate rendition of the original, which is generally spelt - "He was a verray, gentil, parfit knyght".
Berry had great difficulty enlisting; he was refused twice on the grounds of health - in fact the State Library of Victoria website has the badge he was entitled to wear, which says 'Volunteered for active service - Medically unfit". This was to prevent people like Berry being labeled 'slackers'. Berry's problem was that he had a weak heart as a result of a bout of typhoid fever. However, on 30 October 1916 he was eventually accepted and sailed for England that December. After training to be a signaller - and securing full marks in the qualifying exam - he arrived in France on 8 September 1917. Less than a month later, on 4 October, he received gunshot wounds to his chest and knee and died in a Casualty Clearing Station the same day.
Berry was educated at Scotch College, Melbourne. Their website has more information about his life and death together with some lovely photographs.


HE LOVED CHIVALRY
TRUTH AND HONOUR
FREEDOM AND COURTESY

PRIVATE OLIVER BILTON


There is a memorial in Loos British Cemetery that reads:

"To the memory of these 16 Dominion soldiers killed in action 1917 and buried at the time in Lens Canadian Cemetery No. 3, which was destroyed by the enemy". "Their glory shall not be blotted out."

Oliver Bilton was one of these sixteen soldiers, consequently he has what is called a Kipling Memorial. Kipling Memorials are headstones that look like normal headstones but for the superscription, chosen by Rudyard Kipling from the Apocrypha, Ecclesiastes 44:13, "Their glory shall not be blotted out". It was used to mark the graves of casualties who were known to have been buried in a particular cemetery but whose graves were subsequently destroyed in the fighting and couldn't be located. Bilton was originally buried in Lens Canadian Cemetery No. 3 but when the time came to consolidate the cemetery into Loos British Cemetery there was no trace of his body.
However, he was allowed to have a headstone in the new cemetery and therefore his wife was able to choose an inscription. It comes from The Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and it introduces Chaucer's most admired character, the knight:

A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man, [There was a knight, a most distinguished man]
That fro the tyme that he first began [Who from the day on which he first began]
To riden out, he loved chivalrie, [To ride abroad had followed chivalry]
Truth and honour, fredom and curteisie. [Truth, honour, generousness and courtesy]

Chivalry, a series of religious, moral and social codes associated with medieval knights, was much glamourised in the late nineteenth century both in art and literature. Not surprisingly therefore, Oliver Bilton's is not the only inscription that references the code.
Bilton was born in Barrow-on-Humber, Lincolnshire, the youngest of his parents eight children. He emigrated to Canada and then enlisted in Aldershot, Nova Scotia on 10 August 1915 and served with the 24th Battalion Canadian Infantry. He went home on leave to Barrow in July 1917 when he married Miss Elsie Martin. He was killed in action the following month when the battalion attacked at Cite St Laurent close to the Lens-Bassee Road.
The Hull Daily Mail reported his death on 1 September, quoting from the letter his Commanding Officer wrote to his wife telling her that, "He [Bilton] was always held in the highest esteem by his fellows, he having such high ideals, which drew all the men to him". "Such high ideals" - it sounds as though his inscription may have been well chosen:

He loved chivalry
Truth and honour
Freedom and courtesy


"BELOVED AND HONOURED
FAR AS HE WAS KNOWN"
WORDSWORTH

LIEUTENANT HOLROYD BIRKETT-BARKER


Birmingham Daily Post
Thursday 23 August 1917

Second Lieutenant Holroyd Birkett Barker, R.G.A. who ... died in a military hospital on 15th inst., aged 30, was the eldest son of Councillor T. Birkett Barker, J.P., M.I.M.E., ... He volunteered for military service in 1915. Lieutenant Birkett Barker was a prominent golfer, and won the gold medal for Warwickshire in 1912-13-14. In 1914 he lost the Midland Counties Championship by one stroke and in the same year competed in the Amateur Championship at Sandwich.

In January 1916 the same newspaper reported that all four of Mr T Birkett Barker's sons had now enlisted but that Fred, who had returned from farming in Canada, had just been invalided home suffering from partial paralysis and neuritis, the after effects of a severe illness. The 20 April 1917 edition carried the news that Greville Birkett Barker was in a London hospital suffering from shock and wounds having been shot down while flying at the front. Four months later it announced Holroyd's death from malaria in Salonika and in September 1918 that Allen Noel Birkett Barker had died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station in France.
Both Holroyd and Allen have the same inscription - "Beloved and honoured as far as he was known". It comes from Wordsworth's The Excursion:

All but a scattered few, live out their time,
Husbanding that which they possess within,
And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least; else surely this Man had not left
His graces unreveal'd and unproclaim'd.
But, as the mond was fill'd with inward light
So not without distinction had he lived,
Beloved and honoured - far as he was known.


TRUE LOVE BY LIFE
TRUE LOVE BY DEATH IS TRIED
LIVE THOU FOR BRITAIN
WE FOR BRITAIN DIED

CORPORAL CHARLES ALEXANDER BOGIE


There's an interesting variation from the original in this inscription, was it misremembered or was it intentional?
On 16 February 1918 The Times published this suggestion:

For a Memorial Tablet
True love by life - true love by death - is tried:
Live thou for England - we for England died.

It was signed A.C.A. who is thought to have been Arthur Campbell Ainger (1841-1919) a Classics master at Eton and the author of a number of hymns including, 'God Moves in a Mysterious Way'. Ainger's word was England, whoever chose Corporal Bogie's inscription and it looks like a Mrs NA Flower, Sinlalula, Saskatchewan, used the word Britain.
Charles Alexander Bogie was born in Dumfries, Scotland in 1882; he was a Scotsman not an Englishman. At some point he emigrated to Canada from where he enlisted on 12 November 1914. Some Canadians already felt Canadian but many simply felt that they were Britons, even 'better Britons', abroad. I would suggest that this is how Bogie felt.
Bogie served with the 10th Battalion Canadian Infantry and died at No. 22 Casualty Clearing Station of wounds - "shrapnel wounds, left leg, left foot, left hand and face" ... for Britain.


PASSED BEYOND
ALL GRIEF AND PAIN
DEATH FOR THEE
IS TRUEST GAIN

PRIVATE WILLIAM WATCHAM


Safely, safely gathered in
Far from sorrow, far from sin,
Passed beyond all grief and pain,
Death for thee is truest gain:
For our loss we must not weep,
Nor our loved one long to keep
From the home of rest and peace,
Where all sin and sorrow cease.

Esther Watcham chose some lines from the second verse of this hymn by Mrs Henrietta Dobree (1831-1894) for her son's inscription.
There appears to be some confusion about Watcham. Firstly over the spelling of his name. Watcham is how the War Graves Commission spell it, and the census records; he appears as Watchman in Soldiers Died in the Great War, and as Watsham on the war memorial in his home town of Fingringhoe near Colchester in Essex. Then there's the fact that his record in SDGW states that he 'died' on 27 August 1917, not that he died of wounds or was killed in action, the implication being that he died of illness. However, the Colchester Chronicle reported on 14 September 1917 that Private William Watcham of the Manchester Regiment had been wounded, and then a month later, on 12 October, that he had died of wounds.
Nevertheless, however his name was spelt - and there is only one William Watcham, and no Watsham or Watchman, who served in the Manchester Regiment and died in the First World War - and whatever the cause of his death, this young man was dead, as his mother saw it:

Safely, safely gathered in,
No more sorrow no more sin;
God has saved from weary strife,
In its dawn, this young fresh life,
Which awaits us now above,
Resting in the Saviour's love.
Jesus, grant that we may meet
There, adoring at his feet.


IN SILENCE HE SUFFERED
IN PATIENCE HE BORE
TILL GOD CALLED HIM HOME
TO SUFFER NO MORE

PRIVATE JOHN C CROWE


Private Crowe's inscription comes from a conventional piece of memorial verse, which often appeared in the In Memoriam columns of newspapers:

Peacefully sleeping, resting at last,
His weary trials and troubles past,
In silence he suffered, in patience he bore,
Till God called him home to suffer no more.

However, I have an ominous feeling that there may be more behind the words of this inscription than simple convention. Thirty-three-year-old John Crowe is buried in the cemetery of his home town of Arbroath. His medal card shows that he served initially with the Black Watch, army number S/18318, and then with the 4th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, army number S/40821, and that he was entitled to the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, in other words that not only had he served overseas (the War Medal) but he had entered a theatre of war (the Victory Medal). This raises the question as to why he was buried at home.
His inscription probably provides the answer, either he died at home from a lingering terminal illness or from wounds received in action. Men with the worst wounds were sent back to Britain to be cared for and to die. Private Crowe's inscription was perhaps meant literally:

In silence he suffered
In patience he bore
Till God called him home
To suffer now more.


A RUDDY DROP
OF MANLY BLOOD
THE SURGING SEA OUTWEIGHS

PRIVATE JOHN KERR DONALDSON


Private Donaldson's father chose the first line of a poem by the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) for his son's inscription. The poem, 'Friendship', talks about the meaning a friend gives to life:

Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form ...

Perhaps the Donaldsons meant to imply that their son had given meaning to their lives; it would be quite natural for them to say this. However, taken out of context, the first line seems to be making a statement about the power or the influence of a brave man (their son) being greater than that of the sea. The Donaldsons, a baker and his wife from Sandport in Kinross, were proud of their soldier son and show it in their choice of inscription.
John Kerr Donaldson originally served with the Argylll and Sutherland Highlanders. I suspect he would have received his machine gun training with them. These gunners were usually strong men of above average intelligence who understood their guns and how to use them - and knew that they would be called upon to place themselves in dangerously exposed positions during attacks. They were detached from their original regiments when the Machine Gun Corps was formed in October 1915.
Donaldson served with the 58th Company Machine Gun Corps and died of wounds in hospital at Rouen, where he is buried. There is no information about when or where he was wounded.


"BUT HE LIVES. SOMEHOW
HE LIVES. AND WE WHO
KNEW HIM, DO NOT FORGET"

CAPTAIN HERBERT BEN DREWETT


These words come from The Beloved Captain by Donald Hankey, the gentleman soldier and author who wrote for The Spectator under the pseudonym A Student in Arms. The beloved captain was a real man, Ronald Montague Hardy, under whom Hankey had at one time served. An old Etonian, Hardy was a quiet, thoughtful, caring man whom his men adored:

"There was not one of us but would gladly have died for him. We longed for the chance to show him that. We weren't heroes. We never dreamed about the V.C. But to save the captain we would have earned it ten times over, and never cared a button whether we got it or not. We never got the chance, worse luck."

The captain was killed when a shell landed in the trench on the exact spot where he was trying to dig out some of his men who had been buried by a previous shell. The story concludes:

"But he lives. Somehow he lives. And we who knew him do not forget. We feel his eyes on us. We work for that wonderful smile of his. There are not many of the old lot left now; but I think that those who went West have seen him. When they got to the other side I think they were met ... Anyway, in that faith let me die, if death should come my way; and so, I think, shall I die content."

Captain Ronald Hardy was killed at Hooge on 23 July 1915. The Beloved Captain was published in The Spectator on 15 January 1916. Donald Hankey was killed in action on 12 October 1916.

Captain Herbert Drewett was 33 when he joined the Inns of Court OTC in November 1915, and 34 when he received his commission in the 4th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment in November 1916. According to the battalion war diary, he was killed in action on 31 October 1917 not on the 30th as in the CWGC records, in an attack on Turenne Crossing on the outskirts of Houthulst Forest.
His only brother, Charles, was killed in action on the 29 June 1916 and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.


IN MEMORY OF MY DEAR SON
SOME DAY
THE SILVER CORD WILL BREAK

PRIVATE JOSEPH FELTON


Private Fulton's inscription is taken from the first line of a hymn by the prolific, American hymn-writer, Fanny Cosby, 1820-1915:

Some day the silver cord will break,
And I no more as now shall sing,
But, O, the joy when I awake
Within the palace of the King.
And I shall see Him face to face,
And tell the story saved by grace.

Cosby in turn took the imagery from the Book of Eccelsiastes 12:6: "Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern", all of which are metaphors for death. In the hymn, when the silver cord breaks we shall see God face to face, but somehow I feel that Mrs Felton believes that when the silver cord of her life breaks the 'He' she will see 'face to face' is her son.
The War Graves Commission has Private Joseph Felton, army number 11985, as aged 19 when he died. But the Joseph Felton 11985 who attested in West Bromwich on 19 September 1914 gave his age on that date as 19 and 88 days. He could have been lying but the 1901 census seems to confirm the fact that he would have been 19 in 1914 and 22 in 1917. Felton served with the 5th Battalion Dorsetshire Regiment and was killed in action on 5 October 1917 following the attack at Poelcapelle.

Some day, when fades the golden sun
Beneath the rosy-tinted West,
My blessed Lord will say, "Well done!"
And I shall enter into rest.
And I shall see Him face to face,
And tell the story saved by grace.




POOR OLD BILL
WE REMEMBER HIM STILL
(JOCK)
LOVING BROTHERS

PRIVATE WILLIAM JACKSON


Bill - William Jackson - was the second of four brothers, one of whom, Frank, chose his inscription. It's an affectionate inscription for a family that had fragmented following their mother's death in 1900. Father, Isaac Jackson, with his eldest son, Harold, went to live with Isaac sister's family, whilst William, Frank and Charles went to live with Isaac's brother.
William was a volunteer who served with the 16th Battalion Cheshire Regiment, originally a Bantam Battalion for men under 5' 3'', the minimum height requirement for soldiers. There is nothing to say how tall William Jackson was.
Jackson died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station in Proven on 29 October 1917. The 16th Cheshires had been in action on the 22 October South of Houlthorst Forest. The war diary recorded how the night of the 21st/22nd "was bitterly cold and there were heavy showers after midnight, the men underwent extreme discomfort and were wet through and perished with cold before zero hour arrived". When zero hour did arrive the men struggled to keep up with the barrage as the ground was pitted with shell holes which in some places were knee deep in water. Relieved soon after midnight on the 23rd their casualties totalled 9 officers and 37 Other Ranks killed, wounded and missing. Jackson would have been among the wounded. He died six days later.


"SINE METU"

SECOND LIEUTENANT ERIC LIEUELLEN JAMIESON


Sine metu - without fear - is the motto of the Jameson family of the Irish whiskey brand. Eric Jamieson's brother, Andrew, chose his inscription, putting it in inverted commas. Was he indicating that the two families were related? Although John Jameson, to whom the arms and motto were granted in the mid 1800s came from County Galway, Ireland, his grandfather, John Jameson, came from County Clackmannan, Scotland. There could therefore have been a tangental connection.
Eric Jamieson was one of eight children. He had a twin brother, Ion, who became an expert in traditional Scottish country dances in the 1930s. In 1911 both Eric and Ion were apprentices. Unfortunately whoever transcribed the census has written 'Apprentice Statione', whatever that might mean.
Eric served with the 11th Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. On 22 August 1917 the Battalion was in the front line north of the Ypres-Roulers Railway line. The war diary reported that at 4.45 am the British barrage opened and the battalion advanced to be met almost immediately by heavy machine gun fire and sniping. By 6.05 the telephone lines had been cut, it was impossible for runners to get through and battalion HQ became dependent on pigeons for information.
The Battalion remained in the front line on the 23rd, described by the author of the diary as a 'trying day', at the end of which Lt J.F.C. Cameron was the only officer in the front line. The Battalion came out of the line with its C.O. Adjutant Lt Cameron and some 140 O.R.s. Lt E.L Jamieson was among the missing, a fact reported in the Linlithgow Gazette on 7 September, which hoped that he might be a prisoner. But a month later the same paper reported that it was believed he had fallen on the day he went missing.
It was October 1920 before his body was found in an unmarked grave, identified by his disc, badge and pince-nez glasses.


ON FAMES ETERNAL CAMPING
GROUND
THEIR SILENT TENTS ARE SPREAD

CAPTAIN CLARENCE SMITH JEFFRIES VC


The muffled drum's sad roll has beat
The soldier's last tattoo;
No more on life's parade shall meet
That brave and fallen few.
On fame's eternal camping ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead.

Verse 1 The Bivouac of the Dead
Theodore O'Hara 1820-1867

'Fame's eternal camping ground' is therefore the war cemetery and the 'silent tents' are the dead soldiers' graves. The poem goes on to explain how, now dead, the soldier will be spared all further troubles and nothing will ever diminish 'one ray of glory's light that gilds your deathless tomb'.
Captain Clarence Smith Jeffries 'glory' is assured - he was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions on the day he was killed when:

"his company was held up by enemy machine-gun fire from concrete emplacements. Organising a party, he rushed one emplacement, capturing four machine guns and thirty-five prisoners. He then led his company forward under extremely heavy artillery barrage and heavy machine-gun fire to the objective. Later, he again organised a successful attack on a machine-gun emplacement, capturing two machine guns and thirty more prisoners. This gallant officer was killed during the attack, but it was entirely due to his bravery and initiative that the centre of the attack was not held up for a lengthy period. His example had a most inspiring influence."

Jeffries' body was not recovered from the battlefield until September 1920 when it was discovered in an unmarked grave and identified by the three stars of his captain's rank and the initials CSJ on the groundsheet in which he was buried. Clarence Jeffries was his parents' only child.


I WAITED AND WAITED
BUT ALL IN VAIN
FOR THE DAY OF LEAVE
THAT NEVER CAME

GUNNER WILLIAM JONES


There doesn't seem to have been any hard and fast rule about soldiers' leave but it appears that, depending on the war situation at the time, soldiers were entitled to up to ten days leave every twelve to eighteen months. Gunner Jones' medal roll card shows that he was not entitled to the 1914-15 Star so he can't have entered the war zone before 1916. Killed in August 1917, it'stherefore quite possible that he never got any leave.
William Jones is not a good name if you are trying to find out exactly who he was, there are rather too many of them. Even though his mother, who had remarried and was Mary Ann Davies at the time of her son's death, states that he was born in Bangor, I still can't find him in the census records. All we do know is that Gunner William Jones, army number 11782, served with the 460th Battery, 15th Brigade Royal Field Artillery and was killed in action during the Battle of Langemarck, 16-18 August 1917. We also know that his mother, who chose his inscription, lived at No. 1 Prospect Place, Near Hospital, Penydarren, Merthyr Tydvil (sic), and that he is commemorated on the Bangor War Memorial.


WITH HIS BROTHERS

RIFLEMAN RODERICK EMILE LEADBETTER MACKENZIE


My heart sank when I saw this inscription - just how many of Roderick MacKenzie brothers had been killed. It sank even further when I realised that he was one of nine boys. Yet in fact only one of them, Osmand, was also killed in the war. But the inscription definitely says 'brothers' - why not 'brother'? The 1911 census provides the answer. One of the questions on the form asks how many live births a woman has had, and how many of these have subsequently died. Mrs MacKenzie has answered, '1'. I would suggest that the child who died was a boy and that this explains why Roderick is 'With his brothers'.
Roderick served with the 14th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles, which was in the trenches at Hermies just south of Bapaume at the beginning of September 1917. The battalion war diary described the day MacKenzie was killed but gives no real clue as to what could have caused his death:

HERMIES SECTOR
Sept 2nd
"Fine fresh day - cool ... Some aeroplane activity. Our guns fired throughout the day at intervals but our covering battery is limited to a consumption of 30 shells per day so they are unable to be aggressive. The Infantry are not sorry as we don't want to stir up the Boche who is very quiet, until we have got our trenches into some sort of decent condition, and our dugouts built etc. From 7 pm until well after 8 pm a heavy bombardment could be heard on our left, a considerable distance away."

Osmand Mackenzie, who was one year older than Roderick, was killed on the Somme on 15 September 1916 when he too was 19. His body was never identified therefore he has no inscription. He is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.


HE GAVE HIS LIFE
TO BRING IN
A WOUNDED COMRADE
DEEPLY MOURNED

PRIVATE LESLIE CLEGG MCMURDO


Leslie McMurdo was underage when he was killed by a sniper - born in April 1900, he was only seventeen. But he had been determined to fight, so determined that when his attempt to join up in South Africa at the age of 16 failed he stowed away to Australia where he added two years to his age and claimed that he'd already undergone 121 days military training. The Australians accepted him on 21 September 1916, he embarked from Sydney on 23 December 1916, arrived in France via Britain on 4 August 1917, joined the 12th Rifle Company, 31st Battalion Australian Infantry on 24 August and was killed in action one month and two days later in the Battle of Polygon Wood.
Leslie McMurdo was the eldest of his parents' seven children. He was born in Stockton-on-Tees, Durham. The family emigrated to South Africa sometime between 1909 and 1911. His father, Thomas McMurdo, died in November 1914 so it was his mother who was his next of kin. She filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia and interestingly, she backs up her son's story claiming that he was 18 when he died. But the British records don't lie and they show that he was born in the second quarter of 1900. She also states that he came to Australia when he was 16 - that bit is true - "to go farming with Mr F.A. Sheppard ... but I do not know if he would have any other information to give you". I can't tell whether that is true or not but the speed with which he gets into the Australian army would indicate that he didn't have much time to do much farming. It's Mrs McMurdo who tells us of the manner of his death"

"After the Battle at "Polygon Wood", whilst attending a wounded comrade, 200 yards out in "No Man's Land, was shot though heart and left eye."

His body was found in an unmarked grave in March 1920.


'TIS THE LUCK OF THE GAME

LIEUTENANT WALTER JOHN MCMULLIN


My mother lived in Birmingham during the Second World War and the saying among her friends was, if the bomb has got your name on it it's got your name on it and that's all there is to it. In other words - it's the luck of the draw, or as Lieutenant McMullin's father put it, the luck of the game.
Four months before he died McMullin had narrowly escaped death and been awarded a Military Cross. The camouflage over one of his guns caught fire and could have exploded a large pile of ammunition had he and another lieutenant not risked their lives to extinguish the flames. On the 4 October, the opening day of the Battle of Broodseinde Ridge, he was not so lucky.
It's commonplace for letters of condolence to tell the bereaved that their son/husband was 'the best' , but it must mean something when the Brigade HQ War Diary for 4 October 1917 states: "The loss of Lieuts Bennett and McMullin is a big one to the Brigade. These officers have performed excellent service".
McMullin was a grazier from Brooklyn, Upper Rouchel, Aberdeen, New South Wales. He and his brother, Alfred Oswald McMullin, both enlisted on 29 August 1914 and embarked from Australia on 18 October 1914. Alfred survived the war and died in 1960.


HE WENT TO WAR
FOR THE SAKE OF PEACE
HE DIED WITHOUT HATE
THAT LOVE MIGHT LIVE

PRIVATE SIDNEY MILHAM


Sidney Milham was a gardener with St Leonard's-on-Sea Borough Council when he attested on 15 November 1915. He had not volunteered before this; he was a thirty-five-year-old married man with two children, Frederick Albert aged two and George Edward who was only three months old. However, the Derby Scheme had been introduced in the autumn of 1915 and men between the ages of 18 and 41 were being asked to attest their willingness to serve. Mrs Alice Milham perfectly expressed the terms of her husband's willingness in the inscription she chose for him.
Milham joined the 1/4th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment. After service in Gallipoli, this spent some time in Egypt before being sent to Palestine early in 1917 where Milham joined them in time for the Second Battle of Gaza, 17-19 April 1917. He was killed seven months later in the capture of Beersheba during the Third Battle of Gaza 27 October-7 November.
Twenty-seven years later, George Edward Milham, son of the man who 'went to war for the sake of peace' and 'died without hate that love might live', was killed in Italy on 17 January 1944 in the British attempt to cross the Garigliano River and breach the German Gustav Line. It was his wife who chose his inscription too:

He died that we might have
A better world to live in
Fond remembrance
Jeanne and sons


JESUS TOOK HIM FOR A SUNBEAM

PRIVATE GEORGE PARRY


George Parry's inscription comes from a popular Sunday School hymn, 'Jesus wants me for a sunbeam' of which this is the first verse and the chorus:

Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,
To shine for Him each day;
In every way try to please Him,
At home, at school, at play.

A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
Jesus wants me for a sunbeam;
A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
I'll be a sunbeam for Him.

Parry joined up in February 1917 when he was 18. He served with the 7th Battalion South Lancashire Regiment, joining them in France at the end of August 1917. Seven weeks later the sister-in-charge of the Casualty Clearing Station in Bailleul wrote to tell his parents that their son -

"was admitted severely wounded in the abdomen and although everything possible was done to relieve his condition he could not respond to his treatment and passed away on October 6, a few hours after admission".

His parents, sister and brother 'in France', and uncle and aunt all put notices announcing his death in the Liverpool Daily Post on both Wednesday 17th and Thursday 18th October. His parents' announcement concluded with a line from another hymn - 'Safe in the arms of Jesus'.

Safe in the arms of Jesus
Safe from corroding care,
Safe from the world's temptations;
Sin cannot harm me there.
Free from the blight of sorrow,
Free from my doubts and fears;
Only a few more trials,
Only a few more tears.


TO LOVE, TO HOLD
AND THEN TO PART
IS THE SADDEST STORY -
A HUMAN HEART

DRIVER WILLIAM MCRAE


This is a near quote of a couplet composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834):

To meet, to know, to love - and then to part,
Is the sad tale of many a human heart.

It makes me realise that many inscriptions will have been composed from memory rather than from reference to a book. This would explain why Mrs McRae's inscription is close but not accurate - nor is it an improvement on the original, or a personalising of the original, which sometimes explains the differences.
Mrs McRae had two sons serving at the front, William and Percy. Percy was a witness to William's death, as he informed the Australian Red Cross Enquiry Bureau:

"Driver Wm McRae No. 2531 of the 6th Batty is my brother and I was behind his gun which he was pulling into action at Yeomanry Post, Zillebeke on 31st July 1917 ... when he was killed instantly by a shell. He is buried in a Military Cemetery at Reninghelst, and there is a cross on his grave. I have sent full details to my mother ... "
Sgt P.A. McRae



NOT ONE SOUL
HAS VALLEN IN VAIN
HERE WAS
NO USELESS SACRIFICE

LIEUTENANT IVAN LANCELOT STOCKHAUSEN


Unnamed at times, at times unknown,
Our graves lie thick beyond the seas;
Unnamed, but not of Him unknown; -
He knows! - He sees

And not one soul has fallen in vain.
Here was no useless sacrifice.
From this red sowing of white seed
New life shall rise.

All that for which they fought lives on,
And flourishes triumphantly;
Watered with blood and hopeful tears,
It could not die.

The world was sinking in a slough
Of sloth, and ease, and selfish greed;
God surely sent this scourge to mould
A nobler creed.

Birth comes with travail; all these woes
Are birth-pangs of the days to be.
Life's noblest things are ever born
In agony.

So - comfort to the stricken heart!
Take solace in the thought that he
You mourn was called by God to such
High dignity.

The Nameless Graves
John Oxenham

Just in case you don't read the whole poem, Oxenham is holding out to the bereaved that a new world will be the result of all these these deaths: 'that for which they fought' will live on', replacing the 'slough of sloth, and ease, and selfish greed' into which the old world had fallen. This is why 'not one soul will have died in vain'.
Ivan Lancelot Stockhausen was born and brought up in Jamaica where his family owned sugar plantations. He joined the British West India Regiment, came with it to Britain in 1915 and was gazetted a second lieutenant that December. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in November 1916 where he served with 17 Squadron on reconnaissance and scout duties on the Struma front in Salonika.
Stockhausen and his twenty-year-old fellow airman Lieutenant Charles Victor MacGregor Watson were killed in aerial combat over enemy lines near Seres on 3 October 1917. How do we know? The record of Stockhausen's death contains the note, 'Message dropped by Germans'. This wasn't usually done to gloat but just to inform - evidence of a different age.


"NONE KNEW THEE
BUT TO LOVE THEE
NOR NAMED THEE BUT TO PRAISE"
LONGFELLOW

SECOND LIEUTENANT OSWALD LUCKING STRONG


I don't know what made Oswald Strong's father think that Longfellow wrote these words as they are the most famous lines of a now little-known American writer, Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867). They come from the first verse of his poem, 'On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake', another now little-known poet who died in 1821:

Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise.

Oswald Strong was a chemistry student at Imperial College, London when the war broke out. He joined up immediately. In January 1916 he was posted to Egypt and then in June 1916, attached to the 2nd Battalion King's Shropshire Light Infantry, went to Salonika. The regiment were in the trenches at Neohari on the Struma front until December 1917. Strong, a member of a Trench Mortar Battery, was wounded by shellfire on 4 August 1917 and died the next day.


MY SWEETEST FLOWER
MY CHIEFEST JOY
WENT FROM OUR HOME
WHEN BUT A BOY - MOTHER

PRIVATE ARTHUR FREDERICK JOHN WAITE


Surrey Advertiser 20 October 1917
"Official information has been received from Mesopotamia that Pte. A. Waite 1/5th Queen's Regiment, whose home is at Box Grove, Westfield, is dangerously ill with gun-shot wounds in the head. He joined the Army in the second week of the war, and was severely frost-bitten at Gallipoli in 1915. After several months in hospital in Malta, London and at North Camp, he went to India in July, 1916, and thence to Mesopotamia. Before joining the Army he was with Mr. W. Pendle, White Rose Lane, as under gardener."

The newspaper report was out of date, Arthur Waite had been dead for a week. Born in 1897, Waite was 17 - as his mother says, 'but a boy' - when he enlisted in August 1914. He served with the 1st/5th Battalion The Queen's (West Surrey) Regiment, which at the time of his death was in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq. Without any specific information, I would suggest that Waite was wounded in the Second Battle of Ramadi, 27-29 September, when the British reported 995 casualties following the capture of the town.
Arthur Waite, his mother's 'sweetest flower' and 'chiefest joy' was the eldest son of her first marriage. She had two daughters from this marriage and a son from her second marriage who would have been 8 when Arthur died.


BRAVE, UPRIGHT, SINCERE, KIND
A LOVED SON
A WIDOWED MOTHER'S PRIDE

GUNNER ANDREW SNEDDON THORBURN


'A widowed mother's pride'; Mrs Maggie Thorburn's husband, a police constable, was already dead at the time of the 1901 Census when she, her sixteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth and five-year-old Andrew were living at 29 Parnie Street, Glasgow. In the further details she gave the War Graves Commission, Mrs Thorburn states that Andrew was her only surviving son. The 1911 Census form asks how many live births a woman has had and how many children have survived. Unfortunately the Scottish household schedules have not survived so it's not been possible to tell this of Mrs Thorburn.
However, it's thanks to Mrs Thorburn that we know that Andrew worked at the Corporation Gas Office in Glasgow and that he had been a lieutenant in the Boys Brigade.
Founded in Glasgow in 1888, the Boys Brigade's stated aim was 'The advancement of Christ's kingdom among boys and the promotion of habits of obedience, reverence, discipline, self-respect and all that tends towards true Christian manliness'. From Mrs Thorburn's tribute to her son it would appear that Andrew Thorburn was a credit to the movement.
Thorburn served with the 200th Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery, which moved from French Farm Hooge to Verbrandenmolen sometime during September 1917. Thorburn died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing at Lijssenthoek on the 20th.


A GALLANT SOLDIER
& SPORTSMAN
A MODEL HUSBAND & GOOD SON
REST IN PEACE

MAJOR GUY WINTERBOTTOM


Guy Winterbottom was the second son of William Dickson Winterbottom, the millionaire owner of the Winterbottom Book Cloth Company, which dominated the US and UK book-cloth markets. Reading between the lines, I rather think that William Winterbottom may have dominated his family too. His eldest son Archibald, aged 25, married an American divorcee, four years older than himself. His father had forbidden the marriage but Archibald went ahead and married his wife in Scotland - a marriage they both later appeared to regret. It was several months before Archibald told his father.
Guy was 22 when he got married. Educated at Eton he was a gentleman farmer in Derbyshire when the war broke out. A member of the Derbyshire Yeomanry, he volunteered for foreign service on the outbreak of war.
The regiment served in Gallipoli where it received heavy casualties at Scimitar Hill. It then moved to Salonika in February 1916. Winterbottom was killed by a long-range shell whilst on patrol. He is elaborately commemorated in the church of St John, Aston on Trent by a three-light stained glass window and a marble monument, which reads:

In
Loving memory of
Major Guy Winterbottom
Derbyshire Yeomanry
2nd Son of Lt. Col.
William Dickson Winterbottom
of Aston Hall, Derby,
Killed in action
on the Salonika Front, Aug 9 1917
Aged 27 years.
This tablet is dedicated
By his father, wife
and step mother.
His last words were
"I have tried to do my best.
God's will be
Done."

Despite the fact that Guy Winterbottom had been married for five years it was his father who chose his inscription, paying tribute to the son who was a 'gallant soldier', awarded the Serbian Order of the White Eagle 4th Class, 'a sportsman' who played polo and regularly rode to hounds, a 'model husband & a good son'.


WE FIND IN OUR DULL ROAD
THEIR SHINING TRACK
IN EVERY NOBLER MOOD

SECOND LIEUTENANT LEWIS HAYES WHITFIELD


The poetry and songs of the American Civil War are the source of several original personal inscriptions. This one comes from 'Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration July 21 1865' by James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). On 21 July 1865, Harvard held a commemoration service to honour their 590 alumni who had served in the Civil War, 1861-1865, and in particular the 99 who had died. It was a huge, solemn and emotional occasion and Lowell's Ode made a deep and lasting impression.
Lowell , who was the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at the university, acknowledged that,

"We sit here in the Promised Land
That flows with Freedom's honey and milk;
But 'twas they who won it, sword in hand,
Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk."

And yet,

"In these brave ranks, I only see the gaps,
Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps,
Dark to the triumph which they died to gain:"

It was from the following section that Lewis Whitfield's father chose his inscription:

We rather seem the dead that stayed behind.
Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow!
For never shall their aureoled presence lack:
I see them muster in a gleaming row,
With ever-youthful brows that nobler show;
We find in our dull road their shining track;
In every nobler mood
We feel the orient of their spirit glow,
Part of our life's unalterable good,
Of all our saintlier aspiration;
They come transfigured back,
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways,
Beautiful evermore, and with the rays
Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation!

Just as in Shelley's 'Adonais' and Binyon's 'For the Fallen', these youthful dead are now 'secure from change', and 'beautiful evermore'. The comfort such words offer the bereaved is obvious.
I can find out very little about Lewis Hayes Whitfield. He was born in Fulham in October 1898, his father Lewis Lincoln Whitfield, was a solicitor and he had one sibling, a brother who was four years younger than him. Educated at Clayesmore School, then in Middlesex, he joined the Royal Flying Corps and died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station on 30 October 1917 aged 19.




CEASES
THE PUNKAH STOPS
AND FALLS THE NIGHT
FOR YOU OR ME

GEORGE BERNARD STRATTON


What's a punkah and what did Major Stratton's widow see in these words to think they made a suitable inscription? A punkah is large piece of cloth, like a short curtain, suspended from the ceiling on a frame and moved forwards and backwards across the ceiling by a cord to cool the air (a punkah wallah was the man who pulled the cord). The words come from Kipling's poem The Last Department; however well you've done in the world, to whichever department you've been promoted, the last department is always death and you can be 'promoted' there on a whim without any warning:

"A breath of wind, a Border bullet's flight,
A draught of water, or a horse's fright - "

In India, any of these could be the cause of sudden death, at which point, "ceases, the punkah stops, and falls the night for you or me".

Why did Mrs Stratton think this was a suitable inscription? Major Stratton served with the 10th Battalion Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, a pioneer battalion. On the night of the 10/11 August 1917 he was asleep in the battalion headquarters near Dunkirk, some considerable distance behind the front line, when it was hit by two shells and he, the colonel and the adjutant were all killed. Not exactly 'a Border bullet's flight' but certainly unexpected.


SURRENDERED SELF TO DUTY
TO HIS OLD HOME
AND ENGLAND HIS COUNTRY

GUNNER HAROLD RALPH SHEPHERD MM


Just in case you thought that all these young men nipped off merrily to do their duty as some contemporary writers would like to have us think, Harold Shepherd's father indicates that his son had made a positive, unselfish decision when he decided to enlist. It's interesting that we have an earlier version of the inscription, which has been crossed out and replaced with the one above. This is the earlier inscription:

He gave of his all to duty
England, his country
And his home

It looks pretty much the same - it could even be said that the original version is slightly more elegant - but can you see that the emphasis is different? In his father's opinion - father signed for the inscription - Harold Shepherd didn't just give his all for duty, he surrendered himself to it, had there been a bit of a struggle? Then there is the change from 'England, his country and his home' to 'his old home and England his country'. Harold Shepherd had emigrated to Australia, or at least was working as a stockman in Australia when he enlisted in March 1915, but England was still 'his country', just in case you thought that he'd only done his duty by England but that Australia was now his country and his home.
I can't see when Harold emigrated to Australia but he left behind in Bexhill-on-Sea a mother and father, and four brothers and sisters, three older than him and one younger. The younger one, James Harper Shepherd, was a territorial soldier and had been serving in the 1st/5th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment since the outbreak of war. James was killed in action on 5 May 1915, two months after Harold had enlisted in Australia.
Shepherd served with the 2nd Brigade Australian Field Artillery. In August 1917 it was 'In the Field' near Ypres. The war diary makes no specific mention of Gunner Shepherd but reports that following an enemy air raid on the guns on 15 August the casualties included "12 ORs wounded, 9 horses killed, 16 wounded".


A BOY WITH
A TRUE SENSE OF DUTY
AND A BRAVE MAN'S
SCORN OF FEAR

GUNNER THOMAS MCDOWELL


Thomas McDowell's father, Peter, chose his inscription; his mother was dead. The couple had seven children but Thomas was their only son. Young enough to have been conscripted rather than to have volunteered, McDowell was only 16 when the war broke out; his father nevertheless makes it clear that his son was fully prepared to do his duty. However, father wanted to emphasise that although his son was only a boy his courage was that of a man. Courage is the ability to face fear and overcome it, not to have no sense of it.
Thomas McDowell served with B Battery 295th Brigade Royal Field Artillery. He died from the effects of gas in a Casualty Clearing Station at Dozinghem.


HIS MOTHER'S JOY
AND
HIS FATHER'S BOY

PRIVATE BENJAMIN HOWARD


Is there any difference between inscriptions that are chosen by mothers and those chosen by fathers? As a generality, women (mothers and wives) chose more affectionate, loving inscriptions than men. Men were more likely to express their pride. Young Benjamin Howard's inscription seems to represent exactly this point, emphasised by the way his parents asked for it to be carved.
However, it's difficult to generalise about inscriptions; yes someone signed the form which confirmed the choice but were they the person who actually chose it. The person who signed for it could just have been the more literate or the one with the better handwriting rather than the one who made the decision.
Mothers do seem to be the privileged mourner in many inscriptions; Private Snooks died on 4 April 1916 for 'Mother, King & Country', the form signed by his father. Corporal Savage, who died on 3 October 1918 was, 'A mother's darling'. Mrs Savage signed the form but it appears that Mr Savage was still alive. Mr Robinson was definitely alive when his wife confirmed the inscription, 'My darling' for their son Private David Robinson killed on 22 September 1917. Mr Robinson died in 1950 and was described on his headstone as the 'beloved father of David' so it's not as if there was any estrangement. Yet fathers could be affectionate too as shown by this inscription, which Rifleman Henry Herbert's father, a widower, chose: 'Farewell my son, your life is past loved by your dear father until the last'. And Mr Ride risked offending his other sons when he chose this for his son's inscription: 'Dad's best pal'. He risked offending his wife too as she was still alive and doesn't get a mention.
Mr and Mrs Howard had two sons, Benjamin and his younger brother, Thomas. Benjamin attested on 6 June 1916 when he was 18 and 4 months. It was a year before he joined his unit in France on 3 June 1917. He was killed in action ten weeks later. Thomas Howard was too young to serve in the war, he was still only 14 when it ended.


A MOST AMIABLE & DEVOTED BOY
WHO NEVER GAVE
FATHER OR MOTHER
A WRONG WORD. SORELY MISSED

PRIVATE JOHN MESSINA LAVERJACK


This is a lovely tribute from a widowed father to his grown-up son. John was the fourth of his seven children and the third of his five sons, all of whom apart from John survived the war. Their mother had died when John was 13 and the youngest, Percy, was 6.
John was a bank clerk in Hull when the war broke out. His medal rolls index card shows that he was entitled to the War and Victory medals but not the 1914-15 Star so he was not a volunteer, or if he was he was a late volunteer.
Laverack served with the 9th Battalion Royal Fusiliers. From the position of the cemetery where he is buried, he was probably killed in a minor operation involving the 12th Division which is famous for being the first time the Royal Flying Corps was used to strafe enemy position as the troops left their trenches for the attack.


AN ONLY BOY
HIS PARENTS PRIDE AND JOY

GUNNER FRANCIS HAZZLEDINE


Frank and Ann Hazzledine had two children, Annie Eliza and Francis, also known as Frank. Frank senior was an assistant engineman in Beeston Colliery; at the time of the 1911 census, Frank junior was an errand boy in a lace factory. He was only 16 when he enlisted in September 1914 but became ill and spent some time in hospital before being sent to the Front in June 1916. Sent home again early in 1917 with shell shock, he had only recently returned to the Front when his gun received a direct hit and he was killed.
Exploring Beeston's History has more information on Hazzledine together with a photograph which shows a very youthful, gentle-faced boy - his parents' pride and joy.


A BRAVE SOLDIER
A PERFECT SON

CAPTAIN STUART LE GEYT CUTLER


Jersey Evening Post
Wednesday 21 October 1914
"Though there were very few passengers on the Mail Boat this morning animated scenes were witnessed on the quay. Lieutenant S Le G Cutler of D Company 3rd Battalion RMIJ was a passenger for England where he is joining the Army Service Corps and the men of the Company were determined not to let him leave the Island without showing him in what high regard he is held by them."

As part of this splendid early morning send off, his old Company marched down to Albert Pier where the Battalion's drum and fife band played 'Tipperary and other now world famous tunes'.

"As the vessel slipped her mooring the strains of Auld Lang Syne were just heard above the cheers of the Company. There were renewed when the Sarnia passed out of the pier heads, the band playing and the cheers being raised until the vessel was well out of the harbour."

Jersey Evening Post
Friday 10 August 1917
We deeply regret having to announce that another gallant Jerseyman has just been added to the list of victims of the War. A telegram was received this afternoon bearing the sad news that Captain S Le G Cutler, son of Major Cutler of Queen Street, had been killed in action. ... The deceased officer, who was only 23, joined up in August 1914 and got his Captaincy some 12 months ago. He had a narrow escape from death only a week ago, his machine being riddled with bullets and brought down in flames.

Jersey Evening Post
Monday 13 August 1917
As we stated on Friday last Captain S Le G Cutler was killed ina ction on 9 August. The late officer who was the son of Major & Mrs J.F. Cutler and grandson of Mr Philip Le Guyt of St Lukes, was an Old Victorian and at the outbreak of war served in the 3rd RMIJ. ... Only a few weeks ago he was on leave with his fiancee, Miss Katy de Faye of the VAD, who is nursing at a war hospital in Wales. To Major and Mrs Cutler, who are both on war service, and the other relatives we again tender our sincerest condolences.


AS UNKNOWN YET WELL KNOWN
AS DYING, BEHOLD HE LIVETH

LANCE CORPORAL FREDERICK ELPHICK


As unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, behold, we live
2 Corinthians 6:9

Unknown and yet well known, dying and behold we live
Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, Westminster Abbey

As unknown yet well known
As dying, behold he liveth
Personal inscription Lance Corporal F Elphick

The changes are subtle but they are there: in Corinthians, St Paul informs his fellow Christians that although they may be of insignificant parentage, 'unknown', their conduct has made them well known, and that whilst they are in constant danger of being put to death, whilst it's constantly reported that they have been put to death, they are still alive.
On the tomb of the unknown warrior the reference to unknown is literal - the man underneath this marble slab is totally unknown, yet, because he is Britain's unknown warrior, buried with full ceremonial in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920, he is well known. And by his death, by the fact that the unknown warrior sacrificed his life for us, we are all able to live.'
As unknown yet well known' in Elphick's inscription probably has the same meaning as in Corinthians, Elphick was a 'domestic garden boy' in the 1911 census, and a gardener when he joined up in November 1915, an unknown. But his death has made him well known: the death reported in the newspaper, his name carved onto the East Grinstead war memorial. But the very last three words of Elphick's inscription - 'behold he liveth' - refer to the resurrection. Just as the strangers at Jesus' tomb told the women, 'He is not here, he has risen', so Elphick's mother is expressing her belief in the resurrection - 'behold he liveth'.
Elphick's parents' lived at The Lodge, Barton St Mary, East Ginstead. This raises interesting possibilities. Elphick joined up in November 1915, giving his occupation as 'gardener'. Barton St Mary was a house designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1907, the gardens designed by Gertrude Jeykll; it looks as though Elphick could have been the gardener here.


HE IS QUIETLY CALLING US
FROM PARALYSING GRIEF
TO HIGH ENDEAVOUR

LIEUTENANT NORMAN STUART EDMONDSTONE


Many, many families must have struggled with 'paralysing grief'; how could they possibly come to terms with their loss, how could thy make sense of it? Lieutenant Edmondstone's family were among those whose solution was to make themselves worthy of the sacrifice. In this they were following the advice of the popular poet John Oxenham (William Arthur Dunkerley 1852-1941), whose 1915 poem 'Epilogue 1914', asks what will happen when the war is over:

God grant the sacrifice be not in vain!
Those valiant souls who set themselves with pride
To hold the way .... and fought ... and died, -
They rest with Thee.
But to the end of time,
The virtue of their valiance shall remain,
To pulse a nobler life through every vein
Of our humanity.

And who was the 'he' of the inscription, who was quietly calling? You might think it was Christ but it wasn't, it was the dead man, Norman Edmondstone. What makes me think this? The family have quoted from Sir Oliver Lodge's book, 'Raymond or Life and Death', in which Lodge presents evidence to prove that his dead son, Raymond, who was killed in action in 1915, is in communication with them from the spirit world:

"Let us think of him, then, not as lying near Ypres with all his work ended, but rather, after due rest and refreshment, continuing his noble and useful career in most peaceful surroundings, and quietly calling us his family from paralysing grief to resolute and high endeavour."

So, how did families come to terms with their paralysing grief - by believing that their dead were still alive in the spirit world, still in communication with them, urging them to 'resolute and high endeavour'.
Norman Edmonstone, a Lieutenant in the Queen's Westminster Rifles, was hit in the stomach by a shrapnel bullet while waiting with his company for the order to attack the Ottoman defensive systems at Kauwukah and Rushdi during the battle for Hareira and Sheria, part of the Southern Palestine Campaign . He died the following day. His Colonel told his parents:

"He is a very serious loss to me and to the battalion, as he was an untiring and dependable officer with a very good knowledge of a soldier's duty .... He was universally beloved by men and officers, and this I mean literally, for he had a very lovable disposition."


DEEDS NOT WORDS
LET US DO, OR DIE
FOR OUR COUNTRY

LANCE CORPORAL FRANK MAYO DALE


'Deeds not words' is the maxim George Washington attempted to live by, based on the words of St Matthew 7:20, 'By their fruits ye shall know them'. 'Deeds not words' was also the motto of the Women's Social and Political Union, the Suffragettes. Fed up with the slow progress of the negotiations to get them the vote, they decided that direct action would be more effective.
'Let us do or die', quotes the final verse of Robert Burns' poem, 'Scots Wha Hae' (1793) in which Robert Bruce addresses his soldiers on the eve of the Battle of Bannockburn:

Lay the proud Usurpers low
Tyrants fall in every foe
Liberty's in every blow
Let us Do or Die.

'Let us do or die' also comes from a poem by Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), 'Gertrude of Wyoming'. Here the speaker is less confident of victory but still prepared to risk death.
Obed Oldfield Dale, Frank's father, chose his son's inscription. I do not imagine for a moment that he had the Suffragettes in mind when he chose it but rather that was by his son's deeds, being prepared to die for his country, that we should judge him.
Dale served in the 6th Battalion Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry and died of wounds in a base hospital at Etaples. The battalion had taken part in a costly attack at Gelncorse Wood and Inverness Copse on 22 - 24 August losing seven officers and 55 Other Ranks killed, eight officers and 252 Other Ranks wounded, with 28 Other Ranks missing.
Before the war, Frank Dale had been an assistant in his father's pawnbroking business.


I HAVE LEARNED
THAT GOD DOES NOT WANT
MEN TO LIVE
EACH FOR HIMSELF

GUNNER REGINALD JOHN PERRY CUFF


This is a quotation from a short story by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), 'What Men Live By', written in 1885. An angel, punished for failing to obey God's order, was forced to live as a man until he could answer three questions: 'What dwells in man', 'What is not given to man' and 'What do men live by'. After six years on earth the angel has the answers. What dwells in man is love, what is not given to man is to know his own needs, and what men live by is love: 'I have learnt that all men live not by care for themselves but by love'. In explaining his answer to the man who has given him shelter, the angel says:

'I understood that God does not wish men to live apart, and therefore he does not reveal to them what each one needs for himself; but he wishes them to live united, and therefore reveals to each of them what is necessary for all. I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God in him, for God is love.'

Reginald John Perry Cuff, a junior shipping clerk in the 1911 census, joined the army in 1916, served with the 286th Brigade Royal Field Artillery and died of wounds in one of the four Casualty Clearing Stations at Proven. His father, John Pitman Cuff a cabinet maker in Toxteth, Liverpool, chose his inscription. I have not come across it before. It makes a subtle criticism, or perhaps not such a subtle criticism, of mankind for allowing itself to descend into savage warfare.


"THAT, SETTING DUTY FIRST
HE WENT AT ONCE
AS TO A SACRAMENT

PRIVATE EDWARD BLACKBURN


Edward Blackburn volunteered in May 1915 when he was 18. He was keen, his elder brother Joseph, who was 21, didn't volunteer until that November. Edward's keenness can be sensed in the inscription his parents chose. It comes from The Empty Chair by John Oxenham, a prolific poet whose poems were very popular during the war and feature in many inscriptions.
The Empty Chair belonged to the dead volunteer, "that heroical great heart that sprang to duty's call". Oxenham's comfort to the bereaved is to ask:

Think! Would you wish that he had stayed
When all the rest The Call obeyed?
- That thought of self had held in thrall
His soul, and shrunk it mean and small?

Surely not, you should be glad: " - That setting duty first, he went at once, as to a sacrament".
Edward Blackburn served with the 12th Battalion Royal Fusiliers and died of wounds, judging from the war diary most probably caused by gas or HE shells, on 12 September 1917. His brother, Joseph Blackburn, who served with the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, survived the war.


A NOTABLE EXAMPLE
TO SUCH AS BE YOUNG
TO DIE WILLINGLY
AND COURAGEOUSLY

GUNNER ERNEST TOMSETT


This sounds as though it's a rather stilted extract from a letter of condolence, but it isn't, it's a quote from the Old Testament book of Maccabees. Eleazor, an old man in his eighties, is a supporter of the Maccabees, defenders of the Jewish faith. He refuses to obey an order from the Seleucids, who are trying to suppress Judaism, despite the fact that he knows this means he will be put to death. Eleazor even refuses to pretend to comply with the order as well-meaning friends suggest he does. No, he says:

I will shew myself such an one as mine age requireth, and leave a notable example to such as be young to die willingly and courageously for the honourable and holy laws.
2 Maccabees 6.27-8

Eleazor dies with the following tribute from the writer:

And thus this man died, leaving his death for an example of a noble courage and a memorial of virtue, not only unto young men, but unto all his nation.

Gunner Tomsett's wife chose his inscription. It's the dedication on the Douglas Head Memorial on the Isle of Man but otherwise, for all its appropriateness, it's quite rare. So is the address she gave: 2 Married Quarters, Detention Barracks, Windmill Hill, Gibraltar. I can only assume that Tomsett had been stationed on Gibraltar before being posted to France.







HE COUNTED HIS VERY LIFE
AS NOT TOO MUCH TO GIVE
FOR ENGLAND

CORPORAL ERNEST ALFRED WARDEN


This inscription piqued my curiosity, here was a Canadian soldier specifically dying for England, not the King, or the Empire, or Canada but England, why was this. Well the answer of course was not too difficult; Ernest Warden, born and educated in England, had only been in Canada for one year when the war broke out. He, or perhaps it was his mother who chose his inscription, still thought of England as his home. He left his job as an electrical engineer in Toronto in May 1915 and returned 'home' with the 2nd Canadian Contingent that September.
Warden originally served with the Brigade Ammunition Column but early in 1917 transferred to the Canadian Corps Signals Company as a despatch rider, carrying orders between Head Quarters and the front line. A keen motor cyclist he had won many test trials and races at Toronto Motor-cycle Club events. It was whilst carrying despatches on the night of the 15/16 September that his motorbike collided with a lorry. Seriously injured, he died later that day. A comrade in the Canadian Field Artillery told his parents:

"Everyone who came into contact with your son spoke well of him. His officers, and senior n.c.o.'s looked upon him as being a young man of more than average ability, careful of and anxious in the execution of his duties, and of manly bearing and address."


KILLED IN ACTION
FLYING OVER ENEMY LINES

SECOND LIEUTENANT GEOFFREY MILES WILKINSON


Miles Wilkinson's inscription says no more than his parents knew about his death; it repeats the official information they received. No one knew exactly what happened to him. However, the fact that he was originally buried by the Germans indicates that he was probably shot down by German artillery. Pilots on both sides did their best to identify the planes they brought down in order that they could claim them as victories - even making contact with the enemy squadron for confirmation. No one claimed Wilkinson as a victory so presumably he wasn't brought down by a plane
Wilkinson originally served with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry and at the time of his death was attached to the Royal Flying Corps, but the War Graves Commission doesn't have a squadron number for him. He was gazetted second lieutenant in April 1917, reported to have been wounded in June 1917, obviously recovered, and died in unknown circumstances on 10 October.
Wilkinson's elder brother, Alan Machin Wilkinson, was a Royal Flying Corps an ace with 19 victories to his credit. He finished the war as a Group Captain with a DSO and bar - he was 27. Their younger brother, John Graham Wilkinson, a lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment, was a member of Dunsterforce. This early special forces unit hoped to organise local resistance to Ottoman advances into the Caucasus and Central Asia. The region was a powder keg of competing Bolshevik, nationalist, Ottoman and British interests. Wilkinson was killed when Jangalis, Iranian nationalists, attacked a small detachment of British forces in the town of Rasht. Originally buried in Rasht Armenian Cemetery, his name is now commemorated on the Tehran War Memorial. He was 23.


LAUGH, AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU
WEEP
AND YOU WEEP ALONE

PRIVATE ARTHUR GEORGE EDWARD VASSAR


Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has troubles enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

This is the first verse of the popular American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox's (1850-1917) most famous poem, Solitude, and Private Vassar's inscription is its most famous line. It's not just that people do 'not need your woe', so that you are forced to 'weep alone' and 'drink life's gall' alone, but the fact is that we must all die alone:

But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Vassar enlisted in July 1915 when he was still only 18. He served in France from 23 February 1916 until he was wounded seven months later on 12 September. He didn't return to the front until 24 July 1917. There is no record of when he was wounded again but he died of these wounds two months later in a base hospital in Boulogne.


"YES DAD"

LIEUTENANT HORACE ALEXANDER COLLINS


'Dad', Edward Alexander Collins, chose this inscription for his son. What can he have meant by it? I have to admit that I have no idea and can't even speculate. But I've included it in this epitaph collection as an example of one that presents an impenetrable enigma ... and was presumably meant to.
Horace Collins was the eldest of his parents' three sons. Educated at Felsted School in Essex, he was articled to his father, a solicitor in Edgware Road, London. He joined up on 8 September 1914, scarcely a month after the outbreak of war. He was 19. He served initially as a private in the Artists' Rifles before being gazetted Second Lieutenant in the South Staffordshire Regiment on 9 November 1914. Promoted lieutenant in March 1917, he was appointed Divisional Signalling Officer and attached to the 246th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. He was killed in action at Kemmel Hill on 9 September 1917.
"Yes dad", in inverted commas - what can it mean?


OF CREWE

THE MUSIC OF HIS LIFE
IS NOWISE STILLED
OUR EARS NO LONGER HEAR IT

LIEUTENANT FRANK BLAMPHIN TIPPING


The blank line after 'Of Crewe' was specially requested by Frank Tipping's father, making a distinction between the factual detail of his son's address and the quotation from Frances Ridley Havergil's (1836-1879) poem, The Message of the Aeolian Harp:

For I know
That he who is not lost, but gone before,
Is only waiting till I come; for death
Has only parted us a little while,
And has not severed e'en the finest strand
In the eternal cable of our love:
...
The music of his life
Is nowise stilled, but blended so with songs
Around the throne of God, that our poor ears
No longer hear it.

Just as you can't see the beam of a torch in broad daylight so you no longer make out the voice of someone who has died because it is drowned in the clamour round God's throne.
It's an appropriate choice of inscription for Frank Tipping who had a precocious musical talent. He took up playing the violin at the age of 9 and, aged 10, was playing for the Crewe Philharmonic Orchestra. Aged 13 he won a scholarship to the Royal Manchester College of Music, and aged 15 joined the Halle Orchestra.
Aged 19 in the summer of 1915 he graduated with distinction from the College of Music and in September joined the army. Tipping served originally with the Royal Garrison Artillery before joining the Royal Flying Corps. Aged 21, he was killed 'while flying over enemy lines'.


SLEEP THAT KNITS UP
THE RAVELL'D SLEAVE
OF CARE

TROOPER CHRISTOPHER NORRIS


Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast -

Sleep has the ability to sort out the tangled threads of our lives, it provides us with relief from our troubles, it soothes our minds - as of course does death, although with death the 'solution' is permanent. The quotation comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth Act 2 Sc. 2. The words are spoken by Macbeth who, by murdering Duncan, fears he has murdered his ability to sleep and so will no longer be able to benefit from its soothing balm.
I can tell you very little about Trooper Norris. The War Graves Commission do not appear to have an age for him nor the details of his parents, neither their name nor their address. His inscription was chosen by a Miss MJ Norris of 76 Chapter Road, Cricklewood NW2 - a sister or an aunt perhaps. However, his medal roll index card tell us enough - he was entitled to the 1914 Star having arrived in France on 6 October 1914, and he died on 11 September 1917. The cause of death? "Suicide whilst temporarily insane". Trooper Norris's 'hurt mind' had been unable to find peace in this life and so he had chosen to end it.


" ... THE SHEEP ARE IN THE FAULD
AND THE KYE ARE A' AT HAME"

PRIVATE THOMAS BOYD MATHISON


The instructions to the stone carver are very specific: "Stone No. 2452 - three stops and inverted commas to be engraved as shown", which is strange as this is the first line of the song so there is nothing that comes before these words. I wonder what Private Mathison's parents meant to convey by their instructions?
The words come from 'Auld Robin Gray', a Scottish ballad by Lady Anne Lindsay (1750-1825). In the song, a young woman laments the fact that she has married Robin Gray at her parents' urging, an elderly man with money. Jamie, the young man she hoped to marry has gone away and was thought to have died when his ship was wrecked. But he returns soon after the wedding. Robin Gray is a good man but he is not Jamie.

When the sheep are in the fauld, and the kye a' at hame,
And a' the warld to rest are gane,
The waes o' my heart fa' in showers frae my e'e,
While my gudeman lies sound by me.

The words of the ballad are not relevant to Mr and Mrs Mathison's situation, but the feeling of despair, of life having no meaning could well have influenced their choice. The young woman dare not think of Jamie, she can't rouse herself to do what she ought: 'I wish that I were dead, but I'm no like to dee'; 'I gang like a ghaist, and I carena to spin'.
Thomas Mathison, a gardener in civilian life, joined up in November 1915. He served as a Lewis gunner with the 1/4th Battalion Royal Scots in Palestine and was killed in action on 2 November 1917 in the strong Ottoman fight back following the fall of Beersheba on the 1st.

"He was killed instantaneously by a bullet on Friday morning, 2/11/17, while making a gallant attempt to bring his Lewis gun into action. He was a good soldier, and his cheery nature made him very popular with his comrades."
Quoted from County of Peebles Book of Remembrance.


WHOSE DISTANT FOOTSTEPS ECHO
THROUGH THE CORRIDORS
OF TIME

PRIVATE EVEN THOMAS KENNEDY


Military Hospital
Tidworth
30.11.17

Dear Madam,
In reply to your letter of Nov: 26th re: illness and Death of Pte E.T. Kennedy. He was admitted to this Hospital on 6-7-17, suffering from Bronchitis. On 17.7.17 his diagnosis was changed to Tubercle of Lung. Everything possible was done for him, but he did not improve at all, gradually grew worse, & died on 7-8-17 to our great regret.
He is buried in Tidworth Military Cemetery. Grave no.313 Plot C. The funeral took place on 18-8-17.
The Sister-in-Charge of the ward has written to his relatives.
Yours truly,
G. Rickleton
for E.M.Denne
Matron

This letter to the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau would have been in answer to an enquiry from them. The Bureau did the most amazing work and I hope that someday, someone does justice to Vera Deakin, the twenty-four-year-old Australian woman who founded the Bureau in Egypt in October 1915 in order to help people find out what had happened to their relations. Her efforts were not exactly welcomed by the authorities, but she kept it going until the end of the war. The Bureau's digitised files on the Australian War Memorial site provide details about the deaths of thousands of Australian soldiers - like Even Thomas Kennedy.
Kennedy's inscription comes from 'The Day is Done' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1808-1882). There is a fine, elegiac quality to the words, which were chosen by Private Kennedy's mother. She is saying that her son's presence, his footsteps, continue to reverberate around her down through the years, which is not what Longfellow was saying. Longfellow, in search of some words of consolation for his melancholic mood, was rejecting the words of the 'grand masters' and 'bards sublime, whose distant footsteps echo through the corridors of time', in favour of 'some humbler poet, whose songs gushed from his heart'.

Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.


FIVE YEARS HAVE PASSED
AND STILL TO MEMORY DEAR
WE BREATHE YOUR LOVING NAME
AND WIPE AWAY A TEAR

PRIVATE HARRY JENKS


There's some interesting information in the first line of this inscription - it was five years after their son's death before the War Graves Commission asked Harry Jenks' parents to confirm the details for his headstone and to choose an inscription. Jenks was killed in 1917 so the year was 1922. This is one reason why so many headstones don't have inscriptions, families no longer lived at their old addresses. This and the fact that the Commission charged 3 1/2d per letter, which it is assumed many families were not able to afford.
However, there's another interesting fact about this inscription - it runs to 78 letters and the Commission's limit was 66. But some official has simply added up the letters, multiplied them by 3 1/2d and written 22s 9d in the margin. The Jenks family were not rich. In the 1901 census the father, Alwyn Jenks, was a general labourer. In the 1891 census he was an inmate in a boys' reformatory.
Although charging the bereaved for a headstone inscription, when their relation had died serving their country, seems rather outrageous to us today, the State was burying the dead and choosing their headstone so paying for an inscription was seen as a way for families to feel that they had had a part to play in the commemoration of their dead. And the fact that there was no fuss over the length of this inscription shows that you didn't have to be a person of influence to exceed the stipulated length - you just had to be prepared to pay.
Jenks served with the 1st/4th Battalion South Lancashire Regiment, part of the 55th West Lancashire Division. The Division took part in the attack on the Menin Road Ridge, 20-23 September. Jenks died in a Casualty Clearing Station at Mendinghem on the 21st.


WHOSE DEATH
WAS FOLLOWED BY
HIS BROKEN HEARTED MOTHER'S
FIVE WEEKS LATER

CORPORAL ABRAHAM FERNER


Abraham Ferner's parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who arrived sometime between 1888, when their daughter Rachel was born in Poland, and 1891 when their son David was born in London. Father, Hyman Ferner, set up as a boot mender in Stepney where the family lived above the shop. In 1911 Abraham and three of his siblings were all working in the tailoring trade.
Ferner served with the 6th Battalion Yorkshire Regiment and died of wounds received on 14/15 August in the attack at Langemarck. The following month it was announced that, for his actions on that day, Ferner had been awarded the DCM, the Distinguished Conduct Medal introduced in March 1916 for exceptional acts of bravery. The citation reads:

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. During the advance, he moved the line in the open under machine gun fire, directing and encouraging his platoon, and later when ordered with his machine gun section to outflank a strong point, he moved up his gun, and though all his men were disabled, and he himself was wounded, continued to fire it until it was put out of action. His pluck and coolness were deserving of the highest praise.

A week after the attack, Ferner died in a base hospital in Etaples. His mother died five weeks later. Although his father was alive, it was Abraham's brother, David, who chose his inscription.


O MONSTROUS WORLD
TO BE DIRECT AND HONEST
IS NOT SAFE

TROOPER ALFRED DUNNE


Alfred Dunne's father, Frederick, chose his inscription. Alfred was the fourth of his seven sons to die during the war and a fifth was to die in February 1918. There is no evidence that the first, William Oscar Dunne, was a soldier when he died in Kingston, Surrey, but the other four were. Arthur was killed in action on 13 May 1915, Walter Edwin died of pneumonia on 18 October 1915, Alfred died of wounds in October 1917 and Montague died of wounds in February 1918. Frederick Dunne was entitled to call it a 'monstrous' world.
The inscription comes from Shakespeare's Othello, Act 3 Sc. 3, where it is spoken by Iago who, far from being direct and honest, is a scheming liar. So what can Major Frederick Dunne, a long-serving soldier who was promoted from the ranks at the outbreak of war, have meant by his choice? Is he questioning his reward for being a loyal subject? And does the fact that Alfred was only 17 when he died have anything to do with what sounds very much like bitterness?
The Surrey Advertiser, 27 October 1917 suggests further evidence for this view: in reporting Alfred's death it mentions that two of Major and Mrs Dunne's son-in-laws have also been killed in the war.


O monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world,
To be direct and honest is not safe.
I thank you for this profit, and from hence
I'll love no friend, sith love breeds such offence.


LIVE PURE, SPEAK TRUE
RIGHT WRONG, FOLLOW THE KING

LIEUTENANT HENRY WILLIAM BOWD


Tennyson's words, spoken by Gareth in 'Idylls of the King', summarise the knights code; the King is Christ.
Henry Bowd was a solicitors articled clerk in Inverell New South Wales before he enlisted as private in July 1915. Sent to Egypt in March 1916 - arriving in June - he began aerial observation instruction in August before qualifying as a pilot in April 1917.
He was killed near Heliopolis when test flying a modified Martinsyde G.102 A 1607. At a height of 4000 ft the plane seemed to stall and began to dive. Bowd seemed to be successfully pulling it out of the dive when it began to break up, caught fire, broke into pieces and crashed.
His father chose his inscription.


DAD'S BEST PAL

RIFLEMAN MICHAEL HENRY RIDE


A lovely tribute from 'Dad' but nevertheless rather a strange inscription. 'Dad', George Ride, had nine children, of whom Michael was the fourth. Eight of them were still living in the family home at the time of the 1911 census, the three eldest boys all working in a wallpaper factory, as was their father. The three included Michael who was 14.
Michael enlisted within ten days of the outbreak of war and was in France with the 7th Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps by the end of May 1915. He was killed on 30 September. George Ride signed for his son's inscription. It seems strangely partisan; the children's mother was still alive, so were his other eight children. Perhaps we just have to accept it - Michael was his favourite child.


NEC PROPTER VITAM VIVENDI
PERDERE CAUSAS

LIEUTENANT ROBERT QUILTER GILSON


Robert Gilson was one of the four members of the TSCB, the Tea Shop and Barrovian Society, a quartet of school friends of whom the other members were JRR Tolkien, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman. Tolkien and Wiseman were the only ones to survive the war, Gilson was the first to die, killed leading his men into action on 1 July 1916.
The four were all pupils at King Edward's School, Birmingham where Gilson's father, Robert Cary Gilson, was the headmaster. He chose his son's inscription, a quotation from the Roman poet, Juvenal (c.55 BC-127 AD) which translates as, 'No, not for life lose that for which I live'. The meaning being that it is not worth saving my own life only to lose that which makes life worth living. And what was it that made life worth living? Robert Gilson probably explained this in his reply to Tolkien's letter of condolence when he wrote: 'you are going to win and restore righteousness and mercy to the councils of mankind I am certain'.
King Edward's have used Gilson's letters as the basis for a moving forty-minute documentary: Robert Quilter Gibson: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, which is beautifully made and well worth watching. And there is more information about the four friends in Connie Ruzich's blogpost, The First Fellowship, in which she examines a poem Geoffrey Smith wrote in Gilson's memory, Let Us Tell Quiet Stories of Kind Eyes:

Let us tell quiet stories of kind eyes
And placid brows where peace and learning sate;
Of misty gardens under evening skies
Where four would walk of old, with quiet steps sedate.


HIS LAST WORDS
I'M GLAD I DONE MY BIT

PRIVATE WALTER SCOTT TELFORD


Walter Scott Telford died of wounds in a military hospital in Britain. Although the War Graves Commission's records have him serving with the 3rd Battalion Scots Guards, his medal rolls index card indicates that on 4 October 1915, when he qualified for the award of the 1914-15 Star by entering a theatre of war, he was in the 1st Battalion. The 3rd Battalion was in any case a home battalion and never went abroad during the war. None of this helps us discover when Telford was wounded but it is obvious that his wound was serious enough for him to be returned to a hospital in Britain - that he had that much yearned for 'Blighty' wound. Not that soldiers wanted it to be serious enough to kill them but just serious enough to keep them out of the war for a long time, preferably until it was over.
Telford was one of thirteen children, five of whom died before him, none of them in the war. His military service number indicates that he joined up between 3 September and 1 October 1914, making him if not actually one of the first one hundred thousand volunteers certainly an early volunteer, all of them prepared to 'do their bit' as the recruiting posters encouraged them to do.
Telford is commemorated on the war memorial in Livingston. Originally this was the memorial for employees of the Dean Oil Works in the town, indicating that Telford, like his father, was employed there in the shale mining industry.
His mother having died in 1910, it was his father who chose his inscription.


HE WOULD GIVE HIS DINNER
TO A HUNGRY DOG
AND GO WITHOUT HIMSELF

GUNNER CHARLES DOUGLAS MOORE


Charles Moore sounds like real character and full marks to his mother, Sarah Moore, who chose his inscription, for conveying this to us so vividly. Born in Bethnal Green London in 1888, Moore was one of her eight children. Her husband, Joseph, was a self-employed cabinet maker, and she worked with him as a French polisher.
Aged 14 in 1901, Charles Moore was living at home and working as a van guard lad. By the time of the 1911 census he had emigrated to Canada. He enlisted on the outbreak of war and signed his attestation form in Valcartier, Quebec on 22 September 1914.
His complete military file has been digitised by the Canadian Government. It reveals that he was 5'4" tall, with a 37" chest, dark hair, hazel eyes and with 'slight scars on index, ring and little finger left hand', and on his right hand too.
His record sheet shows him to have been no angel. On the 28 August 1916, he was sentenced to fourteen days Field Punishment No. 1 for, 'failing to comply with an order and insubordinate language to an N.C.O.'. And on 18 March 1917 to Field Punishment No.2 for 'when on active service failing to comply with an order of an N.C.O.'. His medical record shows him being hospitalised in October 1915 with 'V.D.S.' Venereal Disease Syphilis.
Moore served with the Canadian Anti-Aircraft Battery and was killed on 19 September 1917. The war diary's entry for the day records:

'Allied planes seen 52, hostile 25, engaged 21, over 12, weather clear, visibility fair, right centre section in front of Souchez shelled.'

Moore was presumably in the right centre section.

[I am grateful to the staff at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for drawing my attention to this inscription.]


I ONCE HAD A COMRADE ...
MY HUSBAND

SECOND LIEUTENANT CYRIL ARNELL NEWMAN


Ragnhild Torp married Cyril Newman whilst he was home on a brief leave in March 1917. The following month he was killed in action during the Battle of Arras. Ragnhild chose his inscription. I have a feeling that she assumed we'd recognise the phrase, 'I once had a comrade', because it comes from a traditional European military lament, a lament for a comrade killed in battle.
The words were written in 1809 and set to a Swiss folk tune in 1825. It originally had no affiliation to any country but after 1871 it became a fixed part of German military funerals, the equivalent of Last Post at British military funerals.

You can hear it here.

I once had a comrade,
You will find no better.
The drum called to battle,
He walked by my side,
In the same pace and step.
A bullet came a-flying, ...

The man who walked by Ragnhild Torp's side, 'in the same pace and step', was her husband of one month, Cyril Newman. She died in 1976 - It appears that she never remarried.


"THE WORLD SHALL END
WHEN I FORGET"
SWINBURNE

SECOND LIEUTENANT DOUGLAS TOWRY FARRIER


This declaration of eternal grief comes from Swinburne's Itylus, based on the Greek legend of Aedon who accidentally kills her young daughter, Itylus, and is stricken with grief and remorse. The gods take pity on her and turn her into a nightingale. In Swinburne's poem, a nightingale sorrowfully contrasts a swallow's carefree existence, its ability to carry on its life as if nothing has happened, with its own unending heartbreak.
Many of the bereaved must have felt the same - how could the world carry on as though nothing had happened. John Oxenham (William Arthur Dunckerley 1852-1941) touched on it in his poem, To You Who Have Lost:

I know! I know!
The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe, -
The pang of loss, -
The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross,
" - Heedless and careless, still the world wags on,
And leaves me broken ... Oh, my son! my son!"

Oxenham's comfort was to tell relations:

He died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God and Right and Liberty; -
And such a death is immortality.

Swinburne's nightingale received no comfort.

Douglas Farrier, the son of a sea captain, had been a Bank Clerk in civilian life. In December 1915 he married Netta Jemima Beale, it was she who chose his inscription.


BUT THE VERY HAIRS
OF YOUR HEAD
ARE ALL NUMBERED

DRIVER JOHN LEWIS DAVIES


Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.
But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
Fear not therefore, ye are of more value than than many sparrows
St Matthew 10: 29-31

Driver Davies' father chose this inscription, deriving comfort from the message being that as God concerns himself with the smallest details about each and every one of us, he cares about the death of every man and the grief of all who mourn.
Davies came from Abercynon in Wales, a coal mining community based round a railway junction. He was a volunteer, his medal card showing his qualifying date for the 1914-15 Star was the 20 July 1915. He served as a driver in the Royal Field Artillery and was with the 20th Divisional Ammunition Column when he died of wounds at the dressing station at Canada Farm during the Third Ypres Campaign.


WOULD SOME THOUGHTFUL HAND
IN THIS DISTANT LAND
PLEASE SCATTER
SOME FLOWERS FOR ME

PRIVATE EDWIN GRANT


Mrs Grant's plea does not go unheeded. People often drop a flower on her husband's grave, and this is quite apart from the flowers that permanently fill the beds in front of all the graves. Far away in Vancouver, British Columbia one doubts that Bella Grant would ever have been able to make the journey herself - few did.
Her husband, Edwin Grant, had been born in Aberdeen. He worked there as an engineers' labourer before emigrating to Canada where he became a steel worker. He enlisted in February 1916 and served with the 47th Battalion Canadian Infantry. He was killed sometime between the 26th and the 28th October 1917, the War Graves Commission does not have a firm date. The battalion were in 'close support' at Abraham Heights:

26 October: B Coy moved forward to the NE side of Passchendaele Rd. Lt Hinckesman, 2nd in command of B Coy was killed by a machine gun bullet late in the evening.
27 October: During the day the enemy shelled our new line. At night the whole battalion, in conjunction with the 44th was ordered to advance & occupy the ridge in front and throw outposts.
28 October: Terrific and intense bombardments of our lines by guns of all calibres marked this day. ... Enemy aeroplanes travelled over our lines throughout the day & directed the enemy's artillery.

After the war, Grant's was one of the thousands of bodies gathered up from the surrounding battlefields and buried in Tyne Cot Cemetery. Of the 11,961 soldiers buried here 8,373 were never identified - some of them, no doubt among the 35,000 missing dead named on the surrounding walls.
Seven years after Edwin Grant's death, Bella married his brother, James.



DEATH OPENS UNKNOWN DOORS
IT IS MOST GRAND TO DIE

LIEUTENANT DEREK EDWARD LEWIS VENN BAUMER


These lines come from John Masefield's play, The Tragedy of Pompey the Great (1910). They form part of a brief mediation on death over the body of Pompey's youthful commander, Valerius Flaccus. The 1st Centurion, looking at the body, remarks: "Man is a sacred city, built of marvellous earth", to which the 2nd replies, "Life was lived nobly here to give this body birth". The 4th Centurian brings the conversation to the end a few lines later with the comment: "Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die".
Impressed by the conversation, Ivor Gurney set it to music in a six-line song called 'By a Bierside'. Gurney was serving in the front line at the time and wrote to tell a friend that, "events yesterday gave one full opportunity to reflect on one's chances of doing that grand thing".
Bauman was the son of the Punch cartoonist and book illustrator, Lewis Bauman. Educated at Winchester College, Bauman won a Classical Scholarship to New College, Oxford but instead of going up in 1914 on leaving school, he joined up. He was still only 17 so it was January 1916, just after his nineteenth birthday, before he was sent to France. He served with the 86th Battery Royal Field Artillery and was killed near Langemarck when the battery came under fire.
According to the Winchester College website, Baumer was "running to the assistance of some of his men who had been buried by the burst of a shell" when he was wounded and died a few hours later. His commanding officer told his parents that this was typical behaviour of a man who had become "one of my best subalterns and an officer of the very best type". What made him of "the very best type"? "Under fire he was always cool".


SA MORT A LAISSE
DANS NOS COEURS
UNE PLAIE PROFONDE

PRIVATE ALBERT LARIVIERE


The French translates as, "His death has left a deep wound in our hearts". Sometimes relatives composed inscriptions in French because they wanted local people to be able to understand what they said. Others wrote in French because that was the language they spoke. Albert Lariviere's family were French speakers who came from Sainte Rosa du Lac, a French settlement in Manitoba.
Recruitment figures show that French-speaking Canadians were less likely to volunteer in what they saw as Britain's war than those who spoke English. This despite the fact that parts of France were actually occupied by the Germans. Some French-speaking Canadians had been in the country for more than a century; they were Canadians whose connection to France was in the distant past. The war in Europe was nothing to them - and nor was the British Empire. Many English speakers however were more recent arrivals. To them the Empire was worth fighting for, the motherland was in danger and that danger threatened them all.
Lariviere enlisted and served in the 16th Canadian Infantry Battalion, known as the Canadian Scottish. The war diary described events on 6 November:

Wieltje
In Billets. Working parties of 50 men furnished. No parades. 1st Brigade attacked this morning and carried all objectives. Weather wet. Enemy shelling area occasionally. Casualties: - 3 O.R's killed; 11 wounded; 1 accidentally wounded; 1 missing.

Albert Lariviere is buried in Track X Cemetery with two other members of the 16th Battalion, both also killed on 6 November 1917. Although not mentioned by name, he must have been one of the '3 O.R's killed' mentioned in the diary and perhaps they were part of the working party.


ON HONOUR'S SCROLL
HIS NAME SHALL BE
THOUGH ALL UNKNOWN
TO HISTORY

LIEUTENANT WILFRED STUART LANE PAYNE, MC


Wilfred Payne's brother chose his inscription; it might surprise him to learn how much his brother is not unknown to history. This is the result of the Internet and the digitization of records.
Payne's full names, rank, age, previous service with the Royal Garrison Artillery, parents - Charles and Anna Lucy Payne of British Guiana - Military Cross and place of burial are all recorded on the front page of his Commonwealth War Graves Commission website entry. Further CWGC documents show that he was attached to No. 7 Squadron whilst still a member of the Royal Garrison Artillery and that it was his brother, Mr RH Payne, Plantation Wales, West Bank Demerara River, British Guiana, who chose his inscription.
The digitized London Gazette records that he was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery on 11 September 1915, and the 3 March 1917 edition published the citation for his Military Cross:

For conspicuous gallantry in action: he displayed great courage and skill when employed as Observation Officer. Later he rescued six men who had been buried in a dug-out.

Put Payne's full name into the Internet and a table in Wikipedia shows that he was the 14th 'kill' of the German flying ace, Rudolf Berthold, that Payne was the observer in an RE. 8 piloted by Thomas Ernest Wray and that they were shot down at 08:25 hours somewhere north of Ypres. Berthold, who went on to have 44 victories, 16 of them after his right arm had been paralysed by a bullet, was killed by Spartakists in March 1920.
A search for No. 7 Squadron RFC brought up theaerodrome, an online forum which provided the information that No. 7, was based at Proven. The UK Incoming Passenger Lists show that Payne sailed from Valparaiso, Chile and arrived in Liverpool on 5 September 1915, six days before he was gazetted Second Lieutenant.
Payne and nineteen-year-old Wray, are buried in adjacent graves in Mendinghem British Cemetery


THE PIPERS PLAYED
THE GATHERING OF THE CLANS

PRIVATE ARCHIE STUART THOM


Born in Crieff, Perthshire, Archie Stuart Thom had only been in Australia for three years before he enlisted and returned to Britain as a member of the 47th Battalion Australian Infantry. His wife chose his inscription, hinting at his continuing loyalty to the land of his birth.
The Gathering of the Clans is a traditional piece of music for bagpipes, it is also a term for an event where members of various clans gather, and it's the title of a poem by Sir Walter Scott, a call to arms.

Awake on your hills, on your islands awake,
Brave sons of the mountain, the firth, and the lake!
'Tis the bugle - but not for the chase or the call,
'Tis the pibroch's* shrill summons - but not to the hall.
'Tis the summons of heroes for conquest or death,
When the banners are blazing on mountain and heath;
They call to the dirk, the claymore, and the targe,
To the march, and the muster, the line, and the charge.

The pibroch's, the piper's, summons "to the march, and the muster, the line, and the charge".
Thom was killed in the assault on Passchendaele Ridge. According to the war diary, "Weather conditions horrible & going very slow. Men bogged, country in a very bad state & much churned by shell fire. No cover for men all ranks cheery". At 5.45 on the morning of the 12th, "enemy heavily shelled Battn H.Qrs shell fire killing 24 and wounding 10 men ... Nearly all signallers, runners & scouts casualties ... many valuable lives lost, that will be hard to replace".


BUT THE THOUSANDTH MAN
WILL STAND YOUR FRIEND
WITH THE WHOLE ROUND
WORLD AGIN YOU

SECOND LIEUTENANT HERBERT C ROSA


Herbert Rosa's wife chose his inscription. It comes from Rudyard Kipling's poem, 'The Thousandth Man" . The thousandth man is a very special person, more close than a brother he believes in you, sees you for what you are, always stands by you and is utterly trustworthy.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine depend
On what the world sees in you,
But the Thousandth Man will stand your friend
With the whole round world agin you.

To Marie Rosa, her husband was 'the thousandth man'.
Rosa was born in Hammersmith, London three years before his father, Carl Rosa, "a natural born subject of the Empire of Germany", became a naturalised British citizen. Educated at Clifton College, on leaving school he became a tea merchant in London and a member of the Honourable Artillery Company. When the war broke out Rosa was living in Ireland but rejoined the HAC and served with them in Egypt, returning to take a commission in the Royal Field Artillery in 1916.
He served with the 8th Division Ammunition Column. Wounded in action near Wytschaete, he died in a field ambulance dressing station in Poperinghe.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine can't bide
The shame or mocking laughter,
But the Thousandth Man will stand by your side
To the gallows-foot - and after!





ALL THAT HE HAS LEFT
IS BRUISED
AND IRREMEDIABLY BEREFT

LIEUTENANT FREDERIC DOBELL YOUNG


Other relations have quoted from this poem, In Memoriam A.H. by Maurice Baring, but unlike Frederic Young's father, few have chosen these bleak lines preferring the comfort of the last ones:

It is well with you
Among the chosen few,
Among the very brave, the very true.

Baring wrote the poem in memory of great friend Auberon Herbert who was shot down and killed on 3 November 1916. Baring cannot believe that he will never see him again, never talk to him again:

... The desolated space
Of life shall nevermore
Be what it was before.
No one shall take your place.
No other face
Can fill that empty frame.
There is no answer when we call your name.
We cannot hear your step upon the stair.
We turn to speak and find a vacant chair.
Something is broken which we cannot mend.
God has done more than take away a friend
In taking you; for all that we have left
Is irremediably bereft.
There is none like you.

'Irremediably bereft', not possible to restore, gone for ever.
Young who came from Jesmond, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, originally served as a member of the Tynemouth Battery, a territorial battery, used to guard the coast in the early days of the war. However, once it became obvious that an invasion of Britain was unlikely, these trained batteries were sent overseas. It was 26 July 1917 before Young reached the war zone. He was killed eleven days later.


CAPTAIN OF MY SOUL

PRIVATE FRANCIS JAMES CAREW


Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

This is the first and last verse of Invictus, a four-verse poem by W.E. Henley (1849-1903), which many people felt epitomised the British spirit of fortitude in adversity.
Private Carew's mother chose her son's inscription and I would suggest that it was to her unconquerable soul that she was referring, that it was her head that was "bloody but unbowed" (verse 2). Five weeks after her son, Francis James, died of wounds received in action at Passchendaele Ridge, her husband, Francis Joseph, was killed when the SS Mont-Blanc, loaded with high explosives, collided with the SS Nimo in Halifax harbour, caught fire and exploded causing the largest explosion then know to man. Almost 2,000 people were killed and in the region of 9,000 injured. Francis Joseph Carew, a foreman stevedore, appears as number 844 in the Halifax Book of Remembrance.


HE LOOKED AHEAD AND SMILED
MY HEART SHALL KEEP
HIS MEMORY FOR EVER

LANCE CORPORAL ALFRED WILLIAM JACK PLOWRIGHT


It won't surprise you to learn that it was Lance Corporal Plowright's mother who chose his inscription. This must be her memory of her last good-bye - 'he looked ahead and smiled'. There is something very moving about this kind of personal memory. Look at these two other last goodbyes:

I could not speak
That last good-bye
But kissed him o'er and o'er
Private William Carr Epitaph 793

With aching hearts
We shook his hand
It was our last good-bye
Private John McKay Epitaph 880

Alfred Plowright had been a railway clerk before the war, as was his father. Born in Enfield, in 1911 he was living with his parents in Wood Green. He enlisted in May 1915 and embarked for France with the 20th Battalion Middlesex Regiment on 17 November 1915. He "died of wounds received in an enemy air raid" according to the extra information his mother added to the War Graves Commission record.


HE MARCHED
IN A DEATHLESS ARMY

PRIVATE JOHN JAMES GUSTHART


A deathless army is one made up of the old, dead soldiers of the past who march with their living comrades, swelling their ranks. It's an ancient idea that gave rise to numerous First World War legends, including that of the Crecy archers helping the soldiers at Mons.
John Gusthat's widow chose his inscription, quite possibly inspired by an old Imperial marching song called 'The Deathless Army', written in 1891 with music by H. Trotere and words by F.E.Weatherly. Whilst the soldiers sleep in a city square on the night before an attack a phantom army gathers:

Solemnly, silently, through the night,
Grim set faces and eyes so bright,
As heroes look when they march to fight
At the head of a mighty army.
And then I knew, in the still night-tide,
What men were must'ring side by side,
They were the men who had fought and died
In the ranks of our brave old army.
And their gallant swords may broken lie,
Their bones may bleach 'neath an alien sky,
But their souls, I know, will never die, -
They march in a deathless army.

The idea of 'deathless' also implies immortality, soldiers whose memory and reputations will never die. It's not the same as the Christian concept of eternal life, which comes from the resurrection of the body. To the ancient world you gained an everlasting name by dying for your country in battle - as John Gusthart had done.
Gusthart served with the 28th Battalion Canadian Infantry and was killed on 20 May 1917.

28th Battalion Canadian Infantry War Diary
May 20th
Vimy
Battalion in Support along BAILLEUL - RIAMONT - LOOS Line. Headquarters at T.27.d.4.5. During day enemy shelled our "A" Company front (Right Coy.) causing two Officer casualties. Lieuts. R.D'A STRICKLAND and D.J.CLARKE. Intermittent shelling throughout the whole day along the whole of B - R - L Line resulting in several O.R. casualties. Work parties carrying wire and consolidating B. - R. - L. Line at night. Weather fair.


WHY SEEK YE THE LIVING
AMONG THE DEAD
HE IS NOT HERE

CAPTAIN LESLIE FINLAY DUN


Two days after the crucifixion, on what we now call Easter Sunday, some of the women in Jesus's group, Mary Magdalen, Joanna and Mary the mother of James, brought spices and ointments to where they had seen him buried. They wanted to anoint his body as was the custom. However, when they arrived at the grave they saw that the stone in front of it had been rolled away and the body of Jesus had gone.

"And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: and as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen:"
Luke 24:5-7

Christians believe that Christ's death and resurrection secured eternal life for all mankind so that no one should seek the living among the dead because they are not there.

'LIVERPOOL OFFICERS DIE SIDE BY SIDE'
Liverpool Daily Post 4 October 1915
... Captain Finlay Dun (also of the Liverpool Scottish), of Hoylake. Educated at the Leas School, Hoylake, and Loretto School, he was a member of Trinity College, Oxford. A well-know golfer, he was a life member of the Royal Liverpool Club. On the outbreak of war he enlisted in the Liverpool Scottish, went out to France with the 1st Battalion in November as a corporal, and was invalided home in December owing to an injury to the knee. On recovery he obtained a commission in the 2nd Battalion, and returned to the front after the heavy losses sustained by the 1st Battalion on June 16. He was recently promoted to be temporary captain. On the morning of September 28, after the grand attack on the enemy, Captain Macleod and Captain Leslie Dun went together to inspect the guards. While they were standing talking to two of the men on guard a German shell suddenly fell amongst them, and bursting, killed all four instantly. All were buried in the soldiers' cemetery.


HODIE MIHI CRAS TIBI

PRIVATE JACOB CONROY


Hodie mihi cras tibi - today it's me, tomorrow it could be you. This is an ancient inscription, used since medieval times to warn people that death is ever present: we know neither the day nor the hour. The inscription often has the additional words, 'sic transit gloria mundi', thus passes the glory of the world.
Private Conroy's sister, Elizabeth Watson, chose her brother's inscription. It was to her that he had willed his effects, £4 12s 3d, probably in gratitude for the fact that she took the family under her wing following their mother's death sometime between 1901 and 1911. In the 1911 census, Elizabeth and her husband George were living in a three-roomed house with their own four children, aged from 7 to 11 months, and with her father, Thomas 52, and two of her brothers, Thomas 22 and William 20. Jacob Conroy was boarding with a family in Fife where he was working as a coal miner.
Conroy joined up on the outbreak of war. His qualifying date for the 1914-15 Star is 21 May 1915, the date the battalion arrived in France. He survived the liquid fire attack at Hooge at the end of July and was killed in action at Loos on 25 September.
After her brother's death, Elizabeth had another son whom she named in his memory Jacob Conroy Watson.


IF THIS CUP
MAY NOT PASS AWAY
EXCEPT I DRINK IT
THY WILL BE DONE

DRIVER ROBERT CHRISTMAS YAXLEY


It's the words "except I drink it" that are the most chilling - these are Christ's words in the Garden of Gethsemane, St Matthew 26:42. Christ knows that the only way the terrible future that is in store for him can be overcome, can 'pass away', is by going through with it, through with his betrayal, his flogging and his crucifixion. There is no other way. In the same way that soldiers had no alternative but to stand and face whatever was in store for them, and the next-of-kin were forced to 'drink' the bitter cup that was given to them.
Robert Yaxley, a railway platelayer, served with the 45th Battery, 42nd Brigade Royal Field Artillery and died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Duisans. His mother, Anne Yaxley, a widow, chose his inscription.




WATCH AND PRAY

PRIVATE MALCOLM MITCHELL


On the night before his crucifixion, Christ went with his disciples to Gethsemane. He asked Peter, James and John to watch whilst he went to pray. But when he came back he was dismayed to see that they they had fallen asleep:

What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
St Matthew 26:41

Malcolm Mitchell's mother signed for his inscription, 'Watch and pray'. It's the refrain of the hymn, 'Christian, seek not yet repose' . Watch and pray because you are in the midst of foes who lie in wait to ambush you, watch and pray because that is what Christ asked you to do:

Watch, as if on that alone
Hung the issue of the day;
Pray that help may be sent down:
Watch and pray.

Mitchell, in 1911 a plumber's boy, joined the 8th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, a territorial battalion, on the outbreak of war. It was immediately sent to Egypt to defend the Suez Canal. However, Mitchell cannot have been with them. His medals came up for sale recently and they included the 1914-15 Star, not the 1914 Star. He was with the battalion when it landed in Gallipoli on 5 May 1915 and was killed in action two months later in the Battle of Krithia.


"THESE BE THE GLORIOUS ENDS
WHERETO WE PASS"
KIPLING

PRIVATE MICHAEL ALFRED STANTON


This inscription does not mean what it looks as though it means. It has nothing to do with death and glory, quite the opposite in fact. What Kipling is saying is - we all must die, much of what we do on earth is pointless, death can come from anywhere, any time, the dead are soon forgotten and we are all replaceable.

These be the glorious ends whereto we pass -
Let Him who Is, go call on Him who Was;
And He shall see the mallie* steals the slab
For currie-grinder, and for goats the grass.

A breath of wind, a Border bullet's flight,
A draught of water, or a horse's fright -
The droning of the fat Sheristadar**
Ceases, the punkah stops, and falls the night

For you or Me. Do those who live decline
The step that offers, or their work resign?
Trust me, Today's Most Indispensables,
Five hundred men can take your place or mine.

* the cemetery gardener
** the court clerk
The Last Department, 1899 (verses 7-9)
Rudyard Kipling

This is a very different sentiment from Kipling's 'If' in which he claimed that:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - what is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Michael Stanton's father chose his inscription. Did he know how Kipling meant it? I think he did, and that he meant us to know too otherwise he wouldn't have shown so clearly that it was a quotation, nor identified the author as he did. This is a very disillusioned father who does not think his son's death was worthwhile.

Nineteen-year-old Michael served with the 3rd Company Canadian Machine Gun Corps and was killed in action in the attack on Vimy Ridge.

War Diary 3rd Company Canadian Machine Gun Corps
Trenches Roslincourt Sector
April 9 1917
At 3 am, in accordance with attached Operation Orders and with Brigade Operation Orders our 12 mobile guns Commanded by Major E. H. Houghton proceeded through Douai and Bentata tunnels to the Assembly trench. ... At zero hour, 5.30 am. Artillery opened up Barrage on Enemy front line and at zero plus 3 minutes our Infantry advanced. All our 12 mobile guns going forward with the second wave. The infantry reached and captured the Black line at about zero plus 36 minutes ...
[At the end of the day] Total casualties 4 killed, 13 wounded, 4 missing.


LOVED AND WAS LOVED

PRIVATE PHILLIPS WELCH


Is this just an ordinary gravestone inscription or are we meant to hear an echo of the words of the second verse of Canada's most famous war poem?

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
[In Flanders Fields John McCrae 1915]

I hear an echo of the poem; loved and was loved rather than loved and were loved because we're only talking about one man not all the dead.
Eighteen-year-old Phillips Welch - some sources spell his first name without the 's', others spell his surname Welsh not Welch - enlisted on 3 January 1916. Born on 11 March 1899, he was two months short of his seventeenth birthday. This means that when he was killed in action on 10 April, he was eighteen and one month. He probably didn't confess to being so young when he joined up as he would have been too young to serve abroad. No doubt he could convince the authorities he was older since he was 5' 9'' , tall for those days, with a 38" chest and a 4" chest expansion. All this information is contained in a soldier's attestation form.
Welch served with the 7th Company Canadian Machine Gun Corps and was killed in action on the second day of the fighting at Vimy Ridge.


ALAS! WHAT LINKS
OF LOVE THAT MORN
HAS WAR'S RUDE HAND
ASUNDER TORN

PRIVATE JAMES WINNING CHAPMAN


Alas! what links of love that morn
Has War's rude hand asunder torn!
For ne'er was field so sternly fought,
And ne'er was conquest dearer bought.
Here piled in common slaughter sleep
Those whom affection long shall weep:
Here rests the sire, that ne'er shall strain
His orphans to his heart again;
The son, whom, on his native shore,
The parent's voice shall bless no more;
The bridegroom, who has hardly press'd
His blushing consort to his breast;
The husband, whom through many a year
Long love and mutual faith endear.
Thou canst not name one tender tie,
But here dissolved its relics lie!

Stanza XX The Field of Waterloo
Sir Walter Scott 1815

As with the field of Waterloo on 18 June 1815 so with Vimy Ridge, on 9 April 1917; the bodies of fathers, sons, husbands and new bridegrooms lay scattered everywhere, the cause of heartbreak in homes across the world. The War Graves Commission site records that 6,851 men died in France on 9 April 1917, the first day of the Second Battle of Arras, of which Vimy Ridge was a part. British and Prussian casualties (allies in 1815) on 18 June 1815 were in the region of 42,000. I haven't been able to discover how many of these were dead.
Private Chapman was an undertaker from Paris, Ontario. Born in Glasgow, he and his family emigrated to Canada before the 1911 census. He served with the 8th Company Canadian Machine Gun Corps and was killed in action on 9 April 1917, his body found in a shall hole four days after the battle with three other members of his gun crew. The nature and extent of the injuries indicated that they had all been hit by a shell.


KILLED IN ACTION
VIMY RIDGE

PRIVATE FRANK LEWIS PORTMORE


War Diary 54th Battalion Canadian Infantry
Vimy Ridge 9 April 1917
Weather, snow & rainstorms. 5.30 am. Bn. attacked, - 350 all ranks in four waves behind 102nd Bn. Frontage LA SALLE to OLD BOOT SAP. Distance about 500 yards. Objective BEER and BLUE trenches. ... Strenuous opposition encountered on our extreme left flank from enemy strong post at OLD BOOT SAP & slight opposition from strong point near BROADMARSH CRATER. All objectives were reached and communication with 42nd Bn. stabilised. ... Our casualties approximately 4 officers & 20 O.R. killed, 5 officers & 100 O.R. wounded - 100 O.R. missing ... "

This was just one episode, for one battalion on one day of the four-day battle for Vimy Ridge, part of the five-week 2nd Battle of Arras. At the end of the four days the Canadians had lost 3,598 killed and 7,004 wounded - but they had captured Vimy Ridge, the high ground that dominated the plain of Douai and had been an Allied objective since the earliest days of the war.
Frank Lewis Portmore, originally one of the 100 missing other ranks, was killed by shell fire in the attack on the ridge. His mother chose his inscription.


"TRUE GLORY
LIES IN NOBLE DEEDS"
CICERO

CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOHN ARMSTRONG PRATT, MC


It's true that Cicero is credited with this statement but it isn't exactly what he said. Three days after Julius Caesar's assassination, what Cicero actually said (in translation) in his attack on the consuls Mark Anthony and Dolabella, was:

" ... it is impossible for me to keep silence respecting the error into which you are both falling; for I believe that you, being both, men of high birth, entertaining lofty views, have been eager to acquire, not money, as some too credulous people suspect, a thing which has at all times been scorned by every honourable and illustrious man, nor power procured by violence and authority such as never ought to be endured by the Roman people, but the affection of your fellow citizens, and glory. But glory is praise for deeds which have been done, and the fame earned by great services to the republic; which is approved by the testimony borne in its favour, not only by every virtuous man, but also by the multitude."
Philippics 1. 12.29

Cicero doesn't mention the word 'noble' but noble deeds are surely those that give great service to the state and if this is how glory is achieved it explains why the words on the cenotaph in Whitehall read, 'The glorious dead'.
William John Armstrong Pratt was the son of Robert and Elizabeth Margaret Pratt. Born in Queen's County, Ireland, he served with the King's Liverpool Regiment and was killed in action during the Third Battle of Albert on 23 August 1918. Three months after his death the London Gazette announced he had been awarded a Military Cross:

"For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty during a raid. He showed great pluck and dash as a company commander, and set a splendid example to his men, being one of the first to enter the enemy line. For three nights previously he had reconnoitred the ground."



NO SOUR SORROW
STAINS OUR THOUGHT OF THEE
YOU LIVE IN HAPPY MEMORY

PRIVATE JOHN FRANCIS WILLIAMS


To be called John Francis Williams makes it very difficult for anyone to track you down, as has been the case with Private JF Williams. This despite the fact that his parents stated in the War Grave Commission records that he was born in Cardiff and lived in Blaina, Monmouthshire.
Williams appears on the war memorial in St Peter's Church, Blaina as Trooper JF Williams of the 1/3rd Co. of London Yeomanry. But the 1/3rd County of London Yeomanry were not in Palestine in April 1917, nor were either the 1st or the 2nd. His medal card indicates that he was entitled to the 1914-15 Star and that he entered the theatre of war in Egypt on 28 April 1915. But that is the end of the information on him.
It's a shame not to have been able to pin him down as I rather admire the inscription his parents chose; their insistence on not letting grief cloud their happy memories. It is not a quotation so they composed it themselves. Where did they get 'sour sorrow' from? It's a telling phrase and makes a good contrast with Shakespeare's 'sweet sorrow'.


BEHOLD HE TAKETH AWAY
AND WHO SHALL SAY UNTO HIM
WHAT DOEST THOU

PRIVATE CHARLES ANDERSON


This bitter rail against God is not what we've come to expect from Job who is more usually quoted as having said, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord" [Job 1:21]. Here [Job 9:12], Job speaks of the unchallengeable power of God who has made the universe, can move mountains, shake the earth and, if he feels like it, "breaketh me with a tempest, and multiplieth my wounds without cause". Some bible commentators claim that Job is simply speaking of his own unworthiness in relation to God's perfection, and maybe he is, but it feels as though Private Anderson's mother is definitely quoting these lines from Job as a challenge, a complaint against God.
The sense of hostility towards authority is compounded by the fact that Anderson's inscription, which is original and strong, is the only information the family have provided for their son. The War Graves Commission register doesn't have a Christian name for him nor any family information.
Charles Anderson was the son of Charles Anderson, a fisherman 'on his own account' from King's Lynn in Norfolk, and his wife, Fanny. Unusually, under the census heading 'occupation', which almost all women leave blank, Fanny has written 'Home duties'. Private Anderson's medal card shows he was not entitled to the 1914-15 Star so he didn't join the army until 1916 when, aged 18, he would have been conscripted - the Military Service Act having been introduced in January 1916. He served with the 1st/5th Norfolk Regiment in Egypt and Palestine and was killed in action on the opening day of the Second Battle of Gaza when the regiment suffered 75% casualties.


SECOND SON OF A. BONAR LAW

LIEUTENANT CHARLES JOHN LAW


"Lieutenant Charles Law, second son of the Right Hon. A. Bonar Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was previously reported wounded and missing, is now believed to have died of wounds on April 19. Lieutenant Law, who was 20 years of age, held a commission in the King's Own Scottish Borderers. On April 26 it was reported from Germany through Holland that he had been "captured by the Turks in the recent fighting in Palestine. ... Mr Bonar Law's indisposition, to which reference was made in the House of Commons yesterday, is due to the strain of overwork during the past few weeks, coupled with anxiety regarding the fate of his son."
Dundee Evening Telegraph
8 June 1917

"Mr Bonar Law's Son, a tribute from 'one who knew him':
He was the embodiment of all that is best in Public School life. He played all the games with enthusiasm and he loved the open air. He was modest, affectionate, and full of the joy of life. He was intensely popular with his brother officers, and, as I know from letters which have been received, he was beloved by the men he led. His death marks the breaking of yet another lamp which, having shone so brightly over the home, was surely destined to shed its radiance far afield."
The Times
8 June 1917

"Mr Bonar Law's Son
Mr. Bonar Law has received official confirmation from the Vatican of the fact that his second son, Lieutenant C.J.Law, King's Own Scottish Borderers, is a prisoner with the Turks. A Reuter message from Rome adds that the Vatican has ascertained that Lieutenant Law is being well treated, and that there appears to be no cause whatever for apprehension in regard to him."
The Times
14 June 1917

Cruelly, the Vatican was wrong. The telegram it received had omitted the vital word 'not'. Lieutenant Law was NOT a prisoner of the Turks. And even more cruelly, three months later, Mr Bonar Law's eldest son, Captain James Kidston Law RFC, was killed when his plane was shot down in France. His body was never identified and he is commemorated on the Arras Flying Services Memorial.
Bonar Law chose a brief, factual inscription for his son Charles' headstone, giving his address as 10 Downing Street. This means that he signed for it sometime between 23 October 1922 and 22 May 1923, the dates of his extremely short premiership.


THE BEAUTY OF ISRAEL
IS SLAIN
UPON THE HIGH PLACES

PRIVATE HUGH MCCREATH


Hugh McCreath used David's lament for Saul and Jonathan, who were killed in the battle at Mount Gilboa, for his son, Hugh, killed on the Mansura Ridge in the Second Battle of Gaza: "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!" [2 Samuel 2:19]. The beauty of Israel refers to the flower of the race, and 'thy high places' doesn't mean high in terms of height but in terms of belonging to. Hugh McCreath used the definite article 'the', not the possessive 'thy' for high places.
The Second Battle of Gaza ended in a second defeat for the Egyptian Expeditionary Force just under a month after the first. Allied casualties were huge, greater than the authorities wanted to admit. Official figures were 509 killed, 4,359 wounded, 1,534 missing and 272 taken prisoners of war. However, 767 of the burials in Gaza War Cemetery relate to the dates 17-20 April 1917 and 767 of the names on the Jerusalem Memorial to the missing of the Egypt and Palestine campaigns.
Private Hugh McCreath was one of the nine children of Isabella and Hugh McCreath, a ships' carpenter from Partick in Lanarkshire. He and his younger brother, Gilbert, joined up together receiving adjacent army numbers. Both served with the Army Cyclist Corps in the 52nd Lowland Division, and both went with it to Gallipoli, arriving on 28 July 1915. After Gallipoli, the Corps went to Egypt and then to Palestine, arriving in time to take part in the first and second battles of Gaza. Gilbert survived the war.


MARCHING TO THE PROMISED LAND

SECOND LIEUTENANT FREDERICK JOHN BARTLEY


This could be a coincidence but I don't think so. The Promised Land has a dual identity, it is both heaven and the physical land that God promised to Abraham, which was to stretch,: "from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates" [Genesis 15:18]. No one can quite decide whether 'the river of Egypt' referred to is the Nile or to the Wadi-el-Arish, but whichever it was Frederick Bartley was in the Promised Land when he was killed in the assault on Mansura Ridge in the First Battle of Gaza on 26 March 1917.
However, Bartley's inscription, 'Marching to the promised land', is a quote from the first verse of the hymn Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow, not a statement of fact, even though factually

Through the night of doubt and sorrow
Onward goes the pilgrim band,
Singing songs of expectation,
Marching to the promised land.

And once he was dead, Bartley was of course, on his way to the promised land of heaven:

Where the one almighty Father
Reigns in love for evermore.

What I find curious is the fact that the first time I come across this inscription,it is on a grave in Palestine. I have not seen it in France or Flanders.
An auctioneer in East Anglia, Bartley was a member of the 1st/5th Battalion Essex Regiment, a Territorial battalion. Posted to Gallipoli in May 1915, the battalion was withdrawn to Egypt in December, spent 1916 defending the Suez Canal before moving to Palestine early in 1917.






TRANSPLANTED
HUMAN WORTH WILL BLOOM
TO PROFIT OTHERWHERE

PRIVATE FREDERICK MILLER


This is yet more evidence of the popularity of Tennyson's poetry in headstone inscriptions. Frederick Miller's comes from In Memoriam, the poem Tennyson wrote following the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam. Hallam was only 22, yet Tennyson was able to believe that Hallam's youthful life wasn't wasted by his death since his potential would be fulfilled in the next life.

Nor blame I death, because he bare
The use of virtue out of earth:
I know transplanted human worth
Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

The only thing Tennyson's blamed death for was that:

He puts our lives so far apart
We cannot hear each other speak.

An enquiry by Miller's family to the Australian Red Cross in October 1918 elicited the following witness statement:

"This man was killed by my side on the 5th October 1917 and was buried by myself and another man on the morning of the 6th October 1917. He was buried in the field. It was impossible to get his body back to a soldiers cemetery as the shelling was very heavy and the cemetery was so far away. This man was a short dark man."

Another witness told the Red Cross:

"Miller was my mate. This grave position has been smashed up since, as the Huns came through, it was on the right of Zonnebeke. Broodseinde road (from Zonnebeke) just below Daisy Wood."

Miller was 'buried in the field'. It was not until December 1924 that his body was discovered in an unmarked grave, identified by his clothing and his discs. This was three years after the Graves Registration Unit had stopped scouring the battlefields for bodies and yet plenty continued - and continue - to turn up.




"SWEET IT IS TO HAVE DONE
THE THING ONE OUGHT"
TENNYSON

PRIVATE WILLIAM JOHN WILSON


Private Wilson's inscription comes from Tennyson's The Princess, published in 1847, which addresses the idea of the education of women. Whilst the context of the poem throws little light on Wilson's inscription the sentiment is very pertinent. Many men would have recognised this feeling of satisfaction in knowing that you were doing your duty. Lavinia Talbot recognised it in her son Gilbert's army career, writing in the memoir she compiled:

"I think the definite, and, until the war was over, the unquestioned rightness of his serving in the army produced a feeling of quiet and satisfaction which made his soldier's life very happy."

Talbot was killed in July 1915. William John Wilson's life was very different from Gilbert Talbot's. Talbot was the son of the Bishop of Winchester, educated at Winchester and Oxford and related to some of the grandest families in England. Wilson was a farmer from Warbrook in Western Australia whose education had been gained by correspondence course, yet both men took satisfaction from knowing that they were doing "the thing one ought".
Wilson, who served with the 48th Battalion Australian Infantry, died of wounds received in the savage fighting at Pozieres when the War Diary recorded:

"The Battalion casualties 5th to 7th [August] inclusive were: 6 officers killed ... , 14 officers wounded ... 98 other ranks killed, 404 other ranks wounded, 76 others ranks missing."


THERE IS NO DEATH
CLOSER IS HE THAN BREATHING
NEARER THAN HANDS AND FEET

SECOND LIEUTENANT THOMAS HANSON AVERILL


"All who know him will feel a sense of personal loss on hearing that Thomas Hanson Averill has been killed in action. His was so bright and attractive a personality that we do not wonder at the affectionate way in which his brother officers have written about him. For him one cannot feel sorry at all, for his parents one cannot feel sorry enough; although they have so much reason to be proud of such a son."
Witley (Worcs) Parish Magazine
October 1917

His Commanding Officer wrote:
"I and all the officers and men of the battalion feel your son's death most keenly; he was always a keen hardworking and cheerful officer. We shall all miss him very much as he was very popular, and was such a genuine and straightforward man, always reliable - one whom, in these times, we can ill afford to lose."

The second and third lines of Thomas Averill's inscription come from Tennyson's poem, The Higher Pantheon. To Tennyson, God could be found in nature, in "The sun, the moon, the stars, the hills and the plains", He was everywhere. But whereas to Tennyson "Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet" refers to God, I have a feeling that to the Averills it was their son they were referring to. The clue is in the first line of the inscription, "There is no death". This is the title of a well known book on Spiritualism written by the British author Florence Marryat in 1891.

The personal information on Thomas Hanson Averill comes from Sandra Taylor's research for the website Remember the Fallen.


READY WHEN CALLED

PRIVATE ARCHIBALD RICHMOND MIDDLETON


Private Middleton enlisted in October 1915; he answered the 'call to arms'. But I don't think that this is the 'call' his father was referring to when he chose his son's inscription. The call Archibald Middleton answered was God's. Christians are constantly warned that they should be prepared to meet their God, in other words that they should always live godly lives because they never know when they will be called to meet their maker - "ye know neither the day nor the hour". Middleton, a Presbyterian, was, according to his father, ready when God called him.
Middleton served with the 31st Battalion Australian Infantry. He had embarked from Australia in March 1916 and was killed six weeks before the war ended. According to a witness:

"He was of 31st Battalion, A.2. 5ft 4, medium and 30. Came from New South Wales. Beyond Bellecourt near the railway line on September 29th 1918 at 10. a.m. we were resting in shelters during the attack when Middleton was wounded by a shell. He was carried out by two prisoners of war. He was conscious when I last saw him."

Another witness reported, "He died at a field D/S about two miles back from Bellicourt". The Officer Commanding 20th Casualty Clearing Station confirmed, "Admitted 20th Casualty Clearing Station 30.9.18. Died 1.10.18. Wounds: - shell wounds chest and left leg".


A CAREER SO BRILLIANT
LAID ASIDE
FOR THE CALL TO ARMS
LOVED BY ALL

CAPTAIN FRANCIS JOHN PIGGOTT


Francis John Piggott was working in marine insurance before he joined up in February 1916. After several months training in both Australia and England, he arrived in France in November 1916 to serve with the 36th Battalion Australian Infantry. Australia's digitised records are phenomenal and one site, the Harrower Collection, documents every single aspect of Piggott's military career together with the bureaucracy surrounding his death.
Piggott was killed on the third day of the Battle of Messines. The Battalion War Diary records the action but doesn't mention his death:

10/6/17: At 3 a.m. threw out Advance Posts on Ulster Avenue and Ulster Drive to line "O" and Tilleui Farm ... At 5 p.m.received orders to storm La Potterie Farm System of trenches. Zero time 11 p.m. Organised 6 Officers and 200 men who carried the works killing 80 Boche and sending back 5 prisoners.

An enquiry by his mother to the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau elicited the information that:

Captain F.J. Piggott of C. Coy. of the 36th Battn was killed on the night of the 10th June just prior to the attack at La Potteril (sic) Farm. He and four others were killed instantly by a large shell which fell into the trench. His body was brought back to the Casualty Clearing Station and handed over for burial.

Other witnesses weren't quite so sure about the 'killed instantly'; one reported that he had been "badly wounded through the lung at Messines and died at the dressing station at Charing Cross".


BETTER A WOODEN CROSS
THAN BE ONE
WHO COULD HAVE GONE
AND DID NOT

SAPPER FREDERICK WILLIAM JEEVES


Sapper Jeeves' wife chose his inscription. She took the words from a letter he had written from the front, which she quoted when she filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia:

"I would rather lie with a little wooden cross above my head, than be one of those who could have gone and did not."

The words inspired his brother-in-law, Clarence Herbert Cazaly, to write 'In Memoriam Sapper Frederick Jeeves'. The poem, published in the Lilydale Express on 25 October 1918, begins with the same sentiment:

"I would rather lie," he said,
"With wooden cross above my head,
Than be one who could have gone
And who did not." By the Somme
In a soldier's grave he lies,
Dust of France upon his eyes,
Robe of honour on his heart;
And in token of his part,
A wooden cross above his head,
Calm amid the Austral dead,
By the waters of the Somme,
On the road to Amiens.

Jeeves, a motor mechanic and garage proprietor from Croydon, Lilydale, Victoria, joined up on 1 February 1916 and embarked for Europe on 28 July that year. His inscription has to be seen against the background of Australian resistance to the introduction of conscription. He served with the 6th Field Company Australian Engineers and was killed on 1 August 1918, as reported in the War Diary:

No.4 Section, while building S.P. Shelters for 22nd Battalion in railway cutting at O.28.c.3.8. came in for a heavy "area shoot", Sapper F.W.Jeeves being killed and Sapper H.Q. Boutchard wounded.

Jeeve's platoon commander, Lieutenant Carleton, described him as, "Absolutely one of the very best".



THEN THE GODS PITIED HIM
AND TOOK HIM TO THEIR MIDST

PRIVATE ARTHUR PROUT


Who dies in youth and vigour dies the best,
Struck thro' with wounds, all honest on the breast
Homer Iliad Bk viii, 1.371

No one knows but that death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man
Plato 'Apologia of Socrates sec. 29

Prout's inscription makes sense if you take the view that to die in youth is to die the best, if death may be the greatest of blessings. It follows on from yesterday's inscription, 'Whom the gods love dies young', and it informs that very popular verse of Laurence Binyon's, now regularly recited at Remembrance Day services:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Binyon probably meant the polar opposite from the way the verse is taken today - that tragically those who died in the war never had the opportunity to grow old. To Binyon, and to others, those who died young would be young forever unlike the survivors who would end up 'sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything' (As You Like It Act II. Sc. viii, Shakespeare).
Arthur Prout was 22 when he died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station on the Somme. His mother, Mrs Jessie Prout, requested information from the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, which told her:

"This man was admitted to a dressing station administered by this Field Ambulance on the Bray Corbie Road (map reference approximately Sheet. 62D.J.24.b.) suffering from Bullet wound skull - fracture, and died a few minutes after admission. He was buried by an Army Chaplain close by at a spot known as Cemetery Copse, which has since been made an English Cemetery.
[O.C. 2/3rd H.C. Field Amb. R.A.M.C. B.E.F.]


WHOM THE GODS LOVE

SECOND LIEUTENANT DAVID PRITCHARD


'Whom the gods love dies young' (Menander), 'He whom the gods love dies young (Hypsaeus), 'He whom the gods love dies young, while he has his strength and senses and wits (Plautus). Byron echoed the ancient authors when he wrote:

"Whom the gods love die young," was said of yore,
And many deaths do they escape by this:
The death of friends, and that which slays even more,
The death of friendship, love, youth, all that is,
Except mere breath.
Don Juan (Canto iv st. 12)

The same sentiment lay behind the passage in Horace Vachell's 'The Hill' when the Headmaster told the assembled school that one of their number had just been killed in the South African War:

"I would sooner see any of you struck down in the flower of youth than living on to lose, long before death comes, all that makes life worth living. Better death a thousand times, than gradual decay of mind and spirit; better death than faithlessness, indifference and uncleaness."

I'm not suggesting for a moment that these were Dr Joseph Pritchard's sentiments when he chose his son's inscription. The phrase had come to mean that the dead person was beloved of the gods rather than that it was better to be dead, beloved of the gods because he was beautiful, graceful, accomplished, happy ...
David Pritchard's life and death is excellently covered on Bradford Grammar School's memorial site. Pritchard served with the 1st Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers, along with Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. He was killed by a high explosive shell on the same night as Sassoon's friend, David Thomas. Thomas, Pritchard and another officer, all killed on the same night, were buried the following night with Graves and Sassoon both present.
Many people wrote many complimentary things about young David Pritchard, all lending credence to the idea that he was beloved of the gods, but it was what his father wrote of his son that is the most touching: "David was just an ordinary boy. He was afraid of the dark. He disliked to get hurt ... you will see what an ordinary boy can do if he sets himself to do it, and what one ordinary boy can do any ordinary boy can do".



BUT IF YOU ONLY KNEW
THE WHOLE GREAT BRITISH ARMY
WAS MADE FROM STUFF LIKE YOU

FRANK CAIN


Frank Cain's inscription comes from 'Barnabas' by George Willis a poet of almost complete obscurity who wrote one poem for which he is occasionally remembered. That poem, 'Any Soldier to His Son', was also the title of a very slim volume of verses - eighteen in total - published by George Allen and Unwin in 1919.
The poem 'Barnabas' has been exceptionally difficult to find so I am going to write it out in full, although I think this may just be an extract rather than the whole poem.

We march in fours to-day, mate, but tomorrow man by man,
For it's "Up the Line" to-night, mate, and dodge it if you can;
You may work it out in billets, with your synovitis knee,
But all you'll get tomorrow is a whacking great M.D.
It's a damned, infernal pity you should have to do your whack,
But better men than you are have trod the self-same track.
You ain't the only pebble on this beach: there's plenty here
Been out three winters, and you joined up this year.
You're a poor, faint-hearted soldier, but if you only knew,
The whole great British Army was made up from stuff like you.

It's a strange sentiment for an inscription, which Cain's father, Francis Cain a coal miner in Northshields, chose; his wife had died in 1913. What did he mean by it? George Willis, about whom I have discovered nothing, is credited with having been a front-line soldier himself. This is because it was felt he 'knew' how the front-line soldier felt. Whether Willis's experience of war was first-hand or not, he was certainly not someone who glamourised it. In one reviewer's opinion, Willis's poetry "will do more than any measured argument or fiery denunciation to aid in the preservation of peace". The final verse of 'Any Soldier to His Son' shows just exactly how little he glamourised war:

You'd like to be a soldier and go to France some day?
By all the dead in Delville Wood, by all the nights I lay
Between our lines and Fritz's before they brought me in;
By this old wood-and-leather stump, that once was flesh and skin;
By all the lads who crossed with me but never crossed again,
By all the prayers their mothers and their sweethearts prayed in vain,
Before the things that were that day should ever more befall
May God in common pity destroy us one and all!

Frank Cain, came from Chirton, Northshields, Tyne and Wear. Before the war he worked in a coal mine, like all the men in his family. He served with the Drake Battalion, Royal Naval Division and died in a Casualty Clearing Station of wounds received during the Battle of the Ancre, the final stage of the Somme Campaign.


TRANQUIL YOU LIE ...
YOUR MEMORY HALLOWED
IN THE LAND YOU LOVED

LIEUTENANT COLONEL RICHARD CHESTER CHESTER-MASTER, DSO AND BAR


Lt. Colonel Chester-Muster's inscription comes from the first verse of the once very popular and highly emotional Remembrance hymn O Valiant Hearts, written by Sir John Arkwright in 1917.

O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through clouds of conflict and through battle flame;
Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.

Chester-Muster was a professional soldier who had served in the South African War. In 1914 he was on the reserve list; he was also Chief Constable of Gloucestershire. He rejoined his regiment on the outbreak of war and went with it to France. He was shot by a sniper on 30 August 1917. His DSO and Bar bear testament to his qualities as a soldier and the Acting Chief Constable's tribute, distributed to all the police stations in Gloucestershire to notify them of his death, bear testament to his qualities as a man:

"In him the country has lost a brave and experienced soldier; the county of Gloucestershire has lost a valued and high-minded official; the Police Force has lost a head who had devoted the best energies of his life, since he became Chief Constable, to their official and private welfare; and a great many people have lost a friend whom they had learnt to honour and love. He has passed away in the midst of what promised to be a brilliant military career, leaving behind him a memory which will never bee forgotten of a "gallant gentleman" in the best and noblest sense of the word."

Richard Chester-Master's wife, Geraldine, chose his inscription. Born Geraldine Mary Rose Arkwright, she was the sister of Sir John Arkwright, the author of 'O Valiant hearts'.




IN LOVING MEMORY
OF OUR ONLY CHILD
R.I.P.

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN GEORGE JOSEPH WILLIAMSON


"At 4 am on the 1st September orders were received to change direction left and advance on Wulverghem ... The advance encountered no serious opposition until the Kemmel-Neuve Eglise road was reached at 9 am. Here the right of the battalion was held up by heavy machine gun and trench mortar fire from the Neuve Eglise Ridge. Our trench mortars were brought to bear on the German machine guns and silenced those nearest the battalion. At 10.30 a forward movement was made, but B Company lost all its officers, killed or wounded, the right platoon of C Company lost 2nd Lieutenant Williamson killed and most of his men either killed or wounded."
The Campaigns and History of the Royal Irish Regiment 1902-1922

7th Battalion Royal Irish Regiment War Diaries
Sept 1/2 1918 W of Wulverghem
Casualties incurred during an attack by the Batt: -
Killed - 2 Officers and 15 OR
Wounded - 3 Officers and 55 OR and 5 OR missing

Letter from Williamson's Commanding Officer to his parents:
"There is no doubt at all that he was the best officer in the company, and he was very popular with everyone. His men would have followed him anywhere ... Whenever there was a difficulty, or an awkward job had to be tackled with judgment or tact, I always knew that I could rely on him to take it in hand and see it through properly."

Born, brought up and educated in Ireland where the family were Roman Catholic, Williamson went to RMC Sandhurst in May 1917, was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the Royal Irish Regiment in April 1918, served with them in France and Flanders from June 1918 and was killed in action at Wulverghem that September. As the inscription says, he was his parents' only child.


SUCH A DEATH
AS THESE HAVE WON
GIVES THE TRUE MEASURE
OF THEIR WORTH

SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT BRIAN HOLMES


YORKSHIRE POST AND LEEDS INTELLIGENCER
Friday 7 July 1916
Sec-Lieut. Robert Brian Holmes, King's Royal Rifle Corps, who died of wounds on July 1, was the sixth and youngest son of the late Alfred Holmes and Mrs Holmes, of Udimore, Sussex, and Ashfield, Bingley. Educated at Oatlands, Harrogate, and at Haileybury, he was a partner in the firm of J.R.Holmes & Sons, Bingley, and at the commencement of the war enlisted in the Public Schools Battalion. He was granted a commission in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, and was sent to France in October 1915. He was wounded last spring by the accidental explosion of a bomb, but very shortly rejoined his regiment.

Despite the influence of the Classics in British education, especially in the public schools - Holmes was educated at Haileybury - classical authors do not provide many inscriptions. Except of course for Horace whose Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori always remained popular even after the savaging Wilfred Owen gave it in his poem of the same name. In fact, this is the inscription on Hume Sanders Wingard's headstone, just five graves down from Holmes'.
Kate Holmes, Robert's mother, chose his inscription. It comes from Pericles Funeral Oration taken from Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War:

"And of how few Hellenes can it be said of them, that their deeds when weighed in the balance have been found equal to their fame! Methinks that such a death as theirs has been gives the true measure of a man's worth."

J.R.Holmes & Sons, the firm in which Holmes had been a partner, were brewers, taken over by Hammonds in 1919. Was his death a material factor here? They were a prosperous family. The 1911 census shows there were seven people in the household: four members of the family, a cook, a parlour maid and a house maid in a house with eighteen rooms.


DAVID BELOVED

DRIVER DAVID WILLIAM SULLIVAN


This is a very neat epitaph since the name David is thought to derive from the Hebrew word 'dwd', which means beloved. David Sullivan's mother, Evelyn, chose it, perhaps fully aware of its meaning when she first decided on the name at his birth - never thinking it would make a suitable inscription for his grave.
Fourteen-year-old Sullivan, the son of a glass embosser, gave his trade as 'messenger' in the 1911 census. He served with "B" Battery, 173rd Brigade Royal Field Artillery, part of the 36th Division. The Division took part in the attack on Langemark on 16 August 1917; Sullivan was killed that day.


WE LOVED HIM

DRIVER THOMAS HALLIWELL


Such a simple inscription - 'We loved him'. And who were those who loved him? As one of the seven surviving children of Thomas and Mary Elizabeth Halliwell, he was loved by his parents and brothers and sisters Jane, George, Henry, Margaret, John and Charles Halliwell.
The Halliwells lived in Wigan, Lancashire where in 1911 Thomas Halliwell senior and his three oldest sons all worked underground in a coal mine. Thomas senior was a hewer and George, Thomas junior and Henry were all trammers. Trammers were the men who pushed the 'trams', wheeled carts carrying the coal, along the rails away from the coal face to the surface. It was hard, exhausting work. In 1911 George, Thomas junior and Henry were 14, 13 and 11.
Halliwell served with "D" Battary, 87th Brigade Royal Field Artillery and was killed in action on 24 April 1918 at Kemmel during the Battle of the Lys. It seems to have been rather a long time before his parents were informed.

Wigan Observer
27 July 1918
A NEWTOWN DATALLER KILLED
The parents of Dvr. Thomas Halliwell, of the Royal Field Artillery, whose home is at 11, Stanley Street, Newtown, have been notified that he has been killed in action. Dvr. Halliwell, who was 20 years old and single, enlisted in March last year. He was last employed as a dataller at the Garswood Hall Collieries.


THE LAST ENEMY
TO BE DESTROYED
IS DEATH

CORPORAL ARTHUR SAMUEL BENNELL


Chelmsford Chronicle
26 October 1917
Essex Roll of Honour
Cpl. A.S. Bennell R.F.A. son of Mr and Mrs Bennell 41 Queen Street, Colchester, was killed in action aged 21. Before the war he was employed by Messrs. E. Scott and Son, grocers. Three other brothers are still serving.

Corporal Bennell's father, John, chose his inscription. It comes from I Corinthians 15:26 in the English Revised Version of the New Testament, first published in 1881. The passage declares that Christ's death and resurrection have destroyed death so that when we die we will have overcome our last enemy and are assured of everlasting life.
Bennell's inscription is yet more evidence of comfort families received from their belief in an afterlife. To some it was just the thought that they would all meet again whereas to others it was the full Christian belief in the resurrection and the life of the world to come.


IRELAND

PRIVATE VINCENT ARNOLD


'Ireland', this one word summarises a world of conflicting patriotism, loyalty, heartbreak and pain.
Vincent Arnold was born in Clonmult, a tiny community close to Ballydonagh More in Co. Cork. His family were Roman Catholics and Vincent was the youngest of his parents' seven children. Aged 20 in 1911 he was working as an ironmonger's assistant in Youghal, just 13 miles from where he was born; aged 23 in 1915 he was serving in the British army.
Ireland was in turmoil. The question of Home Rule had divided the country and not just north versus south and Catholics versus Protestants. Just a month after the outbreak of war, John Redmond, the Irish Nationalist politician, pledged his support for the Allied cause and urged members of the Irish Volunteers to join the British army, claiming that, "The interests of Ireland - of the whole of Ireland - are at stake in this war". Many Irishmen did enlist, motivated by a sense of adventure, love of Ireland, loyalty to Britain or poverty. Many others saw England's difficulty as Ireland's opportunity and pressed on for independence.
Arnold served in the 7th Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers and died of wounds in Salonika on 22 March 1917. When the war ended and the time came for his family to chose an inscription the turmoil in Ireland had worsened. In January 1919 Sinn Fein formed a breakaway government, Dial Eirann, and declared independence from Britain. In September 1919 the British Government outlawed Sinn Fein and the Dial and then in November 1920, following a period of escalating attacks, ambushes and reprisals, it declared martial law.
Dublin, Belfast and Co. Cork were at the centre of the violence. In December 1920 the centre of Cork City, just 30 miles from Clonmult, was burnt out by British forces and in February 1921 one of the worst atrocities took place in Clonmult itself. Following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in May 1921, which partitioned Ireland, the two sides agreed on a truce. However, this was not the end of the violence as fighting broke out between the republicans who opposed and those who supported the Treaty.
Who loved Ireland more, those who wanted to maintain the union with Britain, those who were happy to support the partitioning of Ireland or those who were determined to achieve full independence? And where did the family of a soldier who had died in the service of the British crown stand? The use of the single, enigmatic word 'Ireland' on Vincent Arnold's headstone gives no clues.


I SHALL SEE MY PILOT
FACE TO FACE
WHEN I HAVE CROST THE BAR

LIEUTENANT RICHARD HUBERT LEWIS UGLOW


War Diary 3rd Canadian Divisional Signal Company
15 June 1917
Working party of 50 for buried cable work. All other work progressing favourably. Lt Uglow seriously wounded by sniper while looking over new points for extension of buried cable system.
16 June 1917
Only small working party for cable burying. Work commenced on installing new Signal office at Adv Div HQrs. Other work of air line construction and tunnel work progressing. Lt.Uglow died of wounds at No. 7 Casualty Clearing Station.
17 June 1917
Lt Uglow buried at Noeux Le Mins. All other work in hand being carried on satisfactorily.

Uglow's mother, Charlotte, chose his inscription. It comes from Tennyson's much-loved poem, Crossing the Bar, except that Tennyson wrote "I hope to see my Pilot face to face when I have crost the bar", whereas Uglow's mother wrote , "I shall see my Pilot face to face when I have crost the bar".


LOVE ONE ANOTHER
AS I HAVE LOVED YOU

CORPORAL RICHARD JACKSON


"Corporal Richard Jackson, who was killed in action last month, served with the Inniskilling Fusiliers. He leaves a wife and seven children who reside at Derrylileagh, Portadown."
Portadown News 21 April 1917

His wife, chose his inscription. It comes from the New Testament, St John 13:34-5:

"A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another."

These are the instructions Jesus gave to his disciples after the Last Supper, knowing that it was his last night on earth. Were these Richard Jackson's instructions to his wife as he left for war, or was this Mrs Jackson's plea to the world in the wake of the war?

Jackson, a farmer, was a member of the Derrylileagh Orange Lodge, which would make him a fierce Protestant, a fierce Unionist and a fierce supporter of the British Crown.


IT IS BETTER TO DIE
FOR OTHERS, DEAR LAD
THAN TO LIVE
FOR ONESELF ALONE

PRIVATE ROBERT WILLIAM PANKHURST BUCKINGHAM


Robert Buckingham was killed in the 47th London Division's capture of Rancourt on 1 September 1918. According to the Divisional History, the 15th Battalion London Regiment (Prince of Wales Own Civil Service Rifles), part of 140th Brigade, successfully took the west edge of St Pierre Vaast Wood "with many prisoners, and a motor ambulance complete with driver and two doctors". The troops were facing a newly-arrived German division but apparently "its quality was not remarkably good, however, and the morale of prisoners taken in large numbers later on fell distinctly low".
Private Buckingham's sister, Alice, signed for his inscription. Nine years older than him, she was an elementary school teacher in Croydon. Can I hear a sisterly attempt to encourage a dubious soldier of his duty, or am I imagining things?


PEACE HATH HIGHER TESTS
OF MANHOOD
THAN BATTLE EVER KNEW

PRIVATE ARCHIBALD IZZATT


Private Izzatt's widow, Margaret, chose his inscription. It's a relatively well-known quotation from a virtually unknown poem, The Hero, by a now almost forgotten American poet, John Greenleaf Whittier. (1807-1892). The poem celebrates the actions of another American, Samuel Gridley Howe, who, inspired by Byron, went to fight for Greece in its War of Independence. Whittier's claim is that you don't need to lament the passing of the age of chivalry because wherever freedom is in danger the Bayards and the Sidneys, the knights 'without reproach or fear' can still be found. However, to Whittier, a fervent abolitionist, you didn't need to take up arms in a military manner in order to fight for freedom.

But dream not helm and harness
The sign of valour true;
Peace hath higher tests of manhood
Than battle ever knew.

Izzatt served with the 1st Battalion Black Watch and was killed within three months of the outbreak of war. This suggests to me that he was a regular soldier, his army number, 5857, indicating that he joined up in 1894. He would have been 18. Before that the 1891 census shows that at the age of 15 he was a miner.
The Black Watch crossed to France on 14 August 1914 and had been in action ever since, taking part in the fighting retreat and the race to the sea. Izzatt was killed at Gheluvelt. His body was not recovered until April 1921 when he was identified by his kilt and his spoon. Given the number of times a spoon is recorded as the means of identification, I am assuming that many were marked with the serviceman's initials and number.
Izzatt is buried in Bedford House Cemetery, a concentration cemetery where there are only 2,194 identified graves out of 5,139 burials.


RELIEF COMPLETE

CAPTAIN ALLAN MACDOUGALL


"RELIEF COMPLETE"
[Mr W.H. Davison, Mayor of Kensington, writes: - "I have just received the enclosed poem, written at the front by a brother officer in memory of Captain Allan MacDougall, of the Royal Fusiliers, who was recently killed in action. He had just written the message in his pocket-book: - 'O.C. - - Royal Fusiliers - Relief complete,' but was killed before he was able to sign the memorandum. Captain MacDougall was born in North Uist, in the Hebrides. From there he went to New Zealand, whence he came to New College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar, obtaining a First in History. He was gazetted as a subaltern in the - Royal Fusiliers in October 1914."] (N.B. censorship meant that The Times couldn't print the number of the battalion, which was the 22nd.)

Not where in grey surges of unnumbered miles
Rises the Coronach of the Hebrides;
Nor far away where molten sunlight smiles
On Southern Seas;
Not from the cloistered strife of Academe,
Spent with its subtle warfare, bowed with years
Of honoured labour, did'st thou pass supreme
Amongst thy peers:
But in the blasting hurricane of the Fray,
Deaf to its roar, unheeding of its toll,
Humbly before the Altar did'st thou lay
Thy splendid Soul.
So thou art gone, but who that lives can mourn
The promise of thy manhood, who by fire
Tried and accepted, did'st endure to scorn
The world's desire?
Rather we pray that we who hold the fort
May with an equal courage pace our beat,
Till, unashamed, we can at last report
"Relief complete."
August 3, 1916 P.H.Y.

The above was printed in The Times on 18 August 1916, ten days later the newspaper printed another tribute, from "an Oxford correspondent" who wrote that, having taken a First in English (not history), MacDougall,

"was appointed successively Assistant Lecturer in English at University College, Nottingham, Assistant Lecturer at the University of Belfast, and Lecturer at Bedford College, London. On the outbreak of war he enlisted, soon received a commission in the Royal Fusiliers, and became a first-rate officer. His high spirits and sense of humour and his union of courage and resource made him a leader of men. He was a faithful friend and a most loveable character."



WE ASKED LIFE OF THEE
AND THOU HAS GIVEN HIM LIFE
FOR EVERMORE

PRIVATE ROBERT EDWARD RHODES


Robert Rhodes' family prayed that he would survive - that he would live. God heard their prayers and gave Rhodes eternal life. I've come across this inscription before in the war cemeteries but each time I see it I get the feeling that, for the family, this was the wrong answer.
Rhodes was a nineteen-year-old bicycle enameller from Newcastle-under-Lyme when he joined the army in 1915. He served with the 12th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, which took part in the opening of the Passchendaele Offensive on 31 July 1917, and in the Battle of Langemarck on 16 August. After which the regimental history records that:

"the wet weather and the arrangement of new tactics to suit the new elastic defence of the Germans imposed a long interval in the operations; and although minor assaults were delivered here and there, no further concerted movement took place in this area until September 20th".

Rhodes was killed during this period. His brother, Albert, who was 18 years older than him, chose his inscription.


WHO THROUGH AGE
COULD HAVE RETURNED
BUT CHOSE TO STAY

DRIVER WILLIAM HENRY BRUNSDON


William Henry Brunsdon enlisted on 30 January 1915. He was just 17. To serve in the British army you had to be 18, and to serve abroad, 19. However, until the introduction of conscription in January 1916 you did not have to prove your age you just had to state it. If you looked 19 the army believed you. If you were 19 and didn't look it they probably didn't believe you. The army wanted men not boys. You needed to be able to carry your pack, which weighed at least 25 kg, rising to 41 kg as the war went on, and march long distances carrying it. This was the reason for the age qualification, not for any child protection reasons. This is why the navy accepted boys at 16 - you didn't need to be able to march carrying a pack. Brunsdon's medal card indicates that he was entitled to the 1915 Star having gone to France in December 1915, still only 17.
In the autumn of 1916, after the introduction of conscription and the death of many underage soldiers in the Somme campaign, the army agreed to remove them from the front line - if they wanted to go. Brunsdon obviously didn't. He was killed in action near Ypres on 23 July 1917.


EVER IN OUR THOUGHTS
PERCY, HERBERT, ARTHUR
CISS & AMY
R.I.P.

PIONEER ARTHUR CHARLES HUGHES


I picked this inscription to show the wider community of mourning that can be associated with a single war death. I thought it would be easy to show who Percy, Herbert, Arthur, Ciss and Amy were, but it turned out to be very difficult. The War Graves Commission only had Hughes' initials, AC, which always makes life difficult, but eventually he turned up in the 1911 census as Charles Hughes, living with his children - Percy, Herbert, Arthur, Lydia (Ciss?) and Amy - as well as with Alice Hughes, his wife of nineteen years.
Hughes attested in September 1915. When asked for the name of his next-of-kin he gave it as Alice M Wilson, describing the relationship as "Friend (as wife)". They had obviously never married. Alice's name is not listed on the headstone. Was she dead? The uncertainty of her legal name makes her very difficult to trace.


THERE'S A COTTAGE HOME
IN ENGLAND
WHERE HIS MOTHER SITS AND WEEPS

RIFLEMAN PETER THOMAS REDMOND


There's a lonely grave in Flanders
Where a brave young hero sleeps;
There's a cottage home in England
Where a mother sits and weeps.
"He nobly answered duty's call,
He gave his life for one and all."

Mrs Elizabeth Redmond chose her son's inscription, quoting from a popular piece of verse that appeared quite often in the In Memoriam columns of newspapers. However, Mr and Mrs Redmond did not have "A cottage home in England", they lived in a three-roomed dwelling in Corporation St, West Ham with six of their nine children who were aged from 26 to 12. This was in 1911 when seventeen-year-old Peter Redmond was working as a shop porter.
Redmond served with the 21st Battalion London Regiment (First Surrey Rifles) and died at a Field Ambulance Station on 3 May 1917 during the Second Battle of Ypres.


A NOBLE TYPE OF
GOOD HEROIC WOMANHOOD

STAFF NURSE NELLIE SPINDLER


LEEDS NURSE KILLED BY THE HUNS
Victim of Bombardment in France
Miss Nellie Spindler, who, from 1912 to 1915, was a nurse at the Leeds Township Infirmary, was killed in France on August 21st by a German shell during the bombardment on a stationary hospital where she was engaged.
She was 26 years of age, and was a daughter of the Chief Inspector of Police at Stanley Road, Wakefield. In November 1915, she left Leeds to take up duties as nurse at a military hospital in Staffordshire, where she remained until last June, when she proceeded to France.
[Leeds Mercury Tuesday 28 August 1917]

The Leeds Mercury published further particulars of Nurse Spindler's death in the following day's paper under the headline - THE MURDERED NURSE.

A letter has been received from Miss M. Wood, sister-in-charge of the hospital who states:-
"Your daughter became unconscious immediately she was hit, and she passed away perfectly peacefully at 11.30 a.m. - just 20 minutes afterwards. I was with her at the time; but after the first minute of two she did not know me. It was a great mercy she was oblivious to her surroundings, for the shells continued to fall in for the rest of the day."

The Germans had been systematically shelling the area round the Casualty Clearing Stations at Brandhoek, convincing the British that they were intentionally targeting them and forcing their temporary closure.
Nellie Spindler's mother chose her inscription, which comes from Santa Filomena, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's tribute to Florence Nightingale, which he wrote in 1857:

A lady with a lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.


SLEEP BEAUT DARL
UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN

SERJEANT ALBERT JAMES STARES


Serjeant Stares, "Beaut darl" to his mother who chose his inscription - beautiful darling perhaps? - served with the 25th Division Signal Company, Royal Engineers. Maintaining communications along the front and between Battalion and Divisional headquarters was a dangerous business whether you were a despatch rider or a signaller using flares, telegraphy or wireless. If contact was to be maintained, wires had to be re-connected, messages sent or carried regardless of the military situation.
Albert James Stares, an insurance clerk in civilian life - a job he had been doing since 1911 when he was 15 - enlisted on 12 October 1914 at the age of 18. By the time he was killed in action on 9 September 1917, the day the 25th Division was withdrawn from the Ypres front, he had become a serjeant.
Mr and Mrs Stares had two sons: Albert James and Frederick Clarence. Frederick survived the war but his son, Frederick Lewis Stares, was killed in action on D-Day, 6 June 1944. His parents chose a similarly affectionate tribute, making use of their diminutive for him as had been done for his uncle killed 27 years earlier:

Sleep on Freddy
The dawn will break.


THANK GOD: WE KNOW
THAT HE "BATTED WELL"
IN THE LAST
GREAT GAME OF ALL

SECOND LIEUTENANT RICHARD DOUGLAS MILES, MC


This inscription, with its sporting analogies, comes from the last lines of 'The Fool', a poem by the Anglo-Canadian author Robert William Service. The fool of the poem is a young boy, Dick, who insists on giving up his schooling in order to join the army. The poet's voice is that of a parent:

"Rubbish!" I cried; "the bugle's call
Isn't for lads from school."
D'ye think he'd listen? Oh, not at all:
So I called him a fool, a fool.

Dick, of course is killed:

Dick with his rapture of song and sun,
Dick of the yellow hair,
Dicky whose life had just begun,
Carrion-cold out there,

The parent realises his huge mistake:

And I called him a fool ... oh how blind was I!
And the cup of my grief's abrim.
Will glory of England ever die
So long as we've lads like him?

Before concluding with the only comfort he can find:

Thank God! we know that he "Batted well"
In the last great Game of all.

Richard Douglas Miles, born in Jamaica where his father was the Collector General, was educated at Bedford Grammar School and destined for the army but decided to go to Canada instead where he first worked on a farm before joining a bank. Soon after the outbreak of war, he enlisted in the Alberta Regiment and went to Europe with the Second Canadian Contingent. He rose rapidly through the ranks to become Company Sergeant Major before being commissioned into the Royal Irish Fusiliers early in 1916.
On 16 August 1917 the 9th Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers attacked on the opening day of the Battle of Langemarck. According to Nick Metcalfe in 'Blacker's Boys', the action virtually destroyed the battalion, which was amalgamated with the 2nd Irish Horse the following month. Miles was wounded and died at the Casualty Clearing Station in Brandhoek early the next day.


SON OF
MALCOLM & MARION GIFFORD
OF HUDSON, NEW YORK, USA

GUNNER MALCOLM GIFFORD


There's a very strange story behind this most inoffensive of inscriptions. Just look at this report from the front page of a New York newspaper on 18 April 1914:

RICH BOY HELD AS MURDERER
Malcolm Gifford Jr. seventeen-year-old son of a wealthy manufacturer of Hudson is under arrest here charged with being the 'slayer of mystery' in the tragic murder of Frank J. Chute, chauffeur, April 1, a year ago.

The circumstantial evidence was extremely damning, but, despite the fact that Gifford was tried twice, neither jury could agree on a verdict. There was, however, a lingering suspicion that the fact that Gifford's parents were extremely wealthy might have had something to do with the outcome.
After the second trial in 1915, Gifford went to College and it was from here, Williams College, that he enlisted in February 1917, just two months before the United States entered the war. After training, Gifford, who served as a gunner in the Canadian Field Artillery, arrived at the front in late September 1917. He was killed by a shell, along with another member of the gun crew, on 8 November 1917. The New York Times reported his death on its front page with the headline:

MALCOLM GIFFORD KILLED. Youth twice tried on murder charge dies in France.

Perhaps Gifford would never have escaped his past. But at least his parents didn't attempt to dissociate themselves from him, in fact far from it, they have put both their names and their address on his headstone.


"THE ELEMENTS BE KIND TO THEE
AND MAKE THY SPIRITS
ALL OF COMFORT"
S

LIEUTENANT ARNOLD GRAYSON BLOOMER


Arnold Bloomer's inscription comes from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: an appropriate source for someone who was educated at Shakespeare's own school - King Edward's Stratford-upon-Avon. They are the words Octavius speaks to his sister Octavia in Act 3 Sc. 2 as she leaves Rome with her new husband Antony:

Farewell, my dearest sister, fare thee well:
The elements be kind to thee, and make
Thy spirits all of comfort! fare thee well.

Bloomer died on 3 August 1917, the Birmingham Daily Post reported his death under the headline: Casualties Among Midland Officers.

Lieutenant Arnold Grayson Bloomer of the Lincolns, who received a mortal wound on 31 July, was the second son of Mr. and Mrs. G.F. Bloomer of Stratford-on-Avon, and grandson of the late Mr. George Yates, surgeon, of Birmingham. He was educated at King Edward VI's School, Stratford-on-Avon, and on the outbreak of war he joined a Birmingham City Battalion. After training he was given a commission and went to France, where he remained for about eighteen months. He came home on sick leave, under-went a serious operation, and returned to France in May last. He was 31 years of age.

Bloomer received his 'mortal wound' on the opening day of the Passchendaele Campaign, 31 July 1917. He died at a Casualty Clearing Station at Brandhoek, three days later after receiving all possible care and attention as his parents were assured by both a sister and a chaplain of 32 Casualty Clearing Station, Brandhoek, .




LOVED WITH SUCH LOVE
AND WITH SUCH SORROW MOURNED

GUNNER LESLIE EDWARD JONES


Gunner Leslie Jones was his parents only son. He had three sisters but no brothers. His father, Edward Jones, was a caterer and he was his father's caterers manager. The report of his death in the Essex Newsman, on 22 September 1917, records that he "had been for nine years the representative in Southend of his father, the lessee of the Pier Refreshment Rooms, and proprietor of the White House, High Street"
Jones enlisted on 30 June 1915 and served with 2/B Battery Honourable Artillery Company, going with them to the front on 20 June 1917. The Battery took part in the opening battles of Third Ypres. Jones was killed on 3 September and buried in a small cemetery near St Jan.
His inscription, chosen by his mother, comes from The Wanderer, a long poem by William Wordsworth:

Oh blest are they who live and die like these,
Loved with such love, and with such sorrow mourned.

Wordsworth's 'blessed' are those who live and die in the heart of their community, surrounded by their family and friends who love them, bury them, and mourn them.


NEVER FORGOTTEN
MOTHER'S DARLING BRAVE BOY
LOVED BY ALL

PRIVATE CHARLES OWEN


Charles Owen was the fourth of his mother's five children. Born and brought up in Hull, where his father was a brewer's engineer, he joined up in Hull and served originally with the East Yorkshire Regiment. He transferred to the 5th Battalion Border Regiment and was killed in action near Loker, 11 km south of Ypres, on 27 August 1916. This is the date the War Graves Commission gives for his death but other reports say he was killed on the 26th.
Charles' elder brother, Walter William Owen, enlisted in August 1914 on the outbreak of war and was killed in action in France on 12 April 1917 aged 23. He is commemorated on the Arras Memorial to the Missing.
After the war, the boys' mother, Clara Selina Owen, went to live in Lewisham in South London. It's possible that her husband went with her but there is no evidence either way. It was Clara who chose the inscription for her "darling brave boy".


OF BRIDGE OF DEE
CASTLE DOUGLAS
WEE JOE
TO MEMORY DEAR

PRIVATE JOE CONNELLY


"Wee Joe" was not just his parents' fond diminutive but a physical description since Joe Connelly, a flat race jockey, was small. Born and brought up in the tiny community of Bridge of Dee, part of the parish of Balmghie, Castle Douglas, Kirkudbrightshire, where his father was a horse dealer, by 1918 Joe was working for a racing stable near Aston Tirrold on the Berkshire Downs. From here he joined up in March 1918 and was serving with the 2nd/4th The Queen's (Royal West Surrey) Regiment when he died of wounds in a Canadian Casualty Clearing Station at Esquelbecq.
The 2/4th Queen's War Dairy throws no light on Joe Connelly's fate. The Battalion spent the 11th, 12th and 13th September in the line without incident. The weather was continuously wet but the enemy was generally quiet, "confining his activities to M.G. fire, occasional bursts of artillery fire, sniping and very little use of trench mortars".
Nevertheless the casualty summary for September 1918 records that two officers and 14 other ranks were killed and one other rank died of wounds - presumably this was "Wee Joe".


MAN AM I GROWN
A MAN'S WORK MUST I DO
ELSE WHEREFORE BORN

PRIVATE CLARENCE ROBERT FOWLE


Is there a personal story behind this inscription? We shall never know but the context suggests that there might be. The inscription comes from Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King'. Gareth, the youngest of his parents' sons, wants to go and join his brothers as a knight at Arthur's Round Table. But his mother wants to keep him safe and refuses to let him go, telling him, "Stay my best son! ye are yet more boy than man', and trying to persuade him that he can train for manhood by following the deer, in other words by hunting in the forest. Gareth replies:

... O mother,
How can ye keep me tether'd to you? Shame.
Man am I grown, a man's work must I do.
Follow the deer? follow the Christ, the King,
Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King -
Else, wherefore born?

Clarence Fowle was 18 when he was killed, technically too young to be at the front unless he had his parents' signed permission. Do we think he persuaded an unwilling mother to let him go? We shall ever know. It was his mother who chose his inscription.

Fowle, serving with the 1st Regiment South African Infantry, was killed in the attack on Frezenberg Ridge on the opening day of the Battle of Menin Road. Of the 20 September 1917, John Buchan's 'History of South African Forces in the Great War' said, "That day's battle cracked the kernel of the German defence in the Salient. It showed only a limited advance ... but every inch of the ground was vital". However, in Buchan's opinion:

"Few struggles in the campaign were more desperate or carried out in a more gruesome battlefield. The mass of quagmires, splintered woods, ruined husks of pill-boxes, water-filled shell holes, and foul creeks which made up the land on both sides of the Menin road was a sight which, to the recollection of most men, must seem like a fevered nightmare. ... the elements seemed to have blended with each other to make it a limbo outside mortal experience and almost beyond human imagining."


SO YOUNG, SO FAR FROM HOME

SERGEANT CHARLES AUSTIN CARD


On 6 November 1917 the 14th Battalion Canadian Infantry was in reserve at Wieltje. That morning the CO's report recorded: "at about 5 a.m. the enemy opened an intense bombardment on CAMP "A" and surroundings and inflicted heavy casualties upon us. The balance of the day was uneventful."
Sergeant Card, one of the casualties, was buried in the nearby Oxford Road cemetery so called after the road that ran behind the support trench from Wieltje to the Potijze-Zonnebeke road. Card
Card came from Elora, a small community in Ontario. He was indeed "so far from home"; 6,000 km to be exact. He was, however, only 81 km from his older brother, Daniel Oscar Card, who is buried in Neuville-St. Vaast, France having been killed in action in the storming of Vimy Ridge on 9 April 1917.


WHO DIES IF ENGLAND LIVES
WHO LIVES IF ENGLAND DIES

MAJOR HENRY FRANCIS FARQUHARSON MURRAY


"At 11 a.m. nothing less than a tragedy to the Battalion occurred. The Commanding Officer, Major H.F.F. Murray, temporarily in command owing to Lieutenant-Colonel Innes having been ordered not to take part in the attack, on account of the necessity for keeping at least one senior officer to replace a possible casualty, had made his headquarters in a captured German concrete dug-out. Unfortunately the entrance faced the enemy, and a shell entered it, killing 12 of the Battalion Headquarters staff and wounding nine others, among the former being Major Murray ... "
A History of the Black Watch in the Great War 1914-1918 Volume III

Major Murray's fate was the result of previous success, the German dug-out had been captured by the British but its entrance now faced the wrong way making it vulnerable to its previous owners' shells.
Henry Murray, a professional soldier who had fought in the South African War, was the son of a soldier. He married Madeline Elizabeth Giles in January 1915 and it was she who chose his inscription. The line "who dies if England live(s)" comes from the last verse of the poem Rudyard Kipling wrote in September 1914 in response to the outbreak of war, For All We Have and Are. However, Kipling didn't write the other line of the inscription, 'Who lives if England dies'. Kipling's associated line was, 'What stands if Freedom fall'. This is the last verse:

No easy hope or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
But iron sacrifice
Of body, will, and soul.
There is but one task for all -
One life for each to give.
What stands if Freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?

Murray's inscription as written forms the text on the final frame of an official film made in 1916 showing preparations for an attack on the Somme, 'Sons of Empire' Episode 4. This is what will have given the saying prominence. That and a deeply romantic painting by Charles Spencelayh, painted in 1914, which shows a dying soldier on a virtually empty battlefield with the rays of the setting sun lighting up a phantom Union Jack in the sky. It's called 'Who dies if England live'.
Before I finish let me just show you that the sentiments of Murray's inscription and Kipling's verse were common to both sides. In 1914 the German poet Heinrich Lersch published own poetic response to the outbreak of war - 'Soldaten Abschied', the Soldier's Farewell. Each of the five verses ends with the same words - "Deutschland muss leben, und wenn wir sterben mussen", Germany must live even if we must die.


I HAVE ONLY DONE MY DUTY
AS A MAN IS BOUND TO DO
"GIBBIE"

PRIVATE JOHN GILBERT GILL


"Gibbie", Private John Gilbert Gill, served with the 4th London Divisional Field Ambulance and was killed in action on 8 August 1917. His father signed for his inscription, quoting his son's own words; words that will have summarised what motivated hundreds and thousands of other young men - their duty.
Gill had been a clerk in a felt factory before the war. He volunteered in March 1915, which meant that he volunteered to do his duty rather than that he was conscripted to do it. Some RAMC men were conscientious objectors who accepted non-combatant work in the RAMC but this would seem to be unlikely in Gill's case. And even if this was the case, service with the RAMC did not keep you out of danger.


EVERY NOBLE LIFE
LEAVES ITS FIBRE INTERWOVEN
IN THE WORK OF THE WORLD

ACTING BOMBARDIER THOMAS MOUNTFORD


Thomas Mountford's inscription is a slightly altered version of some famous lines from John Ruskin's 'Proserpina'. Ruskin claimes that the impact of a 'real' human life on the world is not at all slight or insubstantial:

"That life, when it is real, is not evanescent; is not slight; does not vanish away. Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven for ever in the work of the world; by so much, evermore, the strength of the human race has gained; more stubborn in the root, higher towards heaven in the branch; and, "as a teil tree, as an oak, - whose substance is in them when they cast their leaves, - so the holy seed is in the midst thereof".

Mountford, the son of a hewer in a coal miner, was a trainee teacher in the 1911 census. He served with C Battery 232nd Army Field Brigade Royal Artillery and died of wounds on 31 July 1917, the opening day of the Third Ypres Campaign. His mother chose his inscription, asserting that her son's life had made a positive contribution to the 'work of the world'.


M.SC., F.I.C., F.C.S.

LIEUTENANT HERBERT KING


This inscription is concerned with identity and status. Herbert King was just one of the over 12,000 lieutenants who died serving in the armies of the British Empire during the First World War - of whom 91 were Lieutenant Kings. But this Lieutenant King had a masters degree in Science and was a Fellow of both the Royal Institute of Chemistry (F.I.C.) and the Chemical Society (F.C.S.). This is how his brother-in-law, his sister's husband, chose to identify him on his headstone. It's formal, correct and proud - this isn't just anyone lying here.
King was also 41 and since his medal card shows that he was not eligible for the 1914-15 Star he can't have joined up until 1916, probably as the result of the introduction in January 1916 of conscription for men between the ages of 18 and 41. The son of a tailor in Scarborough, King was teaching science in Leeds when the war broke out. He served with the Royal Army Ordnance Department, responsible for the supply and repair of military equipment, and died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station at Brandhoek on 6 October 1917.


HE DID HIS BIT

PRIVATE ROBERT THOMPSON


If you think this sounds a rather begrudging epitaph then you wouldn't be the only one. But as it happens, it's a near quote from the poem that begins Ian Hay's best-selling novel, 'The First Hundred Thousand', which was published in 1915 and by early 1917 had sold 30,000 copies. It purports to tell the tale of a group of men who were among the first hundred thousand to answer the call to arms in August 1914 and how they became soldiers in Kitchener's New Army.
The book, like the poem, is written with typical British self-deprecation and understatement but a sense of pride in the task being undertaken is never far from the surface. In the poem, the men resist any heroic claims, yes they've given up their jobs but no they haven't done it for glory rather just "To have a slap at Kaiser Bill". And now they're off to war and they know that some of them will not come back:

But all we ask, if that befall,
Is this. Within your hearts be writ
This single-line memorial: -
He did his duty - and his bit!

Robert Thompson did his bit. Originally Private Thompson 25296 of the East Yorkshire Regiment, he was serving with the 22nd Company Labour Corps when he died from the effects of gas in a Casualty Clearing Station at Dozinghem on 9 September 1917. His transfer from the East Yorkshire Regiment to the Labour Corps suggests that he had been been wounded and was no longer deemed fit for front line service. Nevertheless, the work done by the Corps was still within the reach of the guns - and gas.


TENDER BUT FEARLESS
GENEROUS AND CHIVALROUS

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR FRANCIS DEANE


Second Lieutenant Deane's father, Henry Deane, has attributed to his son some of the essential qualities of a perfect Christian knight. We know very little of Arthur Francis Deane's life but we know enough to know that these were qualities more noted by their absence than their presence in his father's life.
Henry Deane was not his real name, it was Henry Pockett, and in 1896 Henry Pockett was sentenced to six months imprisonment and fined £500 for "obtaining money by false pretences from persons who wanted to borrow money from him". In his defence, Pockett said that he "had only followed the practice of other money-lenders" and appealed for leniency. But the judge said that Pockett had shown no sign of leniency to his victims, "and the majority of the applicants were people of the poorer classes who could ill afford to part with it [their money]".
The whole story can be read in this excellent article on the Epsom and Ewell History Explorer.
At the time of his father's imprisonment Arthur Francis would have been 6. His mother died the following year, at which point the family appear to have changed their name from Pockett to Deane. In the 1911 census, Henry Deane stated that he had been married for nine years to Florence Elizabeth Pockett and to have had one child from the marriage. The records show that he didn't marry Florence until 1917.
In the summer of 1916, Arthur Francis Deane returned from Shanghai where he had been working for Messrs Butterfield and Swire. He attested in Whitehall on 20 September and was gazetted 2nd Lieutenant in the Machine Gun Corps on 27 January 1917. He was killed in action outside Ypres during the Battle of Langemarck on 16 August. The War Diary records that the attack took place at 4.45 am:

"Two guns with 1st Londons on left got well forward and covered the advance from J.8b.1.6. 2/Lt Deane was with these guns which did excellent work and found many targets on the opposite side of the valley at ranges from 600 yards to 1500 yards. One of the guns was destroyed by shell fire and the greater part of the team became casualties."

Deane's body was found at map reference J.7.b.81.09 on 30 April 1921 and identified by his 'damaged discs and clothing'.


RATHER DEATHE
THAN FALSE OF FAYTHE

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN PERCY HODGES


The phrase would seem to date from the sixteenth century where it appeared on jewellery, presumably worn by people prepared to declare their willingness to die for their faith. In the nineteenth century, it became the motto of Sir Walter St John School Battersea, although it does not seem to have been the motto of its seventeenth-century founder.
Percy Hodges was a pupil at this school, his name appearing on a plaque, now in St Mary's Church, Battersea. The plaque refers to a stained glass window, which doesn't appear to have survived. The motto appears at bottom of the plaque after the list of the 78 boys who "gave their lives for King and Country in the Great European War 1914-1919" - "Rather deathe than false of faith".
Hodges, the son of a commercial clerk, served with the 6th Battalion King's Own Scottish Borderers and was killed in action on 25 April 1918 in a German attack on Kemmel. The 6th Battalion's two forward companies were all either killed or captured in the action. Hodges body was discovered at map reference 28/N.16.d.3.6 in November 1919. Although there was no marker on the grave the body still had its identity disc. His father chose his inscription.


"SERVANT OF GOD, MAN'S FRIEND"

MAJOR ARTHUR TOWARD WATSON


There's a black marble plaque in St Andrew's Church, Bishopthorpe, Selby, Yorkshire, which tells the story of Major Watson's war:

To the beloved memory of
Arthur Toward Watson
Major 21st Battn. Kings Royal
Rifles of Bishopthorpe Garth
And of Burnopfield in the
County of Durham
He offered his services to his
Country as a soldier in the Great
War. He led a company in the
Battle of the Somme, Sept 15th
1916, when he was severely wounded
And in the Battle of Messines
On June 7th 1917. On Sunday Aug 5th
1917 when second in command of
His Battn. he was killed in action
In the fighting for Passchendaele
Ridge in his 48th year

Arthur Watson was a wealthy coal owner. He had always wanted a career in the army but a non-military gun-shot injury had deprived him of the sight in his right eye, over which he wore a patch. Although this had previously prevented him joining the army it didn't stop him receiving a temporary commission in September 1914. Initially he served with the Remount Department but in October 1915 he managed to get a commission in a service battalion of the Kings Royal Rifle Corps.
Severely wounded on the Somme, he returned to the front in April 1917. At the beginning of August he received a well-deserved home posting. On Sunday 5 August he went up the line for the last time to say good-bye to his old battalion and was very badly wounded when a shell exploded beside him. He died of his wounds the same day.
His inscription is a puzzle. The quotation marks are definitely there and yet it doesn't appear to be a quotation. In addition, the rather stilted syntax would suggest that they weren't Watson's own words. The inscription implies that Watson, by being a servant of God, was a friend to man and this interpretation is born out by the inscription on the reredos, also in St Andrew's Church Bishopthorpe:

To the Glory of God & in loving & grateful memory of Arthur Toward Watson whose days on earth were spent in the endeavour to
Make the lives of others happy & who for his King and Country willingly laid down his life in battle.
This reredos and panelling were placed in this chancel
By Virginia his widow, John his son & Diana his daughter MCMXIX


"I PRAY YOU SHED NO TEAR"

CAPTAIN TALBERT STEVENSON, MC & BAR


"Your son was without exception the finest specimen of the young British officer I have ever met. His loss to the battalion is irreparable. Since our former Colonel (sic. should it be captain?) left he has been my Adjutant, and I relied implicitly on him. Brave to a fault, brimming over with energy and kindness, a prime favourite with officers and men, he also possessed a very old head on young shoulders. Personally, I loved your boy as if he had been a son of my own, and I have never been so cut up over any loss in this war."
Lt. Colonel Thomas David Murray
Quoted page 257 Volume 3 of the Marquis de Ruvigny's Roll of Honour

Stevenson was studying Chemistry at Manchester when the war broke out. He joined up immediately and was gazetted Second Lieutenant on 2 September 1914 arriving in France on 2 February 1915. Promoted lieutenant on 27 September 1915, and captain on 10 August 1917, he was wounded three times before being killed in action by a sniper at Polderhoek on the Menin Road. Stevenson, who had been awarded an MC in January 1917, received a posthumous bar to it in November 1917.
His father, Francis Stevenson, chose his inscription. It's a quote from a very obscure poem called 'To All Who Love, written by Lieutenant Colonel J. Berkley and published in The Spectator on 24 February 1917:

If Death should claim this mortal shell of me
Which you have seen and touched and thought to be
Needful to happiness,
I pray you shed no tear as though this life
Held all, or were but passing phase of strife
'Tween pleasure and distress.
I pray you clothe yourself in gala hue,
Purging your soul of that self-pitying view
That calls for mourning black.
For I would have you mingle with a throng,
Bright-hued, exulting, cheering me along
The road that leads not back,
That I may pass beyond the SOLDIERS' GATE,
Whose arch is SACRIFICE and threshold FATE,
Unburdened by regret;
To greet my battle comrades who have bled
For ENGLAND'S sake, and, risen from the dead,
Rest, clear of Honour's debt.

I pray you, urgently, to see your woe
As just that jarring note you would forgo
Could you but feel at heart,
How, grieving, I could have no other grief
Than helplessness to bring you dear relief,
Being near - yet far apart.

Four years after Talbert Stevenson's death his sister, Mrs Margaret Philip, had a son who she named Talbert Stevenson Philip after her brother. He was killed in action in Normandy on 19 August 1944. Lt Colonel Murray's sons were both killed in 1943.

There is more information about Talbert Stevenson on this Great War Forum site.
A portrait of Captain Talbert Stevenson MC & Bar by Anton Abraham van Anrooy hangs in the Black Watch Castle and Museum, Perth, Scotland


OF BRYNGWENALLT
DOLGELLY, N. WALES
"A DDUG ANGAU NI DDWG ANGOF"

SECOND LIEUTENANT GRIFFITH CHRISTMAS OWEN


'A ddug angau ni ddwg angof', the words on the Dolgelly (Dolgellau) war memorial are repeated on Griffith Christmas Owen's headstone. Translated from the Welsh they mean, 'when death comes it does not mean we forget'.
Owen was killed on 31 July 1917 leading his men in an assault on Pilkhem Ridge on the opening day of the Third Ypres Campaign. Between 31 July and 2 August the 11th Battalion South Wales Borderers lost 320 men killed, wounded and missing. Owen was among the missing, his body not discovered until 24 April 1928 when it was identified by his badges of rank and his general service uniform. By this time his name had been carved on the Menin Gate, dedicated by Lord Plumer in July 1927 to the "officers & men who fell in the Ypres Salient, but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death".
Owen is now buried in Sanctuary Wood Cemetery where his inscription, chosen by his brother, John Llewelyn Owen, links him back to the town of his birth and shares with it the same dedication.


HIS BROTHER'S KEEPER

SERGEANT GEORGE HOSTRAWSER


Sergeant Hostrawser's father, William, has chosen a succinct but profound way to express his son's sense of responsibility for his fellow man. When God asked Cain where his brother Abel was - just after Cain had killed him - Cain replied, "I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?" [Genesis 4:8] In other words, how should I know, what do I care where he is? Cain's words have become a shorthand for man's unwillingness to look out for his fellow man, to only be interested in himself. But George Hostrawser was not this sort of man, he was, "His brother's keeper". A factor I would suggest in him being a sergeant by the age of 20.
Hostrawser, the youngest of his parents twelve children, enlisted in Brampton, Ontario on 18 December 1915. He served with the 116th Battalion Canadian Infantry, which in October 1917 was in the Weiltje area, near Ypres. It came out of the front line on 28 October but remained in the forward area to provide working parties. This was a dangerous business: four others ranks were killed and two wounded on the 29th, and two were killed on the 30th. On 1 November the war diary reported: "Strength 31 officers, 617 other ranks. Our casualties on the 31st of October were 7 killed and 3 wounded".


UNITED WITH HIS FATHER
& FALLEN BROTHER BERT
MY ALL GONE

PRIVATE ERNEST LUCAS


Mr and Mrs Albert Francis Lucas had two children, two sons - Albert born in 1894 and Ernest in 1897. Albert enlisted on 9 September 1914, went to France on 7 November 1915 and was serving with the 19th Battalion Manchester Regiment when he was killed in action on 1 July 1916. His body was never recovered and he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial. Ernest's service records haven't survived. He served with the 11th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers and died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station at Brandhoek on 17 August 1917. Both sons were unmarried.
Their father, a merchant shippers clerk, died on 5 April 1920, aged 57. As Mrs Sarah Lucas so plainly put it on Ernest's headstone inscription: "My all gone".
Sarah Lucas died in Park Hospital, Davyhulme, Urmston, Lancashire on 4 March 1937 aged 69.


BELOVED BY
OFFICERS AND MEN

CORPORAL GEORGE BASIL BROWN


George Basil Brown, "Beloved by officers and men", was a nineteen-year-old acting corporal serving with the 32nd Battery 8th Brigade Canadian Field Artillery. He was killed in action on 14 November 1917. The 8th Brigade's war diary described the day:

"In the afternoon enemy put on "Area" shoot with 5.9 and 8" H.E. and shrapnel. Two mguns (machineguns?) 30th battery and two guns 24th Battery knocked out.
Casualties - 1251575 Gnr. L.O.Liddell (24th Bty) killed, and two gunners wounded.
306623 Gnr. Kennedy H.E., 30th Battery killed, three gunners wounded. No. 305598 A/Cpl Brown G.B. (32nd Bty) killed, and two gunners wounded. Three gunners 43rd Battery wounded.
At night enemy shelled positions with gas, using some phosgene and Yellow X."


IN THE WORDS OF HIS COLONEL
HE WAS AN EXAMPLE TO ALL

SECOND LIEUTENANT DOUGLAS FITCH


Douglas Fitch's father has quoted from the letter of condolence he received from his son's colonel. There's more information from this letter on a brass memorial plaque in St Andrew's Church, Kingswood, Surrey:

"A most gallant officer, beloved of his men. Throughout the hard and dangerous work of the last few weeks of his life he never spared himself and he was an example to us all."

There is even more information in the Marquis de Ruvigny's Roll of Honour. His Battery Commander wrote of him:

"Always thoughtful for others, whether they were his brother officers or the men of his section; always cheerful, he had a wonderful effect on us all and I think it was a good deal due to his influence that the battery has faced a very hard gruelling without a murmuring."

And his captain wrote:

"His unfailing cheerfulness and unconcern through the heaviest shell fire and greatest discomforts were wonderful ... There was no more popular officer in the brigade and the men of his battery and especially those of his own section, almost worshipped him."

Douglas, who served with 'C' Battery 162nd Brigade, was killed in action just ten days before his twenty-first birthday. He was his parents only child.


"HE WAS THE BRAVEST MAN WE HAD"
HIS CAPTAIN

GUNNER WILLIAM DAVID LLOYD


The family of every soldier killed in the war received a letter of condolence from his officer. His words may only have been conventional platitudes often repeated - although one cannot criticise because how difficult must it have been to write something personal and meaningful that would bring comfort to the bereaved. So who knows how many times Gunner Lloyd's captain had used this phrase about one of his soldiers, but does it matter? However, we do know that Lloyd was a brave soldier, we know this because he had been mentioned in despatches.
His mother, Agnes Lloyd chose his inscription. You can sense her pride in the captain's accolade, and the comfort she took from it. At the age of 16, according to the 1911 census, Lloyd had been a "hall boy mansion". I think this means that he was a general helper in a block of mansion flats not in a large mansion. His father was a house painter, his mother a cook in a private house, and his fourteen-year-old sister an apprentice dressmaker. He served in the 37th Battery 27th Brigade Royal Field Artillery and was killed in action on 2 October 1917.


TO BREAK BUT NOT TO FAIL

GUNNER HARRY HANDLEY


Gunner Handley's inscription comes from the last line of a little-known poem, 'To Women', by Laurence Binyon, author of the spectacularly well-known verse from his poem, 'For the Fallen':

They shall grown not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Published in The Times just two weeks after the outbreak of war, 'To Women' acknowledges the front-line role women will play in the war, not that they will actually be present on the front line but every bullet, sword or lance wound suffered by a soldier will be suffered by them too.

For you, you too to battle go
Not with the marching drums and cheers
But in the watch of solitude
And in the boundless night of fears.

But, despite their fears and and their suffering, Binyon acknowledges that the women of Britain are prepared " to bleed, to bear, to break, but not to fail".

The War Graves Commission records don't show who chose Handley's inscription but I would suggest that the quality of endurance, the person who might break but won't fail, is in this case the soldier. Born in Yorkshire the son of an agricultural labourer, at the age of 17 Harry Handley was living with a farmer in Hull and described in the census as 'Lad among the horses'. He served with the Royal Horse Artillery and was killed on 23 April 1917 during the Battle of Arras.


FOR LIBERTY

LIEUTENANT HORACE LISLE RINTEL


How can the war have been a struggle for Liberty? Because it was a struggle between the democracies and military autocracy, at least this is how the Allies saw it. Liberty was particularly the cause the United States claimed for their participation in the war so that those who contributed money to the war effort bought Liberty Bonds - Beat back the Hun with Liberty Bonds - and one of their popular history's of the war was titled, 'The World War for Liberty'. But others were allowed to fight for Liberty too. One of the most popular British poems of the war, by the poet John Oxenham, assured the bereaved that their dead had:

"died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God, and Right, and Liberty".

By way of explanation, Oxenham wrote:

"War is red horror. But, better war than the utter crushing-out of liberty and civilisation under the heel of Prussian or any other militarism."

Rintel, a school teacher at Ballarat College, enlisted in July 1915. He embarked from Australia on 23 November 1916, six days after he'd married Gwendolyn Morey, a teacher at Fairlight Girls Grammar School in East St Kilda. He served with the 8th Battalion Australian Infantry and was killed on 20 September 1917 in an attack on the German lines near Zillebeke. The 8th Battalion's war diary gives the details of the attack. Rintel was "killed instantaneously by a piece of shell in the advance".
Many websites say that Rintel 'secretly' married Gwendolyn Morey. If he did, by the end of the war the family knew of her. Rintel's father chose his son's headstone inscription and received his Victory Medal and Memorial Plaque, but Gwendolyn had his British War Medal, Memorial Scroll and the pamphlet, 'Where the Australians Rest' the booklet that was given to the next-of-kin of all those who died on active service abroad. By 1920 she was the headmistress of Fairlight. She appears never to have remarried and to have died aged 72 in 1967.
It's strange the things you can find out about people: Horace Rintel, the grandson of Moses Rintel, who is commemorated in the Australian Jewry Roll of Honour, is buried under a headstone inscribed with a cross. His father did not request the star of David as he was perfectly within his rights to do.


IN FREEDOM'S CAUSE

PRIVATE CHRISTOPHER GEORGE TAYLOR


Private Taylor was one of nineteen men from the 6th Battalion the Somerset Light Infantry to have been killed on 9 April 1917, the opening day of the Battle of Arras, in the attack on Wancourt. A farmer's son from Suffolk, the 1911 census shows that at the age of 14 he was working on his father's farm.
It was his father, John Taylor, who chose his inscription - In Freedom's Cause. This was a phrase that regularly appeared on patriotic postcards - The flags that fight in freedom's cause - this one showing the flags of Britain, France, Belgium and Russia. The phrase also featured on mugs and plates, also with an assortment of allied flags. The Australians used the phrase on war loan posters, but perhaps the most influential use of the phrase was on the front page of the Daily Mail on 21 July 1919 when reporting on the Victory Parade that had taken place through the streets of London the previous Saturday, 19 July. The headline read: "Hail, ye heroes, who fought in Freedom's cause".


FOR HUMANITY'S SAKE

PRIVATE RALPH BURTON FOWLER


The 18th to the 25th June 1917 was Red Cross Week. Fundraising posters were issued in Britain, Canada and the United States with the slogan "For humanity's sake". Whilst each country has its own Red Cross Society, they are all meant to be part of an international humanitarian organisation. This is why the fundraising is "For humanity's sake", a strictly neutral cause. However, one of the posters is headed, 'Civilization vs Barbarism' and enough newspaper articles had accused the Germans of barbarism for the public to know for which side the money was being raised. Another poster, not a Red Cross poster this time, shows a child holding up its handless arms against the background of a burning town with the message: "They mutilate - for humanity's sake enlist". Who 'they' are is made clear by the use of the word 'Kultur', the German word culture and civilization.
Ralph Burton Fowler came from Nova Scotia and enlisted in the 106th Overseas Battalion Nova Scotia Rifles, which was raised in November 1915. It crossed to England in July 1916 and was absorbed into the 25th Battalion Canadian Infantry. 1 January 1917 found them in the trenches near Bully-les-Mines engaged in working parties. On 3 January they went into the trenches, the war diary records the day:

"Relieved 24th Canadian Battalion in Angres Sector 1, "A" and "C" Co'ys going into front line, "B" and "D" in support trenches. Artillery and Trench Mortars active on both sides. Private R.B.Fowler being killed and Pte. McA. Blackburn fatally wounded, and two OR shell shocked."

Ralph Fowler's father chose his inscription, no doubt influenced by the Red Cross and recruiting posters he must have seen.


CHEERFULLY GIVING UP
HIS LIFE
THAT WE MIGHT HAVE
SECURITY AND PEACE

LIEUTENANT FREDERICK THOMAS LEE ABBISS


Frederick Abbiss chose the same inscription for both his sons: Frederick Thomas Lee Abbiss who died of wounds in hospital at Wimereaux on 27 October 1917 aged 23, and John Lee Abbiss who "died of illness" in Baghdad on 25 July 1918 aged 21. Frederick himself, who had been a widower since 1901 when John was 3, died in 1934, before it was obvious that his sons' deaths had brought neither security nor peace. They were his only children.


HE GAVE HIS LIFE
TO SAVE MANKIND
FROM DESTRUCTION

LANCE CORPORAL PERCY CLEMENT MARCH


Lance Corporal Percy Clement March was in hospital in Etaples suffering from influenza when he was killed in a German air raid. On the night of the 19-20 May 1918, fifteen German bombers came over in two waves between 10.30pm and 1am, dropping 116 bombs and causing multiple casualties in the collapsed and burning buildings.
March had been a serving soldier since arriving in Egypt in December 1915; born in 1899, this would have made him 16. His medal index card records that he served in the 3rd Battalion Hampshire Regiment and the Royal Sussex Regiment before he became a member of the East Yorkshire Regiment. This suggests to me that he was wounded twice.
March's father, Clement Harry March, chose this inscription for his eldest child, possibly attempting to match the effect of his son's death on the family with the cause for which he died. Father lived long enough to know that Percy's death did not "save mankind from destruction"; he died in 1963 aged 91.


HE LEFT HIS HOME
TO GIVE HIS ALL
FOR THE SAKE OF CIVILIZATION

PRIVATE CHARLES EDWIN HABGOOD


You may wonder where Mrs Sarah Habgood, Private Habgood's wife, got the idea that her husband had given "his all for the sake of civilization". The answer is probably from the back of the Victory medal that he, as a member of the Allied armed services, would automatically have received having been in one of the theatres of war at some time between 5 August 1914 and 11 November 1918. On the front there's a robed, winged figure - a winged victory - and on the reverse a laurel wreath with the words, "The Great War for Civilisation". (Mrs Habgood spelt it with a 'z', the medal with an 's').
Throughout the war British propaganda had demonised the Germans as barbarians, depicting them as apes in pickelhaubes, their hands covered in the blood of women and babies. Posters mocked the Germans' much vaunted claims to 'kultur' with images of the burning of the medieval library at Louvain. Fears of German barbarism helped sustain the war effort to the end, and when the end came the Victory Medal maintained the theme.
Charles Habgood served with the 36th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, a labour battalion formed in May 1916. Originally used for unloading ships at Rouen, in April 1917 it became the 106th Company Labour Corps. These were often made up of men medically rated as below A1 fitness, but this didn't mean that they were safe from the guns. Five men of the old 36th Battalion died in an unspecified incident near Boezinge on 14 October 1917, with sixteen dying of wounds from the same incident in the following days. One of them could well have been Habgood.
Habgood's younger brother, Alfred, had been killed in action on 17 February 1915. His father chose his inscription:

Like his comrades
He died
That others might live


HIS LIFE WAS FREELY GIVEN
DEFENDING HONOUR
TRUTH AND RIGHT

SERJEANT FRANK JAMES WHERRETT


Frank Wherrett was born between July and September 1897. From the evidence of his medal roll, he arrived in France on 2 September 1915. I would suggest that he had just turned 18. He was, as his inscription suggests, a volunteer. He was also too young to be in France - unless he'd had his parents' signed consent. It would seem that he did. Within less than three years he was a serjeant - obviously an excellent soldier. But before three years was actually up he was dead.
His father, Frank Wherrett, a builder of 77 Chester Terrace, London, chose Serjeant Wherrett's inscription. I have decided to look again at inscriptions which state the cause for which people died, in particular those that use 'big' words. I used to think that these inscriptions were mere hyperbole, the next-of-kin attempting to match the cause with their grief in an attempt to make the deaths worthwhile. But if 2016 has taught me anything it's that these 'big' words are very powerful and that whilst the exact meaning might be unspecific, people believed these concepts were worth fighting and dying for - honour, truth and right. After all, the next-of-kin memorial plaque stated - "He died for freedom and honour".


LOST TOO SOON
LOVED SO WELL
TOO DEAR FOR DEATH
MY SON FAREWELL

PRIVATE JAMES DAVIDSON


This is a peculiarly powerful inscription for all that the language is simple and the sentiments conventional. Private James Davidson's mother, Bridget, adapted it from something she may have seen written on other headstones or read in religious tracts. No author is ever mentioned but the whole verse reads:

O lost too soon - O loved too well!
Too dear for death - farewell! farewell!
One soothing solace yet is given,
Thou 'rt lost to earth, to live in heaven!
Fond faith forbids us to deplore,
For thou 'rt not dead, but gone before.

Davidson came from Sunderland. In 1911 his father worked in the coal mines as a shifter, someone who repaired the horse routes - rolley-ways - and other passages in the mines, keeping them free from obstruction. His sixteen-year-old brother was a 'driver', someone who led the horses pulling the coal trucks along the rolley-ways. James, aged 12, was still at school. No doubt a career in the mines lay before him.
Davidson may however have moved away. He served originally with the 29th Battalion London Regiment Royal Fusiliers but was posted to the 1st/4th. He died on 2 June 1918. There is no individual information about his death but the brigade diary reports heavy enemy bombardment of the Fusiliers' line that day.


O TRUE BRAVE HEART
GOD BLESS THEE WHERE SO 'ER
IN GOD'S GREAT UNIVERSE
THOU ART TODAY

PRIVATE EDWARD DOUGLAS PERCY FEATHERSTONE


This inscription, chosen by Private Featherstone's father, is fairly popular on both headstones and 'In Memoriam' columns, yet it has become so separated from its author that few people would imagine it had one. In fact both poem and author have virtually disappeared from sight.
Called 'Somewhere', it was written by an American, Julia Caroline Dorr (1825-1915) and published in 'Friar Anselmo and Other Poems' in 1879. The poem begins with the question:

How can I cease to pray for thee? Somewhere
In God's great universe thou art today:

The loved one may well be dead but the writer has no intention of not continuing to ask God to take care of them since, "Somewhere within His ken thou hast a place", "Somewhere thou livest and hast need of Him:". It is obvious that to the writer there is, of course, still life after death, which leads to the final lines:

O true, brave heart! God bless thee, whereso'er
In His great universe thou art to-day!

The youngest in a family of four, Private Featherstone came from Amersham in Buckinghamshire and was educated at Dr Challenor's Grammar School. Featherstone served with the 1st/14th London Regiment (London Scottish) and was killed in action just outside Arras on the 28 May 1918 as the German Spring Offensive began to run out of steam. But if people at the time thought the end was in sight, many would have thought that 'the end' would be a German victory.


ONE WHO NEVER DREAMED
THOUGH RIGHT WERE WORSTED
WRONG WOULD TRIUMPH

LIEUTENANT FREDERICK CHARLESTON


Robert Browning's (1812-1889) Epilogue to Asolando, his final poem, was published on the day he died. The famous verse from which this inscription comes is generally considered to be Browning's description of himself:

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

The sentiments chimed with many families who chose various of the above lines for personal inscriptions, even changing the personal pronoun so as to be able to use them for a VAD.
Frederick Charleston's father, Thomas William Charleston, chose the inscription for his only son but gave no other family details to the War Graves Commission. However, in 2002, Dix Noonan Webb sold Frederick's medals and his memorial plaque in "mint perfect condition". Their research is always excellent and it is their website that describes how Charleston "died on July 7th 1915, at No. 12 Field Ambulance Dressing Station, of wounds received in action at Pilkem, near Ypres". Their information comes from The University College London Memorial Book, where Charleston had been an engineering student. The book describes how an officer with the Field Ambulance wrote to Charleston's father to tell him:

"Several of the men of his Company were wounded at the same time and brought in to us. I got the same tale from them all - of his gallantry and courage in the trenches. He was in charge of a machine-gun section, and stood to it until it was put out of action. The same shell that injured the men gave him his death wound."

Among the medals sold in 2002 was Charleston's 1914 Star. Out of the country when the war broke out, Charleston, who had been in the London University OTC, returned immediately and was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers. He disembarked in France on 24 October 1914, thus easily meeting the date criteria for this award, 5 August to 22 November 1914.
Charleston had two sisters, Susan Ellen and Irene Lavinia. In May 1960, forty-five years after her brother's death, Irene presented Guildford Cathedral with an exquisitely embroidered banner featuring a descending dove, two angels, one with a harp and one with a trumpet, and the badge of the Lancashire Fusiliers. The banner is Irene's work, which she dedicated:

AMDG in memory
of F Charleston
Ypres 7 July 1915.


HE IS A PORTION
OF THE LOVELINESS
WHICH ONCE HE MADE
MORE LOVELY

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM MCCONNELL RUTHERFORD


William Rutherford's brother chose these lines from 'Adonais: an Elegy on the Death of John Keats'. The poem became the source of many First World War epitaphs as hundreds mourned the death of young men who, like the poet John Keats, died before their time: "He hath awakened from the dream of life", "He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night", "He lives he wakes - 'tis Death is dead, not he;", "He is made one with Nature: there is heard his voice in all her music", "He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely".
Rutherford was a teacher at Kingston Grammar School and they have compiled a wonderfully detailed biography of his life and war service. In brief, he was born in Belfast, educated at Belfast Methodist College, Queen's University, New College in Edinburgh and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1912 he took a job teaching a junior class at Kingston Grammar School but when war broke out two years later, despite the fact that he disliked war, he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He worked as a hospital orderly in Alexandria, where the wounded from the Gallipoli and Palestine campaigns were brought, and in October 1916 applied for a commission. Gazetted into the East Yorkshire Regiment in May 1917, he was severely wounded in the thigh during the heavy fighting around Hazebrouck 11-13 April, and died in hospital in Wimereux on the 19th.


HIS LIFE FOR THE LIFE
FRANCE GAVE US
OFF USHANT, 6TH OCTOBER 1779

LIEUTENANT EDWARD CRAWFORD


Captain Crawford's ancestor has to have been one of the thirty-eight survivors of the Royal Naval frigate HMS Quebec sunk by the French frigate Surveillante off the island of Ushant on 6 October 1779. Quebec had fought a bloody action to the death and once her magazines had exploded and the ship had sunk there were few survivors. However, the French ship managed to pick up some of them. Surveillante herself was in a desperate state and had lost many of her crew, so the British sailors helped get this enemy ship back to port. Once there the captain, Lieutenant Charles Louis Du Couëdic de Kergoualer, treated the British sailors as castaways found at sea rather than as prisoners-of-war, and made sure they were repatriated without either parole or ransom. The whole story can be read here.
Edward Crawford, together with his twin brother Frederick, were regular soldiers serving in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers having been gazetted lieutenants in April 1906. Edward went to France with the British Expeditionary Force in October 1914, was invalided home with frostbite in December 1914 and, having returned to the front, died in hospital at Wimereux on 27 May of gas poisoning and wounds received some time around the 25th.
By the time the war broke out in 1914 both Crawford's parents were dead. It was one of his older brothers, Robert Karl Crawford, who chose his inscription - "His life for the life France gave us off Ushant 6th October 1779".


"DUTY"

BRIGADIER GENERAL WALTER LONG


The records don't show who chose this inscription but I would assume it was 'Toby' Long's wife. I'm curious because there is nothing heroising or romantic about it. Is this Wordsworth's duty, "the stern daughter of the voice of God"?

Who art a light to guide, a rod
To check the erring and reprove;
Thou, who art victory and law
When empty terrors overawe;
From vain temptations dost set free;
And calm'st the weary strife of frail humanity!

It's interesting that the word 'duty' should have featured prominently in The Times' report of his death:

"The death of General Long will be lamented by a wide circle of friends. He was the best type of officer of the old Army, adored by his soldiers, and a man to whom duty always came first. He was never off duty for a day while in France"

Brigadier General Long had been in France since he crossed with the Expeditionary Force in August 1914 as a captain in the Scots Greys. He was 37 when he was killed in January 1917 while inspecting the trenches at Hebuterne. He had a distinguished career behind him and the expectation of an even more distinguished career in front of him. As General Haig wrote to his father:

"his death deprives the Army of one of our best Brigadiers. As a soldier he was so practical and thoroughly up to his work. I always felt he was sure to attain high rank, and as a man, he was loved and admired by us for his manly straight forward ways."

Walter 'Toby' Long was the son of Walter Long, who at the time of his son's death was Secretary of State for the Colonies. Elevated to the peerage as 1st Viscount Long of Wraxall it was his thirteen year-old grandson, Walter Francis David Long, who inherited the title in 1924. Walter Francis David, 2nd Viscount Wraxall, was killed in action during Operation Market Garden in September 1944. The title went to his father's brother, Richard, whose younger son inherited the title in 1967, his older brother, a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, having died in 1941.

To humbler functions, awful Power!
I call thee: I myself commend
Unto thy guidance from this hour;
O, let my weakness have an end!
Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;
The confidence of reason give;
And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live!
Ode to Duty
William Wordsworth 1770-1850


NOTHING TO SHAKE
THE LAUGHING HEART'S
LONG PEACE

LIEUTENANT MARTIN HUNTER


I didn't recognise this inscription and yet I would have thought I might have done. It comes from the first of Rupert Brooke's sonnets: Peace, the one that begins,

Now God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
And caught our youth and wakened us from sleeping,

The poem expresses pleasure that the war has given today's youth the opportunity to do something noble and fine in the face of the moral corruption of contemporary society. And even if they are killed, the worst that will happen is that they will have found peace. The poem ends:

Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, Hunter was commissioned into the 9th Lancers in January 1915, joining them in France in February 1916. As trained cavalrymen the Lancers were thought too valuable to be used as assault infantry so spent much of the war dismounted, digging trenches, building railway lines, clearing the battlefields, as 'vulture parties', and waiting for the great breakthrough when remounted they would sweep through the German lines to victory. Unfortunately it was the Germans who broke through. Hunter was wounded on 25 March 1918 during the German Spring Offensive, fighting a desperate mounted rearguard action near Bapaume. He died seventeen days later in hospital in Wimereux, his parents at his bedside.
Martin Hunter was his parents only son. Today there is a rather overgrown, private family burial plot close to Anton's Hill, their house in Leitholm, Coldstream. James and Jessie Hunter placed their son's original wooden grave marker here, in a little wooden shrine, which was recently surveyed for The Returned. James Hunter, who had also served in the 9th Lancers, chose his son's inscription.


OH MY DEAR SON
HOW I MISS YOU
MOTHER

PRIVATE THOMAS MANUEL


Mrs Catherine Manuel was a widow and Thomas was her youngest child. The family came from Linlithgow, where father James was a mason, but at the time of Thomas's death his mother was living in Brandon Place, Palace Colliery, Bothwell, Glasgow. Thomas described himself as a colliery worker when he enlisted on 15 September 1914 but he is not listed on the Bothwell war memorial.
Thomas Manuel served with the 2nd Battalion Highland Light Infantry and went with them to France in May 1915. However, he was not with them when he was killed. According to the report of his death in the Hamilton Advertiser of Saturday 13 May 1916, Manuel had been attached to the Royal Engineers as an officer's servant. His medal roll indicates that this was the 173rd Tunnelling Company, which was engaged in countering enemy mining initiatives in the region of Loos en Gohelle, waging 'main', 'deep' and 'deep deep' underground warfare, sometimes to a depth of 40 metres. The newspaper does not record how his death occurred.


I AM FOR PEACE
BUT WHEN I SPEAK
THEY ARE FOR WAR
PSALM 120.7

SERJEANT PERCY TUCKER


Serjeant Tucker was killed in action in a local attack at Leuze Wood near the village of Combles, which is where his body was discovered in a temporary grave in 1920. His brother Reginald had been killed in Flanders two months earlier. Their father Jonah, chose both their inscriptions. Reginald's says:

We are more than conquerors
Through him
That loved us

This comes from Romans 8:37 and is an introduction to the beautiful passage about nothing being able to separate us from the love of God - "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature". If Reginald's inscription is about the permanence of God's love, what is Percy's about? It sounds like the words of a conscientious objector - whenever I speak in favour of peace I am shouted down. I don't think Percy Tucker can have been one or he wouldn't have achieved the rank of serjeant, but that doesn't mean to say that he didn't speak out in favour of peace.
Percy Tucker was an elementary school teacher in London when he enlisted in the 2nd Battalion The London Regiment, Royal Fusiliers. Reginald was a miller's clerk in Chippenham, Wiltshire where both brothers had been born and where both are commemorated on the Tabernacle Congregational Church Memorial. There's a Frederick Tucker on this memorial too. Percy and Reginald's eldest brother was called Frederick but it has not been possible to establish whether this is their brother.


HE NEVER YET
NO VILEINYE NE SAYD
IN ALL HIS LYF
UNTO NO MANER WIGHT

CAPTAIN JAMES BRUCE


Yesterday the widow of an elementary school headmaster quoted from the portrait of the knight in the prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for her son's inscription. Today the grandson of an earl quotes from the same source for his brother's inscription.
Captain James Bruce was the grandson of the Earl of Elgin and Kincardine. His father, Frederick John Bruce, was a landowner in Arbroath. James, the third son, was reading for the Scottish Bar. On the outbreak of war he immediately joined the Forfarshire Battery, 1st/2nd Highland Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. After a period of training, the Brigade left for France on 1 May 1915 where it became A Battery, 256th Brigade and was involved in all the major actions on the Western Front.
Bruce was killed in Flanders in the week before the brigade took part in the launch of the Third Ypres Offensive. Apparently, whilst on his way to an observation post somewhere to the east of the Yser Canal, he was caught by shell fire and "died instantaneously". The writer of this document quite rightly questions whether this can be true as Poperinge New Military Cemetery, where Bruce is buried, was relatively far behind the front line and attached to a group of Casualty Clearing Stations. Is it significant that three members of A Battery 256th Brigade, who all died on 25 July 1917, are all buried in a row in the same cemetery and that the mother of one of them has recorded for the cemetery register that her son died of wounds (gas).
There is a family memorial in St Vigean's New Cemetery, Arbroath. James' death is recorded here along with his parents, three brothers and a niece and nephew, the lettering is less definite than it is on the later inscriptions but you can just make out the words:

He never yet no vileinye ne sayd
In all his lyf unto no maner wight


HE LOVED CHEVALRIE
TRUTH AND HONOUR
FREEDOM AND CURTESIE

RIFLEMAN ALAN COLVILLE HUDSON


Alan Colville Hudson was the son of an elementary school headmaster; a fact which must go some way to explaining his educated inscription. However, it wasn't his father who chose it since father, Robert Hudson, died in May 1913, rather it was his mother, Helen Constance Hudson. She has quoted Chaucer, using archaic spelling, if not the usual archaic spelling:

A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie.
Trouth and honour, fredom and curteisie

The knight is the most admired person on the pilgrimage to Canterbury, depicted as the perfect example of Christian manhood, "a verray, parfit gentil knyght". Hudson, a rifleman in the 1st/5th London Regiment, was killed in action at Dainville just west of Arras. There are no details about his death.


THAT GENTLENESS
THAT WHEN IT MATES
WITH MANHOOD
MAKES A MAN

GUNNER LESLIE AMYAS COOK


Tennyson's poetry is turning out to be the most popular source of secular personal inscriptions. This one comes from Geraint and Enid, one of his Idylls of the King. As used by Gunner Cook's father, it makes a lovely epitaph implying that his son combined gentleness, the quality of being kind, agreeable and courteous, with the manly qualities of courage and integrity, which together made him a man.
Leslie Cook served with B Battery, 74th Brigade Royal Field Artillery, attached to the Guards Division. He died at a Casualty Clearing Station in Proven on 14 September. There is no individual information about his fate but on 13 September the 74th Brigade's war diary reported that the enemy put up a box barrage, a defensive barrage round Ney Copse and Ney Wood. It could have been in this incident, or any like it, the Cook was fatally wounded.


"LOOKING AFTER HIS MEN"

CAPTAIN CHARLES ROBERT FORBES HAY-WEBB


The Times
January 5 1917
"Captain Charles Robert Hay-Webb, R.F.A. killed on December 28, aged 22, was the third and only surviving son of Mr C.R. Hay-Webb of Moohtapore, Behar, India, grandson of Mr T. Bonville Were, of Hay Broadclyst, Devon. ... he passed into Woolwich in January 1912, and was gazetted in July 1913 to the Royal Field Artillery. ... He went to the front in January 1915, was severely wounded in the second battle of Ypres on 30 April 1915, and was on medical leave for 11 months. He returned to the front in November [1916]. His eldest brother, Captain Allan Bonville Hay-Webb, died of wounds in Gallipoli in August 1915.."

"The third and only surviving son"; there's nothing to say how the unnamed brother died but it wasn't in the war. Mr and Mrs Charles Hay-Webb had one remaining child, a daughter called Adele.
Captain Hay-Webb's mother chose his inscription. It is in inverted commas, and whilst I would suggest that she is quoting from a letter of condolence, the words create a lovely image of an officer still looking after his men, the prime responsibility of an officer, in death as he had done in life.


THE EVENING BRINGS ALL HOME

PRIVATE WILSON STANSFIELD


This is yet another way of expressing your belief in the fact that there is life after death. For many people this was the only thing that brought them any comfort as they faced the future without those they loved. The belief is so prevalent, as evidenced by inscriptions, that I sometimes wonder whether people could have carried on supporting the war without it.
The words here come from poem by the prolific Scottish hymn writer, Horatius Bonar (1808-1889). When we die it is the evening of our life on earth but the morning of our life in heaven

The evening brings all home. For that we wait,
Which is at once our evening and our morn,
The end of evil and the dawn of good.

Stansfield enlisted on 28 October 1916 at the age of 18 and 11 months. After eight months training he arrived in France on 30 June 1917 and was killed at the front exactly two months later. When he enlisted, Stansfield gave his occupation as 'weaver'. He had been in the industry for at least five years as the 1911 census shows him as a thirteen-year-old 'reacher in cotton'. This is someone who is responsible for creating the pattern in the fabric by correctly organising the threads from several beams. The 'reacher' does the work under the supervision of a 'drawer-in'. And this is not the only old trade I learnt whilst researching Wilson Stansfield: his father was a whitesmith, someone who makes objects out of metal, especially tin.


"BROTHERS IN ARMS"

CAPTAIN ARTHUR NORBURY SOLLY


"Brothers in arms": the usual meaning of these words is that the men were fellow combatants. In one sense this is what the inscription does mean, but in a more literal sense than usual. Captain Solly and his observer Lieutenant Hay are buried in the same grave. On 11 August 1917, Solly, an experienced pilot with nine victories to his name, took off on a test flight. Reports differ but one says that all was going well until the wings collapsed at 7,000 feet. The plane crashed to the ground and caught fire, the ensuing inferno making it impossible to separate the two bodies.
Educated at Rugby and Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, Solly intended to be a doctor like his father. However, the war broke out and he left his studies after only one year. He served originally in the Manchester Regiment before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps in October 1915, first as an observer before receiving his wings in November 1916.
His photograph in the Rugby memorial register shows a handsome, devil-may-care young man. Several reports testify to his bravery and to his disregard for danger. On one occasion he made a solo reconnaissance flight over the front line, circling and diving, in total disregard of German efforts to shoot him down, until he was satisfied that he had seen enough of their troop arrangements and gun emplacements. An infantry officer watching him wanted Solly to be told that, "all ranks in the Salient felt proud to think that such work, apparently by one Englishman, should be carried out with such bravery".
The inscription is quoted within inverted commas, which would suggest that it was more than just a phrase. Perhaps Solly's parents had in mind a poem by Arthur Perceval Graves, father of Robert Graves, which was published in an anthology of war poetry in 1916. Titled Brothers in Arms, the poem tells how:

At their Mother's call, her mighty daughters,
Sprang, as Pallas sprang, full-armed to birth.

These 'daughters' are the countries of the British Empire, which joined with the French and Belgian nations in challenging the German foe:

Trusting surely that how oft soever
Back and forth War's crimson waves may flow,
On our faithful, chivalrous endeavour
Victory's full-orbed sun at last shall glow.


AND O' WE GRUDGED HIM SAIR
TO THE LAND O' THE LEAL

PRIVATE KENNETH MOODIE MCBEAN


Kenneth McBean's mother chose his inscription, quoting from The Land of the Leal a poem by Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne (1766-1845), in which a mother describes how sorrow for the death of her child is slowly killing her:

I'm wearin' awa', John
Like snaw-wreaths in thaw, John,
I'm wearin' awa'
To the land o' the leal.

The land o' the leal, the land where the faithful go, in other words, heaven.

Our bonnie bairn's there, John,
She was both gude and fair, John;
And O! we grudged her sair
To the land o' the leal.

There are small changes in Mrs McBean's version, mainly the change in the personal pronoun; the child in the poem is a girl. The apostrophe after the letter O is probably a misreading by the War Graves Commission of the exclamation mark.
The bereaved mother in the poem feels death approaching and welcomes it because her child is in the land o' the leal:

O, dry your glistening e'e, John!
My saul langs to be free, John!
And angels beckon me
To the land of the leal.

Mrs McBean had two dead children: Allan William McBean, killed in Gallipoli on 26 June 1915 aged 21 and his younger brother, Kenneth, killed in Flanders two years later.


BOYHOOD'S
SCARCE CONSCIOUS BREATH
CHEERFULLY GIVEN
LEST WE FORGET

SERJEANT LOWRY LEES


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.


HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR ANOTHER

CAPTAIN WILFRID THOMAS CHANING-PEARCE


Captain Wilfrid Chaning-Pearce was shot at close range by a German soldier as he was trying to reach some wounded men who could not be brought in from No Man's Land. It was broad daylight but he was afraid to leave them until after dark when it would have been considerably safer.
Chaning-Pearce, a newly qualified doctor, joined up on the outbreak of war. He went to France in May 1915 where he initially worked in base hospitals. In 1916 he was attached to The King's Liverpool Regiment and moved to the front line. He served throughout the Somme campaign and the battles of Arras and Messines Ridge.
After his death correspondents were effusive in their praise of him: his contempt of danger, his cheerful endurance, the fact that he could always instil confidence in those around him. He was awarded a Military Cross for his actions on 31 July 1916 when he moved his Regimental Aid Post forward into captured ground, not considering the danger but only how he could better serve the wounded. He remained on duty of 36 continuous hours. The citation for the award reads:

"For conspicuous gallantry, and devotion to duty, in attending the wounded men belonging to nine different battalions, under heavy and continuous shellfire. His Aid Post, was the only one in the vicinity, in such a forward position, and he worked continuously and without rest until all the wounded had been attended to, displaying splendid devotion to duty."

Educated at Rugby, Emmanuel College Cambridge and Guy's Hospital, Chaning-Pearce qualified as a doctor in 1911 and was working at Guy's as an anaesthetist when the war broke out. His sister, Eleanor, chose his inscription. It would appear that she underestimated the number of people who owed their lives to him.


A GOOD SON
A GOOD SOLDIER
A GOOD SPORTSMAN
UNSELFISH TO THE END

CAPTAIN CECIL RICHARD LANGHAM


A father chose this inscription for his son, Cecil Langham; a son who was a captain in the regiment his father, Colonel Frederick Langham, commanded. This was the 5th (Cinque Ports) Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment with which the family had been associated for many years. Captain Langham was killed at Langemarck attempting to bring in his badly wounded orderly. His death was a blow to this territorial battalion, as the regimental gazette reported, "The loss of such a fine officer as Captain Langham ... was keenly felt by the whole battalion, which made their beloved C.O.'s grief their own".
Cecil Langham joined the 5th Battalion on leaving school in 1910. As with all territorials, his peacetime commitment was limited to four years' service, regular drills and between eight to fifteen days annual training a year. Langham was therefore able to combine his service with a degree at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to which he had won an open classics scholarship. Whilst there he rowed both for his college and for the uiversity.
In 1914, Langham took a position with the trading house of Patterson, Simmons & Co in Singapore. He had scarcely arrived before war was declared and having applied to be released he returned to Britain to rejoin the battalion. He served on the Western Front continuously from February 1915 until his death in August 1917 - earning from his father the tribute: a good son, a good soldier, a good sportsman, unselfish to the end.


FATHER AND MOTHER
WEEP NOT FOR ME
NOR WISH ME BACK AGAIN

DRIVER JAMES BUSHBY


The State Library of Western Australia has a collection of photographs entitled the Bushby Collection of Rosedale Farm, Cuballing, Western Australia. This is Driver James Bushby's family. James Bushby Senior arrived in Australia in 1885. His wife, Honour, came the following year with with their two children: Annie and her younger brother James Junior. In November 2015 the Cuby News, which covers the communities of Cuballing, Popanyinning and Yornaning, published an article by Stephen Bowes on the family and the sons who went to war.
Jim enlisted on 24 June 1915 at the height of the Gallipoli campaign, embarking from Australia on 18 November. The transport arrived in Suez in December by which time the Gallipoli Campaign was winding down. Bushby joined the 54th Battery Australian Infantry and went with them to France, arriving in June 1916. By the summer of 1917 the Battery were in Flanders. Bushby was killed on 12 August. His death is not mentioned by name in the war diary but it does record two soldiers killed that day.
Two other brothers also served, Fred was badly wounded in the chest in September 1917. After being hospitalised in England, he eventually returned to the front but in September 1918 went absent without leave. He was arrested five days after the war ended and sentenced to seven years penal servitude. This was suspended in April 1919 after he had spent some months working for the AIF Graves Detachment. The other brother, Alf, was also wounded and had a leg amputated.
Mrs Bushby chose her son's inscription, presumably quoting her son's sentiments if not his actual words: Father and mother weep not for me nor wish me back again.


THE LORD WATCH
BETWEEN ME AND THEE
WHEN WE ARE ABSENT
ONE FROM ANOTHER

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ARCHIBALD JOHN SALTREN-WILLETT


Western Morning News Saturday 20 October 1917
"Lt-Col Archibald John Saltren-Willett (killed in action on Oct.11) was the son of the late Capt. John Saltren-Willett, of Petticombe, Torrington, and Newington House, Oxford. He was born in 1866, and after leaving Cheltenham, entered the RMA; he passed out of Woolwich into the Royal Artillery in April 1885, reaching the rank of lieut-col. in Feb. 1913. He had served on the Staff as Assistant Inspector of Warlike Stores."

Strange, this doesn't sound anything like the man that I have discovered. In the first instance he had a wife who chose his lovely inscription, she doesn't get a mention in any of the death announcements, of which thee were several. In the second, at the time of his death Saltren-Willett was in Flanders, at Zonnebeke right in the centre of the battle serving as a commander of a 1st ANZAC Heavy Artillery Battery Group.
Compare the above newspaper announcement with this:

"SECRET
Routine Order No: 62 13th October 1917 by
Brigadier-General L.D. Fraser CMG RA
Commanding 1st ANZAC Corps Heavy Artillery
1. Obituary: It is with deep regret that the B.G.H.A. announces that Lieut-Colonel A.J. Saltren-Willett, Commanding 66th H.A.G. was killed in action on the 11th instant.
Full of energy, and at all times keenly solicitous for the welfare of those serving under him, the loss of this gallant officer will be deeply felt by those serving under him so recently, and by the Royal Regiment in general."

This link to the unit war diary for October 1917 on the Australian War Memorial website shows, page after page, how deeply involved the 1st ANZACs were in the Third Ypres campaign. The site also has a digitised copy of his Mention in Despatches:

"For conspicuous energy and devotion to duty and untiring supervision of his group of counter-batteries during the offensive E. of Ypres in June, July, August and September 1917.
On active service since 10/10/1916
Dated 20th September 1917"

Saltren-Willett was killed three weeks later whilst "directing the batteries of his Group, which were then in action at Zonnebeke, he was hit by the fragment of a German shell and killed instantaneously".

In 1900 he married Helen Margaret Bird in St Peter's Lahore. His inscription comes from Genesis 31:49, "The Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent one from another". This loving blessing, often represented by the single word Mizpah, is used whether the couple are separated by distance or by death.


AFTER ONE CROWDED HOUR
OF GLORIOUS LIFE
HE SLEEPS WELL

PRIVATE JOHN WILSON KELSO


William Wilson Kelso created his son's inscription, combining a very short poem by Thomas Osbert Mordaunt (1730-1809) with a line from Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife,
To all the sensual world proclaim
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.

Mordaunt's poem, The Call, was at one time thought to have been written by Sir Walter Scott who used it as the motto to Chapter XIII in Volume II of An Old Mortality. W.E.Henley (1849-1903) certainly attributed it to Scott when he used it on the title page of Lyra Heroica, his collection of poetry for boys.
The phrase was frequently used as a shorthand to describe a certain type of person. Vera Britain used it to describe her fiance Roland Leighton:

"I know you're the kind of person who would risk your life recklessly; I was talking to someone a short time ago and I said I thought you were the kind who believes in the 'one glorious hour of crowded life' (sic) theory; is it true?"

There's something rather touching about the way John Kelso's parents recorded that he "left school to join the Colours in February 1916". I expect he was just 18 because they record equally carefully that he was 19 and a half when he died a little over a year and a half later. John was the fifth of their six children and their only son.
Kelso served with the 6th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, part of the 51st Highland Division. This went into the trenches near Langemarck on 20 August 1917 and remained in the area until 20 September. The History of the 51st Division remarks that this was an interesting period on three counts: "First the mud ... the ground throughout the whole front was so sodden with rain and churned up by shell-fire as to be impossible to troops in any numbers". Second was the "consistently lavish use of the recently-introduced mustard gas, which caused numerous cases of slightly-gassed men, and a lesser number of men seriously gassed. The latter suffered indescribable agonies, and either ultimately died or made an insufficient recovery ever to return to the ranks as whole men". The third feature was the aerial bombing, which the Germans began to use increasingly at this time. The bombing was "difficult to deal with, as shelters for the men could not be provided by means of dug-outs in the clay soil of Flanders".
Kelso died of wounds at a field ambulance on 2 September, whether from gas, mud, shell or bomb we don't know.

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.
Macbeth Act III Scene ii



MI Y YMDRECHAIS YMDRECH DEG

CAPTAIN THOMAS THOMAS


This Welsh inscription, a quotation from 2 Timothy 4:7, translates as 'I have fought the good fight'. The verse continues, 'I have finished my course, I have kept the faith'. It's a popular inscription but strange as it may sound it appears to be only popular on officers' graves. I can't think of any reason for this.
Thomas Thomas was commissioned into the 13th Battalion, Welsh Regiment on the outbreak of war. Raised in Llanelli in August 1914 it didn't cross to France until December 1915. Initially in the Ypres sector it moved down to the Somme in June 1916 where it took part in the capture of Mametz Wood. It was then moved north again to Ypres. On 31 July 1917 it took part in the capture of Pilkem Ridge where it suffered heavy losses. After being rested, the battalion returned to the front line on 20 August, going into the trenches along the line of the Steenbeek. Thomas was killed by shell fire on the 23rd.


NOW A' IS DONE
THAT MAN CAN DO
AND A' IS DONE IN VAIN

SERJEANT ALEXANDER ROUGH


Alexander Rough was a miner from Stirlingshire. Married on 31 December 1913, he enlisted on 31 August 1914. By the time of his death he was a serjeant, surely a testament to his qualities. He was killed in action at the 2nd Battle of the Scarpe on 23 April 1917.
His wife, Margaret Hall Begg Rough, chose his inscription. It comes from a poem by Robert Burns, It Was a' For our Rightful King. After the 1745 Rebellion, when despite all being done that a man could do it was all done in vain, two lovers are to be parted as the man faces exile. There were plenty of lines that one might have thought Mrs Rough could have used from this poem: 'With, Adieu for evermore, my dear!', 'But I hae parted frae my love, never to meet again', 'I think of him that's far awa the lee-lang night, and weep'. But she didn't, she chose to say that it had all been in vain.
Margaret Rough can have had no idea how 'in vain' her husband's death was. If she had thought it would help bring peace, it was only 22 years after Alexander Rough's death that Britain was again at war with Germany, and only 27 years before their son, Alexander Thomas Begg Rough, was killed in action at Rimini on 16 September 1944.


NON OMNIS MORIAR

CAPTAIN WILLIAM MORRISON


Captain Morrison's Latin inscription comes from Horace's Ode 3.30. Horace claimed 'I shall not wholly die, non omnis moriar, because I have created a monument more lasting than bronze, and loftier than the pyramids, which neither time nor the weather will be able to diminish. Horace's monument was his poetry. Morrison's brother, Alexander, chose the inscription. For him his brother's immortality would rest on his war service.
William Morrison was born in 1886, the year after his father, who for 29 years had been the Free Church of Scotland minster in Boharm, Banffshire, died. Educated at Milne's Institute, a Free School in Fochabers, and Edinburgh University, Morrison joined the British East Africa Medical Service after graduating in 1909. He returned in March 1915 to take a temporary commission in the RAMC, serving with the 14th Field Ambulance.
Morrison spent two years at the Front except for a few months during the winter of 1916-17 when he was recovering from shell shock. This could be related to the MC he was awarded on 25 November 1916. The citation reads:

"For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. Although himself wounded, he tended and dressed the wounded under very heavy fire, displaying great courage and determination."

The 14th Field Ambulance was part of the 5th Division, which joined the Third Ypres offensive just before the Battle of Polygon Wood (26 September 1917). It took part in the battles of Broodseinde (4 October), Poelcapelle (9 October), First Passchendaele (12 October)and Second Passchendaele (20-22 October). Morrison died of wounds and gas poisoning on 23 October before the end of the offensive on 10 November.


HIS WEB OF TIME HE WOVE

PRIVATE GEORGE EDWARD EVANS


George Evan's inscription comes from a hymn, The Sands of Time are Sinking written in 1857 by Anna Ross Cousin, the wife of a minister in the Free Church of Scotland. She was inspired by the writings of Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661) on whose last words, "Glory, glory dwells in Immanuel's land", she based the refrain in her nineteen-verse hymn.
The inscription comes from verse 9:

With mercy and with judgement
My web of time He wove,
And aye the dews of sorrow
Were lustred with his love!
I'll bless the hand that guided,
I'll bless the heart that plann'd,
When thrones where glory dwelleth
In Immanuel's land.

What happens in your life is willed by God and although you may meet with sorrow, scorn, hatred and woe along your way at the end you can be sure that "Glory - glory dwelleth in Immanuel's land.
George Evans, who served in D Coy 1st/5th King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek on 8 January 1917.


COURAGE

PRIVATE ROY MONTEITH COMYN


There are only a few inscriptions of just one word; I have written about Kismet, fate, the epitaph for the soldier who had survived the South African War and service on the North-West Frontier in India only to be killed on the first day's fighting, 23 August 1914, and Sacrificed, which could mean that the soldier's wife believed he was sacrificed by others or that he made the sacrifice. 'Courage' is similarly elusive. Does it mean that Roy Comyn, apparently always known as Jim, had the courage to face what frightened him, or that he was a man of bold free spirit who faced danger without fear.
Comyn was the youngest of ten children and it was Henry, his eldest brother who was 14 years older than him, who signed for the inscription. 'Jim' was born in 1890, was 11 months old at the time of the 1891 census, was a pupil at his sister's prep school, St Cyprian's in Eastbourne, at the time of the 1901 census and doesn't appear at all in the 1911 census. He next appears in the records when he returns to England from America in June 1916 on board the Philadelphia, giving his occupation as rancher. Had the long arm of conscription reached him - could it? Or had he decided it was his duty?
Comyn came from a prosperous Home Counties family - they lived at Marle Place, Brenchley in Kent. He was privately educated - his brothers went to Dulwich College but I can't see where he went. Nevertheless, he served as a private in the 9th Battalion the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) and all I can tell of his war service is that just over six months after his return from America he was buried in a Casualty Clearing Station Cemetery at Avesnes-le-Sec.


HIGH IN THE CLOUDS HE FOUGHT
NOBLY STRIVING, HE NOBLY FELL
ALONE HE DIED
FOR GOD, FOR RIGHT & LIBERTY

FLIGHT SUB-LIEUTENANT HAROLD LESLIE SMITH


Harold Leslie Smith was educated at Rugby School, which means that his war service is included in one of their wonderful seven volumes of Memorials of Rugbeians Who Fell in the Great War. Each one of Rugby's almost 700 dead is given an individual biography ranging from a couple of short paragraphs to several pages. And for almost everyone of them there is a photograph.
Having qualified as a pilot in May 1916, Smith was commissioned into the Royal Naval Air Service that July. He was 18. In late April 1917 he arrived in France and was killed in action on 24 May. Volume V relates what happened.

"On the early morning of 24 May, he was sent with five others on a fighting patrol. They flew in two formations of three each, and he was flying a single-seater Sopwith Triplane Scout Machine, carrying one gun. He flew behind the leader of the second formation, and, when they were about twelve miles over the German lines, near Douai, the first three machines were observed in action with several Germans over the town. Then nine German Albatross Scouts, known as Baron Richthofen's Travelling Circus, each carrying two guns, approached, trying to cut of the second formation, who immediately flew to the attack. There were several clouds about, so that all were mixed up in the fight, and Lieutenant Smith was not seen again."

Two months later, "official information was received, through the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, that he was killed in this fight, and fell with his machine west of Flers. He was buried by the Germans in the village churchyard of Lauwin-Planque, two miles from Douai". In 1922 his body was reinterred in Brebieres British Cemetery.
Smith's inscription mixes fact - "high in the clouds he fought", "alone he died" - with the poetry of John Oxenham. "Nobly striving, he nobly fell" comes from the first verse of Oxenham's poem Hail! - and Farewell:

They died that we might live, -
Hail! - and Farewell!
- All honour give
To those who nobly striving, nobly fell,
That we might live.

And "For God, for right & liberty" from To You Who Have Lost:

He died as few men get the chance to die, -
Fighting to save a world's morality.
He died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God, and right, and Liberty; -
And such a death is immortality.


HE IS GONE ON THE MOUNTAIN
HE IS LOST TO THE FOREST

CAPTAIN HUGH ADAM MUNRO


This haunting inscription comes from the first lines of Coronach, a poem by Sir Walter Scott of which the last four lines read:

Like dew on the mountain,
Like the foam on the river,
Like the bubble on the fountain,
Thou art gone - and forever.

It was chosen by Captain Munro's father the at one time well-known Scottish author Neil Munro.

Munro, a newly qualified doctor, was called up on the outbreak of war in his capacity as a territorial soldier. He served in France and was killed on 22 September 1915 as the result of what the local paper described as "a foul German trick".

"A party had been out on picket duty when a German flag was noticed stuck in the ground some distance off. Lieut Munro went to bring in the flag but on pulling it up a bomb tied to the stick exploded and killed him instantaneously."

The newspaper went on to report how the experience proved instructive when shortly afterwards some soldiers came across the body of a French soldier. The officer was about to give orders to have the man buried when he remembered how Munro had been killed. He checked the body carefully and discovered that it too had been booby trapped.


"IF, DOING WELL YE SUFFER
THIS IS ACCEPTABLE
WITH GOD"
1 EPIS. PETER 2.20

LIEUTENANT EDWIN LEOPOLD ARTHUR DYETT


Three British officers were executed in the course of the First World War and one of them was Edwin Dyett: Dyett and 2nd Lieutenant Poole were executed for desertion, 2nd Lieutenant Paterson for murder. Paterson was in fact arrested for desertion, four months after he had disappeared, but in attempting to escape arrest he shot and killed the arresting sergeant so the charge was murder. Of the three, Dyett's is the best documented case, and the least clear cut, seemingly based more on opinion than evidence.

On 19 December 1916 Dyett was charged on two counts:

"The accused, Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Edwin Leopold Arthur Dyett RNVR, an officer of the Nelson Battalion 63rd Division, is charged when on active service with deserting His Majesty's Service ... In the field on 13th November 1916, when it was his duty to join his battalion, which was engaged in operations against the Enemy, [he] did not do so, and remained absent from his battalion until placed under arrest at Englebelmer on 15th November 1916.

There was a second charge of "conduct to the prejudice of good order and Military discipline", which stated that Dyett "in the field on 13th November 1916 did not go up to the front line when it was his duty to do so".

The trial was heard on Boxing Day, 26 December. Dyett pleaded not guilty to both charges but did not give evidence nor were any witnesses called for the defence. The Court found him guilty of the first charge and not guilty of the second and sentenced him to death, before recommending leniency:

"He is very young and has no experience of active operations of this nature. And that the circumstances of growing darkness, heavy shelling and the fact that men were retiring in considerable numbers were likely to affect seriously a youth, unless he had a strong character."

The sentence was passed up the chain of command and on 28 December Major General C.D. Shute, Commander 63rd (RN) Division, wrote:

"The Division did very well on the Ancre and behaved most gallantly. Added to this Sub Lieutenant Dyett is very young and inexperienced. Beyond the above I know of no reason why the extreme penalty should not be exacted. I recommend mercy."

However, the next link in the chain, Lieutenant General Macob, Commander V Corps, decided on 30 December:

"I see no reason why the sentence should not be carried out."

And on 31 December at the next level the Commander of the Fifth Army, General Gough, wrote:

"I recommend that the sentence be carried out. If a private had behaved as he did in such circumstances, it is highly probable that he would be shot."

Then finally, on the 2 January 1917, the sentence reached the very top where Field Marshal Douglas Haig confirmed it - "condemned". Dyett was executed at dawn, 7.30 am, three days later, 5 January 1917.

On 4 January he wrote to his mother:

Dearest Mother Mine,
I hope by now you will have heard the news. Dearest, I am leaving you now because He has willed it. My sorrow tonight is for the trouble I have caused you and Dad ... I feel for you so much and I am sorry for bringing dishonour upon you all ... So now dearest Mother, I must close. May God bless and protect you all now and for evermore. Amen.

It was Dyett's mother, May Constance Dyett, who chose his inscription - his father was by then dead. She puts the words specifically in quotation marks and identifies the biblical passage from which they come - yet these are not the words of the passage, which read:

"For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God."
1 Peter 2.20

If you suffer having done something well (or perhaps in this case having not done something wrong) and you accept it patiently, God will admire your behaviour. Perhaps He will see it as the ultimate in turning the other cheek. I wonder whether the quotation marks indicate that Mrs Dyett was quoting from somewhere other than the bible - perhaps from the letter the Chaplain, who spent the last night with Dyett in his cell, wrote to her. The Dyetts did not believe their son was guilty and before he died Edwin's father, Commander Walter Dyett, RN, led an unsuccessful campaign through the pages of the magazine John Bull to have his son pardoned.

A good account of Dyett's case, which I have found very useful, can be found in Shot at Dawn: the Fifteen Welshmen executed by the British Army in the First World War by Robert King.


I SHALL ARRIVE
WHAT TIME
WHAT CIRCUIT FIRST
I ASK NOT

MAJOR JAMES MILES LANGSTAFF


I see my way as birds their trackless way -
I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first,
I ask not: but unless God send His hail
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow.
In some good time - His good time - I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In His good time!

James Langstaff's inscription comes from Paracelsus, a long narrative poem by Robert Browning, 1812-1889. It was chosen for him by his widowed mother.

"Major J.M. Langstaff
Killed in action at Vimy Ridge, March 1st 1917. James Miles Langstaff, son of the late Dr James Langstaff, was born at Richmond Hill, Ontario, July 25th 1883. He had a brilliant intellect. Rarely has his career as a student been equalled. After passing the highest actuarial examinations, he entered law graduating at Osgoode Hall in 1912, with the Gold Medal and the Van Koughnet Scholarship. As a soldier at the Front - 75th Battalion, CE.F. - he rose rapidly in rank, was mentioned in despatches, and later was recommended for the Military Cross."
From Canadian Poets of the Great War. Edited by John Garvin 1918

War Shaped Destiny, one of the poems published in the above volume, was found with his effects after his death.

I never thought that strange romantic War
Would shape my life and plan my destiny;
Though in my childhood's dreams I've seen his car
And grisly steeds flash grimly thwart the sky.
Yet now behold a vaster, mightier strife
Than echoed on the plains of sounding Troy,
Defeats and triumphs, death, wounds, laughter, life,
All mingled in a strange complex alloy.
I view the panorama in a trance
Of awe, yet coloured with a secret joy,
For I have breathed in epic and romance,
Have lived the dreams that thrilled me as a boy.
How sound the ancients saying is, forsooth,
How weak is Fancy's gloss of Fact's stern truth.

Much of this information is copied from the Canadian Virtual Memorial site.


TO PRESERVE THE JEWEL
OF LIBERTY
IN THE FRAMEWORK
OF FREEDOM

PRIVATE FRED BOARDMAN


It seems as though Fred Boardman's widow, Sarah, must have emigrated to Canada after her husband's death. He was certainly still living in Britain in December 1915 when he enlisted in Denton, Lancashire, the town in which he was born. However, when the time came for Sarah Boardman to send an inscription to the War Graves Commission she gave her address as: 25, East 25th St., Mount Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario.
The inscription is interesting. These are Abraham Lincoln's words as carved on the American Civil War Memorial in Edinburgh, dedicated to the Scots who both fought and died in the war - on the side of the Union. The words are based on a letter Lincoln wrote to the military Governor of Louisiana on 13 March 1864. It's a private letter, written on the eve of a Convention which:

"among other things, will probably define the election franchise. I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the coloured people may not be let in as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying times to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom. But this is only a suggestion, not to the public, but to you alone."

You can see that Mrs Boardman used the words on the statue in Edinburgh rather than Lincoln's own. Fred Boardman was a silk hat finisher, a business in which both his mother and his father had worked before him. He married Sarah on 27 December 1909 and by the time he attested on 8 December 1915 he had a son. He was killed in the trenches near Bethune on 22 December 1916.


THE DAWN IS NOT DISTANT
NOR IS THE NIGHT STARLESS
LOVE IS ETERNAL

PRIVATE WALTER STERICKER WILKINSON


Mrs Ethel Wilkinson chose this inscription for her husband. It comes from the last verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, The Musician's Tale; the Saga of King Olaf. Mrs Wilkinson uses the lines to imply the permanence of her love, and her belief that the time is not far off before she and her husband will be reunited. Longfellow is asserting the permanence of God's love:

"The dawn is not distant,
Nor is the night starless;
Love is eternal!
God is still God, and
His faith shall not fail us;
Christ is eternal!"

Walter Wilkinson died on 1 January 1917, three days after his only child's third birthday. The inscription on his parents' headstone in Kirkheaton Lane Side Cemetery, Huddersfield, Yorkshire refers to the fact that Walter was "accidentally killed". In 2014 the Huddersfield Daily Examiner interviewed Walter's grandson. He told them that Walter had been suffocated when a newly dug trench collapsed.


IN LIFE AND DEATH
A CHAINLESS SOUL
WITH COURAGE TO ENDURE
BRONTE

PRIVATE MILTON RAY


The War Graves Commission make a particular point of telling the stone carver that the 'e' at the end of Bronte should have two dots over it. Unfortunately the database I'm using doesn't allow for them.
Private Milton Ray's inscription comes from a short poem by Emily Bronte (1818-1848), The Old Stoic.

Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream,
That vanished with the morn:

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, "Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!"

Yes, as my swift days near their goal:
'Tis all that I implore;
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.

Milton Ray's brother Valentine signed for his inscription, did he choose it? Who is it asking for the courage to endure - Milton, the soldier, or his widowed mother, Fanny? Surely Fanny who wants the courage to endure the rest of her life before she is set free in death.


WITH ACHING HEARTS
WE SHOOK HIS HAND
IT WAS OUR LAST GOOD-BYE

PRIVATE JOHN B MCKAY


This is so sad - a father's farewell to his son ... "we shook his hand". Father, David McKay, was a steam engine fitter from Perth in Scotland and John was the youngest of his four children. Was John's mother, Mary, alive when John left for the war? I can't tell. Surely she would have kissed him. But perhaps they are talking of the last good-bye at the railway station when young John was probably desperate that no one should disgrace him by kissing him or crying. And, of course, the words may not be a literal description. There is an In Memoriam verse that uses some of these words and David McKay may simply have felt less exposed using these:

With aching hearts we shook his hand,
Tears glistened in our eyes,
We wished him well, but never thought
It was our last Goodbye.

There was another father who described his last farewell like this, "I could not speak that last last good-bye but kissed him o'er and o'er". This too is a headstone inscription, that of Private William Carr. But, for all its restraint, the pain is no less evident in John McKay's inscription than in William Carr's.
McKay served with the 6th Battalion the Cameron Highlanders. In July 1918 the battalion had formed part of the combined British, French and American attack at Buzany. At the beginning of August they were moved north again and took part in the final victorious hundred days. McKay and two other soldiers from the 6th battalion were killed on 18 August. They are all buried in a small cemetery at Dainville where they are the only Cameron Highlanders and where there were only twenty burials during the whole month of August 1918.


THE LARKS YE HEARD
THEY SING OF THE CAUSE
WHICH MADE THEE DIE

PRIVATE HOWARD OTIS IRISH


This inscription is based on John McCrae's incredibly popular poem, In Flanders' Fields. The poem was so popular that there were many, many responses to it: poems that promised to keep the torch held high, promised not to break faith with those who died. This inscription comes from one such poem, which was apparently printed on a highly illuminated card by a New York publishing house:

Rest in peace, ye Flanders's dead,
The poppies still blow overhead,
The larks ye heard, still singing fly,
They sing of the cause which made thee die.

And they are heard far down below,
Our fight is ended with the foe.
The fight for right, which ye begun
And which ye died for, we have won,
Rest in peace.

There is little trace of the poem now, in fact, had it not been quoted in The Sunny Side of Grub Street, an essay by Christopher Morley that appeared in Mince Pie, a collection of his writings, it would probably have disappeared completely. Morley was not impressed by either the poem or its sentiments declaring that, "The man who wrote that ought to be the first man mobilized for the next war". However, that's obviously not how Private Irish's American parents saw it.
Howard Otis Irish was born in Barberton, Ohio in 1893. When he was 20 he and his parents went to Australia. Howard enlisted in March 1916, embarked from Australia in June and was killed in the trenches in December.


YOU WERE
ALL THE WORLD TO ME JIMMY

PRIVATE JAMES STRANG


Jimmy's inscription was chosen by his father, Thomas Strang, a blacksmith from Glasgow - Jimmy was the youngest of his six children. He served with the 1st/5th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders and died of wounds in a base hospital at Etaples on 18 April 1918. There is no indication of how, when or where he received his wounds but a glance at the war diary, edited by Captain Sutherland and published in 1920 shows the numerous opportunities the desperate times offered.
Having spent January, February and early March in the usual round of trench warfare, with the additional task of preparing for the long expected German offensive, the 1st/5th, part of the 51st Highland Division, found themselves in the eye of the storm when the attack was launched on the 21 March.

"At 5 am to the minute, after a quiet night, every gun on the German front opened out as hard as they could fire, the front lines being heavily barraged, whilst his heavies systematically shelled support and reserve lines and billeting areas far in the rear. Thousands of guns must have been massed for his great offensive.
After five hours of this systematic and devastating shelling, his infantry advanced to the attack, masses upon masses of men pouring forward towards the British front line. It is reckoned that nine German Divisions attacked our Divisional front alone; while in guns he must have had ten to one."

For the next six days the 51st were involved in a savage, fighting retreat leading the diarist to comment:

"Many sad hearts will there be in Highlands and Lowland bornes over this six day's battle; but this sadness should be tempered with pride at the glorious fight for freedom and right made by our Northern battalions against the powers of darkness as typified by those brutal adversaries, the Boche. Pessimistic you may be at times at home, pessimistic we may be sometimes out here, but bear in mind we are fighting for our lives, our liberties, and all we hold dear, and that, if we do not persevere to the bitter end, to the sacrificing of our last man and our last gun, our race is doomed, our past is wiped out, and we are no longer a free nation, but a race of slaves under the most cruel, vindictive and blood-thirsty tyrants that ever tried to rule the world - a nation with no sense of honour, no sense of chivalry, no sense of decency even; a nation which will grind us into the dust if it once gains the supremacy, and will make us wish we had never been born."

The times were desperate and seven days before Strang died General Haig issued his Special Order of the Day telling his Army:

"There is no course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment."

It was at some point during this maelstrom that Strang received his fatal wounds.


LO, THE WINTER IS PASSED

PRIVATE NATHAN DOUGLAS TEALE


'Passed' is not how the King James Version of the bible spells the word, but plenty of Christian writers do when they quote the extract:

"For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of the birds is come,"
Solomon's Song 2: 11/2

I wonder what Private Teale's mother meant by her choice of inscription? I can't imagine she was saying that the worst part of her mourning was over but it could be that she can take comfort from the fact that whatever happens, spring follows winter, seedtime gives way to harvest, night will follow day and sadness will give way to joy when she is reunited in death with her son. It's this passage from Solomon's Song that ends five verses later with one of the most popular of all headstone inscriptions: 'Until the day break, and the shadows flee away' Solomon's Song 2:17.
Nathan Teale was the seventh of his parents' thirteen children, eight of whom were boys. And it seems as though he was the only one to die in the war. At the age of 17 he was a pupil teacher in Garforth, Leeds. He joined the Coldstream Guards and served with 3 Coy 2nd Battalion. He was killed on 14 September 1916, the day before the Guards Division attacked at Lesboeufs, perhaps he was caught by shell fire as the battalion took up their battle positions. This is all the war diary says:

"14 September 1916 - At 8 pm the Battalion moved up to Ginchy and took over trenches from 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards. Relief completed about midnight."

The Battalion attacked at 6.20 the following morning and by the end of the day had lost 417 officers and men killed, wounded and missing.


SET ME AS A SEAL
UPON THINE HEART
FOR LOVE
IS AS STRONG AS DEATH

LIEUTENANT CLAUD ALGERNON FELIX-BROWN


"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death;"
Solomon's Song 8:6

With these words, Ernest Felix-Brown states the permanence of his love and remembrance for his eldest son who was killed on Boxing Day, 26 December 1916.
Lieutenant Felix-Brown enlisted on the outbreak of war in the London Rifle Brigade and went with the 1st Battalion to France on 5 November 1915. According to his obituary in the Hendon and Finchley Times, Felix-Brown was invalided home with shell-shock in December 1914 but returned to the Front in February 1915. A few months later he received a commission in the West Yorkshire Regiment. He went to Gallipoli attached to the Lancashire Fusiliers and spent Christmas 1915 in hospital in Alexandria.
In April 1916 Felix-Brown joined the newly formed 46 Squadron Royal Flying Corps and went with them to Belgium that October. Flying two seater Nieuports, the Squadron was engaged in artillery spotting and reconnaissance. On 26 December, Felix-Brown and his pilot, Captain John William Washington Nason, were shot down over Railway Wood by the German 'ace' Alfred Ulmer. They were 46 Squadron's first deaths and the third of Ulmer's five kills before he too was shot down on 29 June 1917.
[There does not seem to be any agreement over whether Felix-Brown was a hyphenated surname or not, nor whether Claude was spelt with an 'e' or not. I have been consistent but I am not necessarily correct.]


QUI ANTE DIEM PERIIT
SED MILES SED PRO PATRIA

LIEUTENANT GERALD GALT


There was no Christmas Truce in 1916, at least definitely not in the trenches near Ploegsteert Wood where Gerald Galt was killed by a shell on Christmas Day. The War Dairy gives a cursory narrative:

December 25: We bombarded enemy trenches at 8 pm no retaliation - Mr Galt was killed at about 9 pm just outside dugout 123 trench.

Galt, a mining engineer, had been working with the Braden Copper Company in Rancagua, Chile before returning to Canada to enlist. He joined the 3rd Tunnelling Company Canadian Engineers and arrived in France in September 1916, three months before he was killed.

Galt's Latin inscription was composed by Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) for his poem Clifton Chapel, a rather alarmingly militaristic poem that was very popular in its day. A father introduces his son to his old school chapel and tells him that of all the glittering prizes the future might bring there is none more pure than the one represented by the words on one of the brass plaques:

'Qui procul hinc,' the legend's writ, -
The frontier-grave is far away -
'Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.'

Translated the words mean - who died in a far off land before his time but as a soldier and for his country. In other words, there is no nobler ambition for a young man than to be prepared to die for your country.
I always think it's interesting that Rudyard Kipling, whose own son John was killed in the war but had no grave, chose these same words for John's memorial in Burwash Church in Sussex. Kipling, who expressed so eloquently the pride and grief of a nation in the work he did for the War Graves Commission, used the words of another man for his son.




TO MAKE WARS TO CEASE
UNTO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
MY JOY AND CROWN

PRIVATE J A WALKER


Private Walker died on Christmas Eve, the same night that long ago the heavenly host is said to have greeted the shepherds with the words: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men" (Luke 2:14). Mrs Daisy Walker, Private Walker's widow, in choosing the words of the Psalmist for her husband's inscription, asserts that it is in God's power to end war:

"He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire."
Psalm 46 v.9

What does she mean by "My joy and crown"? St Paul meant that the Philippians were his joy and crown, his reward and his blessing, and exhorted them not to fall away from their belief in Christ.

"Therefore, my brethren dearly beloved and longed for, my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved."
Philippians 4:1

Mrs Walker may have had another person in mind as her 'joy and crown' but was stating that she would not fall away from her belief in God.
Private Walker served with the 5th (London) Field Ambulance, part of the 47th London Division. A Territorial Force, it had been in action since March 1915. The History of the 5th London Field Ambulance describes the locations where it served, lists the 50 men who were killed, and concludes with a wonderful piece of verse:

The Chorus of the 'Fifth'
by R. Wyatt

The Fifth the fliers
The Fifth the triers
The Fifth that never tires
And that never makes a fuss,
Oh we will tell you on the strict Q.T.
Just the sort o'kind o'chaps we be
We are the Fifth London Ambulance R.A.M.C.




TO WEEP
WOULD DO THY GLORY WRONG

PRIVATE ANDREW BLAKE SCOTT


"Our next gun got five men killed by one shell. Gillingham, Clayden, Scott, Little and Brown, all good lads and had been with us since we left Suez."
20 November 1916
From the diary of Corporal Angus Mackay, 'Somewhere in Blood Soaked France'.

Mackay and Scott served in the 88th Machine Gun Company, formed in Suez on the 21 February 1916. The Company embarked for France on 10 March and took part in the Battle of the Somme. By November 1916 they were involved in work to shore up and repair the line in an attempt to make it habitable for the coming winter. Entries in Mackay's diary in the week before Scott's death give an indication of their mood and the conditions.

17 November
Had a struggle with rations over shell holes and barbed wire in the dark, then got washed out of our dugout when we got back. Very funny to read about but I am damn well fed up.

18 November
Got a fire going and got our breakfast after some cursing all round. Rain snow and frost mixed up rather unpleasant. Hear we go up the line in a couple of days. ... Mud up to the neck. This country is not worth fighting for.

Andrew Scott's parents chose his inscription. It comes from the last verse of Byron's 'Thy Days are Done', which he wrote in 1815 in praise of a soldier killed fighting for his country's freedom. This is the first verse:

Thy days are done, thy fame begun;
Thy country's strains record
The triumphs of her chosen son,
The slaughters of his sword!
The deeds he did, the fields he won,
The freedom he restored!

And these are the last two lines:

To weep will do thy glory wrong:
Thou shalt not be deplored.


THE BUGLES OF ENGLAND WERE CALLING
& HOW COULD I STAY

SERJEANT JOHN O'REGAN


Serjeant O'Regan - army service number 17144 - came from Glasgow and died from the effects of gas in a base hospital in Etaples. I have been unable to find out anything else about him, possibly because, as the War Graves Commission's records state, he was 'also known as John McKay'. It's certainly as Sgt John McKay - army service number 17144 - that he appears in the Clan Mackay Society War Memorial volume.
His wife, Isabella O'Regan, chose his inscription. It's based on a poem written in 1914 by a young Australian, James Drummond Burns, who died on Gallipoli in September 1915. The poem was extremely popular in Australia and is generally considered to have summarised of how many Australians felt in the early months of the war - and throughout it too. From Mrs O'Regan's choice of inscription it must have had an impact in Britain as well.

The bugles of England were blowing o'er the sea,
As they had called a thousand years, calling now to me;
They woke me from dreaming in the dawning of the day,
The bugles of England - and how could I stay?

The banners of England, unfurled across the sea,
Floating out upon the wind, were beckoning to me;
Storm-rent and battle torn, smoke stained and grey,
The banners of England - and how could I stay?

O England, I heard the cry of those that died for thee,
Sounding like an organ-voice across the winter sea;
They lived and died for England, and gladly went their way -
England, O England - how could I stay?


ONE NEVER KNOWS, DOES ONE?

PRIVATE JOHN HENRY TURNER


This is another strangely fatalistic inscription but unlike yesterday's I'm pretty sure that Private Turner's father knew what he was saying - you do never know what the future will bring At the time of the 1911 census, Mr and Mrs Turner had had seven live births in their twelve years of marriage, but in 1911 only two of these children were still alive: John Henry, 12 and his younger brother, Arthur, 9. I hope Arthur survived the war.
John Henry was killed in action on 24 August 1918 when the 56th (London) Division captured Summit Trench and attempted to go on and take the village of Croisilles. The village, however, turned out to be far more heavily defended than reports had led the Londoners to believe.


C'EST LA GUERRE
JESU MERCY

PRIVATE JOSEPH WATT


Joseph Watt's mother offers a conventional shorthand prayer for her son's soul, 'Jesu mercy', under what had become an ironic phrase to explain away anything that had not quite gone according to plan. I wonder if she realised that? Originally a French catchphrase, used fatalistically in much the same way that people still say, 'C'est la vie', it was picked up by English speaking soldiers and incorporated into their own vocabulary.
References to fate are not unknown on headstone inscriptions in British war cemeteries. I've seen 'Kismet', 'The luck of the draw' and 'Whatever is - is best'. They are the secular equivalent of the extremely popular, 'Thy will be done'.
I know nothing else about Watt except that died in a base hospital in Etaples and that his mother, Mrs H Watt, lived in Durban, South Africa.


I SHALL SAY
AS I LOOK BACK EARTHWARD
WHATEVER IS - IS BEST

SECOND LIEUTENANT HUGH WILLIAMS


Hugh Williams' older brother, Richard, chose his inscription. Their parents were both dead. Richard still lived in Wolverhampton, where he and his siblings had been born. Hugh had gone to South Africa, from where he enlisted in the 4th South African Regiment. He fought at Delville Wood as a lance corporal during July to September 1916, but by the time he died of wounds in a base hospital at Etaples, he had been commissioned.
I haven't found anything to say where and how Williams was wounded but on 12 April 1917 the South Africans took part in a costly attack at Fampoux for which the regimental history (page 124) was forced to conclude that the enemy must have known they were coming. Added to this was the fact that the men were tired having worked hard for three days under heavy shell fire, that they had had no sleep for four nights, three of which had been spent lying in the snow without blankets. The South African fought hard for little gain, the 1st, 2nd and 4th regiments suffering 720 casualties between 12 April and their relief on the 15th
Hugh Williams' inscription quotes the last lines of a poem by the popular American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919), Whatever is - is best:

I know there are no errors
In the great Eternal plan,
And all things work together
For the final good of man.
And I know as my soul speeds onward,
In its grand Eternal quest,
I shall say as I look back earthward,
Whatever is - is best.


A FLOWER OF THE FOREST
IS WEEDED AWAY

PRIVATE PETER CROSSAN


The words are an English version of an old Scottish lament. The tune was originally composed for the bagpipes and tradition has it that it is a lament for the flower of Scotland, the 10,000 men who were killed at the battle of Flodden in 1513. There are two sets of lyrics that accompany the song. Jean Eliot's words, for the relevant verse, read:

We'll hae nae mair lilting at the yowe-milking,
Women and bairns are dowie and wae.
Sighing and moaning on ilka green loaning,
The flowers of the forest are all wede away.

There's another popular version by Alison Cockburn:

O fickle fortune! why this cruel sporting?
Why thus perplex us poor sons of a day?
Thy frowns cannot fear me, thy smile cannot cheer me,
Since the flowers of the forest are a' wede away.

Peter Crossan was born in Scotland, in Carluke, Lanarkshire. He emigrated to Australia with his parents when he was 13. He enlisted in April 1917. Rather poignantly, he gives his age on his attestation form as 18, and beside this there are brackets containing the words, 'parent's consent'. All soldiers had to be 19 before they could go on active service - unless they had their parents' permission. Crossan's mother, a widow, had given her consent. Peter's brother, William, who also served in the Australian army, chose his inscription.

I've seen the forest adorn'd of the foremost,
With flowers of the fairest, both pleasant and gay;
Full sweet was their blooming, their scent the air perfuming,
But now they are wither'd and a' wede away.


WILL YE NO COME BACK AGAIN

PRIVATE WILLIAM ALEXANDER LOGAN


The words come from the chorus of a traditional Scottish Jacobite song, written some years after the 1745 rebellion by Lady Nairne (1766-1845) whose father, Laurence Oliphant, had been a leading supporter of the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart.

Will ye no' come back again?
Will ye no' come back again?
Better lo'ed ye canna be
Will ye no' come back again.

There's no evidence that William Logan's mother was still alive when the inscription was chosen. She's not mentioned in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records, but she's the one who came from Scotland, from Alva in Banffshire; the rest of the family were all born in or around London where William Logan Senior was a nurseryman.
Private Logan served with the 1st Battalion The Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment and died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station on 10 August. The Battalion had been in and out of the front line for the last two weeks in July. The War Diary regularly reported, without naming any names, casualties in the region of one or two every day. I assume one of these casualties must have been Logan.

Bonnie Charlie's noo awa
Safely o'er the friendly main
Mony a heart will break in twa
Should he ne'er come back again.


LIFE IS VERY SWEET BROTHER
WHO WOULD WISH TO DIE

RIFLEMAN GERALD OSCAR SMITH


'Life is sweet brother.'
'Do you think so?'
'Think so! - There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?'
LAVENGRO 1851
George Borrow (1803-1881)

This part autobiography, part novel received a very cool reception when it was first published. Sales picked up after Borrow's death, encouraged by the opinion of critics like Theodore Watts who wrote in the introduction to the 1893 edition: 'There are passages in Lavengro which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England'. Smith's inscription comes from one such passage. It's so beautiful I'm surprised I haven't come across it before.
Gerald Smith was a married man with at least two children, sons Roy and Phillip. I only know this from the fact that Phillip, a 22-year-old sergeant serving with 10 Squadron Bomber Command, was killed in action on 6 November 1940, and 29-year-old Roy, a constable serving with the Palestine Police Force, was killed in a bomb explosion on 20 October 1946.


HAPPY THE WARRIOR
WHO FINDS BATTLE
THE GATE OPENING TO HEAVEN

SUB-LIEUTENANT SAMUEL GEORGE JAMES


This inscription comes from an unusual source, the Bhagavad Gita, a 700 verse Hindu text concerned in one part with a warrior's duty to fight in a just war. The text was reasonably well known in late nineteenth-century England thanks to a translation by Edward Arnold, which he called The Song Celestial (1885). William Thomas James, Samuel's younger brother, chose the inscription, which is a contraction of Arnold's lines:

Nought better can betide a martial soul
Than lawful war; happy the warrior
To whom comes joy of battle - comes as now,
Glorious and fair, unsought; opening for him
A gateway unto Heav'n.

Educated at Sir Roger Manwood's Grammar School in Sandwich, Kent, Samuel James is described in the 1911 census as a science student His parents were stewards at the Royal St George's Golf Club in Sandwich and Samuel gets various mentions in the local paper in the years before the war for winning golf competitions.
He served as a naval rating in the Royal Naval Division during the fall of Antwerp in October 1914, where he was wounded in the back. During the next three years he was hospitalized with various illnesses and injuries before returning to England in December 1916 to take a commission. He returned to the Western Front on 27 September 1917 and was killed in action twelve days later.


HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR HIS COMRADES

SERJEANT JAMES BREMNER


Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

The words of St John Chapter XV verse 13 form one of the most popular of all headstone inscriptions and war memorial dedications, but Serjeant Bremner's sister was much more specific than this, her brother gave his life for his comrades. Comrades - brothers-in-arms.
Comradeship, fellowship with those in your regiment, platoon, section, was one of the defining qualities of the First World War. In his memoir, With a Machine Gun to Cambrai, George Coppard writes:

"Of my memories of life in the trenches, the one thing I cherish more than anything else is the comradeship that grew up between us as a result of the way of life we were compelled to lead - living together under the open sky, night and day, fair weather or foul, witnessing death or injury, helping in matters of urgency, and above all, facing the enemy. Such situations were the solid foundation on which our comradeship was built. It has been said that such comradeship died when the war ended."

It has not been possible to tell whether Bremner's sister, Ina, was referring to a specific incident in his inscription, or just speaking generally about her brother's motivation. Bremner was the only member of the 251st Siege Battery to die on that day.


THE PATH OF DUTY
WAS THE WAY TO GLORY

GUNNER LOUIS GOLDIE VICTOR BALDING


Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington offers the assurance that glory is achieved by doing your duty.

Yea, let all good things await
Him who cares not to be great,
But as he saves or serves the state.
Not once or twice in our rough island-story,
The path of duty was the way to glory:

Louis Balding did his duty. He was called up on 22 July 1916. He was 29, which means that he was conscripted, conscription having been introduced in March 1916. The March act applied only to single men; Balding had got married on 26 December 1915. However, in May 1916 conscription was extended to include married men; Balding signed up in July. He went to France in October 1916 and served with the 185th Siege Battery. He died of wounds along with three other men of the Battery on 7 August 1917.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
(Elegy Written in a country Churchyard by Thomas Gray 1716-1771)

The path of duty leads to glory, and the path of glory leads but to the grave.





BY THE PATH OF DUTY
R.I.P.

PRIVATE ROBERT SAMUEL WADE


Sometime during the years 1919 and 1920, the bereaved next-of-kin received a bronze plaque carrying the name of their deceased relation, together with a commemorative scroll. Underneath the royal crest, the scroll recorded the deceased's rank, name and regiment with the following much discussed wording:

"He whom this scroll commemorates was numbered among those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom. Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten."

Robert Wade's father, James, quoted the phrase, 'by the path of duty' for his son's inscription.
The Wades were a military family. James Wade had served in the South African War, been wounded and taken prisoner at Zilikat's Nek and then, having retired, re-enlisted in the reserve on 6 September 1914. His brother, Samuel, was also a soldier. He had remained in the army and had risen through the ranks, receiving a commission in November 1914. He was killed in action on 8 December 1914. James' eldest son, William, also a regular soldier, died of wounds received in action on 25 October 1914. Robert Wade, James's third son, was killed at Polygon Wood and buried at Bridge House Cemetery where all but one of the 45 burials died on either 25 or 26 September 1917.


THOUGH ABSENT IN BODY
THANK GOD
HE STILL TALKS WITH US

PRIVATE RICHARD ARTHUR LEWIS


"He still talks with us" ... how? Presumably through the services of a spiritualist medium. Such services were in great demand both during the war and in its immediate aftermath; many people believing fervently that their dead were speaking to them - just as Mr and Mrs Richard Lewis did. The Church disapproved strongly and would not have appreciated the Lewis's thanking God for this manifestation, as far as it was concerned, spiritualism was nothing less than pagan superstition. But those who believed both in God and in spiritualism believed that it was nothing less than evidence of the truth of God's promise of eternal life.
Belief in the supernatural answered a deep emotional war-time need in both soldiers and society. From the persistence of the belief in the acknowledged fiction of the Angel of Mons, or the Crecy bowmen, the individual evidence of soldiers whose dead comrades helped them avoid certain death, and Will Longstaff's hugely popular paintings featuring ghostly soldiers still inhabiting the battlefields, belief in the supernatural brought comfort and consolation.
There were definitely charlatan spiritualists out there, and this is what outraged people like Rudyard Kipling who wasn't interested in the theology of the matter. But though Kipling mocked spiritualism in his poem, The Road to Endor, he also told compassionate supernatural tales, like The Gardener.
Private Lewis served with the 12th Battalion the East Surrey Regiment, which arrived in France in May 1916. He was killed in action on 7 June 1917 when the 12th Battalion East Surrey Regiment attacked on the opening day of the Battles of Messines; the day the British blew nineteen mines along the Messines Ridge at 3.10 in the morning to herald the opening of the attack. Lewis is buried near St Eloi where the largest mine, containing 95,600 lbs of ammonal was fired. We don't know how Lewis was killed but despite the success of the operation some British soldiers were killed by the blast from their own mines.


SUCH GRAVES AS HIS
ARE PILGRIM-SHRINES

PRIVATE FRED LAYLAND


Fred Layland served with the 96th Field Ambulance Unit and was killed in action during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge. In 1911, at the age of 16, Layland was working as a warehouse clerk but it has been difficult to find out anything else about him. Confusingly, the RAMC site has given his army number to Frederick Murrell, a fellow private in the RAMC who was killed on the same day as Layland and his buried beside him.
It was Mr WH Layland, Fred Layland's father, who chose his inscription. It comes from the thirty-second stanza of 'Burns', a poem in praise of Robert Burns by the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867):

Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined -
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind.

To Mr Layland, people of all races and creeds will honour the graves of those who died for their country in the First World War, just as they come from all over the world to honour the grave of Robert Burns.

But what to them the sculptor's art,
His funeral columns, wreaths and urns?
Wear they not graven on the heart
The name of Robert Burns?

Mr Layland was right, these graves are pilgrim shrines. Even before the war was over, some of the bereaved managed to visit them. And then immediately the war was over organizations sprang up to take, guide and accommodate visitors - both the bereaved and the tourists - round the battlefields and the cemeteries. The former group were known as pilgrims who ranged from the wealthy, who would arrange for a private car, usually driven by a former officer, to drive them around, to the poor for whom the Church Army and the St Barnabas Society began to arrange inexpensive group tours. From 1921, the St Barnabas Society organised an annual free pilgrimage for the close relatives of the bereaved who otherwise would never have been able to visit. Mark Connelly has written interestingly about the subject here.


ONE OF THE DEAREST & BEST

PRIVATE REGINALD DANIELLS


Reginald Daniells' mother describes him as one of the 'dearest and best'; was she quoting from the first verse of Cecil Spring-Rice's famous hymn, 'I Vow to Thee My Country'?

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

The fit is good but the dates make it difficult. This new first verse to Spring-Rice's poem was written in January 1918, but it was only circulated privately until Gustav Holst set it to music in 1921. And even then it didn't become widely known until it was published in Songs of Pralse in 1925. It's therefore probably another hymn that Mrs Daniells had in mind when she chose her son's inscription, the communion hymn, 'And now O Father Mindful of the Love', which had been published in the much more widely circulated Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1875. This is the relevant verse:

And then for those, our dearest and our best,
By this prevailing presence we appeal:
O fold them closer to thy mercy's breast,
O do thine utmost for their soul's true weal;
From tainting mischief keep them white and clear,
And crown thy gifts with strength to persevere.

Reginald Daniells, an apprentice at the Salmons Motor Carriage Works in Newport Pagnall, enlisted on 18 August 1917. He went to France on 4 April 1918 and died three weeks later, on 26 April, of wounds received in action that day. His father died a week later, and his elder brother died of influenza on 16 January 1919. His inscription also reads: 'One of the dearest and best'.





OH THAT WE COULD
HAVE CLASPED HIS HAND
& SOOTHED HIS PARTING HOURS

SERGEANT GEORGE LOWBRIDGE


As if the death of your son was not enough grief, the fact that you had not been at his side when he died, had not been able to say goodbye, hold his hand or soothe his brow, added another layer of sorrow. The nineteenth century had idealised the 'good death': the loved one lying surrounded by their family who had gathered to say goodbye, hear their last words, comfort them. For George Lowbridge's parents, it was unbearable to think of him dying alone.
Lowbridge, a bootmaker from Newcastle, New South Wales, had been at war since he left Australia in November 1915. Travelling across France from Marseilles in the spring of 1916 he told his parents how lovely and fresh the air was after Egypt, how like home. But he was struck by the general air of sadness in all the towns and villages:

"It would do some of our Australian boys good to come here and learn a lesson - the slackers I mean. All that are left are the old men and women. Their sons have all gone to war."

By October 1917, Lowbridge was a sergeant who had been recommended for a Military Medal for "conspicuous bravery" at Polygon Wood less than a month before he was killed. There are no details of his death but the war diary records:

"22nd October Support line Anzac Ridge. Officers 40, ORs 811. Fairly heavy shelling all day. Carrying party supplied, heavy casualties to our NCOs during the day. 2 ORs killed in action, 9 ORs wounded, 2 evacuated sick."

Among the dead were two sergeants, George Lowbridge and Eustace King, and Corporal David Price. Price and Lowbridge enlisted in Newcastle on the same day - 18 July 1915 - embarked from Australia in the same ship on the same day - 9 November 1915 - and were killed in action on the same day. Sometime later, in the In Memoriam column of the local Newcastle newspaper, the following announcement appeared:

"In loving memory of our dear comrades, Sergeant George Lowbridge and Corporal D. Price, killed in action October 22, 1917 - Inserted by their comrades, F.W. Keen, F. Field and D.T. Brewster."


LEAVING A WIDOW
AND THREE CHILDREN
HIS DUTY DONE

PRIVATE HAROLD ST CLAIR HENSTRIDGE


Henstridge's three children, Kevin, Betty and Bobbie, were aged 6, 5 and 2 at the time of their father's death. Interestingly, because
his whole service file has been digitised, we can see that subsequently his widow, Violet, received a fortnightly pension of £2, Kevin 20 shillings, Betty 15 shillings and Bobbie 10 shillings.
Henstridge, who described himself at his attestation as an advertisement writer, enlisted on 14 August 1915, trained as a machine gunner and served with the 3rd Company Australian Machine Gun Corps in France and Flanders. He was killed by a shell on 20 September 1917, the witnesses in his Red Cross Wounded and Missing file giving slightly contradictory accounts as to exactly what happened. The most lurid describes how they were advancing in open formation at Polygon Wood when a shell came over and hit him:

"It was about midnight ... when it happened ... Henstridge was the only one hit. We looked for him and found pieces of fresh flesh ... I feel sure the shell wiped him out ...".

Others also say that he was blown to pieces but some say that they saw his body and helped to bury him. I've always wondered how much detail the Red Cross passed on to the next-of-kin; who would want to know about finding pieces of their son's or husband's 'fresh flesh'? However, the letter the Red Cross wrote Mrs Henstridge is in this file and I can see that they say nothing about Henstridge being blown to pieces and only mention that he was killed and probably buried near when he died.
Regardless of the conflicting reports, this does appear to have been what happened. In March 1919, Henstridge's body was discovered at map reference J.8.c.5.0. Although there was no cross on the grave, Henstridge did have his identity disc, which meant that he could be buried under a named headstone. The identity disc was despatched to Mrs Henstridge on 9 June 1920.


DIED AT HIS POST OF DUTY
A SOLDIER OF THE AIR

SECOND LIEUTENANT SIDNEY LORNE CROWTHER


Sidney Lorne Crowther failed to return from a scouting flight on the morning of 20 September 1917. News that he was missing reached his parents 3,600 miles away in Toronto on the 23rd and the Toronto Star reported the fact the next day:

"Official word was received yesterday that Flight Lieutenant S. Lorne Crowther, of the 29th Squadron, France, has been missing since September 20th.
Lieut. Crowther is the youngest son of Mr and Mrs William C. Crowther, St George Street, Toronto. He is 21 years of age and was educated at Upper Canada College. He went overseas in May 1915 to drive the U.C.C. ambulance, returning to Canada to join the R.F.C., leaving again to train in England last November. His brother Major W. Beverley Crowther, was killed May 3rd 1917, at Fresnoy.
Lieut. Crowther went to France about two months ago, and duty has taken him over the German lines on a number of occasions. He had been on scout duty. This morning's mail brought a letter from him to his parents, in which he made brief mention of his work."

Crowther's mother chose his inscription; I like the way she calls him 'a soldier of the air', possibly not sure how else to describe him. Although distinctive RAF ranks were not introduced until August 1919 note how the Toronto Star described Crowther as a Flight Lieutenant. He was in fact a Second Lieutenant, Flight Lieutenant would have been a promotion; Pilot Officer became the equivalent rank.
There was no further news of Crowther until the body of an unidentified second lieutenant was located at map reference D.4.c.39 in March 1920. How the body was identified as Crowther's the records don't say.



HEAVEN IS FULL OF
GAY AND CARELESS FACES
NEW-WAKED FROM
DREAMS OF DREADFUL THINGS

PRIVATE JAMES AULINNE GRAY


James Gray was 17 when he died of wounds in August 1917. He had been serving in France since October 1915. It's possible that by then he was 15, but he was certainly only 14 when he enlisted since his parents say so in the War Graves Commission's cemetery register. He served with the 108th Field Ambulance (Ulster Division) and died of wounds on 9 August 1917.
In May 1919 Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Fawcett, with the officers and men of the 108th Field Ambulance, presented a plaque in James' memory to the Ormeau Road Methodist Church, Belfast. The local newspaper reported that the plaque was unveiled by Major SB Boyd Campbell who told the congregation that James was a special favourite with all the members of his unit:

"he could be depended upon on at all times to carry through any work set before him. It was his own desire to take up the dangerous work of a stretcher bearer. He faced every risk and nobly died in discharging his duty".

Gray's inscription comes from the second verse of 'Flower of Youth', an immensely popular poem by the Irish poet, Katharine Tynan, first published in The Spectator on 26 December 1914. Tynan herself believed that she had written better poetry about the war but nothing approached the popularity of this one.

Heaven's thronged with gay and careless faces,
New-waked from dreams of dreadful things.
They walk in green and pleasant places
And by crystal water-springs
Forget the nightmare field of slain,
And the fierce thirst and the strong pain.

The poem attempts to reassure mothers that God has rescued these young boys and now has them in his special care:

Oh, if the sonless mothers weeping,
The widowed girls, could look inside
The country that hath them in keeping
Who went to great war and died,
They would rise and put their mourning off,
Priase God, and say: "He has enough."


AND THOUGH
THE WARRIOR'S SUN HAS SET
ITS LIGHT SHALL LINGER
ROUND US YET

GUNNER ALAN DOUGLAS ROWLAND MENZIES


His souls to Him, who gave it, rose;
God lead it to its long repose,
Its glorious rest!
And, though the warrior's sun has set,
Its light shall linger round us yet,
Bright, radiant, blest.
COPLAS de MANRIQUE
by Don Jorge Manrique (c1440-1479)
Translated from the Spanish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

The dead warrior, Rodrigo Manrique, was the poet's father, a man with a 'strong heart of steel', who served his 'sovereign's crown' 'with patriot zeal' doing 'deeds of valour strong'. But, regardless of whether a man is high born or low born, rich or poor, virtuous or wicked, Manrique is keen to tell us that we are all destined to die, after which a better life awaits us.
Menzies' mother chose his inscription, whether she meant to imply that her son shared Rodrigo Manrique's qualities she has certainly declared that he will not be forgotten.
In 1911, fifteen-year-old Alan Menzies was a municipal gardener in Weymouth, like his father. He served in the Royal Garrison Artillery with the 21st Siege Battery. These were the heavy guns, the Howitzers, firing their 6 or 9 inch shells from behind the lines. There is no record as to how Menzies met his death but since the Howitzers could do devastating damage to the German trenches and communication routes, they in their turn were a prime target for the German guns.


SOMEONE'S KISS
ON HIS FOREHEAD LAY
& HOPED TO SEE HIM
ONCE AGAIN

PRIVATE LESLIE CYRIL HOGAN


Leslie Hogan's father chose his inscription; was it his father's kiss that lay on Hogan's forehead, or his mother's, or perhaps a girlfriend's? A forehead kiss is a chaste kiss so perhaps it was his mother's. Girlfriends make very few appearances in inscriptions, but then at that time girlfriends had no status, until a couple became engaged they were simply friends.
Hogan was a telegraph messenger from Grong Grong, New South Wales, where he had been born and brought up. He enlisted in December 1915 and was 18 and 10 months when he left Australia for France the following April. Hospitalised in England with frost bite in his feet in February 1917, he only returned to the Front at the end of August. He was killed two weeks later.
According to his Red Cross file, on 17 September Hogan was in Zouave trench not far from the Menin Road, near Hooge Dump.

"At about 7 pm Fritz started shelling and the second shell he put over landed right amongst a group of a dozen soldiers, including Hogan and another soldier named J.W.King (No. 6036) both them were killed and three others wounded. Informant was about 5 yards away at that time and was covered with the dust from the shell. He was dug out immediately and found to be dead. The following morning these two men, together with four others, who had been previously killed, were buried in one grave about 30 yards away from the line."


TO THEM THAT SAVED
OUR HERITAGE
AND CAST THEIR OWN AWAY

CAPTAIN ROBERT SEFTON ADAMS


In May 1922, King George V made a visit to the battlefields of the Western Front. It was his wish that the visit should be accompanied by as little fanfare as possible; he was coming to pay his respects to the dead as their King. A few days after the visit ended, The Times published a poem by Rudyard Kipling called The King's Pilgrimage, which is what the King's visit to the Western Front came to be called. Captain Adam's widow quoted from the first verse of the poem for her husband's inscription:

Our King went forth on pilgrimage
His prayers and vows to pay
To them that saved our Heritage
And cast their own away.
And there was little show of pride,
Or prows of belted steel,
For the clean-swept oceans every side
Lay free to every keel.

Robert Sefton Adams was born in London but brought up and educated in New Zealand where his father was a doctor. He returned to England to study law, first at Trinity College, Cambridge and then in London. In 1913 he married Mary Carpenter and they had two children. When the war broke out he was living in Southsea, Hampshire. He joined the Royal Field Artillery and served with 12th Battery, 35th Brigade. Killed in action on 5 October 1917, his body was located in January 1920 under a temporary wooden grave marker. This grave marker is now in St Mary's Anglican Church in his parent's home town of Silverstream, New Zealand.
Interestingly, had Adams served in a New Zealand Regiment, rather than in the Royal Field Artillery, he would not have had an inscription. The New Zealand Government made the decision not to allow them since in their opinion the War Graves Commission's decision to make family's pay 3 1/4d per character infringed the Commission's principles of equality and uniformity.
Kipling's poem ends with a typical Kiplingesque flourish, which makes me wonder what he, and the dead, would think about our current perceptions of the First World War:

All that they had they gave - they gave -
In sure and single faith.
There can no knowledge reach the grave
To make them grudge their death
Save only if they understood
That, after all was done
We they redeemed denied their blood,
And mocked the gains it won.


VIEGLAS SMILTIS SVESUMA
DUSSI SALDI

PRIVATE OSCAR MARTIN ABRAMSON


The language is Latvian and means 'may the earth of a foreign land lie light upon you'. I believe it's the Latvian equivalent of 'may he rest in peace', a relatively formulaic dedication Latvians use for graves and memorials. The phrase bears a striking resemblance to the Latin formula the Romans put on their graves and memorials, Sit tibi terra levis - may the earth rest lightly on you. It's a sentiment found in English epitaphs and poems too: 'Lie lightly upon my ashes gentle earth', (Tragedy of Bonduca, Beaumont and Fletcher), or as in the quotation on which Mark Twain's daughter's epitaph is based:

Warm summer sun shine kindly here;
Warm southern wind blow softly here
Green sod above lie light, lie light -


Oscar Abramson was born in Riga, at that time one of the most advanced and economically prosperous cities in the Russian Empire. He emigrated to Canada where he worked as a tailor in Kingston, Ontario. He enlisted in the 20th Battalion Canadian Infantry, the Central Ontario Battalion, in January 1916, naming his father, Adam Abramson in Riga, as his next-of-kin. And it was someone in Riga, 'Mrs W Pukit, Skulte House, Lokas-ley, Near Riga, Pr. Vidzis, Latvia' who chose his inscription.
Abramson was killed in an attack at Passchendaele on the last official day of the Third Ypres campaign. The battalion war diary describes the day, 10 November 1917: page 8 page 9.


HE WORE THE WHITE FLOWER
OF A BLAMELESS LIFE

PRIVATE EDGAR BRIERLEY


... He seems to me
Scarce other than my King's ideal knight,
...
The shadow of his loss drew like an eclipse,
Darkening the world. We have lost him: he is gone:
We know him now: ...
... and we see him as he moved,
How modest, kindly, all-accomplished, wise,
... through all this tract of years
Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,

This, much abbreviated, is an extract from Tennyson's dedication at the beginning of his Arthurian poem, 'Idylls of the King', which, as he said, "I consecrate with tears" to Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert. The words of the dedication resonated with Ellen Brierley, Edgar Brierley's wife, who quoted from it for her husband's inscription.
Brierley was born and brought up in Lancashire. He married there and his first son was born there in 1908. Sometime after this, the family moved to Canada where another son was born in 1915. This is the year Brierley joined up. He served with the 7th Battalion Canadian Infantry and died on 10 November 1917 when it took part in an attack towards Musselmarkt in the final stage of the Third Ypres campaign.
The Battalion war diary recorded the aftermath of the battle:

"It was impossible during the 10th to clear the wounded from the Regimental Aid Post, owing to exceptionally heavy shell-fire, with the result that the Post was crowded with stretcher cases during the night. These were cleared during the 11th by a brigade party of 300 Other Ranks which came up in the early morning, and by 8 p.m. (11th) all wounded of the Brigade had been cleared from Musselmarkt.
Owing to the exhaustion of the men and the constant shell-fire, it was impossible to bury many of the dead and no means were at hand for marking the graves of those that were buried."

Brierley's body was recovered from an unmarked grave in May 1920 and buried in Passchendaele New British Cemetery.
The 7th Battalion's war diary narrative for the 10 November 1917 can be read here: page 59, page 60, page 61.






THE LOVE THAT LINGERS
O'ER HIS NAME
IS MORE THAN FAME

SERJEANT GEORGE HARRY BRAMMAGE


Serjeant Brammage's inscription comes from the third verse of Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem, In Memory of John and Robert Ware. Chosen by his mother, it describes a gentle young man.

A whiter soul, a fairer mind,
A life with purer course and aim,
A gentler eye, a voice more kind,
We may not look on earth to find.
The love that lingers o'er his name
Is more than fame.

Brammage must have been not only a gentle young man but a capable one too. At the age of seventeen he was a shoe clicker, the person who cut the uppers from a piece of leather, one of the most skilled and best paid jobs in the shoe industry. It's therefore not surprising to find that within the British army he had achieved the rank of serjeant at 23.
He served with the 2nd/5th Battalion Leicestershire Regiment, a Territorial battalion, that spent 1914 and '15 on home service. Warned for France in March 1916, the plans were altered at the last minute following the Easter Rising in Ireland. Sent to Ireland to help quell the rebellion, the battalion spent the next eight months there.
In January 1917 it was sent to France. After a few months on the Somme it moved to Ypres. Brammage was killed in the trenches near Polygon Wood on 24 September. The battalion war diary recorded:

Hill 37. Shelling not quite so heavy as previous days. Periods of comparative quiet. Back areas bombarded with H.H. explosives & gas shells at night.

There is no information about what exactly happened to Brammage but his body was not recovered and buried until October 1919.




UNDER HIS LEADERSHIP
HIS BATTALION
CAPTURED CAMERON COPSE

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JULIAN FALVEY BEYTS


Lieutenant Colonel Julian Falvey Beyts commanded the 15th Battalion Durham Light Infantry from 3 March 1917 until his death on 5 October that year. For a man who had only been a twenrty-three-year-old second lieutenant in November 1914 he had done well achieving not only promotion but the award of a DSO.
On 4 October 1917, the battalion took part in the 21st Division's attack on Broodseinde Ridge. A German bombardment before the attack began reduced their ranks to two companies. Nevertheless, later in the day, the reduced battalion succeeded in braking up a German counter-attack at Cameron Copse.
Falvey Beyt was killed the next day, 5 October, in another German counter-attack. There are no further details of his deathh. His body was recovered from an unmarked grave at map reference J.15.c.3.7. in April 1921 and identified by a star and crown and his name on a handkerchief.
Julian Falvey Beyts was born in India, the only son of George Falvey Beyts, District Engineer on the East India Railway. Educated at Loretto School, there is no information about his post-school career. He married Hannah Cole, who was 43 to his 26, on 19 August 1914, two weeks after the outbreak of war. It was she who chose his inscription.


WHEN ALIVE THEY WOULD NOT
TAKE YOUR PLACE
THEY CANNOT HAVE IT NOW
MY SON

PRIVATE WALTER JOHN SAYERS


This seemed a curious epitaph until I realised that it must refer to the deep divisions created in Australian society over the question of whether or not the Government should introduce conscription.
By early 1916 voluntary enlistment was drying up, yet Australia needed to provide reinforcements at the rate of 5,500 men a month in order to maintain its overseas forces at an operational level. On 28 October 1916 the Government held a referendum on the matter and was defeated: 1,087,557 in favour and 1,160,033 against.
In 1917 Britain asked Australia to raise another division for active service overseas. This meant it would now have to raise 7,000 men a month. On 20 December 1917 the Government held a second referendum and this time it was defeated 1,015,159 in favour and 1,181,747 against. The question went away but the passions raised had been deeply divisive both socially and politically.
Walter John Sayers was a farmer in Wycheproof, a very small farming community in north-western Victoria where he had been captain of the local rifle club. He enlisted on 17 August 1916 aged 33. This would suggest that he had responded to the call for more volunteers, having not done so originally. He embarked from Melbourne on 2 October 1916 with the 21st Reinforcements for the 7th Australian Infantry. He trained as a Lewis gunner and was killed in action on 4 October 1917 in the Australian attack on Broodseinde Ridge.
The 7th Infantry Battalion's digitised war diary provides every detail of the attack, from which I will quote just the following paragraph from the narrative of operations:

"At 0530 enemy put down on the Bn. assembly position a heavy barrage of all calibres causing many casualties. It was impossible to move the Bn. to avoid the barrage. The Bn. endured the terrific barrage with great steadiness and courage and when our barrage opened at 0600 the Bn. rose and quietly moved forward through the enemy barrage to the attack."

At 1200 noon on 5 October the battalion sent a message to Brigade headquarters with particulars of the estimated casualties: Officers - killed 1, wounded 12. Other ranks killed 50, wounded 150, missing 100. Sayers, initially among the missing, was pronounced dead on 22 October. His body was not found and buried until September 1919.
Private Sayer's widowed mother chose his inscription. "When alive they would not take your place" is a rebuke to those who opposed conscription and those wouldn't volunteer. "They cannot have it now my son" suggests her belief in the fact that her son, as a result of his sacrifice, now has an assured place in heaven.


I AM HERE
AS THE RESULT
OF UNCIVILISED NATIONS

CORPORAL JOHN COLLIN GOODALL


Although the War Graves Commission were happy to allow next-of-kin a sixty-six-character inscription for the base of a headstone, this came initially with the proviso that the Commission would censor any that were plainly unsuitable. Their rationale being that it was "clearly undesirable to allow free scope to the effusions of the mortuary mason, the sentimental versifier or the crank". After a public outcry, the Commission backed down and whilst there is evidence that they did censor inscriptions, they did allow through some that they might not have originally countenanced.
In July 1922 the Vice-Chairman referred an inscription to the Committee which read: "He died the just for the unjust". The minutes record: "The Commission agreed to the inscription being refused". Over a year later the Vice-Chairman submitted another inscription of a very similar hue: "I am here as a result of uncivilised nations". This time the minutes say: "After some discussion the Commission agreed that this inscription might be accepted". This is Corporal Goodall's inscription, the indefinite article having been changed for the definite on the actual headstone.
However, both inscriptions seem to have the same ambiguity to me: in the first, who are the 'just' and who are the 'unjust'? In the second, who are the 'uncivilised nations'? You might assume that both the 'unjust' and the 'uncivilised' refer to the Germans, but they could just as easily refer to all the warring nations - British, French, German, Austrian, Russian etc etc. Nevertheless, one inscription was allowed and one wasn't.
John Collin Goodall, a bicycle maker from Brisbane, enlisted on 4 April 1915 at the age of 18 and embarked for Egypt that May. Unfortunately I cannot quite read the details of his wartime service, which his mother outlined on the Circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia. It looks as though he served in Gallipoli until the evacuation and then in March 1916 was sent to France. Here he was slightly wounded in the back before being severely wounded. He spent six months in hospital and then, after a period of convalescence, he returned to the front. He was killed in action on 20 September 1917. According witnesses, "Goodall was sniped, being shot between the eyes and killed instantly ... I saw his body and examined him. He was my mate and I never heard what happened to his body afterwards"; "He was shot through the head by a sniper just as we were on the point of reaching our objective. He was just in front of me at Glencorse Wood. He had to be left there."
And it was "there", at map reference J.8.b.5.5., that Goddall's body was discovered in April 1921 and buried in New Irish Farm Cemetery where 3,271 out of the 4,719 burials are unidentified.


LOVE NEVER FAILETH

THE REVEREND THEODORE BAYLEY HARDY VC, DSO, MC,


Theodore Hardy's inscription comes from one of the most popular passages in the bible:

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil; rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth;
1 Corinthians 13:8 Revised Version.

Theodore Hardy was the most decorated army chaplain of the war. This is his memorial plaque in Carlisle Cathedral:

In memory of Theodore Bayley Hardy Vicar of Hutton Roof. Appointed C.F. Aug. 1916: Attached 8th Lincs. Regt. & 8th Somerset Lt Infantry. Awarded D.S.O. July 1917: M.C. Oct. 1917: Victoria Cross April 1918. Chaplain to the King Sept. 1918. Was Wounded Oct. 1918. Died at Rouen Oct. 18 1918.
This tablet is erected as part of a Diocesan tribute to His heroic courage, sympathetic service and spiritual labours.

It was to Hardy that Studdart Kennedy was speaking when he offered the advice I quoted for yesterday's casualty. Charmingly, after he had been awarded his Victoria Cross, Hardy is on record as asking the Assistant Chaplain-General if he could tell Studdart Kennedy that he had often wished he could thank him properly for his advice, which "more than any other in my life, has helped me in this work."
After leading what must have seemed like a charmed life, Hardy was wounded in the thigh by a machine gun bullet on 11 October 1918. He was taken to hospital where pneumonia set in and he died seven days later.


KILLED IN ACTION
JESU MERCY

THE REVEREND BENJAMIN CORRIE RUCK KEENE


The epitaph 'Killed in action' is a statement of fact, and can be a matter of some pride, as well, of course, of regret. It was not an unusual inscription for a soldier but it was for a chaplain.
Chaplains did not take part in attacks but this didn't mean they were never seen in the front line. Initially the Army Chaplains Department had forbidden them from going any further forward than the advanced dressing stations. But many went up into the trenches knowing that the soldiers appreciated their presence, and knowing that they could make themselves useful: helping with the wounded, staying with the dying, talking to the men. One of the most famous of all war-time chaplains, the Revd Geoffrey Studdart Kennedy, had this advice to give:

"Live with the men, go everywhere they go. Make up your mind you will share all their risks, and more, if you can do any good. The line is the key to the whole business. Work in the very front and they will listen to you; but if you stay behind, you're wasting your time. Men will forgive you anything but lack of courage and devotion."

When asked what spiritual work could be done Studdart Kennedy replied:

"There is very little; it is all muddled and mixed. Take a box of fags in your haversack, and a great deal of love in your heart and go up to them; laugh with them, joke with them. You can pray with them sometimes; but pray for them always."

According to The Times' announcement of his death, Ruck Keene was killed "by a shell in the regimental aid post". Further forward than the advanced dressing stations, regimental aid posts were usually just metres from the front line trenches.
The son of the vicar of St Michael and All Angels, Copford, Essex, Ruck Keene had been a curate at St James the Great in Bethnal Green prior to beginning his service with the Army Chaplains Department in January 1917. The use of the phrase 'Jesu mercy', a shorthand prayer for the deceased to be spared the pains of hell, would suggest that both father and son had been High Church Anglicans.
Ruck Keene's eldest brother, Ralph, a lieutenant in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, was killed in January 1916. His inscription too gives an accurate description of the circumstances of his death:

Killed in a bombing accident
On active service
Jesu mercy


CHA TILL GU BRATH
GU LA NA CRUINNE

PRIVATE ALEXANDER MCCRIMMON


The Gaelic translates as 'he will not return until the great day of doom and burning', the Last Day, the Day of Judgement . You would be forgiven for assuming that this was a quote from a hymn, but it isn't. The lines come from the chorus of MacCrimmon's Lament, a lament for a piper from the Isle of Skye killed in the 1745 Rebellion:

No more, no more, no more returning,
In peace nor in war is he returning;
Till dawns the great day of doom and burning,
MacCrimmon is home no more returning.

Alexander McCrimmon came from Skye; he was born there in 1871. This is not to say that he was related to the MacCrimmons of the lament who for three hundred years, 1500 to 1800, had been hereditary pipers to the Clan MacLeod. But nor is there anything to say he wasn't. His father, Donald, was a shepherd. In the 1891 census, Alexander was a groom in Snizort; in 1901 a fisherman in Minginish. In 1910, at the age of 39, he left Skye and emigrated to Australia where he worked as a station hand.
McCrimmon enlisted on 15 January 1917, embarking for Britain on 10 February with the reinforcements for the 1st Battalion Australian Infantry. By 31 May he was in France. On 16 September the battalion went into the trenches at Hooge; McCrimmon was killed that day. The war diary gives a detailed description of the day's activities, remarking on the intermittent shelling but not mentioning any casualties.
One of McCrimmon's brothers, also living in Australia, chose his inscription, nor was he the only Scottish soldier to have it as his epitaph. It was a haunting phrase for the Scots, even without any Skye or MacCrimmon connections, and one that became even better known as a result of a poem by Ewart Alan Mackintosh, who was killed in action in November 1917, 'Cha Till Maccruimein'. This is the last verse:

And there in the front of the men were marching
With feet that made no mark,
The old grey ghosts of the ancient fighters
Come back again from the dark;
And in front of them all MacCrimmon piping
A weary tune and sore,
"On gathering day, for ever and ever,
MacCrimmon comes no more".


STRAIGHT OF LIMB
TRUE OF EYE
STEADY AND AGLOW

SECOND LIEUTENANT GEORGE FREDERICK WHITBY HARRISON


I think that few people will be able to identify the poem this inscription comes from and yet this is the next verse:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

This is Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen', published on 21 September 1914, just two months after the outbreak of war. The verse resonated with people at the time and still resonates with people today.
George Harrison's parents however chose to quote from the previous verse:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their face to the foe.

There is such a terrible splendour in this - "straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow", "staunch to the end", "odds uncounted" ... too terrible.
George Harrison was the eldest child of Ernest Harrison, a commercial traveller in cigars. The family lived in Leicester. In the 1911 census George gave his occupation as a cutter in the tailoring trade. He served with the 3rd Battalion the Wiltshire Regiment but was among fourteen officers who were attached to the 6th Battalion on 26 September 1917. Harrison was killed four days later but the transcript of the war diary only refers to a "working party of 50 as on previous night".


IN QUIETNESS
AND IN CONFIDENCE

PRIVATE ERNEST GORDON HANDLEY


"For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel; in returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength:"
Isaiah 30:15

As Sonia Batten pointed out in her PhD thesis, 'Memorial Text Narratives in Britain c.1890-1930, Mrs Handley, Private Handley's widow, presented this inscription without either quotation marks or the biblical reference, perhaps because she thought the quotation well enough known for it to be unnecessary. However, without Sonia Batten's comment, it would never have occurred to me that this was a quotation, I thought it was simply a comment on Ernest Handley's demeanour as a Royal Army Medical Corps man working with the 43rd Field Ambulance.
Handley was a 'clothiers manager', married for eight months and with no children when he attested in November 1915. Having passed a First Aid Course, he went overseas in April 1916 to serve with the 43rd Field Ambulance RAMC.
Thanks to a wonderful itinerary compiled by William C Dicks, a clerk with the Unit, we know where the Unit was from its arrival in France to the end of the war, not that this helps us to know what happened to Ernest Handley. However, on 22 August 1917, II Corps took part in a costly, failed follow up to the Battle of Langemarck at Glencorse Wood and, according to the itinerary, this is exactly where the 43rd Field Ambulance was:

18 August 1917 Woodcote House and Menin Road - Battle positions for operations at Glencorse Wood; Dressing Stations at both places.
26 August - withdrawn to rest area.
History of the 43rd Field Ambulance RAM
Compiled by William C Dickson
Edinburgh 1934




GIVEN BY A LOVING FATHER
AND MOTHER
WITH PROUD BUT ACHING HEARTS

GUNNER FRANCIS JOSEPH GELL


Who else 'gave' their son? It was God:

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Without any intended blasphemy, many parents believed that their sons had made a similar sacrifice to God's son - their sons too had died to save the world. It was an idea confirmed in that wonderful old Remembrance Day hymn, 'O Valiant hearts':

These were His servants, in His steps they trod,
Following through death the martyred Son of God:
Victor, He Rose; victorious too shall rise
They who have drunk His cup of sacrifice.

And this is why although Mr and Mrs Gell's hearts were aching they could feel proud; they too had 'given' their son in a noble cause.

Francis Gell was a sign writer and printer from Geelong in Victoria. He enlisted in December 1915 and left Australia for Europe in April 1916. He served with the 55th Battery of the Australian 36th Heavy Artillery Brigade, which had just taken delivery of its brand-new 9.2-inch howitzers. These were the seriously big guns. They had a working crew of fourteen and could fire their 132 kilogram shells almost 10 kilometres. Normally well behind the lines, the guns were occasionally moved forward, when they became very vulnerable should the German guns get their range. This is what happened the day Gell was killed, the opening day of the Battle of Broodseinde.
Gell's mother appealed to the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau for information. All the witnesses were agreed that the gun had received a direct hit, some were specific about the casualties - fourteen killed and seventeen wounded. The witnesses were again united about Gell's fate, but less so about the details: "I saw him afterwards; he was just recognisable"; "There were several bodies unrecognisable, and Gell was amongst them".


IT IS MEN
OF MY AGE AND SINGLE
WHO ARE EXPECTED
TO DO THEIR DUTY

PRIVATE WILLIAM HENRY RICKARD


William Rickard's father chose his inscription: the words have to have been his son's. Rickard volunteered at Blackboy Camp, Western Australia in April 1916; he was 24. He served with the 24th Battalion Australian Infantry, originally raised in Blackboy in April 1915. Rickard went out with the 16th reinforcements.
By 1916 Australian recruitment was beginning to dry up, so much so that in October 1916 the Government tried but failed to introduce conscription - it lost the referendum 49%-51%. Rickard had not volunteered initially but you can see how his mind was working by April 1916.
He arrived in France on 22 December 1916 and was wounded in the thigh three months later. Hospitalised in England, he rejoined his battalion in August 1917. The battalion took part in the attack on Broodseinde Ridge on 4 October 1917 where Rickard was again wounded. He died the same day at No. 10 Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek of 'shrapnel wounds on the head'.
Rickard, an engine driver from Fremantle, Western Australia, was his parents only son.


"I LEAVE MYSELF IN GOD'S HANDS"
EXTRACT FROM HIS DIARY
WRITTEN 19.9.17

LIEUTENANT JAMES LUNAN


The diary entry was written the day before James Lunan's death; he knew what was in store for him. The next day he was to lead his men in an attack on the German lines on the opening day of the Battle of Menin Road, part of Third Ypres. Attacking across a 14,500 yard front, the British achieved their objectives, showing what could be done in good weather and with a well-prepared attack.
But James Lunan was killed - as he obviously suspected he might be. We don't know how but three years later, on 10 August 1920, his body was discovered at map reference U.30.a.3.6. with no grave marker, which would indicate that he was killed in circumstances where it was not possible to retrieve and bury his body.
His faith in God was no temporary eve-of-battle phenomenon; Lunan, as the Aberdeen Press and Journal report of his death on Friday 28 September 1917 recorded, was an active member of the Boys Brigade connected with his church, Skene Street Congregational Church, where he was also secretary of the Sunday School. He came from a professional Aberdeen family where he had been educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and Robert Gordon College and worked at The North of Scotland and Town and County Bank Ltd. A member of the Territorial Force, he was called up on the outbreak of war. He served on the Western Front from February 1915 and achieved the rank of sergeant. Commissioned into the Gordon Highlanders in December 1915, he returned to Flanders in January 1917.


M.B. CH. B.EDIN.
KILLED WHILE ATTENDING
WOUNDED UNDER FIRE

LIEUTENANT GEORGE HAROLD LUNAN


George Lunan had only been out of medical school a year when the war broke out. He joined up immediately and served with the Royal Army Medical Corps attached as a medical officer to the 9th Queens Royal Lancers. He was killed in the trenches at Frezenberg Ridge on 13 May 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres.
Two weeks later the Dundee Evening Telegraph carried a report of his death as related to Lunan's father by a fellow medic:

"He was in the trenches with A Squadron of the 9th Lancers, and he heard that there were wounded in C Squadron trenches. To reach the latter trenches he had to go over some open and very dangerous ground. He never hesitated, but, accompanied by his dresser, Corporal Steadman, RAMC, he ventured on this journey. He reached the parapet of C trenches, and there was shot through the heart by a bullet from a German rifle. His death was instantaneous. His whole regiment grieved for the loss of their 'young doctor officer'.

Another letter described how Lunan had already dressed the wounds of more than 60 men on the day he was killed. Although the letters are full of conventional platitudes - including one suspects the business of Lunan having been shot through the heart and dying instantaneously - one still gets the impression that he was both an able and a brave man. Front-line doctors working in the trenches at regimental aid posts were frequently told that they must wait for the casualties to be brought to them by the stretcher bearers, rather than expose themselves to greater danger by going out to the casualty. But doctors found it difficult to obey and many, like Lunan, consequently lost their lives in this way.


YOUR MOTHER
DOES NOT CEASE
TO THINK OF YOU
FOR A SINGLE MOMENT

SECOND LIEUTENANT FELIX RAMON ARTHUR DANSEY


Not surprisingly, the idea that the dead man is always in his family's thoughts is not an uncommon sentiment in an inscription. Few people, however, have expressed it quite as emphatically as Felix Dansey's mother. But then perhaps she never imagined that the war would touch her.
Felix Ramon Arthur Dansey was an Argentine citizen, born in Argentina in 1891. His father, William Foley Dansey, had been born in England in 1847 and subsequently gone to Argentina to work as an engineer on the Central Argentine Railway. There he had married Indalecia Guido, his second wife, who possibly came from Uruguay. Felix was their eldest child. William Foley Dansey died in 1905 when Felix was 14.
As an Argentine citizen, Dansey would have been exempt from call up. But it's obvious from the Central Argentine Railway's roll of honour, Felix was an administrator there, that many of their employees had British names and that many volunteered and were killed in the war.
Dansey enlisted originally with the Artists Rifles. He was commissioned into the 1/7th Battalion the London Regiment in December 1917 and was killed on 25 July 1918. Although the Germans were still on the offensive, the victorious Allied fight back was just about to begin.


HE KNEW BEFORE HE WENT
THAT HIS FATE WOULD BE
DEATH IN BATTLE

PRIVATE WILLIAM ARTHUR DUTTON


Soldiers' memoirs often mention those who fatalistically expected to die and those who 'knew' they wouldn't be killed. There's a chilling extract on the subject in the memoir of the rugby player Ronald Poulton-Palmer. Talking to a friend, he says, "I don't want to be killed yet; there is such a lot I wanted to do, or try anyhow". Asked by the friend if he felt he would be killed he replied, "Oh yes, sure of it". Then after a long silence he added, "Of course it's alright; but not what one would have chosen".
"Not what one would have chosen", with that massive understatement Poulton-Palmer goes off to war and is killed by a bullet, not fired by a well-aimed sniper but probably the result of an unfortunate ricochet.
According to his mother, who chose his inscription, William Dutton 'knew' he would be killed. Serving in a frontline infantry regiment his chances were certainly higher than for those in other military roles.
Dutton, who came from Runcorn in Cheshire, served with the 10th Battalion the Cheshire Regiment, raised in Chester in September 1914. On 17 May 1916 the battalion came back into the line near Mont-St-Eloi. The next day the Germans launched an attack on their positions, capturing some of the Cheshire's outposts in No Man's Land together with the strategically important lip of a crater. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting saw the Cheshires recover some of the outposts but not the lip of the crater. The next day, the 19th, they succeeded in driving the Germans out of the crater. Dutton survived all this but was killed on the 20th when continuous heavy shelling caused many casualties.
In 1901 Dutton was 15, living at home with his parents and four siblings - two brothers and two sisters - and working as a general labourer. By 1911, still living at home, he was a cotton spinners' piecer, someone who mended broken threads during the spinning process.


HE LEFT FOR THE FRONT
IN SADNESS O'ER CAST
BUT DUTY WAS DUTY
WITH HIM TO THE LAST

BOMBARDIER CHARLES HENRY CALE


In 1911 Charles Clerk had been in clerk with Lyons Caterers in West London. His parents were the caretakers of the Froebel Institute in Colet Gardens, West Kensington. They had three children but Charles was their only son. Charles' father, Charles Frederick Cale, signed for his son's inscription, its plain truthfulness making it very affecting.
We hear much at Remembrance time of men 'giving their lives', or 'laying them down'; the language somehow making what happened easier for us to hear. The Cales tell it to us straight - their son was very cast down at the idea of going to the Front - whether he was returning or going for the first time we can't tell - but he was firmly committed to doing his duty. He served with B Battery, 83rd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, a trench mortar battery. In the autumn of 1916 they were on the Somme. Cale died of wounds in the Casualty Clearing Station at Contay on 2 November 1916. There is no record of the circumstances of his death.


VIVE LE CANADA
L.L. BELL, GRAND SAULT, N.B.
EST MORT POUR L'EUROPE

CORPORAL LOUIS LEO BELL


Everything seems to point to this being the epitaph of a French Canadian soldier: it's expressed in French, the soldier's Christian names are Louis Leo and he came from Grand Sault which the British call Great Falls, in New Brunswick, Canada. However, his parents don't sound very French - Thomas and Margaret Bell. Perhaps since Great Falls/Grand Sault is a bi-lingual town, the parents spoke French and thought it was an appropriate language to commemorate their son buried in France.
It's an interesting inscription: very Canadian - Vive le Canada - Long live Canada. And then look at the cause for which Corporal Bell died - Est mort pour l'Europe - Died for Europe. No mention of King, Empire, Britain or England.
Bell served with the 26th Battalion Canadian Infantry, which was raised in New Brunswick in November 1914. It departed for Europe in June 1915 and arrived in France in September. In the autumn of 1916 the Battalion was on the Somme. Bell died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Contay on 4 October 1916. The previous day the 26th Battalion had been in reserve in Courcelette Trench when the 22nd, 24th and 25th attacked Regina Trench with very heavy casualties.


I AM CONTENT
TO HAVE DONE MY BIT
PRAY FOR ME

LANCE CORPORAL JOHN WILLIAM IRONS


A newspaper cutting donated to the Imperial War Museum by Lance Corporal Irons' mother tells the whole story of this inscription:

L-Cpl. John Wm. Irons, No. 10612, 5th Bn. Berkshire Regiment, who joined the Territorial Force in August 1914 on the declaration of war being announced, and after training at various camps, went to France in May 1915, since which time he never had a days leave. Prior to enlisting he was employed by Messrs. Adams Bros, 72 Chiswell Street, London E.C., who, in a kindly letter of sympathy with his mother, testify to the worth of their late employer. Mr Horace Adams wrote: -
"I very much admire the manly way he did his duty without question. I well remember the day he came to me and told me he thought it his duty to join, and when I saw him before going abroad he was always cheerful and uncomplaining. We had hoped to have him back with us again, as we all liked and respected him. Mothers today are having a hard and bitter time; your consolation must be that he was content to lay down his life for his King and Country, and that his reward is in the hereafter. May God help and comfort you."
The firm are one of the noble employers of many in the United Kingdom, for not only have they been most kind to Mrs Irons since her son (who was 32 years of age) left for the war, but they have very generously sent him gift boxes every fortnight. May they have an unlimited run of prosperity for their thoughtfulness and continuing remembrance of a gallant soldier, is our sincere wish.
A pathetic incident of the lad's death was the discovery in his pocket of an envelope upon which was written the following, and a request that the finder might post it on to his mother: -
Armentieres, June 7, 1915
Dear Mum,
In case I get bowled out I have scribbled this line to you: Now, Mum, do not worry about me as I am contented at having done my bit. Keep up your spirits and work on as you have always done. Remember me [to] all at home, [to] Nell and Sam, and all my chums when you can."


SO SOON IT PASSETH AWAY
AND WE ARE GONE

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM CHARLES TRIMMER


The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon it passeth it away, and we are gone.
Psalm 90:10
from the Book of Common Prayer

"The days of our age are threescore years and ten": William Charles Trimmer was 19. None of those who died in the First World War reached the age of 70. But in the great scheme of things, as the psalm from which this is quoted says: 'A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night ... so soon it passeth away and we are gone'. 'And we are gone', together with the issues that were so important, so earth shattering. And now that all those who could remember the young men who fought and died are gone - and those who remember the dead of the Second World War are fast disappearing too - we should not just be remembering THAT they died but that intolerance, ignorance and nationalism helped cause their deaths. Is this not what Remembrance should also be about today?

Trimmer's mother chose his inscription. She and her husband had two children, one son and one daughter, Dorothy. A young boy fresh from school, William Charles was commissioned into the 1st Buckinghamshire Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.
On the night of the 20th/21st July the Battalion was ordered to carry out an attack on the German positions between Ovillers and Pozieres. This was to be the Battalion's first serious attack. Zero hour was fixed for 2.45 am. At 2.30 the Germans, obviously expecting something, opened up their machine guns and kept them firing after 2.45 so that when the signal came to advance few men got very far. Casualties in the Battalion amounted to 154; Trimmer was among the twelve who were killed.
Dorothy Trimmer was therefore her parents' only surviving child. She married in 1919, a man who added her surname to his own so that she became Dorothy Trimmer-Thompson. Their son, Charles Edward Adrian Trimmer-Thompson, was killed in action in North Africa on 17 March 1943.


WE OFTEN SIT & SPEAK OF HIM
PICTURING HIM IN OUR MEMORY
JUST AS WE SAW HIM LAST

PRIVATE JAMES WINSTANLEY


You can picture the scene at 12 Talbot Road, Plank Lane, Leigh in Lancashire, a terraced house adjacent to the colliery where at one time James, his father, John, and his younger brother, also John, all worked: John as a miner, a hewer of coal, James and John as colliery labourers underground. This was in 1911, James and John Junior were 18 and 14 respectively.
Mrs Winstanley, James Winstanley's mother, chose his inscription. She also filled in the 1911 census form, which showed that she had a job as a cotton weaver and that the house had three bedrooms, a parlour and a kitchen for the ten people who lived there.
Winstanley served with the 6th Battalion the York and Lancaster Regiment. This was raised in Pontefract in August 1914, went to Gallipoli in July 1915, was evacuated from there in December and was then posted to France, the Somme, arriving in July 1916. Winstanley died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Contay on 6 October 1916. There is no evidence as to how he was wounded but the battalion had been in action during the battles of Flers-Courcellete, 15-22 September, and Thiepval, 26-30 September.
By the time he joined the army James Winstanley must have left home as he is commemorated on the Dalton Main Colliery war memorial. This lists the names of those who worked in the Silverwood and Roundwood Collieries in Rotherham, Yorkshire, more than 60 miles from Plank Lane.


EVER REMEMBERED BY
WIFE, DAUGHTER, MOTHER, FATHER
SISTER AND BROTHERS

SERJEANT ALBERT MCKANNA-MAULKIN


Most inscriptions of this type just say 'Ever remembered by all at home'; I like the way all those who remembered Albert McKanna-Maulkin have been identified, even though not actually named. McKanna-Maulkin's wife was called Nellie, his mother, Grace, his father, Frederick, his sister, another Grace and his five brothers Richard, Harry, George, Arthur and William. The only person whose name I have not been able to discover is his daughter's.
McKanna-Maulkin had been a professional soldier. The 1911 census shows him, a private in the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards, in Blenheim Barracks, Aldershot. His army number, 14417, indicating that he had enlisted some time in 1909-10. He must have subsequently left the army because he's commemorated on the Wisbech and Ely Constabulary war memorial in Wisbech police station. However, the war saw him rejoin the Grenadier Guards, probably as a reservist since he seems to have kept his original army number. He served with the 4th Battalion Grenadier Guards and was killed in action on 25 September 1916 when the Guards brigades took the village of Lesboeufs.
His body was not discovered until January 1928 - in an unmarked grave at map reference 57c. /n.32 d.o.3. In the intervening years, Nellie McKanna-Maulkin had married her brother-in-law, Harry (in 1919) and died (in 1921). It was Harry who chose his brother's inscription.


"IN THE HAND OF GOD"

CAPTAIN SYDNEY VYVYAN TREVENEN, MC


The quotation marks make this a very specific reference; you may think that there are a lot of references to God's hands in the bible but in fact there are only two that actually say, "in the hand of God": Wisdom 3:1 and Ecclesiastes 9:1. And both say pretty much the same thing: that the righteous are in the hand of God. If I were to choose I would say that Sydney Trevenen's mother, who chose the inscription, was referring to the Book of Wisdom since the line comes in one of the readings suggested by the Book of Common Prayer for the service of the Burial of the Dead:

"But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery, and their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are at peace. For though they be punished in the sight of men, yet their hope is full of immortality. And having been a little chastised, they shall be greatly rewarded: for God proved them, and found them worthy for himself. As Gold in the furnace hath he tried them, and received them as a burnt offering."
WISDOM 3 1-6

'Righteous' is not a word in common use today - other than as self-righteous and righteous indignation and both of these give the word a negative connotation - it means to be a virtuous, to be a morally good person.
Sydney Trevenen was a professional soldier, educated at Cheltenham College and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Gazetted second lieutenant in December 1913, he had been in France with the 49th Battery, 40th Brigade Royal Field Artillery, since 20 August 1914, the very earliest days of the war. In 1916 he won a Military Cross for "crawling a thousand yards across No Man's Land" in order to bring back vital information. Soon after this the Gloucestershire Echo reported that he had been wounded. There is no follow up information to this, but on 11 June 1918 the same paper reported that Trevenen had been wounded for a second time. This time the follow up came three days later:

TREVENEN - On 10th June, at a hospital in France, of septic bronchial pneumonia, following gas poisoning, Capt. Sydney Vyvyan Trevenen, MC, RFA, only and dearly-loved son of the late SW Trevenen and Mrs Trevenen, of Welton, Christ Church Road, Cheltenham.


A TRUE HORSEMAN
GONE AWAY

LIEUTENANT THOMAS EDMUND ONSLOW CHAMBERLAYNE


As an officer in the Royal Field Artillery you would expect a man to be a good horseman, however, Thomas Chamberlayne's mother goes further and describes her son as 'a true horseman', someone who was a naturally good rider with an instinct for horses. And from her use of the term 'gone away', Thomas Chamberlayne must also have been a huntsman. 'Gone away' is the hunting call that signals that the fox has broken cover and the chase has begun. For the hunt, this is when the excitement starts.
Chamberlayne was educated at Winchester College (he is commemorated on their website) and at Merton College, Oxford. He joined up on the outbreak of war, was wounded during the Battle of Loos, September 1915, and killed during the Battle of Delville Wood whilst serving with the 73rd Howitzer Brigade,
A brief obituary in the Times, published on 29 August, quotes from the letter of condolence Chamberlayne's colonel wrote to his parents:

"His charming personality and courage, endeared him to all his comrades, and I, personally, mourn the loss of one of my best officers. I am sure you will always be proud to know that your son died in the execution of his duty, in which he never flinched."


GLOS. R.F.A. (T) 1912
HE DIED IN A GALLANT EFFORT
TO SAVE HIS COMRADES

LIEUTENANT EDWARD LEONARD GEDYE


"It is impossible for me to say how much I sympathise with you in your great grief. Your son was attached to my battery when he met his death. A better officer I could not desire. He was always cheerful and intensely keen on his work: he was deservedly popular with all who knew him, officers and men. He died in a most gallent attempt to save the lives of others, and he suffered no pain. His death is a great loss to the brigade, but we are proud of the way he died.
I do not know if you have already heard how your son was killed; in case you have not, I will tell you as nearly as I can. The evening before a bomb store nearby was hit by the enemy, and two explosions occurred. At about midnight on the 23rd your son was on duty at the battery and noticed a fire amongst a large pile of bombs and other ammunition. He called out to a gunner, 'Come on, we must put this out,' and together they went up to it with buckets of water. The gunner was returning with an empty bucket and passed your son on the way up to the fire with a second bucket. A few seconds afterwards the explosion occurred."
Letter to Lieutenant Gedye's father from the brigade major written on 26 August and printed in the Western Daily Press, Bristol on 31 August 1916.

IN MEMORIAM
ON ACTIVE SERVICE
Gedye - In loving memory of Edward Leonard Gedye, Lieut. Gloucestershire R.F.A. (T) 1st South Midland Brigade, who "passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice" at midnight, Aug. 23 1916, near Albert-sur-Somme.
The Times August 23 1934


WE HAVE FOUND SAFETY
WITH ALL THINGS UNDYING

LIEUTENANT COLONEL FRANCIS CHARLES BARTHOLOMEW WEST


Frank West's inscription was chosen by his wife and comes from Rupert Brooke's 'Safety', perhaps the least well known of his famous five sonnets. Brooke's 'Safety' is to be found in being at one with the immortal universe.

... "Who is so safe as we?'
We have found safety with all things undying,
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.

By her choice of inscription, Mrs West suggests that the couple's love is similarly immortal:

We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain forever.
War knows no power ...

West's life and war-time career are contained in a memoir that his wife, Agatha, published privately in 1921: Francis Charles Bartholomew West, A Record of the Great War. The book can be read online but just a few extracts show the type of man he was.

"You ... must not worry about me, for either I shall come back safely or join those others who have done their best, in which case do not grieve - rather, rejoice, that you and I have been counted worthy to live in such a country and at such a time, for seldom does a country call on the whole nation to prove that they are worthy of their heritage, and we must not grudge the price, if only we can keep our homes safe and our ideals and standards of right and wrong bright and unchanged."
Letter from Frank West to his wife, March 1915

According to Agatha West, her husband's basic war aims were to keep his country safe for his and other people's children, quoting some lines from 'The Admonition: to Betsey', a poem by Helen Parry Eden, to illustrate his thinking :

And guard all small and drowsy people
Whom gentlest dusk doth disattire,
Undressing by the nursery fire
In unperturbed numbers
On this side of the seas -

West commanded a territorial brigade of the Royal Field Artillery, which he had trained since its formation in 1906. Four months after their arrival in France the 4th South Midland Brigade was broken up and West was given another command. However, following his death a fellow officer wrote to Agatha West:

"I am sure you will like to know that every man of the old lot who had known him in peace time went to pay their respects, and there were many misty eyes when the Last Post was sounded."

West was killed on 28 September 1916 by a stray shell "while riding down the relentlessly straight road from Pozieres to the Zollern Redoubt, which was then his headquarters".

The next day was Agatha's birthday; she received a letter from him in the morning and the news of his death that evening. She finishes the book at that point with some lines from Maurice Baring's poem, 'In Memoriam Auberon Herbert':

Here is no waste
No burning Might-have-been
No bitter after-taste.
None to censure, none to screen
Nothing awry, nor anything mis-spent.

As I read about men like this, and what they believed they were fighting for, I feel sorry that one hundred years later we belittle them by claiming the very opposite - that it was all a futile waste. It was all a terrible tragedy, but if we don't try to see the war, and what was at stake, as they saw it, if we just dismiss it all as mindless slaughter, then we will never understand how it could have occurred ... nor how it could happen again. Peace depends on wisdom not on judgemental scorn.


THE BRAVEST
ARE THE TENDEREST
THE LOVING
ARE THE DARING

SERJEANT DOUGLAS ALEXANDER, MM


Serjeant Alexander's mother chose his inscription; it comes from the last verse of 'The Song of the Camp' by the American poet, Bayard Taylor (1833-1908). On the night before the attack on the Redan fortress, during the Crimean War (1853-56), the soldiers ask for a song: "'Give us a song!' the soldiers cried" ...

There was a pause. A guardsman said,
"We storm the forts tomorrow;
Sing while we may, another day
Will bring enough of sorrow."

So the soldiers sing, not of fame and glory but of love:

Each heart recalled a different name,
But all sang 'Annie Laurie'.

Voice after voice caught up the song,
Until its tender passion
Rose like an anthem, rich and strong, -
Their battle eve confession.

The next day they stormed the Redan fortress and many of the soldiers who had been singing tenderly of love, and thinking of their girlfriends back home, were killed:

Sleep, soldiers! still in honoured rest
Your truth and valour wearing:
The bravest are the tenderest, -
The loving are the daring.

An insurance clerk in civilian life, like his father, Alexander served with the First Surrey Rifles. The regiment went into the line on 10 September 1916, near High Wood on the Somme. Five days later it was involved in the taking of High Wood but by that time Alexander had been killed.


WENT THE DAY WELL
WE DIED AND NEVER KNEW
BUT ILL OR WELL
ENGLAND! WE DIED FOR YOU

CAPTAIN KENNETH ALGERNON BROOKE MURRAY


Captain Brooke Murray was flying with Second Lieutenant Vinson on an artillery spotting mission when their plane was attacked by three German fighters over Miraumont. Brooke Murray was shot in the leg and the plane was forced to land. Vinson, the pilot, survived but Brooke Murray died seven days later in hospital in Boulogne.
A professional soldier, he had been at the Front since August 1914 with the Army Service Corps, where he had reached the rank of captain. His transfer to the Royal Flying Corps as an Observer was announced on 12 September 1916 and published in 'Flight' two days before his death.
His inscription, chosen by his father, was written by J. Maxwell Edmonds, a Classics don at Cambridge. It was originally published in The Times on 6 February 1918 as being suitable for 'some who died early in the day of battle'. There were four epitaphs in all, under the simple headline: Four Epitaphs, among them was one that became popular on village memorials, for which it was written:

Ye that live on 'mid English pastures green,
Remember us, and think what might have been.


NO VOICE
SAVE AN ECHO REPEATING
HE COMETH NOT BACK AGAIN
L. GORDON

LIEUTENANT HENRY ERIC HAMMEL


Henry Hammel's mother quotes from a rather beautiful poem by a British born, Australian poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870). In the poem, Thora's Song, two lovers part before the autumn ploughing, a whole a year passes and the harvest is ready to be gathered in, but the lover does not return. The inscription comes from the last verse:

Waiting and watching ever,
Longing and lingering yet,
Leaves rustle and corn stalks quiver,
Winds murmur and waters fret;
No answer they bring, no greeting,
No speech save that sad refrain,
Nor voice, save an echo repeating -
He cometh not back again.

An assayer and metallurgist in civilian life, Hammel was wounded in action at Borre in May 1918. A letter to the Secretary of the Information Bureau, Australian Red Cross Society, from No. 14 General Hospital in Wimereaux gives the details of his death.

"Lieut H.E. Hammel 2 Field Co Australian Engs: was admitted to this hospital on the 7th May 1918, suffering from shell wounds in legs and chest (severe). He was placed on dangerously ill list on 15/5/18 and death took place on the 22nd May at 7.20 pm. He was buried in the Boulogne Cemetery on 24th May and his grave is no. 6777."


TREAD GENTLY
O'ER THIS SILENT GRAVE
A WIFE'S FOND LOVE
LIES HERE

CORPORAL JAMES GARDNER


James Gardner was born in Scoonie, Leven, Fife where in the 1901 census his father was a coal miner. I couldn't find any members of the family in the 1911 census but by the time of James' death he was married and living in Cardenden, another mining community in Fife. Gardner enlisted in Dunfermline and served with the 6th Battalion Cameron Highlanders, part of the 15th Division.
The 15th Division moved to the Ypres sector in June 1917 and spent the next month preparing for the big offensive that was to be launched on the 31 July. This involved either taking up supplies to the front, which had to be done at night since the Germans had command of the high ground and could see everything that moved during the day, or taking part in trench raids of vital importance in building up knowledge German strong points and troop positions. There is no specific information as to how Gardner met his death but danger lurked everywhere from the German guns that had the range of all the routes and regularly used gas shells to cause further havoc during the night, to the deep mud that sucked unwary soldiers down into their deaths.
Mrs Gardner used traditional epigraphic language and themes in this tender inscription, which has a very strong echo of the last line of Yeat's beautiful poem, 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven':

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.


ONLY THOSE
WHO HAVE LOVED ONES LOST
CAN UNDERSTAND
WAR'S BITTER COST

SECOND LIEUTENANT FRED HOLLAND


Fred Holland was the son of the police superintendent at Lutterworth in Leicestershire. He was 15 and still at school, Lutterworth Grammar School, at the time of the 1911 census. This is about all I have been able to find out about him. He served with the 3rd Battalion the Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment), but at the time he was wounded he was attached to the 1st Battalion, which had been involved in the 8th Division's attack on Westhoek on 31 July and on the Hanebeek on 16 August. Holland died on the 22 August.
His father signed for his inscription, which is regularly found on headstone inscriptions and In Memoriam columns. Another, perhaps more common, variation reads:

Only those who have loved and lost
Can understand the Great War's cost


IT IS AS IF THE SUN
HAD GONE OUT

LIEUTENANT FREDERICK LEOPOLD PUSCH, DSO


The bleak inscription on this grave has captured the attention of visitors to the Western Front, several of whom have noted it on the Internet. But no one has so far noticed that Frederick's brother, Ernest John Pusch, was killed just under two months later and has exactly the same inscription. For the parents, Mr and Mrs Emile Pusch, it was "as if the sun had gone out", although for them it IS as if the sun had gone out, not was. Nor is this the end of the story - Mr and Mrs Pusch had three children, one daughter and two sons. Their sons, as we have seen, died in 1916 and their daughter, Helen, died "suddenly" on 30 June 1928.
The boys' inscription is said to have originally been written by Sir Walter Scott on hearing of the death of Lord Byron. There is no evidence for this but Scott did say something very similar in a published eulogy: "we feel almost as if the great luminary of heaven had suddenly disappeared from the sky ... ". I prefer the Pusch's version; its simple, stark language is hard to beat.
Frederick Pusch was studying law in Canada when the war broke out. He served initially with the London Regiment and was awarded the DSO for 'conspicuous gallantry' at Loos on the 25th and 27th September 1915. He is one of only eight junior officers to have received this award during the whole war. He transferred to the Irish Guards and had been with them for less than a week when he was shot by a sniper whilst bandaging a wounded soldier, who had himself been hit by the sniper.
His nineteen-year-old brother, Ernest John, went out to the Front for the first time a few weeks later. He was serving in the 11th Royal Warwickshires, the same regiment as A.A. Milne. Milne recorded a conversation he'd had with Pusch on the way out. Pusch confided in him that his mother had sent him off with a chain mail vest to wear for protection. As Milne reported:

"He was much embarrassed by this parting gift, and though, true to his promise, he was taking it to France with him, he did not know whether he ought to wear it."

Milne felt that Pusch thought it would perhaps be cowardly, unsporting or somehow dishonourable to wear it into battle. However, he never got the opportunity. On the day the Warwickshires arrived at the edge of the battle zone, he was killed by a shell just as he was about to have tea.
Emile Pusch was born in Riga and came to Britain in 1879 when he was 16. He describes himself in the 1901 census as a bank clerk, however, he was in fact no ordinary bank clerk being by 1919 a partner in Lazards. He died in 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. I'd like to finish this tale of family tragedy with a quote from an anonymous correspondent who wrote to The Times after Pusch's death:

"... his chief characteristics were his wide sympathy and kindness of heart, which prompted him to help those in need of assistance. Many young men starting their careers, and others who had fallen on evil days through no fault of their own, owe more to the discriminating and tactful assistance of Emile Pusch than they will ever know. He literally went about doing good; and his memory will live long in the hearts of his many friends."


MY SON I LOVED YOU SO DEARLY
MY DEEPEST SORROW
CAN NEVER BE HEALED
MOTHER

LANCE SERJEANT JOSEPH GUDMUNDER JOHNSTON


It would appear that Mrs Gertrude Johnston, Lance Serjeant Johnston's mother, was a widow. This is an assumption. The only facts I have been able to discover about Joe Johnston are: that his middle name was Gudmundur, that he was born in Gimley, Manitoba and that before he joined up on 3 August 1915 he had been a fisherman. Gudmundur is an Icelandic first name so I'm going to make another assumption - that his origins were Icelandic, especially if Gimley is a mis-spelling of Gimli, an area of Canada that was once known as New Iceland. If I could read his Attestation Paper better I'd be able to see his mother's name, which doesn't appear to be Gertrude, yet that's the name she gave to the War Graves Commission.
Johnston served with the 43rd Battalion Canadian Infantry, the Cameron Highlanders of Canada. He was killed on 26 October 1917, the opening day of the Battle of Passchendaele. We don't know what happened to him. The battalion war diary hasn't yet been transcribed but because Lieutenant Robert Shankland, of the same battalion, won a Victoria Cross that day there are descriptions of the action.
Bellevue Spur was a critically strategic piece of raised ground guarding the way to the village of Passchendaele. Two costly attempts had already been made to take it when the Canadians were given the job. D Company of the 43rd Battalion managed to achieve the objective. But when they became dangerously isolated, enduring hours of incessant shelling and German attacks, Lieutenant Shankland returned to battalion Head Quarters to pick up reinforcements and lead a counter attack, which secured the position.
Johnston was one of the many casualties of the day, his body discovered in an unmarked grave in February 1920; unlike so many bodies found on the battle field it was possible to identify it because it still had its identity disc.


THEIR BODIES
ARE BURIED IN PEACE
BUT THEIR NAME
LIVETH FOR EVERMORE

SECOND LIEUTENANT DONALD LYLE WHITMARSH


If you think that the words sound familiar it's not because they form a popular headstone inscription but because the last five words appear on Lutyen's Stone of Remembrance, which can be found in almost every War Grave Commission cemetery, only left out when the cemetery was too small to take it. Anxious not to upset any of the religious denominations among the soldiers of the Empire, and in this case in deference to the Hindus, the Commission omitted the words 'Their bodies are buried in peace'. Hindus cremate their dead.
This was not a consideration for the Mr W J Thomas of Myrtle Cottage, Westbere who chose this inscription for Donald Whitmarsh. For a long time I couldn't work out why WJ Thomas should have chosen his inscription, who was he. Whitmarsh appeared to have parents and a wife. But the Whitmarsh family had fragmented following the parents' divorce in 1887 when Mrs Whitmarsh had confessed that her two youngest children, which would include Donald, were her lover's. Following the divorce, Mrs Whitmarsh went to New Zealand and it seems that her sister-in-law, Alice, brought up the children. Donald married Margaret Guglielmo in July 1915, but when he was killed, just over two years later, it was his eldest sister, also Margaret, who was named as his next-of-kin. And WJ Thomas was her husband, Donald's brother-in-law.
Donald Whitmarsh served with the 12th Battalion Hampshire Regiment but at the time of his death was attached to the 2nd Battalion. He was killed in action on 22 August, a day that saw heavy fighting all along the Langemarck sector as the British attempted to push forward against fierce German resistance. His body was discovered in an unmarked grave early in 1921 and identified by the name on his shirt.


I HAVE FOUGHT A GOOD FIGHT
I HAVE FINISHED MY COURSE
I HAVE KEPT THE FAITH

SECOND LIEUTENANT WALTER MORSE JOTCHAM


There are five Jotchams on the Wotton-under-Edge war memorial, Walter, his brother Cyril, and three of his cousins: Herbert, William and Fred. Walter and Cyril share a marble memorial plaque in St Mary's Church recording the dates of their deaths and concluding with the same quotation as that on Walter's headstone:

"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

The quotation comes from the Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy in which Paul, acknowledging that "the time of my departure is at hand", his martyrdom, looks forward to the "crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day". It's the same crown of righteousness that will be awarded to all those who have endured suffering and faced death for Christ's sake - just as, in their parents' opinion, Walter and Cyril Jotcham had done.
The brothers are also commemorated in volume 5 of the Marquis de Ruvigny's Roll of Honour, which records that Walter went to America in June 1914 and settled in Washington State as a fruit farmer. However, soon after the outbreak of war he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and returned to Europe. He saw action on the Western Front from August 1915 until July 1916 when he returned to England to take up a commission in the Worcestershire Regiment. Back in France in March 1917, he was killed on the night of the 18/19 August leading his platoon across the Steenbeek in the face of fierce German fire.
Cyril Jotcham joined the Gloucestershire Yeomanry in January 1915 and served with them in Egypt and Gallipoli, from where he was invalided home with dysentery. He returned in May 1916 to serve with them in Palestine and died there of malaria on 16 August 1918. His headstone inscription comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress:

And he passed over
And all the trumpets sounded
For him on the other side


WHERE LOYAL HEARTS AND TRUE
STAND EVER IN THE LIGHT

LIEUTENANT MONTAGUE GERALD HERBERT CHAPMAN


The report of Lieutenant Chapman's death in the Newcastle Journal on 1 September 1917 concludes with the words of his commanding officer: "He was doing a very brave deed at the time of his death, which was instantaneous. He was a very brave officer, and I cannot tell you [how] I feel his loss".

The 'brave deed' was the attempt to cross the Steenbeek in order to get a foothold on the east bank prior to the launch of the Battle of Langemarck. There had been several attempts to achieve this since the 8 August but they had all failed. This attempt succeeded in taking enough of the ground for the main attack to go ahead on the 16th, even though the German blockhouse, Au Bon Gite, lost to the Germans on the 31 July, held out until the 16th. The attack cost the 10th Battalion the Rifle Brigade, in which Chapman was serving, 215 casualties.

Chapman's father, Frederick Herbert Chapman, a wine merchant and brewer in Rye, Sussex, chose his inscription. It comes from the hymn 'O Paradise, O Paradise' where it is repeated at the end of every verse:

Where loyal hearts and true
Stand ever in the light
All rapture through and through
In God's most holy sight.


BORN AT KOBE, JAPAN
9TH OCTOBER 1890
SACRIFICED TO THE FALLACY
THAT WAR CAN END WAR

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR CONWAY YOUNG


This is a very famous epitaph, regularly included in battlefield tour itineraries. It expresses what we now want to hear, but is it what the casualty would have wanted to hear?
Arthur Conway Young was the son of Robert Young, the editor of the Japan Chronicle. Robert was an atheist, a republican and a fierce pacifist. Despite this, all three of his sons joined the war effort: Arthur as an officer in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, Douglas George as a captain in the Royal Flying Corps and Eric Andrew as a corporal despatch rider.
However, it wasn't Arthur's father who chose his inscription. Robert Young died in 1922 and the inscription was signed for by G. Young Esq, Conway House, Brent Garden Village, Finchley. Was this Arthur's brother, Douglas George Young? More likely it was his father's brother, George Young. Conway House was a Utopian co-operative housing scheme, where thirty-three households shared communal facilities, including servants, who were housed separately in Brent Lodge.
We know very little about Arthur Young except from a letter he wrote to his father's sister, Margaret, which was published in Laurence Housman's 'War Letters of Fallen Englishmen'. The letter describes the Battle of Ginchy, which took place on 9 September 1916. Describing his feelings on learning that he was to take part in the attack he writes:

"I will tell you the whole truth and confess that my heart sank within me when I heard the news. I had been over the top once already that week, and knew what it was to see men blown to bits, to see men writhing in pain, to see men running round and round gibbering, raving mad. Can you wonder therefore that I felt a sort of sickening dread of the horrors which I knew we should all have to go through?"

He continues:

"You read no end of twaddle in the papers at home about the spirit in which men go into action. ... It's rubbish like this which makes thousands of people in England think war is a great sport. As a famous Yankee general said, "War is hell," and you have only got to be in the Somme one single day to know it."

And yet, as they joined in the attack, this is what he has to say:

"By this time we were all wildly excited. Our shouts and yells alone must have struck terror into the Huns, who were firing their machine guns down the slope. But there was no wavering in the Irish host. ... The numbing dread had now left me completely. Like the others, I was intoxicated with the glory of it all. I can remember shouting and bawling to the men of my platoon, who were only too eager to go on."

And when it was over, he writes of the aftermath: "Our men were very good to the German wounded. An Irishman's heart melts very soon. In fact, kindness and compassion for the wounded, our own and the enemy's, is about the only decent thing I have seen in war". The letter finishes with Arthur telling his aunt that the great Irish charge at Ginchy "will never be forgotten by those who took part in it, for it is an event we shall remember with pride to the end of our days".
So, what would Arthur Conway Young have thought of his inscription, which now meets with such general approval? Does it represent his views or is he commemorated by someone else's. It's complicated.


MY FIRST PRIDE
MY FIRST JOY
MY BRAVE SOLDIER BOY

PRIVATE HEREWARD WILLIAM RAY


Hereward Ray was his mother's eldest child - 'her first pride, her first joy'. He was also 'her brave soldier boy'. I can't help hearing the words of a popular, American anti-war song, written in 1915, in her description of her son. And if this echo is intentional then she's rebuking the song-writers, not agreeing with them. This is the chorus of the song:

I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It's time to lay the sword and gun away.
There'd be no war today,
If mothers all would say,
"I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier."

To his mother, Hereward Ray was not only her pride and joy but a brave soldier too. The Ray family was committed to the war. There was no conscription in Australia but Hereward Ray's stepfather and brother both served in it, as did his mother's brother, Hector Archibald Maclean, who was killed in action aged 47, and two of his cousins. One cousin was killed and the other, invalided home, died of his wounds in Australia.

Hereward Ray enlisted in March 1915 and served with the 22nd Australian Infantry, which embarked from Australia in May. It went to Gallipoli where it remained until the evacuation that December. Then it moved to France and took part in the Battle of the Somme at Pozieres. Early in 1917 it went to Flanders. Ray was killed in the trenches on 18 September 1917. A witness related how he and Sergeant Kelly had both died of head injuries having been hit by a shell at Jabber Trench, Westhoek".


A JEW WHO GAVE HIS LIFE
FOR THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD

PRIVATE ABRAHAM NATHAN


Abraham Nathan's mother, Rachel, chose his inscription, identifying him as a Jew and declaring that he had died 'for the freedom of the world'. In this she was quoting the words on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey,which was dedicated to:

" ... the many
Multitudes who during the Great
War of 1914-1918 gave the most that
Man can give life itself
For God
For King and Country
For loved ones home and Empire
For the sacred cause of justice and
The freedom of the world.

Although Private Nathan served with the 8th Battalion the Dorsetshire Regiment, he was a Londoner. He came from Shoreditch where there was a large Jewish community, and a fair amount of accompanying anti-semitism. Mrs Nathan lived in Sunbury Buildings, part of the Boundary Estate, one of London County Council's first public housing schemes. Today the accommodation would be thought very sub-standard as the flats were small and had no bathrooms. But they were intended to be an improvement on the Old Nichol slums they replaced.
Nathan was killed on 26 October 1916, a day described as 'disastrous' in the regimental history, which, it was keen to emphasise, was no fault of the men's.

"October 26th, 1917, stands out as the worst day the 8th and 9th Devons ever experienced. They had known heavy losses before, at Loos, at Mametz, at Ginchy, but they had never gone into an attack with the scales weighted so heavily against them. ... It was the mud that was Gheluvelt's most effective defence, and the failure of the 8th and 9th to take Gheluvelt was recognised by those in authority as due to no fault of theirs, rather their determination and gallantry were lavishly praised ... the spirit which had led these two battalions to advance so unflinchingly to an attack they could not but realise to be a forlorn hope, represents a triumph of discipline and of esprit de corps. The saddest day in their history, it was, nevertheless, the high-water mark of their endeavour."


FOR GOD, KING AND COUNTRY

CAPTAIN ROBERT CONINGSBY WILMOT


For all that these words are popularly associated with the Great War, they are not a particularly popular headstone inscription. However, Mrs Katharine Wilmot used them on the graves of all three of her sons who died in the war: Thomas Norbury Wilmot MC, who died on 25 August 1916 of wounds received at Thiepval the previous day; Henry Cecil Wilmot, who, died on 23 July 1917 from illness contracted on active service, and Robert Coningsby Wilmot, who was killed in action on 29 October 1917.
The Revd Francis Wilmot, and Katharine his wife, had eleven children: seven daughters and five sons. The two eldest daughters, Winifred and Mary, died in their late twenties before the war, by which time Katharine herself was a widow. Two of the sons went to Canada: Henry in 1911 and Thomas in 1914. Thomas returned to fight in October 1914, Henry in April 1916. Robert, a solicitor in London, joined up in August 1914. Dangerously wounded in August 1915, he didn't return to the front until April 1916. Thomas was killed four months later; Henry, invalided home in April 1917, died in July, and Robert was killed in action three months after this.
The Imperial War Museum has two boxes of letters and memorabilia associated with the Wilmot family. There are forty-four letters from Henry, covering the years from 1911, when he went to Canada, until his death in Lewisham Military Hospital in July 1917. Robert's 165 letters begin in January 1915. They include the time he was in hospital recovering from wounds, his return to the front, and his participation in the battles of the Somme and Arras. The eighty-one letters from Thomas begin when he went to Canada in June 1914; they express his attitude to the outbreak of war, and his war service from Loos to the Somme where he was killed. The collection also includes letters of condolence, newspaper cuttings and other associated ephemera. They provide an interesting insight into a family where, even after the death of three of her sons, the mother's patriotic loyalty stands firm.


I HAVE GIVEN MY LIFE
TO PROMOTE PEACE
BETWEEN ALL NATIONS

PRIVATE EMANUEL FULTON


Private Fulton's mother chose his inscription. It would be interesting to know whether the words were actually her son's or her own. Emanuel Fulton did not die for honour or freedom, God, king or country but to promote peace between all nations.
This was very much the idea behind the establishment in 1920 of the League of Nations, an international organisation whose aim was to both promote and maintain peace throughout the world without the necessity of nations having to resort to war. The aim was laudable but the execution was flawed and the League could not prevent war breaking out in Europe nineteen years later, nor any of the wars in the years preceding 1939.
Emanuel Fulton served with the 31st Battalion Canadian Infantry, part of the Sixth Canadian Infantry Brigade, which took part in the successful capture of the village of Passchendaele on 6 November 1917, the day Fulton was killed. The battalion war diary for the 6 November gives a summary of the day:

"Weather - fine and clear.
At 12 midnight, all were in correct position in assembly area, and communication by lamp established. After a quiet night the attack on the village of Passchendaele was launched at 6.00 am and by 8.00 am the entire town was in the hands of the 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade (see special report on operations, copy attached).
The evening found all well established on the eastern outskirts of the town with a well consolidated trench along the whole Brigade front. The loss of Major GD Powis O.C. C. Coy. early in the day is greatly felt by all ranks."

Fulton was also in C. Company and from the map reference where his body was found in May 1920 it looks as if he too was killed 'early in the day'.
The special report on the operations mentioned in the war diary can be found between pages 29 and 76 in this digitised version of the November 1917 war dairy.


THROUGH HIS DEATH
MANY HAVE LOST MUCH

PRIVATE JOHN JAMES HARGREAVES


This simple statement will apply to all those bereaved by the war and you wouldn't have to have been an industrialist, a cabinet minister or poet for it to be true.
John Hargeaves was a cotton weaver from Bacup in Lancashire. A married man, he served with the 12th Battalion the Manchester Regiment and was killed in action on 10 November 1917 during the Second Battle of Passchendaele.
Among the many who "have lost much" were the children of Bacup. Ten years after the end of the war, the Bacup war memorial was unveiled in the pouring rain, the local paper commenting that:

"The most touching part of the whole ceremony was said to be the presence of children of men killed in the war and wearing their father's medals. Shivering in the rain and trying to keep back the tears which silently flowed, and grasping lovingly the posies 'In loving memory of Daddy".

Listed among the names of the children was Cyril Hargreaves.


THEN THOUGHT I
TO UNDERSTAND THIS
BUT IT WAS TOO HARD FOR ME

PRIVATE THOMAS LITTLE


Thomas Little's inscription comes from Psalm 73 verse 15 in the Book of Common Prayer. In the psalm, the speaker cannot understand how it is that the ungodly always seem to prosper compared with those who live good lives. Is this what Little's family were referring to? Perhaps, or perhaps they were making a veiled comment about the war and the death of their son - 'Then thought I to understand this but it was too difficult for me'. It's the same sentiment as the many families who chose 'Some day we'll understand' for an inscription. It's a way of questioning what they had been fighting for. In fact it was not uncommon for people to quote the Bible, or Prayer Book, as a way of covertly making a comment on the war, see for example "To what purpose is this waste, or 'Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity', which has to have a certain irony to it in a cemetery dedicated to the war dead.
Little was the son of a prosperous marine and mechanical engineer. Interestingly, the 1911 census describes his mother as an architect. She wasn't an architect in the 1901 census. However, the Littles built an Arts and Crafts house, Daweswood, in Patterdale, which was begun in 1908. It's possible that Elizabeth Little was responsible for the design.
Not much is known about Thomas Little, other than the fact that he served with the 1st Battalion the South Wales Borderers and went missing on 10 November 1917. The History of the South Wales Borderers relates what happened that day. Having taken Passchendaele Village on 6 November, the British were desperate to secure the high ground behind it. The date was fixed for the 10 November and the Borderers were detailed to take part in the attack. On the night of the 9th the regiment moved up to the front:

"The night was pitch dark, with rain at intervals, the country was a mixture of glue and water, churned up indescribably by the bombardments so that off the duck-board tracks a footing was hard to obtain. In places the duck-boards themselves were under water, and if a man slipped off he usually fell into a deep shell hole full of water and would be lucky to escape alive."

Add to this the fact that the men were weighed down with rations, ammunition and equipment, that the German artillery had all the duck-board tracks accurately registered so that it's not surprising that the men were in trouble before the fighting even began. Zero hour was at 5 am. At 7.15 am the first counter-attack began. The regiment held out all morning, harassed by German aeroplanes, but didn't achieve its objectives. By the time the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment relieved it that evening it had suffered almost 400 casualties killed, wounded and missing. Little was one of the missing, his body not discovered until 23 March 1920 when it was identified by his disc.


OUR BOY
DUTY NOBLY DONE

CORPORAL EDWARD ERNEST STAINSBY


"We were in the support at Broodseinde Ridge on November 10th and during a gas-shell bombardment two men, of whom Stainsby was one, took cover in the same dug-out. No one knew they were killed until the next morning, and then as they were missing, the dug-out was excavated, and their remains were found, and identified by Captain Ellwood ... by their paybooks. Two temporary crosses were put up. I knew Stainsby very well. He was tall, fair, clean shaven. He came from Richmond."
Private D Llewellyn
Witness Report for Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau. 19 February 1918

Not all the witnesses agreed on this version of events: CSM Hardwick said that the casualty was in his dug-out in the support lines at Zonnebeke Ridge when a H.E. [high explosive] shell exploded on the dug-out killing Stainsby instantly. "I was 30 yards from the casualty at the time of his death and gave orders for them to be dug out but he was dead on recovery".

Edward Stainsby (Teddy to his family), his brother and his father all served in the war. Teddy went first, embarking from Australia in July 1915, his brother William went second in March 1916, followed by father, Edward Allan, who enlisted at the age of 43 just before his second son embarked. Edward Allan left Australia in October 1916 and returned in March 1919.

It was father, Edward Allan, who chose his son's inscription. To his parents and his four surviving siblings - Will, Leslie, Jim and Nellie - Teddy was 'our boy' whose duty had been nobly done. In this they were quoting the letter King George V had sent to the army on the eve of its departure for France in August 1914. In this letter, the King wrote that he had "implicit confidence in you my soldiers. Duty is your watchword, and I know your duty will be nobly done". It's possible that the same letter was sent to all soldiers throughout the war on the eve of their embarkation but I have no evidence for this.


IN ACTION FAITHFUL
AND IN HONOUR CLEAR

SECOND LIEUTENANT NORMAN EDWIN RUTHERFORD


In June 1917 King George V instituted a new Order, that of the Companions of Honour. It was to be "conferred upon a limited number of persons for whom this special distinction seems to be the most appropriate form of recognition ...". Companions were awarded an elaborate oval medallion and, inscribed around its blue border were the words: "In action faithful and in honour clear".
The words did not originate here, they were a quote from a poem by Alexander Pope: 'Verses Occasioned by Mr Addison's Treatise on Medals". Although written in 1715, the poem was not published until 1720 when the last few lines were added having been written by Pope for the tomb of his friend James Craggs in Westminster Abbey:

Statesman, yet friend to truth; of soul sincere,
In action faithful, and in honour clear;
Who broke no promise, serv'd no private end,
Who gain'd no title, and who lost no friend;
Ennobled by himself, by all approved,
Prais'd, wept and honour'd by the Muse* he lov'd.
[* The muse was Alexander Pope]

I would suggest that it was the wording on the medallion that inspired James Rutherford's choice for his son's headstone inscription rather than Pope's poem, but I thoroughly approve of what I assume must have been his reasoning. Although the award is now given for major contributions to the arts, science, medicine or government, the first awards were all for services to the war and who better, in his father's opinion, to be given this accolade than a young man who had given his life.
Norman Edwin Rutherford served with the 7th Battalion the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, which was raised in Lancaster in September 1914. The battalion arrived in France in July 1915 and served there, taking part in all the major engagements, until it was disbanded in February 1918. It fought on the Somme, attacking at La Boiselle on 6 July 1916 and at Bazentin le Petit on the 23rd. But by then Rutherford was dead. He died of wounds on 21 July at a Casualty Clearing Station in Mericourt-l'-Abbe and was buried there.






IN THE MORN
THOSE ANGEL FACES SMILE
LONG LOVED
BUT ONLY LOST AWHILE

SERJEANT FRED IFOULD, MM


Fred Ifould's inscription is a contraction from the last verse of John Henry Newman's very popular hymn 'Lead Kindly Light'. The verse itself reads:

So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.

Ifould was a regular soldier. In the 1911 census he was serving with E Battery, Royal Field Artillery and living in Artillery Barracks, Chapeltown Road, Leeds. He and his brother, Harry, were both serving with the same battery and had consecutive army numbers indicating that they had joined up together. One of them, and I can't tell which, was a member of the gun crew that at 9.30 am on 22 August 1914 fired the first artillery round of the First World War on the Western Front. I have a suspicion that it was Harry Ifould because the crew list says Gunner Ifould and I think Fred Ifould was a bombardier by the outbreak of war.
Harry Ifould survived the war but Fred, now serving with D Battery 155th Brigade, was killed in action on the 23 October 1917, just before the opening day of the 2nd Battle of Passchendaele.


"TIS SWEET TO DIE
FOR ONE'S COUNTRY

SERGEANT STUART NORMAN SPENCE


This is a partial English translation of Horace's famous line: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: it is sweet and glorious to die for one's country. And yes, even after the savaging Wilfred Owen gave it in his famous poem of that name, families did still chose the line as an inscription in either the English or the Latin.
I have written about this before for Serjeant Frank Coad of the South Staffordshire Regiment who was killed in action on 14 March 1917. As I said there, Horace did not mean that there was anything 'sweet' about the process of dying for your country but that to be prepared to do so was appropriate behaviour for a good man.
Norman Spence was born in Glasgow and educated at Hutcheson's Grammar School after which he became a shipping clerk. At the age of 32 he emigrated to Australia and took up fruit farming. He enlisted on 25 August 1915 and after a period of extensive training arrived in the trenches with the 41st Battalion Australian Infantry on Christmas Eve 1916.
The Battalion experienced very heavy fighting around Ypres during the summer of 1917 and on 4 October took part in the Battle of Broodseinde. Spence survived the fighting on that day but was hit by a shell on the following one. Wounded in the right shoulder and hip he was taken to a casualty clearing station at Lijssenthoek where he died two days later.
The St Andrew's (Brisbane) Uniting Church Heritage Committee website has more details about the life and death of Sergeant Spence.


BE VERY PROUD TO NUMBER ME
AMONG THE DEATHLESS DEAD
J. DE L.S.

MAJOR JOHN DE LUZE SIMONDS


If, as I believe, yesterday's casualty was a gardener at Audleys Wood, today's was his employer's son. Both John Pardey and John Simonds are listed on the war memorial in St Leonard's Church, Cliddesden, Hampshire. Major Simonds heading the list of six men as befits his rank and social position rather than alphabetic order.
Simonds was a professional soldier. Educated at Winchester, where he had been the top scholar, he went from there to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, after which he joined the Royal Garrison Artillery. On the outbreak of war he was in India and arrived in France with an Indian Mountain Battery in December. When the Indians were relocated to warmer climes in 1915, Simonds took a staff appointment. In April 1917 he was in charge of a siege battery when he was killed by a shell.
All this information, and that on the house, Audleys Wood, comes from a website recently compiled by a member of the family. By chance, the website also provides the source of the inscription. As the initials indicate, the words were written by Simonds himself, not in a letter but in a poem.
After his death, his family privately published a collection of his poetry. This can be read on the above website where it has been uploaded as a flipping book. Most poems appear to have been written before the war, during his postings to Malta and the Far East. One was definitely written during the war: 'In Memoriam - W.H. Johnston VC, Killed in Action 7-vi-15'. The poem begins:

Very tall beside his grave the Flemish poplars grow,
Bearing the heart to Heaven, that rests in peace below,
The shrieking shell his requiem, the guns his funeral hymn,
A fitting harmony of death for us, whose eyes are dim.

There's an echo here of the opening lines of John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields':

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row
That mark our dead, and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

And also of some of the imagery in Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth':

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers or bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

Simonds could have known McCrae's poem, which was published in December 1915. However, it was only in August 1917 that Owen showed Siegfried Sassoon his as yet unpublished poem and Simonds was already dead.

Simonds' own epitaph comes from another of his poems, which appears not to have been included in the collection but was printed on a separate sheet of paper. It has no title. The reference to the opening line of Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier' is totally intentional. Brooke wrote:

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England ...

Simonds' poem opens:

If I should die, be very full of pride
That I have died for England ...

and continues (I have written out the whole poem here as it is not easy to find other than on the linked website):

... shed no tears
Because unhallowed ground enshrines my bones.
Think of me rather in some orchard plot
At peace with God, where some tall poplar tree
Uplifts my soul to Heaven - my weary soul
That looks for ever star-wards, nor avails.
For France is hallowed by your English dead
Where blaze the poppies like a scarlet wound,
Sprung from the blood of heroes: yesteryear
They led their little lives in shop and mart,
Thinking no evil and content to live
At peace with all around, but this year
The poppy springs above their grave: a wound
Which they have died to salve. Be very proud,
To number me among the deathless dead.
Along the trench the cornflower shimmers blue*
Like eyes bestarred with tears: so long ago
We wore its bloom in pride of victory,
Where called the deep Cathedral chimes to prayer.
Oh the grey walls and warm red-tiled roofs,
The Itchen's purling stream and velvet meads,
Where we have played together - never more
To lie beneath the trees and drink the sun.

* The cornflower is Winchester's flower because it was said to be the favourite flower of the founder, William of Wykeham.


AND LIFE,
WAS NEVER THE SAME AGAIN

PRIVATE JOHN PARDEY, MM


It took me a moment or two to absorb this inscription because it was so blunt, so direct and so different. Private Pardey's wife, Rose, tells it to us straight - life was never the same again. In all the hundreds of epitaphs I've come across in the course of this project, I have never seen one that says this. And yet it must have been true for all the bereaved.
John Pardey was born in Sway, Hampshire, the eldest of John and Winifred Sway's ten children. I couldn't find him in the 1911 census but his widow lived at Garden Cottage, Audleys Wood, Basingstoke. Audleys Wood was the home of the wealthy Simonds family and it's possible that Garden Cottage indicates that John Pardey had been a gardener there.
The war memorial in St Leonard's Church, Cliddesden lists Pardey as having served with the 10th Hampshire Regiment. By the time of his death he was serving with the 50th Company Machine Gun Corps, part of the 17th Division.
During 1916 the Division was mainly on the Somme, and in early 1917 it took part in the Battle of Arras. Pardey died in a Casualty Clearing Station in Duisans of wounds most likely received in the capture of Rouex (9-17 May).


A BRAVE, BRIGHT SPIRIT
HIS LAST WORDS WERE
"CARRY ON"

SECOND LIEUTENANT RONALD HOWORTH STOTT


Stott - Killed in action on the 20th of September, 1917, Second-Lieutenant Ronald Howorth Stott, L.N. Lancashire Regiment, attached the Rifle Brigade, aged 21, the dearly loved only son of Mr. and Mrs C.H. Stott 112 Hare Street
"God grant the sacrifice be not in vain"
Rochade Observer 29 September 1917

For the announcement of their son's death Mr and Mrs Stott chose a line from John Oxenham's 'Epilogue 1914', but for his actual headstone inscription they quoted his own words: 'Carry On'.
According to a letter to his parents from Lt. Colonel Slogett, Stott was killed leading an attack on the opening day of the Battle of Menin Road, his body brought back and buried behind the lines in the presence of his company and brother officers.
It was only three weeks since Stott had been home on leave, celebrating his 21st birthday. Like all parents they must have feared the worst; the announcement of his death may have described him as their only son but he was in fact their only child. They describe him as a brave, bright spirit. The poet Gerald Massey (1828-1907) had described Nelson with these words, on the morning of the Battle of Trafalgar, as though he had foreseen his own death:

His proudly-wasted face, wave-worn,
Was loftily serene;
I saw the brave, bright spirit burn
There all too plainly seen;
As though the sword this time was drawn
Forever from the sheath;
And when its work to-day was done,
All would be dark in death.


PAST THE MILITARY AGE
HE RESPONDED
TO THE MOTHER COUNTRY'S CALL

REGIMENTAL SERJEANT MAJOR STEWART GODFREY


Stewart Godfrey was a former soldier who had fought in the South African War. Born in Brixton, London, he enlisted in Canada on 24 August 1914, giving his civilian occupation as 'clerk'. He was 44. He served with Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry (Eastern Ontario Regiment), which departed for England on 22 September 1914, landed on 25 October and after four months intensive training went to France in February 1915. His rank on departure from Canada was Company Quartermaster Sergeant. This means that he was not "past the military age" as his brother put on his inscription.
The original call up was for men between the ages of 19 and 35 but this recruiting poster shows that for former non-commissioned officers the upper age limit was 45, and for sergeants 50.
The regiment was involved in the fighting at St Julien in April 1915, when the Germans used gas for the first time, and at Festubert and Ginchy. It spent the winter of 1915 in the trenches near Ploegsteert and took part in the battle of St Eloi Craters between 27 March and 16 April 1916. Godfrey survived all this and then was killed on 18 April when, as reported in the War Diary, the Battalion Headquarters at Half Way House was 'shelled with 4.2" R.S.M. [Godfrey S. 1589] killed by direct hit on dugout'.
Although Godfrey had been born in Britain, it was not necessary for a Canadian to have been born there to feel the pull of the mother country. Many Canadian citizens simply looked on themselves as those north Americans who had remained loyal to the British crown - they were British, and more than 600,000 of them were prepared to volunteer to fight for their country.


FROM SCENES LIKE THESE
OLD SCOTIA'S GRANDEUR SPRINGS
THY WILL BE DONE

PRIVATE THOMAS MARSHALL


A Miss J Marshall of 128 Devonshire Road, Walkerville, Ontario, Canada, chose Thomas Marshall's inscription - his elder sister? He certainly he had a sister called Jane who was two years older than him according to the 1911 Census. Thomas Marshall was born in Glasgow but I couldn't find him in the 1911 census. He served with the 1/5th Seaforth Highlanders, part of the 51st Highland Division, whose divisional history describes the circumstances in which he met his death:

"On 6th September the 5th Seaforth Highlanders attempted a raid on the enemy's posts in front of Pheasant Trench, 3 officers and 100 other ranks being employed. The raiding party failed to reach the enemy's lines owing to the intensity of his rifle and machine-gun fire; but they obtained some valuable information, and caused the enemy serious losses by the energetic use of their rifles ... The raiders could not regain our lines during daylight, and remained in shell-holes until dusk, when they returned having lost 1 officer and 19 men killed, 2 officers and 18 men wounded, and 9 men missing."

Marshall was one of the nine missing men, his body not discovered until February 1920. His inscription comes from the nineteenth verse of Robert Burns' The Cotter's Saturday Night.

"From scenes like these, old Scotia's grandeur springs
That makes her love'd at home, revere'd abroad:"

Miss J Marshall might have been referring to the kind of scenes described above in the divisional history, but Burns was referring to the sight of a happy cottager's family contentedly going about their Sunday routines: attendance at church before the family gather together to share a meal.
The final line of the inscription comes, of course, from the Lord's prayer and is one of the most popular of all inscriptions on War Grave Commission headstones.



SONG SINKS INTO SILENCE
THE STORY IS TOLD

SAPPER HAROLD MILNE


The book is completed,
And closed, like the day;
And the hand that has written it
Lays it away.
Dim grows its fancies;
Forgotten they lie;
Like coals in the ashes,
They darken and die.
Song sinks into silence,
The story is told,
The windows are darkened,
The hearth-stone is cold.
Darker and darker
The black shadows fall;
Sleep and oblivion
Reign over all.

Harold Milne's inscription comes from this, the second verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem 'Curfew'. His mother signed the form confirming the choice.
Milne, born in Galashiels in Scotland, emigrated to Australia in 1907 when he was 24. He enlisted in September 1915 and served with the 14th Field Company Australian Engineers. He was killed in action on 25 October. The Company's war diary for October 1917 gives precise details of all the work the Company carried out on its sector of the line: from the Leinster Road to the Hanebeek River. But it doesn't mention any casualties until the end of the month when it lists the fact that, between 16 September and 31 October, 18 members of the Company were killed, 2 died of wounds, 31 were wounded and 1 gassed.


ONE WHO LOVED HIS FELLOW MEN

CAPTAIN REGINALD SHERMAN


To love your fellow man is evidence of your love for God, and it's the way that God likes you to love Him. This certainly was the conclusion of the poet Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) in his famous poem, Abou Ben Adhem. In the poem, an angel appeared to Ben Adhem one night. It was writing in a book and when asked what it was writing it replied, "the names of those who love the Lord". Ben Adhem asked if his name was there and the angel replied that it was not. Ben Adhem was not unduly concerned and replied, "cheerily", "I pray thee, then, write me as one that loves his fellow men". The next day the angel appeared again:

"And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest."

The poem was far and away Leigh Hunt's best-known work, and the words, 'One that loved his fellow men' were not only carved on his headstone in Kensal Green Cemetery but became a popular tribute to men who were thought to have done good in their lives.
Captain Sherman had been married for nearly a year when he died. However, it wasn't his wife, Mrs Dorothy Raffles Sherman, who signed for his inscription but his mother, Mrs Marion Elizabeth Sherman.
As for having done good in his life, Sherman was a doctor. Trained at St Batholomew's, he joined the RAMC in December 1914 and went to France the following February. He served with the 4th Field Ambulance throughout 1915 and 1916 including at Loos and the Somme. A letter from his colonel to his family, published as part of his obituary in The Times on 23 October 1917, described how he met his death:

"He was shot in the chest while visiting the forward aid-posts and died peacefully in the dressing station some hours later".

Another officer and friend told them:

"Everyone is quite heart-broken and everywhere you hear nothing but words of regret at his death. He was always the centre of any fun or frolic and always ready to take a large share of any hardships that were going.He was a large-hearted, generous man, and as brave as a lion."


FORGET ME NOT DEAR LAND
FOR WHICH I FELL

CAPTAIN OWEN ROBERT LLOYD, MC


Owen Lloyd's father chose his inscription, adapting a line from Joseph Lee's, 'Our British Dead'. The poem was first published in the Spectator in January 1917 and opens with a quote from Simonides:
"O stranger, bring the Spartans word, that here,
Obedient to their command we lie."

Here do we lie, dead but not discontent,
That which we found to do has had accomplishment.

No more for us uprise or set of sun;
The vigilant night, the desperate day is done.

To other hands we leave the avenging sword,
To other tongues to speak the arousing word.

Here do we lie, dead but not discontent,
That which was ours to do has had accomplishment.

Forget us not, O Land for which we fell -
May it go well with England, still go well.

Keep her bright banners without blot or stain,
Lest we should dream that we have died in vain.

Brave be the days to come, when we
Are but a wistful memory ...

Here do we lie, dead but not discontent,
That we which found to do has had accomplishment.

Simonides' dead simply ask that their country is told that they have done what was asked of them; Lee's dead, who have also done what was asked of them, want to feel that the country they have died for will be worthy of their deaths, "Lest we should dream that we have died in vain".
Lloyd was wounded on 20 September, the opening day of the Battle of Menin Road. He died two days later. An obituary in The Times on 5 October gave the details, quoted from the letter Lloyd's colonel had written to his parents:

"He was a very gallant soldier and an exceptionally fine leader of men. We attacked on the 20th ... Captain Lloyd saw the attack developing on his right, and got up and led his company on, and it was as he was doing so that he fell, hit by two bullets. The ground was open and raked by machine gun fire, and the advance by Captain Lloyd was a very fine effort. Although not immediately successful, it all bore good fruit, because next day ... we not only captured the mound and its garrison, but absolutely wiped out the whole storm troops of the division opposite us. The men of his company, at the risk of their lives, went to your son, bandaged him up, and took him to the aid post. He died there, after thanking the men who took him down ... I liked him personally so much. I think he would rather have died that way than any other."


GREEN SOD ABOVE
BLOW LIGHT, BLOW LIGHT
GOOD NIGHT DEAR, GOOD NIGHT

PRIVATE SIDNEY ROLAND JENKINS


Mark Twain used a similar inscription to this on his daughter's headstone, which led people to assume that he had written it. He hadn't, but he had adapted it from 'Annette', a poem by Robert Richardson. Richardson's 'Annette' concludes:

Warm summer sun, shine friendly here.
Warm western wind, blow kindly here;
Green sod above, rest light, rest light,
Good-night, Annette!
Sweetheart, good-night!

The inscription on Twains daughter's headstone reads:

Warm summer sun, shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind blow softly here,
Green sod above lie light, lie light -
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night.

Private Jenkins' father adapted it differently and referred to the wind rather than to the sun:

Green sod above
Blow light, blow light
Good night dear, good night

Jenkins, in civilian life a railway porter from Gulargambone, N.S.W., enlisted on 16 October 1915 and embarked from Sydney on 5 June 1916 with the 13th reinforcements for the 18th Battalion Australian Infantry. Wounded on 15 April 1917, he was back in action by 28 August. He then died of wounds at No. 10 Casualty Clearing Station on 22 September 1917.
The Battalion War Dairy records that on the 20 September it attacked at Bellewaarde Ridge with 200 casualties among the soldiers. After heavy shelling on the 21st, it was relieved the next day; the Diary commentating: "Casualties during the relief were slight. Casualties Lieut W.S. Moors (wounded) O. Ranks estimated around 60".
A report in the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau Files states baldly: "Private Jenkins died 22.9.17 from G.S.W. (gun shot wound) compound fracture R.Leg and Wd R. Hand. He was buried at Lijssenthoek Cemetery Plot 22. No. H 14B."


"I'M ALL RIGHT MOTHER
CHEERIO"

LIEUTENANT HAROLD ROWLAND HILL


What would you say to your mother as you signed off the letter you were writing to her just before you went up into the front line? You'd tell her that you were OK. The inscription is in quotation marks, surely the words are therefore Hill's, and given the fact that they have been used for his inscription, they must be something like the last words he wrote to her.
On the night of the 1st/2nd October the Battalion arrived at Esplanade Saps, Zonneke. Its effective strength was was 35 officers and 989 other ranks. They spent the 3rd, 'In Front Line' and then on the night of the 3rd/4th the War Dairy records:

"Jumping off tape was laid by midnight along frontage and along Coy. flanks. The Battalion was on same by 4.30am on 4th. At zero the Bn. closed up to within 50 yards of barrage and fought its way to the objective where it consolidated."

On the 7th October the battalion moved back into the support lines. Their casualties for this period were two officers and 38 other ranks killed, 10 officers and 185 other ranks wounded and 16 other ranks missing.

Witnesses recorded in the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau files inform us of Hill's fate:

"Lieutenant Hill was killed before the hopover just behind Zonnebeke, near Zonnebeke Church. He was with Brigade Sig. at the time in charge of 25th Hd. Qrts. Sig."

"He led the 7th Bde. Signallers advance party over the top, near Zonnebeke about 6.30 am on Oct. 4/17. I was quite close to him when he was severely wounded during the heavy barrage, and was taken by S/Bs to the Menin Road Hospital near the Comforts Fund."

"I helped to bandage Lt. Hill. He was so badly wounded in the head and hit almost allover his body too, that he could not have lived more than an hour if that. Afterwards I heard that he had lived nearly two hours."

"Mr Hill went over the morning of the 4th October with a party of Bde. Sigs and we, the Battn Sigs were not with him at the time he was hit. But from particulars I gathered from one of our A.M.C. men I think he passed through the battalion Dressing Station unconscious but still alive, and died on the stretcher on the way to the A.D.S."




I COULD NOT SPEAK
THAT LAST GOOD-BYE
BUT KISSED HIM O'ER AND O'ER

PRIVATE WILLIAM THORN CARR


William Carr's father describes the scene so vividly that it is really quite affecting. It's a scene that must have been repeated in households all over the world - the saying good-bye to your son who was going off to fight. And Carr was an Australian, which meant that he would never be able to come home on leave
William Carr enlisted on 25 January 1916 and sailed for Europe from Brisbane on 16 August the same year. He served with the 52nd Battalion Australian Infantry made up of veterans from Gallipoli and new recruits, like Carr, fresh from Australia. The autumn and winter of 1916 were spent on the Somme and then early in 1917 the battalion transferred to the Ypres sector. Involved in the the battles of Messines Ridge, Polygon Wood and 1st Passchendaele, Carr was killed as the battalion transferred out of the line to a rest area at Ottawa Camp. The 15th to the 19th October had been spent in the trenches at Broodseinde Ridge, on 20th the Battalion was resting and 'cleaning up' in Ypres and then on 21st it moved out of the town:

52nd Battalion Australian Infantry War Diary 21st October:
"Moved from Infantry Barracks, Ypres to Ouderdum Area - route march - vide Operation Order in appendix. (Casualties - 6 other ranks killed, 32 other ranks wounded, 1 other rank previously reported Missing - reported Killed in addition to those shown on 19th inst.) Lieut A.M. Playfair wounded. Casualties occurred through shell fire as Battalion was leaving Ypres (1 p.m.) 7 other ranks killed, 3 other ranks wounded, on 21st October."

The soldiers might have been out of the direct front line but Ypres was not far from it and the German guns pounded the town incessantly. They knew where the roads were and had their range, which made the whole environs very dangerous.


BEHOLD
HOW GOOD AND HOW PLEASANT
IT IS FOR BRETHREN TO DWELL
TOGETHER IN UNITY (MOTHER)

PRIVATE JAMES PETER ROBERTSON VC


27th Battalion Canadian Infantry War Diary
6 November 1917
, Passchendaele
"Battalion in front line in front of Passchendaele. Weather dull. Wind N.E. Battalion assembled for the assault and all in position at 4 a.m. Zero hour was 5 a.m. Battalion attacked the village of Passchendaele with the 31st Battalion on the left and the 26th Battalion on the right. All objectives captured at 7.40 a.m. Day spent in consolidating position. 9 machine guns and 76 prisoners were captured. Approximate casualties were: 13 officers and 240 O.R.s."

Private Robertson took part in this assault and won a posthumous Victoria Cross for his actions. It's interesting to compare the above diary entry with the citation for his award; it doesn't sound like the same event.

"When his platoon was held up by uncut wire and a machine gun causing many casualties, Pte Robertson dashed to an opening on the flank, rushed the machine gun and, after a desperate struggle with the crew, killed four and then turned the gun on the remainder, who, overcome by the fierceness of his onslaught, were running towards their own lines ... He inflicted many more casualties among the enemy, and then carrying the captured machine gun ... He selected an excellent position and got the gun into action, firing on the retreating enemy who by this time were quite demoralised by the fire brought to bear on them ... Later, when two of our snipers were badly wounded in front of our trench, he went out and carried of them in under very severe fire. He was killed just as he returned with the second man."

And now look at Robertson's inscription, it's the first verse of Psalm 133: "How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity (Mother)". I think we can assume from her choice that we know what Mrs Janet Robertson felt about the war - how much better the world would be if men could live in harmony together. Interestingly, it was not uncommon for families to quote passages from the bible in a manner that indicated their attitude to the war but stopped short of being overtly critical.


NO BURDENS YONDER
ALL SORROW PAST
NO BURDENS YONDER
HOME AT LAST

SAPPER CECIL JOHN OSBORN


Sapper Osborn's inscription comes from a hymn written by Ada Habershon at the beginning of the twentieth century. The hymn itself is based on verse 4 of the Book of Revelations Chapter 21:

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

The hymn itself welcomes the fact that at death everyone will lay down their burdens, there will be no testing, no toiling, no weariness, no disappointments, no distress, no partings, no pain, no sickness and no weeping. Osborn's inscription forms the chorus.
Osborn, a carpenter, enlisted on 14 February 1916. He arrived in France on 27 January 1917 and was killed on 19 October 1917. His mother, filling in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia, tells us what happened. He was "wounded in the right knee going from the line to his dugout with piece of shell and died the same day". The records of No. 3 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station describe it as a gunshot wound, but whichever it was it caused his death.


HE WAS OUR DEAREST TREASURE
OUR DARLING ONLY SON
OUR BRAVE LADDIE

DRIVER HENRY GEORGE PAM


According to one witness in Pam's Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau file:

"Pam was a driver in the 4th Battery and was on the same team with me when he was hit on the 29th Sept at Ypres on the Menin Road. We were on an ammunition wagon. He was hit in the leg, foot and head, and taken to the D/S (Dressing Station)."

From the Dressing Station he was taken to No. 17 Casualty Clearing Station and it was from here that the Officer in Command wrote on 28 November 1917:

"He was admitted to this hospital in a critical condition, having been severely wounded by shell in leg and abdomen. His condition did not improve at all and he died as a result of these wounds at 2pm on 1.10.17. He was buried on 3.10.17 in the Soldier's Cemetery near to this hospital, his grave being duly marked and registered."

A boot maker in civilian life, Pam enlisted on 21 August 1914 and served in Gallipoli throughout the campaign before arriving in France in March 1916. His mother, Caroline Pam, chose his inscription.


A SOLDIER AND A MAN

LANCE CORPORAL WILLIAM GAYNER SMITH


William Smith's parents and his wife all lived in Bristol, England but he himself had emigrated to South Africa sometime before 1904 where he joined the South African police force. At the outbreak of war he returned to Europe as a member of the South African Infantry. Wounded in July 1916 he must have convalesced at home in Thornbury, Bristol where in October 1916 he married Mary Annie Gayner, a distant cousin. The Bristol Mercury commentated that, "owing to the bridegroom having only recently recovered from wounds received in action in July last in France the wedding was of a quiet nature". He returned to France and was killed in action on 15 October 1917 during the First Battle of Passchendaele.
Smith served with the Second Battalion South African Infantry. John Buchan, in his History of the South African Forces in the Great War, writes that:

"On the night of the 13th the 2nd and 4th South African Regiments moved up to the front line, taking over trenches held by part of the 26th and 27th Brigades, which had been engaged in that attack on the 12th which was foiled by the disastrous weather. The relief was very difficult, for the whole country had become an irreclaimable bog, and the mud was beyond all human description. There was intermittent shelling during the 14th and 15th, and much bombing from enemy planes."

Smith was killed either by the 'intermittent shelling' or the 'bombing from enemy planes' but the mud in which men literally drowned could have been a factor too.

His wife, Marjorie Annie Smith, chose his inscription; it's a phrase that had been made popular from songs and films of the period. There were two films with the title and in both a wronged man proves himself worthy of the name soldier. In one of the songs a young woman explains what has made her pick a particular man to marry:

Though he's a soldier, a common soldier
He has got the pluck and muscle for a soldier
And I'm proud to say the dear's
One of the Dublin Fusiliers
And he's proved himself a soldier and a man.

The other song is more mournful. It features in a set of Bamforth postcards - which, by the way, reveal a total ignorance of the life of a soldier - and in this song the soldier dies. The last verse concludes:

Oh! Father, who in heav'n above, hath all things in Thy span,
Remember him who yields his life, is a soldier and a man.


HE LOVED HONOUR
MORE THAN HE FEARED DEATH

LIEUTENANT DAVID GUNN


David Gunn's father, John, chose his inscription. The inspiration probably being a very famous print by the American artist and illustrator Howard Chandler Christy. The print first appeared as a sketch in 'Prince Albert's Book', published in December 1914 to raise support for Belgium. This sketch is called 'On the Field of Honour' and is signed, 'With sincerest admiration Howard Chandler Christy 1914'. Later the sketch was worked up into a more finished drawing and published as a print. It's still called 'On the Field of Honour' but underneath the image of a dead Belgian soldier, who is being crowned with a laurel wreath by an angel, it now says, "He loved honour more than he feared death".
The words are in quotation marks, as I've shown them here. So where are they quoted from? They are the words Brutus says to Cassius in Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' when he tells him that he would prefer to maintain an honourable reputation even if the alternative was death.

Set honour in one eye and death i' th' other,
And I will look on both indifferently,
For let the gods so speed me as as I love
The name of honour more than I fear death.

David Gunn who, aged 15, had been a stock brokers clerk in the 1911 census, served with the 7th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders and was killed in action on 13 October 1917 during the First Battle of Passchendaele. His body was recovered from an unmarked grave in May 1920 and identified by his disc.


UNDER THE SHADOW
OF THY WINGS

LIEUTENANT ROBERT HAY SQUAIR


Glasgow Herald
Tuesday 23 October 1917
Deaths on Service
Squair - Died of wounds received in action on 12th October, Robert Hay Squair, Second Lieutenant, Seaforth Highlanders, eldest son of the late Francis Hay Squair JP and of Mrs Squair, Barone View, Rothsay

Robert Squair was commissioned into the 7th Battalion the Seaforth Highanders in August 1915. The Battalion took part in the Battle of Loos in September 1915, the Somme Campaign, July to November 1916, the 1st and 2nd Battles of the Scarpe during the 1917 Arras Campaignm and Third Ypres where in the First Battle of Passchendaele they suffered heavy casualties attacking over sodden ground against the well-defended German machine guns. Squair was wounded on the first day of the battle and died the next day.
His inscription comes either from Psalm 36 verse 7:

How excellent is thy loving kindness O God: therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings

Or from Psalm 17 verse 8:

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.

Either quotation evokes the image of a bird using its wings to both shield and shelter its young, to protect them from the elements and from predators, and to provide them with warmth and security. Robert Squair's mother chose his inscription, the subtext being that her son is now safe from harm in God's keeping.


IN LOVING MEMORY OF
MY DEAR HUSBAND
THE KENT AND ENGLAND CRICKETER

SERJEANT COLIN (CHARLIE) BLYTHE


On 16 November 1917 The Times announced Colin Blythe's death with the headline, 'A Famous Slow Bowler'. Underneath it summarised his fifteen-year career, which began when he played his first match for Kent in 1899 and took a wicket with his first ball. His best season was 1909 when he took 215 first-class wickets for 14 runs, but his best work was done in 1907. He was England's mainstay in the Test matches against South Africa, and on one day in a match for Kent against Northamptonshire, took 17 wickets - ten for 30 runs and seven for 18. He played for England nineteen times.
Blythe enlisted on 27 August 1914; he was 34 and a married man. He served with the Kent Fortress Royal Engineers which was involved in laying and maintaining railway tracks between the trenches and the ammunition stores. It was dangerous work since it always attracted the attention of the German artillery. In the autumn of 1917, whilst attached to the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, Blythe was in Passchendaele when, on the night of 8 November, a single shell exploded over the working party he was supervising killing Blythe and three other members of the group.


HIS C.O.'S TRIBUTE
"THOUGH A BOY
HE PLAYED A MAN'S GAME
TO THE FINISH"

GUNNER ALLEN RAINSFORD WETMORE


Allen Wetmore was 19 and 4 months when he was killed in action on 7 November 1917 - a boy, as his Commanding Officer says. He looks like a boy too in this photograph at the bottom of his page on the Canadian Virtual War Memorial. Wetmore, the grandson of the prominent if controversial Canadian politician, Andrew Rainsford Wetmore, volunteered in October 1916 in his home in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The photograph was probably taken just before he sailed for Europe.
According to the War Graves Commission, Wetmore served with the 4th Siege Battery, Canadian Garrison Artillery. If he did its War Diary is silent about his death merely noting, "No firing done today". Instead, the soldiers spent the day moving guns and taking stores by light railway to Lens. The Canadian Great War Project has him serving with the 9th Siege Battery. The 9th fired their guns that day but "Enemy shelling nil and (it) was really the only day we have not received the enemy's attentions since taking over the position".
Potijze Chateau Grounds Cemetery is a battlefield cemetery; it's not one associated with a Casualty Clearing Station so Wetmore did not die of wounds received on a previous day. And in fact, four members of the 4th Siege Battery were killed on 7 November and buried in the same cemetery: one of them, Walter McAdam, also lived in Fredericton, New Brunswick, was also only 19 and he and Wetmore had consecutive army numbers - friends who volunteered on the same day?



BREAK, BREAK, BREAK
ON THY COLD GREY STONE
O SEA

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOSEPH IRVINE


Joseph Irvine's epitaph comes from one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's best known short poems. In fact it was so well known that Irvine's widow, who chose it, would automatically have assumed that everyone would have known where the opening and closing verses of the poem were leading:

Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, O sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

In the two sentences, 'I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me', and 'the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me', Tennyson perfectly expresses the inarticulate grief of the bereaved and their desperate longing for a past that will never return.

Joseph Irvine was killed on the opening day of the Battle of Broodseinde on 4 October 1916. There are several rather strange things about this man. The War Graves Commission has his name as Joseph Irvine and his wife as Agnes J Doak, formerly Irvine, indicating that she had married again. But she hadn't because Joseph Irvine was in actual fact Joseph Doak. He first enlisted in February 1915 as Joseph Doak, and then enlisted again in September 1915 as Joseph Irvine. In September 1917 he was court martialled after apparently threatening a soldier and shaking another one. He was severely reprimanded. Early the following month he was killed in action.
His brother, Christopher Charles Doak, serving with the South African Veterinary Corps, died in South Africa on 16 April 1916. In fact, to be brutally frank, he committed suicide. As the letter from the Department of Defence in Pretoria to the Secretary for Defence in Melbourne, Australia, says, "his death was the result of an overdose of morphia administered by Doak himself and was in no way connected with active service".


ONE OF GOD'S GOOD MEN

PRIVATE ARTHUR BRIDGE


'God's Good Man' is the title of a novel by the best-selling Edwardian author, Marie Corelli. It's a love story between the eponymous hero, the Reverend John Walden, and the wealthy, spoilt Maryllia Vancourt - who obviously comes to see the error of her ways as the result of the love of a good man! The book was published in 1904 and 1919 was made into a film starring Basil Gill and Peggy Carlisle.
And what were the qualities of 'God's good man'?

"... he was physically sound and morally healthy, and lived, as it were, on the straight line from earth to heaven, beginning each day as if it were his first life-opportunity, and ending it soberly with prayer, as though it were his last."

On 1 December 1917, the Burnley Express reported that Mrs Bridges, "would be grateful to any soldier who could give her any tidings concerning the fate of her husband, Signaller Arthur Bridge 242113, East Lancashire Regiment. She has officially been notified that he is wounded and missing after an engagement on November 4th". The newspaper report was wrong, Bridges had gone missing on 4 October, a fact the paper corrected seven months later on 31 July 1918 in reporting that although Bridges had been left in the care of three RAMC men nothing had been heard of him and he was now presumed to have been killed on that day.


WHILE THE LIGHT LASTS
I SHALL REMEMBER
GEORGINA

RIFLEMAN HORACE WILLIAM SMITH


This is a beautiful inscription, so beautiful that much of the Internet attributes it to Alfred, Lord Tennyson but he didn't write it. In fact it appears to be an anonymous composition that only began to be used as an epitaph around the time of the First World War.
I'm debating with myself whether this has anything to do with a short story Agatha Christie wrote called, 'While the Light Lasts'. The story, first published in 'The Novel' magazine in 1924, concerns a woman called Daphne whose husband, Tim Nugent, was killed in East Africa during the war. She remarries, a man called George Crozier, and then discovers that her husband is still alive. Fatefully she hesitates before deciding to agree to leave Crozier and as a result Nugent kills himself. Haunted by her betrayal of the man she loved, Daphne remembers the original obituary notice she had chosen for him: "While the light lasts I shall remember, and in the darkness I shall not forget."
'Georgina', Horace Smith's wife, makes the same vow on her husband's headstone. They had been married eight years when Horace was killed and at the time of the 1911 census they had one daughter. At that time Horace was a newsagent who owned his own business having been a goldsmith's apprentice as a sixteen-year-old in 1901. He's buried in Artillery Wood Cemetery, a front line cemetery, his body lying undiscovered in the ground around Boesinghe until August 1919.
It is possible that the Agatha Christie story was the inspiration for this epitaph, even though it was not published until 1924 since it took many years for the permanent cemeteries to be constructed.


A WILLING SACRIFICE
FOR THE WORLD'S PEACE

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM KEITH SEABROOK


This inscription - "A willing sacrifice for the world's peace" - is a phenomenally magnanimous comment from the mother who had three sons killed on two consecutive days in September 1917: George Ross Seabrook and Theo Leslie Seabrook on 20 September and William Keith Seabrook on the 21st. But to whom does the word sacrifice refer? I think it has to be her son, William Keith Seabrook - and by implication her other sons - since they were the ones who volunteered to go and fight, who offered themselves willingly. There was no conscription in Australia so they were definitely volunteers.
An Australian Red Cross and Wounded Enquiry Bureau search was instituted within weeks of the brothers' deaths but it was never easy to find out exactly what happened to any one person in the heat of a battle, let alone three. Some reports say that all three brothers were killed by a single shell but others give more convincing accounts, like Private Cooper:

"T.L. Seabrook was killed by the same shell that wounded me, in fact I fell across him when I was hit. He was killed instantaneously. We were in a trench just this side of Polygon Wood, it was about 9 am."

Private Arnold gives slightly more gruesome details:

"Hit by shell head and stomach and legs. Died very soon after. He was badly hit. I saw him hit. Don't know whether he was buried. He was a friend of mine."

And Private Marshall gives a sequence to the deaths since it was whilst he was talking to George Seabrook that George:

"pointed out his brother Theo Leslie Seabrook's body lying on the ground. He had been killed by a shell. Informant states that another brother, Second Lieutenant William Keith Seabrook had been killed still earlier in the day, and that the Lieutenant had been his officer."

Neither George Ross nor Theo Leslie have graves and both are commemorated on the Menin Gate. William Keith, who had been wounded but not killed on the 20th, was taken to No. 10 Casualty Clearing Station in Lijssenthoek where he died the next day. All three brothers had been involved in the opening day of the Battle of Menin Road, the Australian Infantry Divisions' first action in the Third Ypres campaign.
Look up images of the Seabrook brothers on the Internet and you will find one of all three of them in uniform, presumably on the eve of their departure from Australia since they all left Australia on board HMAT Ascanius on 25 October 1916. And there is another photograph too, this one was found on William Keith's body, it is a photograph of his gentle-looking mother which has a bullet hole through the bottom left-hand corner


Y PRIFARDD HEDD WYNN

PRIVATE ELLIS HUMPHREY EVANS


Ellis Humphrey Evans was reluctant to be a soldier. Not only was he a Welsh non-conformist who remained true to its firm pacifist beliefs, but he was a shepherd on his father's farm and therefore involved in work of national importance - producing food for the nation. However, with the introduction of conscription in January 1916 either he or his brother had to join up and Ellis decided that as the elder brother it should be him.
In June 1917 he joined the 15th Battalion the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in France and at the end of July was killed in the Battle of Pilkhem Ridge. His inscription - Y prifardd Hedd Wyn - reveals him to be the Chief Bard Hedd Wyn whose poem, Yr Arwr (The Hero), written whilst he was in the army, led to him being posthumously awarded the bardic chair at the National Eisteddfod.
In 1923 his home town of Trawsfynydd in Merionydd erected a statue to his memory showing the poet as a shepherd not as a soldier. Below it is a bronze plaque inscribed with the details of his death and below that is an 'englyn', a short piece of verse, which Evans wrote in memory of a friend killed in action in 1916:

Ei aberth nid a heibio- ei wyneb
Annwyl nid a'n ango
Er i'r Almaen ystaenio
Ei dwrn dur yn ei waed o

This translates as: "His sacrifice and his dear face will not be forgotten even though Germany has stained her fist of steel in his blood". The first two lines of this inscription can be found on the graves of more than one Welsh soldier, including Gunner Evan Evans of the Royal Garrison Artillery, who died on the same day as Ellis Humphrey Evans and is buried in Dickebusch New Military Cemetery and Extension.


AN IDEAL SOLDIER AND
VERY PERFECT GENTLEMAN
BELOVED BY ALL HIS MEN

BRIGADIER GENERAL FRANCIS AYLMER MAXWELL, VC, CSI, DSO


On the 11 September 1921 a memorial tablet, paid for by the officers, NCOs and men of the 27th Infantry Brigade, was dedicated in St Giles's Cathedral, Edinburgh to the memory of Brigadier General Francis Aylmer Maxwell, officer commanding the 9th (Scottish)Division, who had been killed by a sniper whilst supervising the action during the Battle of Menin Road.
The inscription on the plaque reads:

Brigadier General
Francis Aylmer Maxwell
VC, CSI, DSO
Killed in action at Ypres 21 September 1917
A gallant soldier and very perfect
Gentleman beloved by all his men.
A tribute from the officers,
NCOs & men 27th Inf. Bde.
9th (Scottish) Division.

General Maxwell's widow quoted from this plaque when the time came for her to chose an inscription for his headstone, just changing one word - Charlotte Maxwell described her husband as an ideal soldier rather than a 'gallant' one.
It's an interesting inscription - "beloved by all his men", how true is this? Maxwell had a reputation as a martinet but when Lieutenant Archibald Gordon MacGregor, using his contemporary diaries, came to write a memoir for his grandchildren in 1968, he could say that Maxwell was universally admired and immensely popular. MacGregor writes:

"Maxwell, 46 years old, was a smallish man of slight build but of tremendous personality, and utterly fearless ... Not infrequently he did not hesitate to challenge or even disobey orders from superiors, if he thought such orders were ill-advised ... Maxwell's death at Ypres in Sept. 1917 was due to a disregard of danger that amounted to foolhardiness. He was killed in no-mans-land after exposing himself to a German sniper who had missed him with his first shot."




HAPPY WARRIOR

PRIVATE HARRY NOEL LEA


I have a friend whose father was killed in the Second World War and this is the inscription his mother put on her husband's grave. My friend has always hated it, feeling that his mother had insulted father's memory by describing him as a gung-ho, trigger-happy soldier. He had no idea that the term 'happy warrior' derived from a poem by William Wordsworth and that it described a soldier of quite different qualities.
Wordsworth asks the question, in his 1807 poem, "Who is the happy warrior? Who is he, that every man in arms would wish to be?". He then gives the answer: a man who is brave, modest, faithful, resolute, diligent and magnanimous, an honourable man, a man of high endeavour guided by reason and duty, a home loving man and thus "more brave for this, that he hath much to love".
The term gained in stature throughout the nineteenth century, enhanced by G.F. Watts painting titled 'The Happy Warrior', which shows a young knight on the point of death being embraced/greeted by an ethereal figure, presumably welcoming him to heaven. By the beginning of the twentieth century the phrase had become a universal term of approval for someone who had led a good, productive life serving the state.
Having told him all this, my friend realised that he had done his mother - and his father - a disservice.
Harry Noel Lea, a bank clerk from Sydney, enlisted on 15 January 1917, served with the 17th Australian Infantry, part of the 2nd Australian Division, and died of wounds received on 9 October when the Division were in action at Poelcapelle.


STRONGER THAN STEEL
IS THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT

CORPORAL TOM DENTON HEPWORTH


Tom Hepworth's inscription comes from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'The Musician's Tale; the Saga of King Olaf'. The poem challenges mankind's traditional way of fighting evil - with weapons of war - and recommends instead that it should be:

Cross against corselet,
Love against hatred,
Patience is powerful;
He that overcometh
Hath power o'er the nations!

The 'weapons' of faith are more powerful than conventional weapons:

Stronger than steel
Is the sword of the Spirit;
Swifter than arrows
The light of the truth is,
Greater than anger
Is love, and subdueth!

Tom's father, a furniture salesman in Halifax, Yorkshire, chose the inscription. Tom himself had been a cabinet maker before he joined up. He served with the 1st/5th King's Own Royal Lancashire Regiment and was killed on 31 July 1917 when the 55th Division attacked at Pilkhem Ridge.


TRUE LOVE BY LIFE
TRUE LOVE BY DEATH IS TRIED
LIVE THOU FOR ENGLAND
HE FOR ENGLAND DIED

LIEUTENANT ALBERT EDWARD KINGHAN


On 7 August 1929 the body of an unidentified British officer was exhumed from an unmarked grave in Leuze Wood, Combles. The exhumation report listed a description of the 'uniform, boots, badges etc.' that had been found with the body:

"Officer's tunic. Bedford cord breeches. Collar badges. Buttons. Leg boots with three straps (size 8). Cuff with braid and trace of one star. G.S. equipment with Officer's revolver holster."

And there was also a ring. Thirteen years after his death the body of Lieutenant Albert Edward Kinghan had been found, the identification probably effected by the dental chart on the exhumation form.
Kinghan was the son of the Revd D Phan Kinghan, Rector of Swinford, Co. Mayo. Born and educated in Dublin, in June 1913 he began work with the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Toronto. He volunteered on the outbreak of war in August 1914 and returned to Britain, taking a commission in the Royal Irish Fusiliers that December. He was killed on the Somme in a German counter-attack at Leuze on the 6 September 1916.
His mother chose his inscription. It had been published in The Times on 16 February 1918 under the heading: 'For a Memorial Tablet' together with the initials A.C.A. Excellent detective work by members of the Great War Forum have identified the probable author as Arthur Campbell Ainger a one-time assistant master at Eton. This is the inscription as it appeared in The Times:

True love by life - true love by death is tried:
Live thou for England - we for England died.


THIS SON GAVE HIS LIFE
TRYING TO AVENGE MY OTHER TWO

LANCE CORPORAL JACK BAILEY


This is a most unusual inscription, in fact, to a certain extant, I am surprised that it passed the War Graves Commission's censors. It's the word 'avenge' - to inflict harm on someone for the harm they have done to you - that I have trouble with. It's not the sort of sentiment the Commission liked to encourage ... but they permitted it.
By 1911, Jack Bailey's father, William, was a widower. He and his wife had had seven children: three sons and four daughters. All three sons were killed in the war: the eldest, Charles William Bailey, served with the 2nd Battalion the Manchester Regiment and was killed at Ypres in December 1914 - he is commemorated on the Menin Gate. The second brother, Alfred Laurence Bailey, serving with the 1st Battalion the Manchester Regiment, was killed on 12 March 1915 in an attack on the Bois de Biez at Neuve Chapelle. He is commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial. Both brothers must have been regular soldiers.
Jack Bailey joined the army on the 16 April 1915. Perhaps, as his inscription says, motivated by the death of his brothers. He served with the 13th Battalion the Manchester Regiment which was posted to the Macedonian front in October 1915 as part of the British Salonika Force. Whilst many of the deaths in Salonika were caused by malaria, Jack Bailey was killed on 25 April 1917 in an attack on a Bulgarian strongpoint at Pip Ridge, two miles south of Lake Dorian.
He is the only one of his brothers to have a grave and therefore an inscription. It was signed for by his father.


HIS COUNTRY CALLED
HE ANSWERED

LANCE CORPORAL DOUGLAS GILRUTH HENDERSON


There's a wonderful British recruiting poster with the heading, 'Your Country's Call'. It shows a kilted soldier pointing to a quintessentially English thatched cottage and asking, "Isn't this worth fighting for?" It's one of a number of posters that refer to 'the call', the call to arms - the call to enlist, to volunteer.
The phrase gave rise to a selection of memorial verses that appeared in the memorial columns of local newspapers. Douglas Henderson's mother could have been quoting from any one of them:

His country called - he answered
Old England to defend
Mid shot and shell, he never swerved
Faced duty to the end.
When death is near and all seems night
May we like him say, "It's all right".

Or another one:

Just when his life was brightest
Just when his hopes were best
His country called - he answered
In God's hands now he rests.

And then there's this one:

His country called, he answered, yes,
And sailed to meet the foe.

The phrase can also be found in enamel letters on a locket which were sometimes known as widows' lockets: the words surround an oval frame which opens to take the photograph of your loved one.
Although Douglas Henderson was killed in 1917, nineteenth months after the introduction of conscription, we know that he was a volunteer - that he answered the call - because there's a record showing he was wounded in 1915, before the introduction of conscription. He died on 1 August 1918, of wounds received the previous day when the 1st Battalion the Scots Guards were in the forefront of the attack on the opening day of Third Ypres. Their losses were expected to be heavy since, "the positions to be taken were known to be difficult of access and to be considered by the enemy to be almost impregnable". In the event the battalion lost 271 killed, wounded and missing between July 29th and 31st. Henderson died the next day.


IN MEMORY OF DADDY
WHOM I HAVE NEVER SEEN
VERMELLES, HUGHINA MUNRO

LANCE CORPORAL HUGH SIMON FRASER MUNRO


Lance Corporal Hugh Munro's wife chose his inscription, highlighting the fact that he had a daughter he had never seen. The baby was called Hughina, an unusual name; the feminine version of her father's name. Using such names was obviously a family custom because Hugh's father was called James and his daughter, Hugh's sister, was called Jamesina.
Hugh Munro served with the 4th Battalion the Cameron Highlanders, a territorial battalion which went to France in February 1915 and saw action at Neuve Chapelle, Aubers, Festubert and Givenchy before taking part in the Battle of Loos when Munro was killed.


SLEEP DEAR DAD
SWEET BE THY REST
FOR ALL OF US
YOU DID YOUR BEST

LANCE CORPORAL HENRY WILLIAM COX


Lance Corporal Cox was the father of two little girls who were aged 4 and 3 at the time of his death. Their mother, Mrs Eliza Cox, chose the inscription, speaking for her daughters rather than for herself. A boot and shoe finisher at the time of the 1911 census, Henry Cox married Eliza, a boot machinist, in 1911.
Cox was killed in a joint attack by the Dorsetshire and East Yorkshire regiments on the German trenches near Beaumont Hamel. The Dorsetshire Regiment's history gives a rather exuberantly savage account of the fighting. The attack took place at 10.05 pm:

"Blood was up. C.S.M. England took charge of a Lewis gun when the team was knocked out, killed many as they came out of dug-outs, and then, though unarmed, closed with a German and slew him hand to hand with his fists. C.S.M. Beck killed six Germans and took eleven prisoners from two dug-outs: Sergt. Chidgey killed two and took four prisoners; Sergt. Drake captured a machine-gun and team; Sergt. Hall killed three and took four prisoners ... It was fierce and murderous work of not an hour's duration; one of three definite occasions when blood was hot for killing, and the Dorsets showed their fangs in real anger and slew their enemies face to face. "

Meanwhile, Lance Corporal Cox was killed, one of eleven members of the regiment to be killed that day.


IN MEMORY OF
MY DEAR GRANDSON
OF GREENWICH
REST IN PEACE

PRIVATE R.J.H. LARKIN


I have been able to find out very little about R.J.H. Larkin. I can see that he attested on 5 March 1915, giving his age as 19 and 30 days, and naming his aunt, Mrs R Larkin, as his next of kin. It's a Mrs R Larkin who confirmed his inscription. But the inscription refers to him as a 'dear grandson' not a nephew.
Larkin served with the 8th Battalion the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment, which crossed to France at the end of August 1915. In reserve on the 25 September, the opening day of the Battle of Loos, they went into action on the 26th suffering very heavy casualties. The battalion war diary describes the day:

"Trenches E of Vermelles
26th [September]
Attack begins at 11.5 a.m. & the battalion advances under heavy machine gun and shrapnel fire in lines of platoons in extended order - As the advance continues over the Lens - La Bassee road the machine gun fire from the flanks was very heavy - On reaching the enemy trenches it was found to be protected by barbed wire, which has not been cut and it being impossible to get through it, the brigade retired. There appeared to be no panic & the men walked back still under machine gun and shrapnel fire."

The diary concludes the report with the information that the battalion had suffered 419 casualties killed, wounded and missing. Initial reports had Larkin among the wounded but he died two days later.


ERNEST, BELOVED HUSBAND OF
RHODA LUCKEY, STANSTED
AT REST

PRIVATE ERNEST LUCKEY


Ernest Luckey married Rhoda Jane Thorne on 18 August 1908. In 1911 he was living in London, married with one child, and working as a butler. He joined up in November 1915 and served with the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. On 21 August 1918 he was killed in action when the 1st Battalion took part in the opening of the Battle of Bapaume.
The 'Essex Newsman', in reporting his death, noted that he had been the butler to Dr R Russell of Wimpole Street and that he was the third son of Mr William Luckey to die in the war. Their 18 March 1916 edition had reported on the death of Private Arthur Luckey who had been killed by a sniper on 3 February 1916. The second brother to die was Gunner Harry Luckey of the Australian Field Artillery who died in Guy's Hospital, London, on 5 January 1918 of diabetes "contacted whilst serving in Egypt". Ernest was killed seven months later. A fourth brother, Thomas, had been severely wounded and discharged from the army.


DAUGHTER OF
CANON AND MRS DICKSON
OF FAHAN, CO. DONEGAL
IRELAND

NURSE MARY CHARLOTTE DICKSON


Mary Dickson's inscription says almost every thing I have been able to discover about her. She died in hospital in Rouen of an infectious disease, possibly measles.There's a description of <"https://archive.org/stream/vadinfrance00dentrich#page/202/mode/2up">a VAD's funeral in Olive Dent's 'A V.A.D. in France', published in 1917, which could well have been a description of Mary Dickson's. The extract concludes:

"No matter what consolation is proffered, death is always an irreparable loss. But surely it is better to have it come when doing work that counts, work of national and racial weight, than to live on until old and unwanted.
And what a magnificent end to one's life, to lie there among those splendidly brave boys in the little strip of land which the French Government has given over in perpetuity to our dead. Thousands of the children that are to be, will come to such cemeteries, and will be hushed to reverence by the spirits of those who are not, by the spirits of the fallen that will for ever inhabit the scene."

There is a brass plaque to Mary's memory in the church in Fahan - "Erected in her honour by the women of Fahan". Her name also appears on the village war memorial - along with that of her sister Anne Eileen Dickson. Mary's name is followed by the initials V.A.D. - Voluntary Aid Detachment - Anne's by the initials F.R.C., which stands for French Red Cross. It's interesting that Anne doesn't have her own plaque in the way that her sister does.


A SOLDIER'S SON
GAVE HIS LIFE
FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR
REST IN PEACE

LANCE CORPORAL ARCHIBALD NICHOLSON COE


For his son's headstone inscription, Captain Richard James Coe quoted the words on the bronze memorial plaque distributed to the next-of-kin of all personnel who died between 4 August 1914 and 30 April 1919 as a result of their military service. The circular plaque features Britannia holding a laurel wreath over the name of the dead person, with a lion at her feet and beneath that a small lion savaging an eagle, to represent Britain's struggle against her enemies. The design of the plaque was open to public competition but the words were decided beforehand by a committee: "He/she died for freedom and honour".
The competition was held in the second half of 1917 but the first plaques were not issued until December 1918. However, there had been enough publicity about both competition and plaques for the words to be familiar to next-of-kin even before they received their own. As a consequence of the plaque, "He died for freedom and honour" is a very popular inscription.
Lance Corporal Coe served with the 4th Regiment South African Infantry, the South African Scottish. In the autumn of 1917 they were on the Ypres Salient. The 'The History of the South African Regiment in France'by John Buchan, describes the days surrounding Coe's death:

On the night of the 13th [October] the 2nd and 4th South African Regiments moved up to the front line .... The relief was very difficult, for the whole country had become an irreclaimable bog, and the mud was beyond all human description. There was intermittent shelling during the 14th and 15th, and much bombing from enemy planes. On the night of the 16th the 2nd and 4th Regiments were relieved by the 1st and 3rd. For five more days the Brigade remained in the front trenches, taking part in no action, but suffering heavily from the constant bombardment. Between the 13th and the 23rd October, when it moved out of the Salient, it had no less than 261 casualties in killed and wounded.


HE GAVE ALL
FOR ENGLAND'S NAME

SERJEANT CHARLES CASIO LAWRENCE MM


Yesterday's casualty, the former butcher Private John Ernest Orr of the 28th Battalion Australian Infantry, died "to save the Empire's name". Today's, Serjeant Charles Casio Lawrence, the son of a London road mender, died "to save England's name".
Serjeant Lawrence served with the 7th Battalion the Rifle Brigade, which was raised in Winchester in August 1914, qualifying its members to be counted among Kitchener's first one hundred thousand volunteers. The battalion crossed to France in May 1915 and was heavily involved in the action at Hooge Crater on 30 July 1915 when the Germans used flame throwers for the first time.
Lawrence survived this, was awarded a military medal for an action at an unspecified date, and then was killed in action on 12 October 1917 on the first day of the First Battle of Passchendaele when the Second Army tried to take the strategically important Passchendaele Ridge.
His mother chose his inscription - an impressively patriotic sentiment for someone who must have been an impressive young man to have reached the rank of serjeant by the time he was 21.


A PRAISE FOR THOSE
WHO FOUGHT AND FELL
TO SAVE THE EMPIRE'S NAME

PRIVATE JOHN ERNEST ORR


There's an Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau file for 'Jack' Orr, which gives us a wonderfully vivid description of him.

"Orr was a short, nuggety, red faced man, who had been a butcher before joining the army."
"Height about 5 ft 7 and a half inches, dark complexion and heavy dark moustache, sturdily built."

Reports about his death vary but these two seems to add up:

"On Nov. 1 when we were on reserves at Passchendaele, Orr was killed by a gas shell which burst right on the Bivy. I did not see him, but Pte. E. Calder B Co. was with Orr when he was killed and can give the details."
G. Taylor, 6650, D Co. 28 Bn A.I.F.

"I know that Private J.E. Orr died from the effects of gas on November 1st. 1917, and that he was buried in the field. Whether his grave was ever registered I could not say."
E. Calder, 6556, B Co. 28 Bn A.I.F.

The grave was not registered but in August 1919 Orr's body was discovered at map reference J.3.c.3.4 in an unmarked grave.

Robert Orr, Jack's elder brother, confirmed his inscription: "a praise for those who fought and fell to save the Empire's name". Included with those who 'fell' was was not only 'Jack', but another brother, George Wood Orr, who was killed on the Somme on 10 October 1916, and a brother-in-law, Albert Nordstrom, killed on 31 August 1916, also on the Somme.


ONLY CHILD OF
ABRAHAM AND ADA HARRISON
OF 52 DAIRY HOUSE ROAD
DERBY

CAPTAIN PERCY POOL HARRISON


Our image of an officer during the First World War can be so wrong. Percy Harrison was obviously an exceptionally able young man: he joined the army as a private in July 1915, was gazetted second lieutenant in the Sherwood Foresters in October 1915 and promoted captain in July 1917. But he did not come from the usual privileged background we associate with officers: his father was a stereotyper at a printing works in Derby and number 52 Dairy House Street was a red-brick terraced house in the Rose Hill district.
Harrison served with the 2nd/5th Battalion the Sherwood Foresters. In April 1916 it was sent to Ireland to quell the rebellion and then in February 1917 to France. He was severely wounded, the report says "received multiple wounds", on 26 September 1917 in the Sherwood Forester's attack on Otto Farm during the early stages of the Battle of Polygon Wood. Harrison died three weeks later in No. 2 Red Cross Hospital, Rouen.
Percy Harrison's inscription is nothing more than factual but it speaks of a world of total loss for his parents.


ALL IS WELL

PRIVATE AARON PAIN


The words are 'All is well'. If they were 'All's well' then Aaron Pain's parents would have been quoting from a very popular First World War poem by John Oxenham called 'All's Well'. But they're 'All is well' and that would suggest that they come from an equally popular, but much longer lasting, poem by Canon Scott Holland (1847-1918), 'Death is nothing at all', which is still read at funerals today. The poem begins:

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.

And concludes:

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just round the corner.
All is well.

Aaron Pain worked in his brother-in-law's grocery-dealing business in Birmingham. Although he was 36 when the war broke out he joined the 2nd/8th Battalion the Royal Warwickshire Regiment when it was formed in October 1914. This battalion was initially to be used for home service but it went to France in May 1916.
Pain was killed on 4 October 1917, the opening day of the Battle of Poelcapelle in which the 1st Battalion took part but I can't see any evidence that the 2nd/8th did. Nevertheless, Pain was killed on that day. His body was discovered in an unmarked grave in October 1919.


AND HOW CAN MAN DIE BETTER
THAN FACING FEARFUL ODDS

LIEUTENANT CARL HANSEN


'How can man die better than facing fearful odds'? Lieutenant Carl Hansen died "while leading his men" on the opening day of the third Battle of Ypres, the battle which became known as Passchendaele, according to The Times' death announcement. Hansen, serving with the Machine Gun Corps and attached to the 9th Battalion The King's (Liverpool Regiment), would have been in charge of his Lewis gun team. We don't know what happened to him but the battalion war diary reported that:

"Four minutes after zero, the enemy put a heavy barrage of H.E. shells on Oxford Trench - several men were hit there, a Lewis Gun team was knocked out, and the reserve Lewis Gun ammunition blown up".
F.M. Drew Lieut. Colonel Commanding 1/9 Bn. The King's L'pool Regt. T.F.
In the Field
Aug 1st 1917

Some time later Major E.G. Hoare, who was in command of the battalion on 31 July, wrote a poem called 'The Valley of the Shadow - 31st July 1917'. This vividly describes conditions on that day. These are verses three and four of the seven-verse poem.

Down in the valley the barrage fell,
Fountains of water and steel and smoke,
Screams of demons and blast of hell,
The flash that blinds and the fumes that choke.
The mud and the wire have chained the feet,
You are up to the knees in swamp and slime,
There's a laugh when the crossing is once complete,
But a setting of teeth for the second time.

Down in the valley the shambles lay
With the sordid horrors of hate revealed,
Tattered khaki and shattered grey
And the splintered wrecks of a battlefield.
Thank God for the end that is sure and swift,
For the fate that comes with a leap and bound,
But what if God leaves you alone to drift
To the lingering death in the pestilent ground.

Did Hansen meet a sure swift death, or a lingering one 'in the pestilent ground'?

Hansen's inscription was confirmed by his father. It comes from 'Horatius at the Bridge', a long narrative poem by Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), a stalwart of poetry anthologies throughout the nineteenth century. In the face of overwhelming odds, Horatius decides that he will take a stand on the bridge in a valiant effort to prevent the invading hordes from taking Rome, since:

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods.


FAIS CE QUE DOIS
ADVIENNE QUE POURRA

CAPTAIN LUDOVIC HEATHCOAT-AMORY


This is an ancient French proverb, which translates as 'Do your duty come what may' or, less formally, 'do what you must whatever the results''.
By August 1918, Captain Amory, as he was generally known, was serving on the Staff of 32nd Division when on the evening of 24 August a German aeroplane bombed their Headquarters. Amory died of wounds a few hours later.
His wartime diary has survived and has been published in 'Artillery and Trench Mortar Memories - 32nd Division', edited by R Whinyates. Here a friend describes him in the foreword of the diary as being "characteristic of the best type of Englishman, no man more happy in temperament, more genuinely friendly in disposition". The friend mentions particularly that Amory was always anxious to "carry out his duties to the utmost of his ability" - 'Do your duty come what may'.
Amory's wife, Mary, chose his inscription. The proverb is not meant to be fatalistic but just utterly pragmatic - do your duty come what may. But Mary Heathcoat-Amory could never have guessed what was to come. She and her husband had three sons; Michael, the second son, was killed in an air crash in 1936; Patrick, the eldest, was killed at El Alamein in 1942 and Edgar was killed in Normandy on 23 June 1944. Edgar is buried in Ranville War Cemetery. His inscription reads:

Fais ce que dois
Advienne que pourra

Do your duty come what may.


STICK IT THE WELSH

CAPTAIN MARK HAGGARD


'Stick it the Welsh' comes from the words Mark Haggard said to his men after he had been mortally wounded during the Battle of the Aisne attempting to take out a German machine gun post - "Stick it Welsh Regiment, stick it, Welsh!" Haggard had reconnoitred the position himself and then he led the attack, which after initial success failed. Knowing he was badly wounded, he told his men to leave him but one of them, Sergeant William Fuller, carried him back and was awarded a Victoria Cross for his action. Haggard died the next day.
His words however became famous, the story of their orgin repeated in newspaper accounts all over the world as the epitome of Welsh grit and endurance.
Haggard, a professional soldier, was the nephew of the novelist G. Rider Haggard. His wife chose his inscription.


THE ODDS AND ENDS
HE LOVED SO WELL
ALL LEFT BEHIND

PRIVATE GEORGE RIDLEY LESLIE


George Leslie's mother has composed a wonderfully informal and totally original inscription for her son's headstone. One can just imagine the ephemera of a young man's life that he might leave around his home in the hope and expectation that he would be around to pick it all up again once the war was over.
Before the war, George, who was born in Glasgow, had been a groundsman at the Wellingborough golf-course. I haven't been able to find any of the family in the 1911 census and wonder whether they went to Ireland, where father Hugh had been born. The Irish connection might explain the fact that George served with the Leinster Regiment.
He was killed on the opening day of the Third Ypres campaign. His battalion, the 7th, were in reserve but George was part of a party of about 500 men detailed to dig a trench in the region of Potijze Chateau. Their task was to bury a cable that would connect up the forward communications as the attack progressed. The whole region was under tremendous enemy bombardment and the party came under heavy shrapnel fire on the Potijze road. There was absolutely no shelter for them until they had the trench underway. After a couple of hours the shelling died down but by the time the party returned to base one officer and ten soldiers had been killed. George Leslie was among the ten dead.


WE SHALL MEET
BUT WE SHALL MISS HIM
THERE IS STILL
HIS VACANT CHAIR

PRIVATE ALBERT GIBBS


This inscription comes from 'The Vacant Chair', a poem by H.S. Washburn written to commemorate the death of Lieutenant John William Grout who was killed at the Battle of Ball's Bluff on 21 October 1861. Set to music by George Root, it became one of the most popular songs of the American Civil War.
I've copied out the whole poem as it illuminates the inscription. The family gather for their annual Thanksgiving Dinner and reflect on the fact that one of their number will be missing. In the last verse they are assured he will be everlastingly wreathed in glory but appear to receive limited comfort from the thought.
The tenor John McCormack recorded 'The Vacant Chair' in 1915, giving it a new lease of life among the bereaved of the First World War. Strangely, but I suspect significantly, the last verse was omitted from the recording.

We shall meet but we shall miss him,
There will be one vacant chair;
We shall linger to caress him,
While we breathe our evening prayer.
When a year ago we gathered,
Joy was in his mild blue eye,
But a golden cord is severed
And our hopes in ruin lie.

At our fireside sad and lonely,
Often will the bosom swell,
At remembrance of the story,
How our noble Willie fell;
How he strove to bear our banner
Through the thickest of the fight,
And upheld our country's honour,
With the strength of manhood's might.

True they tell us wreathes of glory
Evermore will deck his brow.
But this soothes the anguish only
Sweeping o'er our heartstrings now.
Sleep today, O early fallen!
In thy green and narrow bed;
Dirges from the pine and cypress,
Mingle with the tears we shed.

In the 1911 census, Albert Gibbs was a general labourer working in Bristol. He served with the 2nd Battalion the York and Lancaster Regiment, part of the 6th Division, and was killed in the trenches near Hooge on 4 November 1915.


THE DEAR SON OF
HERBERT SPENCER M.P.
OF BRADFORD

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR MAX SPENCER


This inscription throws light on the timing of the War Graves Commission's request for inscriptions, and for the information families would like included in the cemetery registers.
Arthur Spencer was killed on 12 April 1917, helping his men out of a trench as they went over the top into an attack. The Yorkshire Post announced his death on the 18 April:

Sec. Lieut. Arthur Max Spencer, Rifle Brigade, second son of Mr H.H. Spencer of Eshott, the well-known Yorkshire golfer, has been killed in action.

Do you see how father, Mr Herbert Harvey Spencer, was described - "the well-known golfer"? There's nothing here about him being an MP. This is because he wasn't. He didn't become an MP until 1922 and he lost his seat in 1924. So now we can tell that the Commission's request must have come some time between these two dates.
Five months after Arthur's death there is another announcement in the Yorkshire Post:

Capt. J.F. Spencer ... elder son of Mr H.H. Spencer ... has been severely wounded in the left shoulder and right arm. He is now in a London hospital, making good progress. He was invalided home from the front at Christmas last year with diphtheria, but returned in March last.

But this is not the end of the story as the Leeds Mercury of the 11 October 1920 relates:

The body of the well-dressed young man who was found dead in the billiard room of the Pavilion Hotel, Scarborough, on Friday night with a bullet wound in the mouth and head, and a service revolver by his side was identified by his father on Saturday as that of John Fredrick Spencer of Halifax Road, Bradford.

Herbert Spencer told the inquest that his son had been severely wounded in 1917 and that although he had remained in the army until the end of the war he had never been fit enough to return to the front: "He never had full use of his arm, and he was never well. He did not show shell shock noticeably until he fell from his [motor] bicycle about three months ago". Since then his state of mind had deteriorated rapidly. The coroner, who had lost his own son in the war, returned "a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity".
Nor is this the end of the family's tragedies.

Hull Daily Mail, 15 February 1924
Considerable sympathy is felt for Mr H.H. Spencer, Liberal M.P. for South Bradford, and Mrs Spencer, who received news on Thursday, by cable, of the death of their only surviving son, Mr David H. Spencer, as the result of an accident in Canada.

David Spencer, who was 21, had been staying with relatives in Canada after graduating from King's College, Cambridge. He was killed in a mountaineering accident in British Colombia. The news report ends with the information that the Spencers have one remaining child, a daughter.


PICTURING YOU DEAR SON
IN MY MEMORY
JUST AS I SAW YOU LAST

RIFLEMAN FREDERICK DOGGETT


Frederick's mother chose his inscription and said what she wanted to say without any reference to Doggett's father, who was still alive and didn't die until 1934. Not only does the inscription not refer to him but nor do the War Graves' records: Frederick is the son of Mrs Esther Doggett with no mention of his father, William Doggett. I don't infer anything from this, just that this is how she filled in the forms.
I can imagine that Esther Doggett's last image of her son was as a young soldier in uniform. I wonder if she had a photograph taken of him? There are so many photographs of young men posing in their newly acquired uniforms against painted pastoral backdrops in High Street photographers' studios - was Frederick Doggett one of them? How families must have regretted not taking one if their relation was killed.
Doggett served as an orderly in the 1st Battalion the Monmouthshire Regiment, a pioneer battalion attached to the 46th Division. He is buried in Reninghelst Churchyard Extension, a Field Ambulance burial ground, beside his friend Alfred George Williams, another orderly, who was killed on the same day.


IN REMEMBRANCE OF
MY ONLY SON
DAD WILL NEVER FORGET

LANCE CORPORAL ROBERT GEORGE FAWKES


I wonder when Robert Fawkes' mother, Caroline, died? In May 1919 she is shown as the sole legatee of her son's will. He left her his war gratuity*, which looks as though it was £5, and the balance on his account of £3 13s 8d. However, it would be a bit odd if she were still alive for Robert Fawkes Snr to only refer to himself in the headstone. From the evidence, I can see that it has sometimes been years after a casualty's death, and after the end of the war, before the next-of-kin were asked for their details and their choice of inscription - ten years sometimes. Mrs Fawkes could well have died in the interim.
Researching the lives of these First World War casualties has revealed so much social history. The 1911 census asks how many children a couple have living out of how many live births. The Fawkes' answer to this was three still living out of seven live births. I've usually assumed that the deaths would have been infant deaths but I can see that the children who subsequently died were aged 9,4 and 1 in the 1901 census.
*There is a very interesting Great War Forum post here on the subject of War Gratuities.


WE LOVED HIM

PRIVATE WILLIAM EDWARD WILLIAMSON


This is an inscription to touch the heart - 'We loved him', 'we' being his mother and father and two sisters, Grace and Miriam. In fact it was Grace who signed for his inscription.
In the 1911 census the Williamsons were living at 35 Victoria Street, New Sawley, Derbyshire. Father, Albert Williamson, was a lace maker and fourteen-year-old William was an errand boy. He served in the 2nd Battalion the York and Lancaster Regiment and died of wounds in one of the base hospitals near Boulogne on 2 February 1916.


OUR BOB, ONE OF THE BEST

PRIVATE ROBERT AMBROSE HORROCKS


This is such a lovely, homely tribute from a mother to her eldest son. 'Bob', a lithographer in Liverpool in the 1911 census, served with the 19th battalion The King's (Liverpool Regiment), which would suggest that he joined up in August 1915 when it was formed. The battalion arrived in France in November 1915 and on the 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, took part in the successful assault towards the town of Montauban. One hundred and fourteen men from Liverpool died that day; Bob Horrocks was one of them.


"ALGY"
NOTHING FOR TEARS

SECOND LIEUTENANT ALEXANDER JAMES DAVIDSON


On 8 April 1917 Alexander Davidson wrote a letter to his sister, Jean M Davidson:

In twenty-four hours we go out to face the enemy, and [I] feel constrained to write you a few words, not farewell ones I hope and pray, but you can understand that there are thoughts and feelings to which I would give expression ... If it be God's will that we do not meet again on earth, you must not mourn for me as having left you for ever. Whatever happens I am all right. Should I fall in the fight in my country's great cause, then I would like that the great feeling in your heart was one of pride that your brother was privileged to lay down his life - a willing sacrifice - for his country's good:
Nothing is here for tears,
Nothing to wail or knock the breast,
No weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise or blame,nothing but well and fair
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
We are going into the fight, confident in the righteousness of our cause. God give me strength to lead my men fearlessly; that is my prayer. I know it must be yours.

Davidson was killed the next day. His sister chose his inscription since both his parents were dead. Addressing him by his pet name, 'Algy', she quotes from the poem that her brother himself quoted from in his last letter: 'Samson Agonistes' by John Milton (1608-1674).
The letter was quoted by the Revd Ranald Macdonald in an appreciation he gave during the service in the United Free Church in Dingwall on the Sunday following Davidson's death. All this information comes from the Ross-shire Journal quoted on the Ross and Cromarty Heritage website.


I DO NOT KNOW
WHAT GOD'S VAST MEANINGS ARE
BUT PEACE IS HERE
G.W.D.

LIEUTENANT GEOFFREY WINDEATT DAMAN


Geoffrey Daman was the author of a small collection of poems privately printed in 1915 under the title, 'A Few Verses'. From the initials G.W.D. at the bottom of this inscription I am assuming that the words come from one of his own poems. It has to remain an assumption as the book is incredibly rare and I have so far not found a copy of it other than in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford. It would be good to see this as it might help explain what exactly Damon meant. Perhaps he was saying, what many other young men said in one way or another, that he felt calm knowing that by participating in the war he was doing the right thing.
Geoffrey was the eldest of his parents' three children. In the 1901 census he was 7, his sister Katherine was 4 and his brother John was 1. By the 1911 census John must have been dead because the census asks ask how many children have been born alive, how many are still living and how many have died. The answers are 3,2 and 1 and we can tell that both Geoffrey and Katherine are definitely still alive.
Educated at Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford - which explains why they have a copy of his book of poems - Damon joined up on the outbreak of war without finishing his degree. In September 1914 he was commissioned into the Seaforth Highlanders and went with them to France on 5 November 1914. He fought in the battle of Neuve Chapelle and was killed by a sniper on 24 May 1915.


WHEN MY SPIRIT ENTERS
TO ITS REST
MY LIPS SHALL SAY
"I TOO HAVE KNOWN THE BEST"

LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM HERBERT ANDERSON


William Herbert (Bertie) Anderson was the eldest of William and Eleanora Anderson's four sons and the last to be killed. His wife, Mrs Gertrude Campbell Anderson, chose his epitaph. It's a modified quote from the poem 'To M.C.N' by 'Laurence Hope', the pen name of Adela Florence Nicolson (1865-1904). The poem is quite difficult to find on the Internet so I have included the whole of it here:

Thou hast no wealth, nor any pride of power,
Thy life is offered on affection's altar.
Small sacrifices claim thee, hour by hour,
Yet on the tedious path thou dost not falter.

To the unknowing, well thy days might seem
Circled by solitude and tireless duty,
Yet is thy soul made radiant by a dream
Of delicate and rainbow-coloured beauty.

Never a flower trembles in the wind,
Never a sunset lingers on the sea,
But something of its fragrance joins thy mind,
Some sparkle of its light remains with thee.

Thus when thy spirit enters on its rest,
Thy lips shall say, "I too have had the best!"

Mrs Anderson changed the word 'thy' for 'my' in the last two lines of the poem. And, it's the same inscription she had inscribed on her own grave in Invershin Cemetery, Creich, Sutherland after she died in 1967. She was buried under her husband's original wooden grave marker which, as it says on the base, was "brought from Mariecourt, France, by his wife".
Lieutenant Colonel William Herbert Anderson was killed on the fourth day of the German Spring Offensive when for some weeks afterwards it seemed as though they would sweep all before them and win the war. The fight was desperate, as evidenced by the circumstances in which Anderson won his Victoria Cross.
This site describes the war service and deaths of all four of the Anderson brothers. It is based on a novel written by Robin Scott-Elliott, 'The Way Home', which he in turn based on the story of the Anderson brothers.




ALSO IN MEMORY OF
CAPT. C. H. ANDERSON
1ST H.L.I.
MISSING 19.12.14
AT GIVENCHY

SECOND LIEUTENANT ALEXANDER RONALD ANDERSON


Alexander Anderson's inscription commemorates his younger brother, Charles Hamilton Anderson, was was killed on 19 December 1914. Charles' body was never found, consequently has no grave and no inscription, which is why his mother felt impelled to commemorate him on his brother's headstone.
What Alexander Anderson's inscription does not say is that all three of his brothers died in the war: Charles at Givenchy in 1914, Edward on 16 March 1918 in a flying accident in Britain, and the oldest brother, William Herbert, two weeks later leading a counter-attack at Bois Favieres during the German Spring Offensive - an action for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross.
An account of the war service of all four brothers can be found on the site Scotland's War. And there is a handsome bronze memorial to all four brothers in Glasgow Cathedral, the city where their father was a stockbroker.


PRO ARIS ET FOCIS

SECOND LIEUTENANT EDGAR DANIELL GIBSON


There is a beautiful stained glass window in the Lady Chapel of the church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxted, which shows the martial saints Martin and George. The dedication reads:

To the glory of God and in undying remembrance of Malcolm Reginald Gibson, Lt 7th East Surrey Regt, killed in action at Hulloch, France, on 8th Oct 1915 aged 25 and Edgar Darnell Gibson, 2nd Lt RFC, killed on active service near Bethune, France, on 9th Oct 1917, aged 19. Dearly loved eldest and youngest sons of Walter M and Katherine M Gibson - Oxted.

Both brothers have the same inscription, 'Pro aris et focis', the family's motto. This translates literally as 'for our altars and fires', the equivalent of hearth and home. In the Christian world it came to mean both for what was both the sacred and the civil good: God, family and country. The boys' father, Walter Gibson, chose it as his motto when he was knighted in 1920 for his services to the British crown. He had been Secretary to the Privy Purse through the reigns of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V.
Maurice Reginald Gibson, educated at Radley College and Exeter College, Oxford, volunteered in August 1914 on the outbreak of war and served as a machine gun officer with the East Surrey Regiment. He was killed in action on 8 October 1915.
His brother Edgar, educated at Wellington College, joined the RFC when he left school and went to the front on 22 August 1915. He was killed the day after the second anniversary of his brother's death, on 9 October 1917. Edgar Daniell Gibson's second name is spelt variously as Daniel, Daniell and Darnell. I believe that Daniell is the correct spelling because that was his Gibson grandmother's maiden name.
The middle brother, Claude Manley Gibson, also served in the RFC. On 16 May 1916 he was returning from a patrol when his plane was hit by ground fire. The plane crashed into a ploughed field but Gibson survived with only minor injuries.


FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH

KENNETH THEODORE DUNBAR WILCOX


This is one of the most popular of all New Testament headstone inscriptions in the war cemeteries. Admittedly most people usually quote the whole extract:

Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.
Revelation 2:10

And what is 'a crown of life'?

Blessed be the man that perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those that love him.
James 1:12

The crown of life is therefore given to those who suffer hardship and danger for Christ's sake. By only quoting the words, 'Faithful unto death', the Revd George Wilcox has declared that his son WAS faithful unto death and therefore that he HAS won the crown of life, underlining the conviction that his son was fighting Christ's battle, which is what people on both sides felt both sides in fact felt. In Christian theology, to be awarded the crown of life is not to be awarded eternal life as that it due to everyone, it is simply an award, a prize, like the victor's laurels. The image is popular and can be seen in manywar memorial stained glass windows.
Kenneth Wilcox was educated at Westminster School where he was a scholar. In October 1913 he went up to Oxford but after a year the war broke out and he enlisted immediately. He took a commission in the 9th Battalion The Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment and went with them to Flanders on 8 October 1915. He was killed exactly one month later.
The Times' obituary on 19 November describes him as the only son of his parents and describes how, his father, a senior Army Chaplain, " who was on duty at the front, was able to be present at the funeral and to commit his son to rest in a soldier's grave near Ypres". As if it is not bad enough to bury your 'only son', an examination of the 1911 census reveals that Kenneth Wilcox was in fact his parents' only child. The census form has three columns for: total children born alive; children still living; children who have died and Alfred Wilcox has entered under the relevant columns: 2, 1, 1.


ONE OF "THE CHOIR
WHOSE MUSIC IS
THE GLADNESS OF THE WORLD

PRIVATE DONALD MORTON BUNTING


When the war broke out Donald Morton Bunting was a dental student at Guy's Hospital, London. Educated at Rydal Mount School in Colwyn Bay, he had enlisted in the 21st Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, the 4th University and Public Schools Battalion before the end of August 1914. Many of the recruits, like Bunting, preferred to serve with their friends in the ranks rather than take commissions in other regiments. After training for over a year, the Battalion eventually went to France in November 1915, the last of the battalion arriving on the 21 November. Bunting was killed three days later on the 24th.
His inscription comes from the last lines of 'O May I Join the Choir Invisible', the best known and best regarded poem by the novelist George Eliot (1819-1880) in which she articulates her extremely unconventional Christian vision of the afterlife. To Eliot, the only afterlife is that which comes to those whose reputations live on because of the contribution they made to the betterment of the world.

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence:

Bunting's father chose the inscription. I wonder how it went down with Donald's grandfather a Wesleyan Methodist Minister with whom he had been living whilst studying dentistry.


THERE IS SOMETHING SUBLIME
IN CALM ENDURANCE

LANCE CORPORAL RALPH OSBORNE KEMPTON


There is something very striking about this inscription, especially when compared with the entries in the 87th Battalion Canadian Infantry War Diary. Kempton was killed on the first day of their assault on Hill 70. Pages 13 to 22 in the August 1917 diary (see above link) give an immediate and highly detailed report on the operation from the runners as they brought the information in. It is just amazing to read of the savagery expected of these men and of their completely understandable, in the situation, pleasure at killing the enemy. Calm endurance it isn't, endurance it certainly is.
And yet I like the inscription, evoking as it does an image of all those hundreds and thousands of men who gave up their civilian lives to live in fear and danger and in spartan conditions in order to do their duty towards their country. It reminds me of the words on the next-of-kin memorial scroll dedicated to those who:

left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self sacrifice.

The inscription comes from 'Hyperion', a novel by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published in 1839. The novel wasn't particularly well known but the quotation was and it regularly appeared in anthologies and quotation collections:

Welcome Disappointment! Thy hand is cold and hard, but it is the hand of a friend! Thy voice is stern and harsh, but it is the voice of a friend! O, there is something sublime in calm endurance, something sublime in the resolute, fixed purpose of suffering without complaining, which makes disappointment oftentimes better than success.

Ralph Kempton was born in Watford, England on 3 September 1891. Judging from the memorials to him in his home town, he attended Watford Grammar School and Beechen Grove Baptist Church. In the 1911 census he was 19 and working as an insurance clerk. On 3 January 1914 he set sail for Canada. At some point he enlisted and returned to Europe to fight. His mother chose his inscription, his father having died in 1904.



THE HILLS KEEP RECORD
OF YOUR NAME
NEVER CAN ANY SHAME
DARKEN YOUR NOBLE BROW

SAPPER GODFREY TORBET MACKAY


Godfrey Mackay was born in Aberdeen in February 1894. He emigrated to Canada in September 1912 and when he enlisted in February 1915 he was working as a cook in Montreal, naming his mother, Mrs Isabella Ogilvie of 22 Anderson Street, Montreal as his next of kin.
His inscription quotes 'A Fragment', a poem by Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835). Hemans was once a very popular poet but perhaps she became a victim of her popularity and is now best known for her most parodied line from the poem Casabianca, "the boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled". In 1916 Andrew Macphail included 'A Fragment' in his comprehensive collection of poems on death, 'The Book of Sorrow', which perhaps gave it renewed prominence.

Rest on your battle-fields, ye brave!
Let the pines murmur o'er your grave,
Your dirge be in the moaning wave -
We call you back no more!

Oh! there was mourning when you fell,
In your own vales a deep-toned knell,
An agony, a wild farewell; -
But that hath long been o'er.

Rest with your still solemn fame;
The hills keep record of your name,
And never can a touch of shame
Darken the buried brow.

But we on changeful days are cast,
When bright names from their place fall fast
And ye that with your glory passed,
We cannot mourn you now.

Godfrey Mackay died of pneumonia, in all probability a complication of influenza, on 5 February 1919. His mother chose his inscription and although I have no evidence for this, something makes me think that the hills she had in mind were back home in Scotland not Canada.


KILLED IN ACTION
BELOVED DAUGHTER OF
ANGUS & MARY MAUD MACDONALD
BRANTFORD, CANADA

NURSING SISTER KATHERINE MAUDE MARY MACDONALD


Katherine (Christy) Macdonald was killed in a German air raid, which hit No. 1 Canadian General Hospital, Etaples at 10 pm on the night of Sunday 18 May 1918. The hospital war diary gives the complete details of the raid, which resulted in the death of fifty-three medical staff and eight patients, and the wounding of fifty-three staff and thirty-one patients, several of whom later succumbed to their injuries.
The diary records how, "At the close of what had been a peaceful Sunday enemy aircraft came over the camp in large numbers. The hospital was wrapt in slumber when the planes were immediately overhead". The raid had been designed to take place in relays, the flames from the first raid guiding the subsequent raiders. There was no doubt in the British mind that the Germans had deliberately targeted a hospital despite the fact that this was against the rules of warfare and the hospital was clearly displaying a red cross on its roof. The German response was that the British had built their hospital close to an important railway junction and that this had been the target of their raid not the hospital.
Katherine Macdonald was the only nursing sister to be killed outright when her femoral artery was severed. A qualified nurse, she enlisted in March 1917 and had had several postings before she arrived in France in March 1918. Etaples was well behind the front line and just the day before her death Katherine wrote to assure her mother, "Don't worry we are far from harm". The website for 'Legion', Canada's Military History Magazine, hosts a number of digitised letters relating to Katherine, including the one written on the 18 May and one from her fiance, John Ballantyne, to her mother passing on what he had been able to find out about Katherine's death.


"EITHER EDGE"
OF MY SWORD
FOR ENGLAND

SECOND LIEUTENANT ECKLEY OXTOBY ETHEREDGE


Trefor Jones, in his book 'On Fame's Eternal Hunting Ground', points out that this inscription is a play on Second Lieutenant Etheredge's surname - either edge, Etheredge. This gives the inscription such a chivalric tone that I wondered whether it was the historic motto of the Etheredge family. The answer is no. There is an Etheredge family that has a motto but their motto is, 'He conquers by fortitude'.
Given the fact that Eckley Oxtoby Etheredge has such a distinctive name I also thought it would be easy to find out about him on the Internet but he seems strangely invisible. His parents appear: the 17 November 1900 edition of the Worcestershire Journal reports their divorce on the grounds of Augustus Etheredge's adultery. In the 1901 census Eckley Etheredge, his sister and his mother are living with her father in north London, and in the 1911 census there is no sign of him. Strangely, he does appear on a South African Roll of Honour although I have not been able to discover any link between him and South Africa. The London Gazette reports his commission on 10 December 1916 and then there is only the fact that he died at a Field Ambulance unit near Ypres on 17 July 1917.


QUIT YE LIKE MEN

PRIVATE A SEARLE


At one time the words 'quit ye like men' were familiar in the English speaking world but 'quit' did not mean give up it meant 'act', in other words, act like a man, be brave. It's a quote from the New Testament, I Corinthians 16:13:

Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.

Private A Searle, whose Christian name I have not been able to discover, died of wounds following the Battle of Loos on 25 September 1915 when the 1st Battalion, in which Searle was serving, were in the front of the attack. The British army intended to launch the attack with a gas attack, which they had to keep delaying because of the weather. Eventually, at 6.34 am, they released the gas but unfortunately the wind changed and it blew back into the British trenches causing many casualties. More were caused by the uncut German wire as well as by their machine guns etc leaving the days' total casualties for the 1st Battalion as 505 killed, wounded and missing.


ONLY THE ACTIONS
OF THE JUST & BRAVE
SMELL SWEET
AND BLOSSOM IN THEIR DUST

PRIVATE P SMITH


Private P Smith served with the Royal Army Medical Corps attached to the Highland Mounted Brigade. After service in Gallipoli the brigade was transferred to Egypt where it became part of the Western Frontier Force. Based at Minia, a town 150 km south of Cairo on the banks of the River Nile, its task was to monitor the movement of the Senussi who were being encouraged by the Turks to take up jihad against the British. The heat was tremendous, 43°C / 109.4°F, and the men suffered terribly from heatstroke and from the lack of sanitation. Private Smith died from typhus on 27 January 1917.
His inscription quotes a seventeenth-century playwright and poet, James Shirley (1596-1666). Shirley's verse has all but disappeared from view but during the nineteenth century this poem, 'Death the Leveller' was included in Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury'. This best-selling book, familiar in many households, was the source of a large number of inscriptions.
The poem, which bears a resemblance to some of Shakespeare's lines, starts:

The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

We will all die whether we be kings or commoners, famous or humble, and "Only the actions of the just (Private Smith's mother added 'and brave') smell sweet, and blossom in their dust".
Smith was originally buried in Minia War Cemetery but in April 1960 his body was exhumed, along with all the others, and reburied in Cairo War Memorial Cemetery.


HE PLAYED THE MAN

PRIVATE SAMUEL BURGESS


This inscription is derived from what was at one time one of the most famous quotations in English history:

Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man! We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

According to John Foxe in his 'Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, touching Matters of the Church' (1563), which is much better known as 'Foxes Book of Martyrs', these are the words spoken by Hugh Latimer, protestant Bishop of Worcester, to his friend Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, as they went to be burnt at the stake on 16 October 1555 during the reign of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I.
Contrary to what I originally thought, "He played the man" does not refer to a youth - Burgess was only 20 - taking on the role of a man, but references a martyrdom by means of a terrible death for what the victims believed was a noble cause.
Samuel Burgess served with the 6th Battalion the Cheshire Regiment, a territorial battalion. I would hazard a guess that he was in C Company since that was based in Hyde where Burgess's parents lived at 136 Nelson Street. The battalion took part in many of the battles that made up Third Ypres: Pilkem Ridge, Langemarck, Menin Road Ridge, Polygon Wood and Second Passchendaele. Burgess, who died of wounds in one of the base hospitals in Etaples, could have been wounded in any one of them.


BE CONTENT
NO HONOUR OF AGE
HAD BEEN MORE EXCELLENT

SECOND LIEUTENANT STEWART GORDON RIDLEY


Stewart Ridley's inscription quotes the final line of a poem by John Drinkwater, which he wrote in Ridley's memory. The poem is called 'Riddles' R.F.C. - Riddles being Ridley's nickname.

He was a boy of April beauty: one
Who had not tried the world: who while the sun
Flamed yet upon the Eastern sky, was done.

Time would have brought him in her patient ways -
So his young beauty spoke - to prosperous days,
To fullness of authority and praise.

He would not wait so long. A boy, he spent
His boy's dear life for England. Be content:
No honour of age had been more excellent.

'The Saturday Review' published the poem on 5 August 1916 with the following note:

"Lieut. Stewart G. Ridley, Royal Flying Corps, sacrificed his life in the Egyptian desert in an attempt to save a comrade. He was twenty years of age."

Ridley enlisted in September 1914, took a commission in February 1915 and in July 1915 transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. He received his wings in December and was posted to north Africa where the Turks were encouraging the Senussi, a religious sect active in Libya and Egypt, to raise jihad against the British in Egypt. The Royal Flying Corps flew patrols over the Libyan desert for reconnaissance purposes.
On Thursday 15 June 1916, Ridley set out on a routine patrol over the desert in company with another aircraft. Ridley's plane was forced to land and the other plane returned to base to get help. The brief account of his story says that, with water running out, Ridley decided to shoot himself in order to give his observer, Garside, a chance to survive. Garside died the next day.
The October 12 1916 edition of Flight magazine gives the whole story. Had Ridley and Garside stayed where they were they would have been found but they moved on, and not just once but twice. Garside kept a rough diary from which the information comes.
The search party discovered the bodies on Tuesday 20 June and five days later an army chaplain went out into the desert and buried them under a heap of stones marked with a wooden cross. In April 1960 the bodies were exhumed and reburied in Cairo War Memorial Cemetery.


HE TOOK THE SWORD
IN HONOUR'S CAUSE
A BRITISH WORKMAN'S SON. DAD

PRIVATE ARTHUR BOALER


"Dad", Francis Frederick Boaler, was a lithographic printer in Manchester. I don't think I'm making too much of an assumption to say that he was probably a member of the Manchester branch of the Amalgamated Society of Lithographic Printers, which was formed in Manchester in 1880. I say this because the Society was the lithographic print-workers union and father Boaler makes a point of saying that his son was "a British workman's son"; it's a point of pride with him. Yet, this "British workman's son" "took the sword in honour's cause" like the finest knights of chivalry.
'In Honour's Cause' (1896), by the popular author George Manville Fenn (1831-1909), was the title of an adventure story set in the reign of King George I in which the young hero is loyal to the Jacobite cause in opposition to the Hanoverian kings and fights to avenge his father's honour.
Arthur Boaler served with 'A' Company 7th Battalion Manchester Regiment. The regiment arrived in Gallipoli on 7 May 1915 and Arthur was wounded in an attack on the Turkish trenches on the 29th. He died of his wounds shortly afterwards at a Field Ambulance station.


HOME IS THE SAILOR
HOME FROM THE SEA
AND THE HUNTER
HOME FROM THE HILL

LANCE CORPORAL PETER CAMPBELL


This lovely inscription comes from Robert Louis Stevenson's (1850-1894) poem 'Requiem', which was engraved on his own gravestone on Mount Vaea on the island of Samoa.

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Peter Campbell, a graduate of the University of Glasgow, came from Helensburgh on the West Coast of Scotland. His father had been a postman and he became a primary school teacher. Campbell volunteered on the outbreak of war and served with A Company the 6th Battalion Cameron Highlanders. Something of their training and of their involvement in the Battle of Loos can be read here.
Campbell was wounded during the battle on 26 September at Hill 70. He died of his wounds four days later.


IN DEO CONFIDO

LIEUTENANT CHARLES LAWFORD DIVINE


'In deo confido': I trust in God. Although Charles Divine was married it was his mother Ellen who chose his inscription. Born Ellen Lawford, 'In deo confido' was her family motto.
To begin with, Charles Lawford Divine was a puzzle. Why, when he died on 20 January 1918, was he buried in Gallipoli? The British army had abandoned the place two years earlier, leaving it in enemy hands and didn't get back onto the peninsula until the war was over. The answer lies in the fact that he was killed in a naval engagement off the island of Imbros and in all probability was originally buried on one of the Aegean islands. After the war many of these graves were exhumed and the bodies gathered in and reburied in the larger cemeteries on Gallipoli.
On 20 January 1918 four naval vessels, HMS Tigris, Lizard, Raglan and M28, a naval shore bombardment vessel, were caught in Imbros harbour by two Turkish warships, the ex-German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and the lightcruiser, the former SMS Breslau . Tigris and Lizard escaped but Raglan and M28 were sunk, the former with the loss of 130 lives, and M28 with the loss of 12 of her 69-man crew. The battle later turned against the Turkish ships and Allied ships were able to pick some of the survivors. Lieutenant Divine was rescued but died of his wounds later the same day.


KILLED WHILE RUSHING
TO HIS FRIEND'S ASSISTANCE

GUNNER GODFREY DAVID FLEMING SMITH


Unfortunately this is all I have been able to discover about the death of Gunner Smith. I don't know what the incident was nor what happened to the friend. Godfrey Smith appears to have been the only gunner from 187th Brigade to have died on the 9th September 1916 but Heilly Station Cemetery was a Casualty Clearing Station cemetery so the incident could have happened some days earlier.
Smith's mother, Mrs Annie Smith, chose his inscription. Someone, a friend or her son's officer, must have written to tell her about the event. It is a real example of the much used quotation from St John 15:13, which so many memorial committees and bereaved families chose for an inscription:

Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.


HE GAVE UP ALL
EVEN LIFE ITSELF
FOR THE IDEALS
OF TRUTH & JUSTICE

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARNOLD WILLIAM RASH


To the Greek philosopher, Socrates (469-399 BC), "truth and justice" were inseparable and essential for good government. Socrates didn't mean justice as an external force applied for the maintenance of law and order but as a quality attained by those who have truthfully examined and understood themselves. It is this quality that will fit them for leadership. Almost two and a half thousand years later truth and justice are still seen as the ideals for a society.
Socrates refusal to compromise his principles, even in the face of his death sentence, is seen as a supreme example of maintaining these ideals. Mrs Mary Rash, Second Lieutenant Rash's mother, implies the same attachment to principle in her son's determination to fight.
Arnold Rash was already a territorial soldier when the war broke out. He belonged to the 4th Battalion the Suffolk Regiment and went with it to France in November 1914, serving with them continuously until he returned to take a commission in October 1915. Despite the fact that the War Graves Commission says he served with the 5th Battalion the Suffolk Regiment he was not serving with them when he was killed, rather he was with the Cambridgeshire Regiment. This took part in the opening battle of Third Ypres on 31 July 1917, the day Arnold Rash was killed.
Arnold's younger brother, Ralph, was killed on the Somme on 12 October 1916 aged 19. His body was never recovered and he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.


HE DIED AS FEW MEN
GET THE CHANCE TO DIE
FIGHTING TO SAVE
A WORLD'S MORALITY

RIFLEMAN WILLIAM HAROLD THOMAS


Others may have died for their family, or God, King and country but Rifleman Thomas died "fighting to save a world's morality". The lines come from 'To You Have Have Lost', a poem by John Oxenham, the pseudonym of William Arthur Dunkerley (1852-1941). The poem comes from his book '"All's Well!" Some Helpful Verse for These Dark Days of War', which was first published in November 1915 and by May 1917 was in its eighteenth edition.
The poem, especially the first two verses, is the source of many headstone inscriptions and appears as a dedication on war memorials throughout Britain. These are the first two verses:

I know! I know! -
The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe, -
The pang of loss, -
The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross.
" - Heedless, and carelss, still the world wags on,
And leaves me broken ... Oh my son! my son!"

Yet - think of this! -
Yea, rather think on this! -
He died as few men get the chance to die,
Fighting for God and Right and Liberty; -
And such a death is Immortality.

In 1911 William Herbert Thomas was an apprentice marine insurance clerk living at home with his parents and six siblings in Bootle, Lancashire. He served with the 6th Battalion the King's Liverpool Regiment and was killed on the Somme in September 1916.


HE GAVE HIS LIFE
FOR HIS KING & COUNTRY
FOR HOME, LOVE & DUTY
MAY HE REST IN PEACE

PRIVATE JOHN GEORGE SADLER


John George Sadler was a married man. In 1911 he had three children aged 6, 3 and 17 months, and worked at Whitwood Colliery, Yorkshire as a coal hewer, the man responsible for actually hewing the coal from the coal face. He served with D Company, 10th Battalion the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, which was formed at the beginning of September 1914.
On 1 July 1916, the opening day of the Somme campaign, the battalion made a successful attack on Crucifix Trench and the Sunken Road in the region of La Boiselle. At the end of the day 162 members of the battalion were missing: 58 had been killed and 265 wounded. Sadler was among the wounded. He died two days later at one of the Heilly Casualty Clearing Stations.
Sadler's wife chose his inscription. Unlike Private Haywood whose inscription states that "his life was taken away", Sadler "gave his life". This suggests that he was a volunteer and certainly the 10th Battalion were originally a volunteer battalion. Sadler died for his King, country, home, love and duty; Haywood for his mother, father, sisters, brother and his country. The itemising of the causes for which men died is both illuminating and fascinating.


HIS LIFE WAS TAKEN AWAY
FIGHTING FOR HIS MOTHER
FATHER, SISTERS, BROTHER AND
FOR HIS COUNTRY. GOD BLESS HIM

PRIVATE HENRY GEORGE HAYWOOD


'His life was taken away' - there's no suggestion of Private Haywood having 'given' his life, the form of words most families used to describe the death of a soldier, it was taken away. Does this indicate that Henry George Haywood was a conscript? His father, also Henry George Haywood, a self-employed chimney sweep, signed for the inscription carefully enumerating those for whom his son had died: his mother and father, his sisters - Sophia, Hilda and Alice - and his brother Arthur ... 'And for his country'.
Thirty-two members of the 7th Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment were killed in that sector on 27 July 1917: a second lieutenant, a corporal and two lance corporals, plus twenty-seven soldiers. This compares with only one soldier on the 26th and one on the 28th, which would suggest either that the South Staffordshires had attacked the German lines on the 27th, or the Germans had attacked them.


THERE IS NO SERVICE LIKE HIS
WHO SERVES BECAUSE HE LOVES

CAPTAIN JOHN EARNSCLEUGH BRYDON


This inscription is a very famous line from Sir Philip Sidney's New Arcadia Book 2:3 with the word 'who' substituted for the word 'that'. It is said of Zelmane, who has disguised herself as a page, Daiphantus, in order to serve the man she loves, Pyrocles, who doesn't love her. First published in 1593, after Sidney's death at the Battle of Zutphen in 1589, it is a convoluted story that at one time was both very well known and very influential. However, rather amusingly the admiration had worn off by the nineteenth century and the 1867 edition has an asterisk beside these lines to a note that says:

"A most charming sentence; the thought as beautiful as true. It is such as these, and there are many, that more than redeem the involved tediousness of the Arcadia. Of their worth Sidney (or his publisher) seems to have been fully aware, as they were set in italics."

The nineteenth century saw 'service' as the voluntary subordination of oneself to others as in a Christian or chivalric model. Consequently this "most charming sentence" regularly appeared in books of mottos and on calendars as the thought for the day.

John Brydon was a doctor, educated at Richmond School, Yorkshire and Edinburgh University. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps Territorial Force in 1908 and by January 1914 had achieved the rank of captain. He was posted to France in April 1915 and served with the Ammunition Column attached to the Northumberland Division. He died from the effects of gas on 26 June 1917.


BETTER DEATH THAN DISHONOUR
HE FELL OBEYING DUTY'S CALL

LANCE CORPORAL J.A. MORGAN


MISSING
Corporal J.A. Morgan, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, wounded and missing. He is the husband of Mrs M. Morgan 109 Coedpenmaen Road, Pontypridd and before joining the Army worked at the United National Collieries, Wattstown. His wife would welcome any information.
Western Mail 30 November 1917

Lance Corporal Morgan's body was eventually discovered at map reference D1 B50 10 in October 1921. Until then his wife would not have not received any firm information.
It was Mrs Morgan who chose her husband's inscription: 'Better death than dishonour'. It's the motto of the Welsh Regiment, yet Lance Corporal Morgan died serving with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. However, Mrs Morgan lived in Pontypridd, Glamorgan, Wales where her husband is commemorated on the town war memorial. The majority of names on this memorial belong to men of the Welsh Regiment, which recruited in the town, so it's more than likely that this was the regiment Morgan originally joined. He had probably been wounded and on recovery was sent to reinforce the Warwickshires. But from his inscription his heart, or certainly his wife's heart, remained with his original regiment.
I can't decide whether the second part of the inscription, 'He fell obeying duty's call', suggests that Morgan was a volunteer or a conscript. Conscription for married men was introduced in May 1916. However, the 'call' usually refers to the 'call to arms' of the original recruiting posters, which would suggest that Morgan obeyed the call of duty to his King and country and was a volunteer.


WATCHMAKER
WIGAN, LANCASHIRE

GUNNER WILLIAM HENRY HOLLIDAY


The precision required for his job would have been of great value to the other members of Gunner Holliday's gun crew for whom accurate measurement was everything if the target was to be hit. Holliday was a self-employed watchmaker and repairer. He served with B Battery 173rd Brigade, which in the summer of 1917 was in the Ypres sector. He died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Brandhoek on 18 August but I haven't found out when he was wounded.
In the 1911 census Holliday was living at home with his parents, sister, four brothers and his grandmother - his mother's mother - at 235 Gidlow Lane, Wigan. According to the census form the house had five rooms, which included the kitchen. William Holliday had a very different life experience compared with Albert Keppel the Earl of Albemarle's fourth son,whose inscriptionwas featured yesterday.


4TH SON OF EARL OF ALBEMARLE
KILLED IN ACTION AT WESTHOEK
MENTIONED IN DESPATCHES
"RESURGAM"

LIEUTENANT THE HON. ALBERT EDWARD KEPPEL


Lieutenant Keppel was killed on the opening day of what became known as the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele. A friend, writing anonymously in The Times on 23 August, said that, "many a tear will be shed in his memory; many a pulse will quicken when it is known how and where this gay and debonaire spirit vanished from our midst". A wonderfully attractive character, both physically and by temperament, the writer describes how:

"During his short life, from his earliest childhood, his high spirits and joie de vivre, gave an impression of sunshine and joy wherever he went, and this is shown in the dark hour of his death by the spontaneous testimony of many of his companions, both boys and girls, not to mention older people, officers of standing in the Army, and the pastors and masters under whose guidance he so lightly trod the paths of this world here below".

On the morning of 31 July, Keppel was well out in front of his men with a sergeant "running forward with a Lewis gun which he was about to use on some Germans who were running away".
Keppel was so far out in front that the British never consolidated that part of the line and his body was initially unburied although it was discovered and buried later. Another friend told how he had taken communion with Keppel on the Sunday before the attack. Keppel had told the friend that he was "so looking forward to a real fight", which forced the friend to conclude, "I do not think he knew what fear was".
The final word of the inscription, "Resurgam" means I will rise again and implies a Christian belief in the resurrection of the body after death.


A BOY
HE SPENT HIS BOY'S DEAR LIFE
FOR ENGLAND
BE CONTENT

SECOND LIEUTENANT FAIRLIE RUSSELL MARTIN


Martin - Killed in action on the 29th June 1917, 2nd Lieutenant Fairlie Russell Martin, Royal Scots Fusiliers, attached Royal Flying Corps, only child of Fleet Paymaster W.E.R. Martin, C.M.G., and Mrs Martin, aged 19 years and two months.
The Times Friday 6 July 1917

"Nineteen years and two months", Fairlie Russell Martin was indeed just "a boy", who "spent his boy's dear life for England". The words come from a poem by John Drinkwater called 'Riddles, R.F.C.' (1916), which was dedicated to Stewart Gordon Ridley who died on 18 June 1916 when he too was only 19. The poem first appeared in the Saturday Review on 5 August that year and was later included in 'Olton Pools'.

He was a boy of April beauty; one
Who had not tried the world; who; while the sun
Flamed yet upon the eastern sky, was done.

Time would have brought him in her patient ways -
So his young beauty spoke - to prosperous days,
To fullness of authority and praise.

He would not wait so long. A boy, he spent
His boy's dear life for England. Be content:
No honour of age had been more excellent.

Born in April 1898, educated at Bedford Grammar School and Sandhurst, Martin was commissioned into the Royal Scots Fusiliers in April 1916 and served with them on the Western Front from July 1916 until early 1917 when he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps.
On 3 June 1917 he joined 57 Squadron, a long distance bombing and photo reconnaissance squadron flying DH4s. Twenty-six days later, on the 29 June, he was "killed in action whilst flying".
"Be content", is this a reference to Simonides epitaph for the dead of Thermopylae, which was the basis of the famous epitaph on the memorial to the dead of the Battle of Wagon Hill during the Boer War?

Tell England, ye who pass this monument
We, who died serving her, rest here content.

"Be content" ... the inscription, loaded with affection and sorrow, was signed for by Martin's father, Rear Admiral William Ernest Russell Martin, who served throughout the First World War and then became an enthusiastic supporter of the British Fascist movement.

[I wrote in some detail about Simonides quotation and its subsequent variations for Epitaph 181.]


FELL IN THE ATTACK
ON ST JULIEN
LEADING HIS MEN

LIEUTENANT DONALD PERCEVAL LYNDEN-BELL


On 25 April 1915 the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers, after a long forced march the previous day, launched an attack at St Julien in support of the Canadians. Three days earlier the Canadians had been the victims of the German's first gas attack, which had been used on them on the 24th too. The attack on the 25th was a desperate, scrambled affair where, according to the Official History, the Fusiliers "were now called on to do the impossible".
Nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Lynden-Bell, described by his captain as "a brave lad", died in the attack. Seventy-five members of the Royal Irish Fusiliers died that day, the bodies of all but ten of them never recovered; they are commemorated on the Menin Gate.
Tadley and District History Society have published some valuable research on Donald Lynden-Bell, including the facts that the Lynden-Bells were a distinguished military family, and that Donald's younger brother, Lachlan, who survived the war, called his son Donald after his dead brother.


OUR BODIES MAY
FAR OFF REMOVE
WE STILL ARE ONE IN HEART
NELLIE

SECOND LIEUTENANT A.E. CRAWFORD HARRIS HARRIS


'Nellie', Mrs Ellen Harris, was Crawford Harris's wife and certainly the inscription sounds as though it was written by a wife declaring that she still loves her husband even though he is dead. I rather suspect that this is exactly what Nellie Harris meant it to sound like. The words rather appropriately come from a hymn for the sick and dying.

Blest be that sacred cov'nant love,
Uniting tho' we part;
Our bodies may far off remove,
We still are one in heart.
....
Nor joy nor grief, nor time nor place,
Nor life nor death can part
Those, who enjoying Jesus' grace,
In him are one in heart.

At the time of the 1911 census, Crawford and his wife had been married for six years. Crawford was a traveller for an iron merchant, they had no children and Nellie's mother lived with them. He died of wounds at one of the several 'Mendinghem' Casualty Clearing Stations.


I GAVE MY LIFE FOR LIBERTY
THAT HUMANITY MIGHT
HEREAFTER DWELL IN PEACE

LANCE CORPORAL GEORGE MASKELL


At zero hour, 5.50 am, on the morning of 31 July 1917 the 6th Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment attacked at Zillebeke as part of the opening of the Battle of Passchendaele. The battalion war diary recorded the details of how, after initial good progress, German aerial and artillery bombardment together with machine gun fire hampered the consolidation of their gains. However, a threatened counter-attack never materialised when the British artillery opened fire. The relief began at midnight on 1 August and was completed by 2.50 am.
Among the casualties were three officers and thirty-five soldiers killed, six who died of wounds, 177 wounded and twenty-seven missing. George Maskell died of his wounds on 2 August at a Casualty Clearing Station.
There are no family details for George Maskell in the War Graves Commission cemetery register but a Mrs S Maskell signed for his inscription. In both the 1901 and the 1911 census, George Maskell is living with his grandparents, Joseph and Sarah Maskell, and in neither of the censuses is there any mention of any parents. I would suggest therefore that the Mrs S Maskell who chose his inscription was Corporal Maskell's grandmother.


THIS SACRED DUST
IS NEWFOUNDLAND, NOT FRANCE
AND HELD IN TRUST

CORPORAL JAMES ROY TUFF


The reference to 'dust' in Corporal Tuff's inscription is in all probability a reference to Rupert Brooke's poem 'The Soldier':

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware ...

With the obvious proviso that France is specifically mentioned instead of 'a foreign field' and the 'dust' belonged to Newfoundland not England.
James Roy Tuff was a plumber from St John's, Newfoundland who was one of the first 500 Newfoundlanders to enlist as shown by his service number - 23. He sailed with them for England on 4 October 1914. After a period of training in the UK, the regiment embarked for Gallipoli in August 1915 and served there until the evacuation. Transferred to France, Tuff appears not to have been with the regiment on 1 July 1916 when its attack on Beaumont Hamel resulted in huge casualties. However, he was with it when it attacked at Monchy-le-Preux on 14 April 1917 where he received gun shot wounds in his back and arm from which he died two weeks later.
James Roy Tuff's brother, Frank Paine Tuff, was killed in action on 12 October 1916. His body was never found. Their service records can be found online here: James Roy Tuff Frank Paine Tuff


IS IT NOTHING TO YOU?

PRIVATE EDWARD A COOK


Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.
Lamentations 1:12

Edward Cook's inscription is taken from the Old Testament book of Lamentations 1:12, although it's possible that Emma Cook, Private Cook's mother, might have known the words from Stainer's 'Crucifixion' where they are spoken by Christ on the cross. As a declaration of grief it is very powerful; Mrs Cook might have been comforted to know that that for those who pass by her son's grave today it is not 'nothing' to them.
Cook was killed in the 1st Battalion King's Shropshire Light Infantry's successful attack on the old German front line. A and B companies attacked at 5 am on the 18 April when eleven soldiers were killed and twenty-five wounded. The next day, the 19th, B and D companies continued the attack, but the regimental history does not list the number of casualties.


"THE FRENCH ARE
A GRAND NATION
WORTH FIGHTING FOR"
VIDE ALF'S LETTER 22.3.16

PRIVATE ALFRED GOODLAD


Some parents were so magnanimous, so generous in their response to the death of their sons. Alfred Goodlad was his parents only child yet his inscription, quoting from a letter he had written to them on 22 March 1916, says "The French are a grand nation worth fighting for".
Goodlad, an accountant's clerk, served with the 12th Battalion the York and Lancaster Regiment, the Sheffield Pals, which in March 1916 had only just landed in France after a brief spell in Egypt, their first foreign deployment. On 1 July 1916 the regiment attacked the heavily fortified village of Serre. Within minutes the soldiers had come up against uncut barbed wire and heavy machine gun fire causing 513 casualties, killed, wounded and missing, of whom 246 died that day. As someone said of another Pals battalion, "We were two years in the making and ten minutes in the destroying".


THE BLOOD OF A HERO
IS THE SEED OF FREEDOM
FROM FATHER AND MOTHER

PRIVATE W DICKINSON


Private Dickinson's inscription is based on the poem 'Stanzas to the Memory of the Spanish Patriots latest killed in resisting the Regency and the Duke of Angouleme by Thomas Campbell 1777-1844. Campbell's poem actually says that, "The patriot's blood's the seed of Freedom's tree", but the way the Dickinson parents have phrased it is how the quotation is usually known. Campbell's poem, written during the Napoleonic Wars, articulates many concepts that would have been familiar to those who fought in the First World War: "There is a victory in dying well for Freedom, - and ye have not died in vain"; "And looking on your graves, though trophied not, as holier hallowed ground than priests could make the spot"; "Glory to them that die in this great cause".
Private Dickinson was killed in an early morning attack towards La Boiselle-Grandcourt, the 14th Battalion's War Diary gives the details, with the second page of the diary here. The attack appears to have been successful, and many German prisoners were taken, but Private Dickinson was among eight soldiers from the Battalion to be killed that day.


REMEMBERING YOU
WE WILL BE BRAVE AND STRONG

AIR MECHANIC 1ST CLASS WILLIAM ALFRED SAMWAYS


Twenty-year-old William Alfred Samways' active service career was very brief. He served with No. 49 Squadron RFC, which was formed in April 1916. In November 1917 No. 49 went to France as a day bombing squadron. The squadron made its first raid on 26 November and met no opposition but three days later, on another bombing raid, it ran into von Richthofen's Flying Circus. Despite a fierce battle only one British plane was shot down, DH4 A7704. Both the pilot and the observer were killed: Lieutenant Charles Campbell and Air Mechanic First Class William Samways.
Samways' inscription quotes a line from a poem by Maurice Baring (1874-1945), which he wrote for his friend Julian Grenfell. The poem was first published in The Times on 5 June 1915, nine days after Grenfell's death.

To Julian Grenfell
Because of you we will be glad and gay,
Remembering you we will be brave and strong;
And hail the advent of each dangerous day,
And meet the great adventure with a song.
And, as you proudly gave your jewelled gift,
We'll give our lesser offering with a smile,
Nor falter on the path where, all too swift,
You led the way and leapt the golden style.
Whether you seek new seas or heights unclimbed,
Or gallop in unfooted asphodel,
We know you know we shall not lag behind,
Not halt to waste a moment on a tear;
And you will speed us onward with a cheer,
And wave beyond the stars that all is well.


I KNOW NOT WHAT AWAITS ME
GOD KINDLY VEILS MINE EYES

PRIVATE DAVID BROWN MADDISON


David Maddison died of wounds in a base hospital at Etaples. The War Graves Commission gives his date of death as between the 24th and the 25th July. I've seen this before when no one has known exactly when a man has died in battle but not when he's died in hospital. Did he die at midnight or was he found dead in his bed in the morning and no one could say when he had passed away? It's not possible to tell at this distance but I rather like the careful honesty of the records.
His inscription comes from a hymn from the Methodist Sunday School hymn book, which was based on a poem by the American poet Mary Gardiner Brainard 1837-1905. The poem was called 'Not Knowing'. The words were arranged for the hymn by Philip Bliss. The first verse is rather surprisingly positive:

I know not what awaits me,
God kindly veils mine eyes,
And o'er each step of my onward way
He makes new scenes to rise;
And every joy He sends me, comes
A sweet and glad surprise.

It's verse three that must carry the message the Maddison's wanted to convey:

Oh, blissful lack of wisdom,
'Tis blessed not to know;
He holds me with his own right hand,
And will not let me go,
And lulls my troubled soul to rest
In Him who loves me so.


I RAISED MY BOY
TO BE A SOLDIER
MOTHER

PRIVATE MOSTYN SCOTT SANDS


I am grateful to Eric McGeer for drawing my attention to this inscription and its meaning in his article Approaches to Canadian Epitaphs of the Great War. It sounds like a simple statement of fact - I raised my boy to be a soldier - but actually it's a proud reposte to a popular American anti-war song I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier. I shall quote the whole song here because, published early in 1915, it became a significant factor in keeping America out of the war for so long.

Ten million soldiers to the war have gone,
Who may never return again.
Ten million mother's hearts must break
For the ones who died in vain.
Heads bowed in sorrow
In her lonely years,
I heard a mother murmur thru' her tears:

Chorus
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It's time to lay the sword and gun away.
There's be no war today,
If mothers all would say,
"I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier."

What victory can cheer a mother's heart,
When she looks at her blighted home?
What victory can bring her back
All he cared to call her own?
Let each mother answer
In the years to be,
Remember that my boy belongs to me!

Chorus

In the light of this song it's significant that Mrs Sands signs the epitaph, 'Mother'.
Private Sands was killed in a German night attack on the Canadian trenches. The 28th Battalion Canadian Infantry War Diary records that as the 19th Battalion began to relieve them on the night of the 7th/8th May the Germans attacked and penetrated their lines. They were driven back by those of the 28th who hadn't yet left the trenches, together with the newly arrived 19th. Sands must have been among the soldiers of the 28th who hadn't yet left.


HE IS A PRESENCE
TO BE FELT AND KNOWN
IN DARKNESS AND IN LIGHT.

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN ROGER WALLACE


I really thought that this inscription had its origins in Spiritualism, but I was wrong. It's a quotation from stanza 42 of Shelley's 'Adonais', his lament for the death of the poet John Keats. The poem is a popular source of inscriptions but most quote lines from either stanza 39 or 40: "He hath awakened from the dream of life" or "He hath outsoar'd the shadow of our night". These lines attempt to assure us that Adonais is now removed from the pains of life, unlike the living who still have to suffer them. Stanza 42 is different, telling us that although Adonais might be dead he is now everywhere:

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

John Wallace volunteered at the outbreak of the war whilst an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford. A former pupil of Rugby School his obituary in the School's magnificent seven-volume 'Memorials of Rugbeians who fell in the Great War' says that:

"He was struck in an advanced trench near Ypres by a mortar bomb, but refused to be carried off until he had handed over the trench to his Commanding Officer. He was taken to a dressing station about a mile in the rear, but died there shortly afterwards on April 22nd, 1915. Age 20."

A letter from this Commanding Officer was quoted in Wallace's obituary in The Times on 7 May 1915:

"His pluck and unselfishness after he was hit will always be remembered in the Scots Fusiliers. His one idea was that the men wounded at the same moment should be cared for first ... I can only say that his loss to us is irreparable."


MANY DIED
AND THERE WAS MUCH GLORY

SERGEANT WILLIAM JOHN CLEGG


William Clegg died from influenza in No. 12 Canadian General Hospital, Bramshott, Hampshire, UK, just when the influenza pandemic was at its most virulent height.
His mother confirmed his inscription. Does it sound as though Mrs Lucy Clegg is being cynical or at the very least, underwhelmed? If so it's due to the fact that we no longer recognise what was at one time a well-known quotation from Napier's 'History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France, from the year 1807 to the year 1814' (1834) describing the death of Colonel Ridge at the Siege of Badajoz. When all seemed lost, Ridge rallied his men, seized a ladder, scaled the walls of the castle and took the town but was killed in the process. Napier's admiring comment was:

"No man died that day with more glory - yet many died and there was much glory."

The description was quoted throughout the nineteenth century to describe other heroic deaths so that John Buchan could write of the death of Hugh Dawnay, in his history of the First Battle of Ypres, that Dawnay "would wish no better epitaph than Napier's words: 'No man died that night with more glory - yet any died, and there was much glory'".


LAST WORDS
"I AM SO SORRY, I AM TRYING
TO KEEP CHEERFUL AND HAPPY"
R.I.P.

LIEUTENANT EDGAR JOSEPH WILLIAM WHITEHEAD


Not everyone who died in the war and is buried in a War Graves Commission cemetery was killed in action or died of wounds, and nor did they have to have died during the war itself, in other words on or before 11 November 1918. In fact, 31 August 1921 was the latest official date of death for inclusion in the War Graves Commission's register of war dead.
Edgar Joseph William Whitehead had been attached to the Printing Company at GHQ, 1st Eschelon, when he died from pneumonia, quite possibly caused by influenza, in the base camp at Etaples on 17 February 1919. Between 1918 and 1920 it is estimated that more than 20 million people died from the influenza pandemic, traditionally known as Spanish Flu. Some authorities put the figure at well over this. There were four waves: spring 1918; summer 1918, which by October / November was extremely virulent; early 1919 and early 1920.
It was not a 'heroic' way to die in the way that being 'killed in action' or 'dying of wounds' were considered to be heroic, but it was not an easy way to die. Victims suffered high temperatures, headaches, joint pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, haemorrhaging and oedema in the lungs leaving them struggling for breath until they suffocated. Hence Edgar Whitehead's last words, "I am trying to keep cheerful and happy".


NEVER MIND ME BOYS
SAVE SERJEANT BEATON

TROOPER GEORGE RICHARD SOMERVILLE JOHNSTON


Serjeant Beaton survived and returned to Australia at the end of the war. Trooper Johnston died of his wounds and was buried at Embarkation Pier Cemetery, Gallipoli. After the evacuation his grave was lost so that now he has a Special Memorial, a normal headstone but with the addition of the words 'Believed to be buried in this cemetery'.
Johnstone's stoicism must have been reported to his parents for his father to have been able to quote them in his inscription. It's the same stoicism as Private Ernest Proven's "Go on, I'll manage", which Ernest's father chose for his inscription. Simple, powerful words, which do more than words like, honour, glory, duty, sacrifice to illustrate the qualities of the soldiers of a century ago.


DARLING DUDLEY
LAST YEAR BUT A BOY
BUT ENGLAND'S MARTYR NOW
MOTHER

SECOND LIEUTENANT DUDLEY HURST-BROWN


Dudley Hurst-Brown celebrated his eighteenth birthday on 8 June, was wounded in action five days later and died two days after this. He had been at the front for five months, correctly predicting in the last letter his parents received from him that he saw "but little chance of ever safely getting home again".
His parents' inscription speaks the truth, "last year but a boy",. Last year Hurst-Brown had been 17, he was only 18 and seven days when he was killed. This was far too young to be at the front, the rule was 19, unless you had your parents' signed permission, which he must have done. In fact more than just their permission as his father had actively pulled strings to get him into the army. Dudley Hurst-Brown was still at school when the war broke out, with plans to study for another year, go to Oxford and then join the army. The war changed all this and he decided he wanted to join up immediately - except at 17 he was too young. So his father wrote to the Director of Military Training at the War Office and Dudley was commissioned into the Special Reserve on the 11 August, just one week after the outbreak of war.
'Martyr' is an interesting word. It's the first time it's been used in an inscription in this project, unless as a quote from the Te Deum. The Hurst-Browns use the word for both their sons, Dudley's elder brother, Cecil, died of wounds on 25 September 1915. Were they martyrs? In that they were both volunteers, and both therefore willingly gave themselves to a cause they believed in, knowing that it could lead to their deaths, yes they were.
Dudley and Cecil's inscriptions were virtually identical but with two interesting differences: Cecil is addressed as "Our darling Cecil", Dudley as "Darling Dudley". Dudley's finishes with the word "Mother", which is not there on Cecil's - yet both were signed for by Mr W Hurst-Brown, their father.
Cecil Hurst-Brown is commemorated on Westminster School's First World War website
Dudley Hurst-Brown is commemorated on the Winchester College First World War website.


AFTER TWO WEARY YEARS
GOD TOOK HIM
TO HIS TWIN BROTHER
MY HAWTON

CORPORAL MATTHEW HAWTON MITCHELL


Corporal Mitchell's twin brother, Frederick, died of wounds on 1 July 1916. Hawton followed him two years later. The Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau found witnesses who could tell his mother what had happened:

"I knew casualty. He was a well built man, 5 ft. 5 ins. dark complexion, about 19 years of age. Casualty was in advance at Peronne Road. He was leading his machine gun team in attack when an H.E. shell exploded a piece entering his leg. I was 20 yds. away at the time. He was carried to hospital."
Pte. A.G. Thornton
16.5.19

The Registrar of No. 1 South African General Hospital finishes the story:

"This man was admitted to this hospital from No. 53 Casualty Clearing Station on the 24th August, 1918. He was suffering from a severe wound on the thigh with fracture of the femur. He had two attacks of secondary heamorrhage, the second of which rendered amputation of the limb necessary. The operation took place on the 1st September 1918. He recovered slightly on returning to his ward but collapsed later and died at 6.30 pm on the 1st September, 1918."


MY DEAR SON FRED
OH! THE PAIN
WHAT JOY WHEN WE MEET
AT JESUS' FEET

PRIVATE FREDERICK SUMMERSGILL MITCHELL


For Private Mitchell's mother the pain was doubled when Frederick's twin brother died of wounds in September 1918. The brothers have consecutive service numbers - 3541 and 3542 - even though from the embarkation rolls it looks as though Frederick joined up on 21 July 1915 and his brother, Matthew Hawton Mitchell, on 1 December 1915. They left Australia together on 5 January 1916.
By the time Mrs Mitchell chose her sons' inscriptions she was a widow. Like many, many relations her consolation in her grief came from the belief that they will all meet again in the afterlife. Her reference to Jesus' feet comes from the chorus of the hymn God be with you till we meet again.

Till we meet, till we meet,
Till we meet at Jesus' feet,
God be with you till we meet again.


IN GLORIOUS MEMORY OF
OUR BILL

DRUMMER WILLIAM MARK NORTHCOTT


In the 1911 census, William Northcott was an errand boy living at home with his parents and two of his younger brothers. In August 1917 he was serving with the 24th Battalion London Regiment where he held the rank of Drummer. As a bandsman he would have been used in action either as a messenger or as a stretcher bearer. He died of wounds, "gunshot wounds chest penetrating, on left thigh, fractured femur" at No. 3 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek on 30 August 1917.
His mother, Mary Anne Northcott, chose his inscription. Her use of the word 'glorious' is interesting. In November 1920 the cenotaph, the Empire's memorial to its dead, was unveiled in Whitehall: a spare, understated monument, heavy with emotion but carrying only a few brief words - The Glorious Dead MCMXIV - MCMXVIII. Glorious - deserving of admiration, worthy of fame, honoured, a word appropriate to describe all the dead, which included Mrs Northcott's son - 'Our Bill'.


GOODBYE AND GOD BLESS YOU
DEAR ERN AND SID
TILL WE ALL MEET AGAIN

PRIVATE ERNEST PALK


"Palk was a Signaller in C Coy. 9th Battn., tall, stoutly built, fresh complexion, rather large head, wore glasses, a proper cockney, not long joined up. They were in a dug out in a trench on telephone duty. I was close by in a small dug-out. I went to do my shift on phone and found the phone dugout had been blown up by a shell. Palk's body was lying on top of the wreckage, hit all over. I got a shovel and started digging to see if anyone else was underneath, and found Marsden's body also badly smashed."
Witness L/Cpl G.A. Simpson 7057
Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau Report

Born in Fulham, London, in the 1901 census Ernest Palk was 8 and his mother was dead. His brother Sidney was 5. In the 1911 census Ernest looks to have been a waiter at a London Club in Pall Mall. At some point he emigrated to Australia, joined up in 1917 and embarked for Europe in June 1917.
His inscription was chosen for him by his sister Rose. She makes reference to her other brother "Sid". Despite the fact that Palk is an unusual name it has not been easy to identify Sid but I think he has to be Lance Corporal S Palk, 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, killed in action on 31 July 1917 and buried at New Irish Farm Cemetery, Belgium. My reasoning is that there are only two S. Palk's in the War Graves Commission's records and the other one, buried at Lijssenthoek, was called Stanley. However, the records make no mention of any family and he has no inscription.


"OUR WALLY"
O MOST COMPASSIONATE
LORD JESUS
GRANT HIM ETERNAL REST

CAPTAIN WALLENSTEIN RYAN-LEWIS, MC


"Our Wally" had the most splendid Christian name: Wallenstein, it was his mother's maiden name.
Wallenstein Ryan-Lewis was a qualified Mining Engineer and a member of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. From various mentions in the The Mining Magazine you can see that in 1912 he was working for the Amo Tin Mines in Northern Nigeria, and that in early 1914 he was "returning to Russia".
He served with the 284th Army Troops Company, a pool of Royal Engineers held at Army level as, if I have understood their role correctly, technical consultants for some of the big military engineering and construction projects: heavy bridges, railway systems, water supplies etc. Ryan-Lewis was a valuable man.
He died of wounds on 25 March 1918. I haven't found any information about his death but the citation for the award of his Military Cross is both significant and suggestive.

The enemy having captured a village, he counter-attacked, under heavy shell fire, established his company in front of it, and dug in. He held the position with great courage and coolness, for seven hours, and till nearly surrounded, and then successfully withdrew. Whilst holding the position he was wounded.
London Gazette 29 July 1918

First of all, what was a Royal Engineer doing counter-attacking with his company and holding out for seven hours before withdrawing? This is not the normal role of a Sapper in wartime. And, was the wounding referred to the cause of his death? The date of his death, 25 March 1918, makes me wonder if he was wounded on that day, the day the German Spring Offensive reached Noyon. The rate of their advance eventually leading General Haig to issue his famous 'backs to the wall' order on 11 April:

There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.

In the face of the German attack was it a question of all hands to the deck, is that why Captain Ryan-Lewis RE found himself fighting in the role of an infantry officer? The location of his burial would certainly support this. He was originally buried in Noyon Old British Cemetery, a cemetery made by the 46th Casualty Clearing Station and the 44th Field Ambulance, close to the railway station in the town. Noyon fell to the Germans and the identity of the men's graves was lost in the subsequent fighting. After the war the bodies were exhumed and reinterred in Noyon New British Cemetery with the words 'Buried near this spot' on their headstones.
Ryan-Lewis's sister, Evelyn, chose his inscription. The first part quotes his diminutive in inverted commas, the second part a classic Roman Catholic formula, which would suggest that the family were Roman Catholics.


PETER, I LOVED YOU IN LIFE
YOU ARE DEAR TO ME STILL

PRIVATE PETER FENTON


Peter Fenton was his parents' eldest child. In 1901 he had six younger siblings. Killed in action in the 51st Highland Division's attack on Beaumont Hamel on 13 November, he was buried in Y Ravine Cemetery where his grave was subsequently lost. There are now more than 400 men buried in the cemetery of which only 275 are identified burials and 53 have special memorials, like Peter Fenton's. These are headstones that look identical to the standard War Graves Commission headstone but have carved on them the words: 'Known to be buried in this cemetery'.
Peter's mother, Mrs Christina Fenton, chose his inscription, a touching declaration of love and affection that, written in the first person, makes no reference to either his father or his siblings. A gravestone in Dunfermline Cemetery testifies to the fact that James Fenton, Peter's father, was still alive. He died in 1934.

Erected by Christina Hutchison
In memory of
Her dear husband
James Fenton
Died 3rd Sept. 1934 aged 77
Also their son
Peter
Killed in the Great War
13th Nov. 1916 aged 28
Also their daughters
Nettie
Died 27th July 1916 aged 21
Maggie
Died in infancy
Also the above
Christina Hutchison
Died 9th April 1946 aged 77


DEAR HAROLD
WE WILL REMEMBER THEE
MOTHER

PRIVATE E.HAROLD POOL


In 'The Great War and Modern Memory', Paul Fussell remarked on the persistence of Victorian 'high' diction in First World War writing, where a horse became 'a steed', danger became 'peril' and the dead 'perished'. To him, this 'raised' language distanced and glamourised war, lending it a false romance. We could agree with him, better to use the word bravery than valour, soldier than warrior, enemy than foe.
But there is something infinitely touching about Mrs E. Pool of 193 Lavender Hill, Battersea, SW11, addressing her dead son Harold as 'thee' rather than you. The word is formal and archaic with religious overtones - and no doubt, as far as she was concerned, it was exactly the right word.
Harold Pool, serving with the 9th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, was killed in the 36th Brigade's attack on Ovillers. The weather was bad, the German trenches were defended by the Prussian Guard, "worthy foemen", and fumes from the gas shells lingered in the shell holes creating a death trap for anyone who fell into them. Casualties were high: in 'The Royal Fusiliers in the Great War' (1922), the author H.C. O'Neill pronounced that "few more costly actions were fought in the whole of the battle of the Somme". Other regiments would no doubt disagree but certainly 163 men from the 9th Battalion, and 162 from the 8th, were killed on that day, 7 July 1916.


LAST WORDS TO HIS COMRADE
"GO ON, I'LL MANAGE"

PRIVATE ERNEST ALBERT PROVEN


"Go on, I'll manage". Ernest's father says that these words were spoken to a comrade but they could easily have been heard by Ernest Proven's brother, Harry. Both Ernest and Harry served with the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles Battalion and on the morning of 9 April 1917 they were both part of the first wave of the attack on Vimy Ridge. Ernest was hit in the shoulder by shrapnel. He survived long enough to be passed down the casualty evacuation chain to a base hospital in Boulogne, where he died three days later.
Sergeant Harry James Proven survived the attack at Vimy Ridge but was killed seventeen months later on 29 September 1918, six weeks before the end of the war, in the Canadian Corps' attack on Cambrai. Hit in the chest by German machine-gun fire, he died on the way to the main dressing station. His father also chose his headstone inscription. It reads:

Son of
James and Harriett Proven
Clanwilliam, Manitoba
Served 3 years & 8 months

Information on the Proven brothers comes from a blog post written by Michael O'Hagan whose great-grandfather was Ernest and Harry's brother.
The inscription came to my notice in Eric McGeer's excellent article on Canadian epitaphs of the Great War 'Time But the Impression Deeper Makes'.


"A GOOD SOLDIER
AND A REAL HERO"
HIS CAPTAIN

DRUMMER ALEXANDER WILLIAM BURR


Alexander Burr was killed at Beaumont Hamel on 1 July 1916. His body lay undiscovered until March 1928 when, in the absence of an identity disc, it was identified by the initials A.W.B. on the ring it was still wearing.
Drummer Burr was a bandsman, but don't get the idea that he was beating his drum as the soldiers went into battle that morning. That might have been his role in earlier wars but in 1916 he would have been a stretcher bearer, or perhaps a messenger boy. Either way he would have been in the heat of the battle - so much so that it was impossible to recover his body.
His inscription sounds as though it is quoted from a letter of condolence from Burr's senior officer. And however conventional the sentiments, and however many times the Captain had written it, the words evidently brought consolation to Burr's widowed mother - 'a good soldier', 'a real hero'. But they weren't necessarily empty words. My father was a soldier. He served in Burma during the Second World War and for the rest of his life the highest form of praise he could bestow on a young man were the words, "He would have made a good soldier".


IF I DO NOT COME BACK
I AM NOT AFRAID TO DIE

LIEUTENANT ELLIOT ADAMS CHAPIN


Oh my goodness - read this!

On June 27, while bombing Thionville, he was engaged in combat by a German plane at a height of thirteen thousand feet; an incendiary bullet pierced his petrol tank, and his machine fell in flames. His friend, Lieutenant Walker, of the same squadron (the 99th), who was only fifty feet away from Lieutenant Chapin when he fell, wrote:-
"When he saw death staring him in the face, I saw him turn round to his observer, reach out his hand, and shake hands with him. He died a hero's death, unafraid, and was a son for any parents to be proud of. ..."
[Quoted from Phillips Academy Andover in the Great War]

"When he saw death staring him in the face, I saw him turn round to his observer, reach out his hand, and shake hands with him." RAF pilots and their observers did not carry parachutes until September 1918. It was known that if a plane was hit the wood and doped canvas would burn like a torch. It was a horrible way to die and some pilots apparently carried guns in order to shoot themselves rather than burn to death. In the face of certain death, Chapin turned round and shook his observer's hand ... it doesn't bear thinking about. But as his inscription says, 'I am not afraid to die'.
Elliot Adams Chapin was an American citizen, born in Massachussetts to American-born parents. Whilst still at Harvard, he enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps in September 1917. After training in Canada and Texas, he sailed for England early in 1918. In France he joined 99 Squadron flying DH 9 bombers and was shot down returning from a bombing mission on the railway at Thionville.


"LET DETERMINED THINGS
TO DESTINY HOLD
UNBEWAILED THEIR WAY"

LANCE CORPORAL SIDNEY CLAUDE GILBERT


Henry Hannaford Scholey chose a beautifully phrased, fatalistic statement from Shakespeare's 'Anthony and Cleopatra' for his brother's headstone inscription. It comes from Act III. vi. 82. Caesar tells his sister Octavia:

Be ye not troubled with the time, which drives
O'er your content these strong necessities;
But let determined things to destiny
Hold unbewailed their way.

Abraham Lincoln might have put it more prosaically but fundamentally he was saying much the same thing when he would quote one of his favourite aphorisms: "What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree".
Lance Corporal Gilbert was killed on the third day of the Somme campaign. At 3 am on the morning of 3 July, the 10th Worcestershire Regiment attacked at La Boiselle. The attack witnessed savage hand to hand fighting and saw two Victoria Crosses awarded. By the end of the day the Worcesters had taken the village - and 116 men from the battalion had been killed .
Henry Hannaford Scholey was Sidney Claude Gilbert's brother (and by the time he chose his brother's inscription he had emigrated to Australia). Sidney's parents were called Max and Helen Scholey, so why was he called Sidney Gilbert? I don't know the answer but it looks as though the Scholey family had begun to disintegrate by 1901. Helen Scholey was dead: Max Scholey was now married to someone called Winnie and they had a one-year-old child called Hector. By 1911 Hector was living with his married step-sister and there is no sign of Max or Winnie. And, in neither the 1901 or the 1911 census is there any mention of a child called Sidney Claude Scholey. Yet, in the UK Register of Soldiers' Effects, Sidney's name appears as Sidney Claude Gilbert, alias Scholey. And what is more, he's definitely of the correct family because he leaves his money divided between his brothers and sisters, including little Hector.


PROSPICE

LIEUTENANT COLONEL PERCY WILFRID MACHELL, CMG, DSO


This isn't the whole of Colonel Machell's inscription but we'll come to that later. One of the reasons I've chosen to include Percy Machell is to show that not everyone killed on 1 July was a young junior officer or an inexperienced soldier; Machell was 54 and a Lieutenant Colonel. And this is where the rest of his inscription comes in. It exceeds the War Graves Commission's limit of sixty-six letters by forty, and with the link could well have exceeded Twitter's 140 character limit, so I omitted for it for Twitter and have included it here. The inscription relates his military career:

56 Regt. 1882 Egyptian Army 1886
C.O. XII Sudanese 1891-1895
Adviser Ministry of Interior
Egyptian Government 1898-1908
Prospice

The information in the cemetery register gives even more detail.

Machell retired in 1905 and married in 1906. However, when Lord Lonsdale decided to raise a battalion in the border regions, the 11th (Service) Battalion Border Regiment, afterwards known as The Lonsdales, he asked his friend Percy Machell to train and command it. This Machell was prepared to do with his usual commitment and thoroughness, if also with his usual brusqueness and bluntness.
On 23 November 1915 the battalion sailed for France and in the middle of December had its first taste of the trenches. You can see the sort of man he was in this extract from his diary of 14 December:

I had a talk yesterday on the futility of grousing and the necessity of making the best of the worst of everything.

The battalion, like so many of these New Army battalions, was being trained for the 'Big Push' that was to come on the Somme on 1 July 1916. Machell did his best to leave no stone unturned in the preparations, as his obviously hurried final note to his Company Commanders makes clear:

All not hit MUST push on. MUST do our job. If all goes well, I stay proper place; if goes badly, I come up and see it through.

A commanding officer's 'proper place' was behind the lines, as far as possible out of danger so that he could 'command'. Unfortunately all did not go well with the Lonsdale's attack with the result that Machell rushed to the front line, mounted the parapet to urge his men on and was immediately shot and killed.
One hundred and eighty men from the Lonsdale Battalion were killed on 1 July. The bodies of the majority of them, ninety-eight, were never recovered and they are commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, but sixty of them are buried in Lonsdale Cemetery. I find it rather sad that Machell is not among them. Perhaps attempts were made to save him and he was sent to a Field Ambulance Station, where he died and where he is the only member of his battalion to be buried.
His wife chose his inscription. Lady Valda Machell had been born Lady Valda Gleichen, the daughter of Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, the son of Queen Victoria's half sister. The inscription finishes with the single word 'Prospice', the title of a poem by Robert Browning. I'll only quote a few lines of what is not in fact a very long poem, all of which seems very appropriate.

I was ever a fighter, so one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.

Note: Much of the information on Percy Machell came from The Border Regiment on This Day and this excellent site, dedicated to the Lonsdale Battalion and maintained by Kev Johnstone, great grandson of Private John Farrer, killed in action 1 July 1916.


A SOLDIER
OF THE GREAT WAR
KNOWN UNTO GOD

Unidentified


This post is dedicated to all the thousands of soldiers, of whatever nationality, who were killed in action on the Somme and whose bodies were never found, or, as it says on the Thiepval Memorial to the British missing of the Somme:

To whom
The fortune of war
Denied the known
And honoured burial
Given to their
Comrades in death

After the war, the question of how to commemorate the missing dead became an extremely controversial subject on which emotions ran very high. There was much more agreement over how to mark the hundreds of thousands of graves of the unidentified dead. The War Graves Commission agreed that each one should have its own headstone, and that in the absence of any other information it should bear the dedication, chosen by Rudyard Kipling: 'A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God'.
The inscription could be expanded to include even the slightest scrap of evidence as to the man's identity: A Private of the Great War Known Unto God; A Soldier of the Black Watch Known Unto God; An Australian Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God. However, when the inscription reads, 'A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God' it means that there was no way of identifying that man, which of course means that he could be a French soldier, or a Portuguese soldier, or even a German soldier. Strangely, this possibility never seems to have troubled anyone, or if it did it never made it into the record books.
The 58th Annual Report of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, published on 1 April 1977, states that there are 204, 206 unidentified burials in their cemeteries. These will be the bodies of some of the 413,122 missing dead whose names are recorded on the memorials to the missing scattered across the battlefields of France and Flanders, and throughout the world. On the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, a day when 19,240 British soldiers were killed on that one day alone - of whom 12,400 have no grave and are commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial - we remember the dead of all the combatant nations.

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack, -
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads, - those ashen grey
Masks of the lads who were once keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet? ...
Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget.

Aftermath
Siegfried Sassoon


THIS CORNER
OF A FOREIGN FIELD
THAT IS FOR EVER ENGLAND

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM ROY DAVEY


In 1914, Rupert Brooke wrote:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

These are the opening lines of his hugely popular poem, The Soldier. Today readers criticise Brooke for romanticising, even glamourising war and the idea of dying for your country. But it is nevertheless a very beautiful poem, and very consoling should your relation be numbered among the dead.

There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.

In one way William Roy Davey was the classic nineteen-year-old subaltern, fresh from school, killed leading his men 'over the top' into a hail of machine-gun fire and a tangle of uncut German barbed wire on the morning of 1 July 1916. But in another way he does not conform to the stereotype. He was not a young man of privilege, of the establishment, educated at a public school. In 1911 his father was a tailor's cutter, the family lived in Albert Road, Hendon, a road of terraced houses of some substance but no grandeur, and worshipped at the Congregational Church.

Davey was one of five second lieutenants in the battalion killed in the attack at Gommecourt - his body not located until May 1921 - one of 552 second lieutenants killed in France on that day, a small fraction of the 19,240 British soldiers who died on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts of England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


BIVOUAC

PRIVATE KENNETH MILNE-MILLS


This single word probably draws a blank for many a twenty-first century reader yet it is doubly appropriate, perhaps even triply appropriate as an inscription.
Firstly the word bivouac means temporary living quarters that have been specially built for soldiers, sometimes a temporary camp without either tents or cover. Soldiers bivouac, mountaineers too, and the dead bivouac in these cemeteries, 'camps' that have been specially built for them. There is perhaps too a sub-text in that it is only temporary accommodation because the dead shall rise up to everlasting life.
But another reason for the choice of this word as an inscription is the poem by the American poet Theodore O'Hara (1820-1867), 'The Bivouac of the Dead' of which this is the first verse:

The muffled drum's sad roll has beat
The soldier's last tattoo;
No more on Life's parade shall meet
That brave and fallen few.
On Fame's eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead.

Kenneth Milne-Mills, although I don't know where the Milne comes from because the family don't use it in either the 1891 or the 1911 census, served with the 16th Battalion Middlesex Regiment. On 1 July 1916 the battalion was in the supporting wave of the 29th Division's attack on Hawthorn Ridge, Beaumont-Hamel, which followed the blowing of the huge mine there. The battalion advanced into 'withering German machine gun fire' with the inevitable huge casualties.
Private Mills' father, a librarian at Guy's Hospital, was dead by 1911. A Mr M.B. Milne-Mills chose Kenneth's inscription, perhaps a misprint for N? His brother was called Norman.


HOW CLOSELY BRAVERY
AND MODESTY ARE ENTWINED

PRIVATE FRANCIS THOMAS LIND


Private Francis Thomas Lind, much better known by his nickname 'Mayo' Lind, has an entry in the Canadian Dictionary of Biography based on the series of thirty-two good humoured, gossipy letters which he wrote whilst on active service and which were published in the St John's 'Daily News'.
In the letter dated 20 May 1915, Lind complained about English tobacco with the result that the makers of 'Mayo' tobacco launched an appeal for funds to send him tobacco that he could then distribute to his fellow Newfoundland soldiers. On 1 July 1915, 1,700 pounds of tobacco arrived at Stobs Camp near Edinburgh where Lind was in training; much to the amusement and one assumes pleasure of the rest of the camp. This is how he acquired his nickname.
The letters also explain how he acquired his inscription. After the war his letters were published by the editor of the Daily News as 'The Letters of Mayo Lind', "in memory of the cheerful soldier". As the Canadian Dictionary of Biography notes, after Lind's death "he became a symbol in Newfoundland of the soldier who could face discomfort and ultimately sacrifice, with good humour".
Lind went into action with the rest of the 798 members of the 1st Battalion at Beaumont Hamel on 1 July 1916. At the end of the day 710 of them had become casualties: 233 killed, 91 missing, all of the missing eventually to be pronounced dead.
Lind was among the missing. It was months before his family had any firm news and then on 3 November 1916 the headline, 'Frank Lind Dead', appeared in the 'Daily News'. The report stated that:

a returned soldier is sure he saw Frank Lind dead on the field on July 1st. He passed him going out and noticed he was doubled up as though he had been hit in the stomach. The same man was later wounded and in crawling back passed the same place again and is sure there was no doubt that it was Lind and that he was dead.

On 12 November Lind's brother wrote to the Colonial Secretary, (see Lind's file in the digitised records of the Newfoundland Regiment in the Great War) asking him if he would get in touch with the returned soldier, or let him have his name and address so he could make contact himself. I don't know what answer he got but on 23 November the Colonial Secretary wrote a letter to the families of all the missing Newfoundland soldiers telling them that "all these gallant men, whose names are given in the enclosed list, and one of whom was very dear to you, were killed in that fateful action on the 1st of July".

Lind's body was eventually recovered and, in a manner, identified. The full inscription on his headstone reads:

Two soldiers
Of the great war
541 Private
F.T. Lind
Royal Newfoundland Regt.
1st July 1916. age 37
How closely bravery
And modesty are entwined
Unknown soldier
Royal Newfoundland Regt.
Known unto God


BE ASHAMED TO DIE
UNTIL YOU HAVE GAINED
SOME VICTORY FOR HUMANITY

LANCE CORPORAL GEORGE EDWARD PIKE


George Pike was one of the three hundred and twenty-four men from the 1st Battalion the Newfoundland Regiment killed in action on the 1 July 1916. Originally among the missing, his body was located and buried in June 1917. His full army details, medical records and conduct sheets have been digitised and can be found on the Newfoundland Regiment and the Great War website.
His inscription is a well known American quotation from a speech given by Horace Mann 1796-1859, an educational reformer and the President of Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio. It comes from his commencement message to the class of 1859 and is now not only repeated to the graduating class at every commencement but has become the College's motto.
It's not possible to say who chose Pike's inscription as the name under it is that of Lt Colonel T Nangle, Newfoundland's Director of Graves Registration and Enquiries and Memorials and the country's representative on the Imperial War Graves Commission. I have evidence that Newfoundland families did choose inscriptions but sometimes the one on the grave isn't the one they chose.
Nangle served as a Roman Catholic padre with the Royal Army Chaplains Department, where he was much respected by the men. It is to him that credit for the purchase of the ground over which so many Newfoundlanders fought and died on 1 July 1916 was bought and has been preserved as a memorial to all Newfoundlanders who died in the war. He is also responsible for the six caribou memorials, four in France, one in Belgium and one in Newfoundland that also commemorate the dead.


FELL WHILST LEADING
HIS PLATOON

SECOND LIEUTENANT RONALD EDWIN GRUNDY


On 16 June 1916 Ronald Grundy wrote to his father, sending the letter home with a friend going on leave so as to avoid the censor and telling him him that the British were on the verge of a big attack. The letter gave John Grundy far more military details than it should have done, including the fact that Ronald was "glad to say I shall be one of the first over the top". At the end of the letter he warned his father that, "As it is information that would be useful to the enemy keep it to yourself at least until the show as started".
Two weeks later he wrote to both his parents concluding with these words:

And mother, please always look on the bright side. Only 5% of the Army are killed and there are lots of fellows over here who have been out 20 months & in all the big scraps. So cheer up & don't worry for I can't always write as frequently as I have done.
Goodbye and best to you all,
Ronald
P.S. A very happy birthday to you

The next day, 1 July 1916, Ronald led his men (his platoon of about fifty men) 'over the top', according to his batman carrying no more than his officer's swagger stick, and was shot through the neck and killed in the very first minutes of the attack. It appears that his family received his 30 June letter on 4 July and the telegram notifying them of his death on the 5th - his mother's birthday.
Statistics vary but however you look at it Ronald's percentage of Army deaths was way out. Twelve percent is usually the number given for soldiers and seventeen percent for officers.
Ronald and his brothers were all pupils at Emanuel School in London. His elder brother Cecil died of wounds on 16 November 1915, his younger brother, Jack, became headmaster in 1953.
In his book, 'The Great War and Modern Memory', Paul Fussell scorned the use of 'high diction', euphemisms, that disguise the reality of war and glamourize and romanticise it. The use of the word 'fell' instead of died or was killed is one that receives special mention. However, I have seen enough reports from soldiers describing the death of the man beside them to know that they used the word literally - the man fell - without any intention of glamourising what happened. He 'fell', the 'fallen', did become the way to describe the war dead, and it did give their deaths some sort of romantic distance but it was also a literal description of what happened when you were shot or hit by a shell. Ronald's father used the word in his inscription, Ronald's manservant having told them that he had just "crumpled without a sound".
For Cecil's inscription, John Grundy appears to pay tribute to both his sons:

Age 21
And for such sons as these
Be praise to God

I have made extensive use of an article by Daniel Kirmatzis for this post. He is the co-author of 'Emanuel School at War' and can be heard talking about the Grundy bothers here.


WE ARE THE DEAD
WE LIVED, FELT DAWN
AND NOW WE LIE
IN FLANDERS FIELDS

PRIVATE JAMES WALTERS


This inscription is a contraction of the second verse of one of the best known poems of the whole war, 'In Flanders Fields' by John McCrae.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Initially published in 'Punch' in December 1915, the poem achieved immediate popularity. McCrae himself, a doctor with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, died of pneumonia in January 1918, but the poem lives on as an integral part of remembrance services in all parts of the English speaking world.
Strangely however, for all its fame and popularity, the poem is not very popular as a source of headstone inscriptions. Possibly it was too new and people preferred the comfort of the old poets like Tennyson and Browning. And interestingly, it seems as though this wasn't a contemporary inscription but one put up as late as 2003. I can't imagine why this should be.
Private Walters - have you noticed that he was only 16 - serving with the 9th Battalion the Royal Fusiliers, was killed on 7 July 1916 in an attack on Ovillers. Buried in Mash Valley Cemetery his grave was lost in subsequent battles. As a result Walters, and the thirty-four other Fusiliers buried in Mash Valley, have Special Memorial headstones in Ovillers Military Cemetery.


DIED AS HE LIVED
A PATRIOT AND A MAN

PRIVATE NORMAN MARSHALL RAMAGE


You can sense a father's pride in this inscription: his twenty-four-year-old son had died 'a patriot and a man'. In fact, Private Ramage's father elaborated on this when he filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia. In answer to the question as to whether there were any biographical details that might be of interest to the historian of the AIF Mr Ramage wrote:

Who answered the call of duty and died as he lived a patriot and a man.

Ramage enlisted - 'answered the call of duty' - on 2 August, two months before Australia held a referendum on whether or not to introduce conscription. The answer was 'no'. He went missing on 25 October 1917 and his body was not recovered until the war was over. Enquiries by the Red Cross failed to find any witnesses but a letter from Sergeant Short in May 1918 related how Norman:

... was going along the communication trench at Passchendaele on Oct. 25th when a shell got him and killed him instantly. He was very badly knocked about. He was buried in the communication trench near where knocked. I did not see it happen and the person who was with Ramage at the time and saw it has since been killed. He told me about it.


SAFE HOME AT LAST

PRIVATE CHARLES W. ALDRIDGE


So many hymns contain this line that it would be impossible to say with any certainty which one it came from. And does it matter since we all must know what it means: that death has freed us from the trials and tribulations of this mortal life and we are now safe 'home', for the Christian, in heaven.
Forced to choose, my front runner would be the Afternoon Hymn by Geoffrey Thring (1823-1894), mainly because it was the best known. Verse 2 reads:

Our life is but a fading dawn,
It's glorious noon how quickly past;
Lead us, O Christ, when all is gone,
Safe home at last.

When Earth's Labours Are O'er' is another contender. Although I think this is much less likely because it was not so widely known, I have quoted from it as it perfectly captures the wider meaning of the inscription. You can get this from the first two lines of the first verse and the last two lines of the final verse.

When earth's labours are o'er, and I rest on the shore
Of that land where no storms ever beat,
...
All my fears will be past; I'll be safe home at last,
Evermore with the Lord there to be.

In 1911 Charles Aldridge was a thirty-one-year-old married man with two children of three and nine months working as a domestic butler for the owners of Gay's House, Holyport, Berkshire. He served with the 2/4th Royal Berkshire Regiment and was killed in action in the attack on Pond Farm when the battalion war diary for the 22nd/23rd August recorded two officers wounded and missing, 32 other ranks killed, 25 wounded and missing, and 54 missing. Aldridge was among the missing, his body not discovered until September 1919 when it was identified by his identity disc and paybook. His wife, Margaret, now of the General Store, Windsor Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire, chose his inscription.


READER PREPARE
TO MEET THY GOD

SAPPER ARTHUR OLIVER ELLIS


Reader, prepare to meet thy God.
Death is at no great distance; thou hast but a short time to do good. Acquire a heavenly disposition while here; for there will be no change after this life. ... In whatever disposition or state of soul thou diest, in that thou wilt be found in the eternal world. Death refines nothing, purifies nothing, kills no sin, helps to no glory. Let thy continual bent and inclination be to God, to holiness, to charity, to mercy, and to heaven: then, fall when thou mayest, thou wilt fall well.

This passage, from the writings of the Methodist biblical scholar and theologian Adam Clarke (c1760-1832), offers a stern warning: we know not the day nor the hour when death will take us so we must live our lives in readiness. After we are dead it will be too late to change our ways and win our place in 'the eternal world'.
It really is a very stern warning, which Ellis's step-mother chose. Other inscriptions convey the certainty that if a man dies fighting for his country he will earn his place in heaven: 'Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life' (Revelation 2:10).
Sapper Ellis was a eucalyptus distiller from Macedon just north west of Melbourne in Australia. He was killed in the fighting around the Menin Road. A fellow sapper told the Red Cross Enquiry Bureau that they were going forward:

in extended order as shelling was heavy. Casualty was in front of me and I saw an H.E. shell land alongside and he went down. I went to his assistance. Death was due to concussion. He was buried where he fell.




COULD WE HAVE STOOD
BESIDE YOUR GRAVE
AND SEEN YOU LAID TO REST

PRIVATE THOMAS FRANCIS MARNEY


Not to be there when your nineteen-year-old son dies, not to see him dead, not to be at his burial must have been a cause of so much extra grief. And for Mr and Mrs Marney, ten thousand miles away in Ararat, Australia, they must have known that they would never be able to visit their son's grave. So, Mrs Marney will have spoken for many mothers when she composed his headstone inscription. Could they have stood beside his grave and seen him laid to rest it would have given them some sort of comfort, gained them some sort of closure.
Thomas Francis Marney was a farm labourer: his father described him as a drover on the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia. He joined up in July 1916 when he was eighteen and was killed in action in Belgium fifteen months later.


OUR HERO AT REST
A BONZER BOY

PRIVATE ERNEST ROY STONE


This is such a wonderfully Australian, inscription. 'Bonzer', a splendid word but what exactly does it mean? Well it appears to be a term used to express admiration for just about anything, and when used about a person to mean excellent, remarkable, outstanding, or in today's vernacular - a great guy, a cool man. And at the time Tyne Cot Cemetery was constructed in the early 1920s, it was a very new word too, making one of its earliest appearances in the Australian magazine 'Bulletin' in 1904.
Ernest Stone's parents must have been pleased to have 'found' him. He went missing on 20 September 1917 during an attack on the Menin Road, but it was October 1920 before his body was discovered on the old battlefield. Luckily his identity disc was still on his body. Witnesses had told the Red Cross Enquiry Bureau that he must have been killed, even though no one had seen his body and no one had buried him. And they had also said that for various reasons he couldn't have been taken prisoner. But Stone's parents still hoped. As late as August 1919 Mrs Stone had sent the Red Cross a photograph of her son saying that although they had been advised that he was missing, and later that he was reported killed: "We think perhaps that he may not be killed but suffering from loss of memory".
The discovery of his body would have put an end to all this hope and this anxiety - their 'hero', their 'bonzer boy' was dead.


BLESSED IS THE MAN
THAT ENDURETH

PRIVATE HAROLD DARWIN BURGESS


The full biblical text reads:

Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.
The General Epistle of St James Chapter 1 verse 12

In St Matthew Chapter 24, verse 13, Christ promised:

He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

And what would he have to endure:

... nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes
[Matthew 24:7]

Harold Burgess's mother signed for his inscription. Although I feel that her intention was to imply that her son's death had brought him 'the crown of life', her use of the word 'endure' is interesting. For all the talk of honour, patriotism and valour, it is now accepted that the quality that was of greatest value to a soldier in the trenches was endurance.


BRIEF LIFE
IS HERE OUR PORTION
BRIEF SORROW
SHORT LIVED CARE

RIFLEMAN WILLIAM HOYLE


These are the first two lines of a hymn written by Bernard of Cluny in the 12th Century and translated by the English hymn writer, J.M. Neale, in 1858.

Brief life is here our portion,
Brief sorrow, short-lived care;
The life that knows no ending,
The tearless life is there.

And where is 'there', where 'grief is turned to pleasure' and 'shadows shall decay? 'There' is the 'sweet and blessed country' where 'short toil' is turned to 'eternal rest' - in other words, heaven.

There, God our King and portion,
In fullness of his grace,
We then shall see for ever,
And worship face to face.

William Hoyle was killed on the opening day of the Battle of Polygon Wood (26 September - 3 October 1917) in which new tactics were employed and the weather for once favoured the attackers resulting in the British capturing and holding some strategically significant high ground. His mother signed for his inscription, William was the oldest of her nine children.


WAITING IN HOLY STILLNESS
WRAPT IN SLEEP

RIFLEMAN FRANK WILLIAM PROUDMAN


This inscription is yet more evidence of the comfort relatives derived from their belief in the resurrection of the dead. It comes from a hymn by Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) of which these are the first two verses:

On the Resurrection morning
Soul and body meet again;
No more sorrow, no more weeping,
No more pain!

Here awhile they must be parted,
And the flesh its Sabbath keep,
Waiting in a holy stillness,
Wrapt in sleep.

But it's the penultimate verse that says it all:

On that happy Easter morning
All the graves their dead restore;
Father, sister, child and mother,
Meet once more.

Frank Proudman was killed on the first day of the Battle of Langemarck. Buried on the battlefield, two years later his body was exhumed as that of an unidentified British soldier. Later it was identified, according to the records, by his spoon.
Proudman was a married man and in July 1919 his wife, Wilhelmina Edith Proudman, received his war gratuity. However, when it came to the time to choose his inscription she was dead, consequently it was his mother chose the words. Wilhelmina died in December 1921, a fact that provides an interesting clue to the length of time it took the War Graves Commission to send out the requests for inscriptions.


DEARLY LOVED HUSBAND
OF EFFIE
& LOVED DADDY
OF LITTLE MARJORIE

CAPTAIN THOMAS HENRY BONE


Thomas Bone was a school teacher from Subiaco, Western Australia who enlisted in January 1916, almost six months after his younger brother. He served with the 44th Battalion Australian Infantry, which arrived in the trenches in December 1916. The battalion saw extensive service in the Ypres sector where it's reported that only 158 men out of the whole battalion were unwounded by the time it went into rest on 21 October. Bone had been killed on the 4th. (NB The War Graves Commission gives the date of death as 5 October but all the witnesses say it was the 4th.)
As usual the Red Cross reports vary but it seems that during the battle of Broodseinde his spine was pierced by a very small piece of shrapnel that otherwise scarcely damaged him. He died almost instantly and was buried the next day.
Bone's brother, Cecil, died on 25 April 1918 of cerebro-spinal meningitis "due to exposure while on military duty". And what happened to Effie and little Marjorie? History does not relate.


WHEN DAYS ARE DARK
AND FRIENDS ARE FEW
MY DARLING SON
I LONG FOR YOU

PRIVATE ANDREW MCARTHUR


This may be a very conventional memorial inscription, and it is, but it can still jolt the heart. Andrew McArthur emigrated to Australia when he was 18 leaving his widowed mother in Scotland. The very next year war broke out and he volunteered virtually immediately, a fact that is recorded in his service number - 39. It was 24 August 1914. He joined the 8th Battalion Australian Infantry and embarked with it from Australia on 19 October to serve in Egypt, defending the Suez Canal from the Turks.
On 25 April 1915 the 8th Battalion landed on Gallipoli, at Anzac Cove. It remained on Gallipoli until the evacuation in December when it returned to Egypt. Here the Battalion was divided to provide battle hardened soldiers for the newly formed 60th Battalion along with fresh recruits from Australia. McArthur joined the 60th.
In March the Battalion was sent to France and on 19 July went into its first action at Fromelles with disastrous consequences - 780 casualties out of a battalion of 887 men. McArthur must have been one of the survivors - because he was killed fifteen days later.


FOR AUSTRALIA
AND THE BRITISH FLAG
"FOR THEY KNOW NOT
WHAT THEY DO"

PRIVATE JOHN THOMAS STEPHENS


This is a complicated inscription which mixes the conventional with the critical. Two of Mr and Mrs Stephens' sons were killed in the war - within thirteen days of each other. 'Tom' on 7 August and George on the 20th. George has no grave and no inscription - he is commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial - so this inscription must stand for both of them.
'For Australia' is a conventional cause, so too is 'the British flag', the Union Jack, which featured on recruitment posters as the symbol of the British Empire of which Australia was then a proud part. But what about, "For they know not what they do"?
This is a quotation from Luke 23:33-4:

And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

Who didn't know what they were doing? Mr Stephens doesn't specify. Was it his sons, or those who fought for the British flag - or Australia? Or was it the whole of mankind who were defying Christ's commandment "that ye love one another as I have loved you".


NOW GOD BE THANKED
WHO HAS MATCH'D HIM
WITH HIS HOUR

SECOND LIEUTENANT DENYS EDWARD GREENHOW


The poem from which this inscription comes was once extremely popular and the sentiment it expresses once caught the spirit of the age. It has now gone completely out of fashion and today the poem is much more likely to be derided than admired. The inscription is a slight modification of the opening line of Rupert Brooke's sonnet, 'Peace', one of the poems in his sensationally popular '1914 and Other Poems', which included 'The Soldier', with its immortal lines:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever, England.

The opening lines of 'Peace' read:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

Greenhow's mother (his father had died in 1913) says 'match'd him' rather than 'matched us', but this scarcely affects the sense. God is to be thanked for having sent the youth of the day, or more particularly Denys Greenhow, the opportunity to match his skills and abilities with a great cause, the chance to rise above a world grown 'old and cold and weary,' and the opportunity to demonstrate the nobility of which he was capable.
For all that it is derided today as ridiculous and naive - how on earth could anyone have thought that going to war was in any way like a swimmer 'into cleanness leaping' (line 4) - the poem did express what many people thought. And not just early in 1915 when it was first published and the war was in its infancy, it still resonated with people in 1919 when the war was over and the next-of-kin were being asked to chose their inscriptions despite all that had happened.
Denys Greenhow was an observer in the Royal Flying Corps. He left school, Lancing College, in December 1915, was commissioned into the RFC in July 1916 and promoted Flying Officer in January 1917. On 6 March 1917, he and his pilot were returning to base with engine trouble when they were attacked by five enemy planes. Greenhow was shot and fatally injured, dying soon after the pilot managed to bring the plane down. Many good things were said about men in the letters of condolence their senior officers wrote to their families; Greenhow's Flight Commander wrote this in his diary, which gives it an extra impact:

In Greenhow we have lost one of our best and cleverest observers, one of the cleverest I have ever known.


MAN IS FOREVER

CAPTAIN CHARLES KENNETH MCKERROW


This seemed such a strange inscription, even after I discovered that it was a quotation from Robert Browning's poem 'A Grammarian's Funeral' it still made little sense:

Others mistrust and say, "But time escapes:
Live now or never!"
He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has forever."

The capital letter for 'Now' gives a little hint: leave 'now' i.e. the present, to dogs and apes, man has forever to fulfil his destiny. It's an idea that appeared in more than one of Browning's poems:

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?
('Andrea del Sarto')

And in 'Rabbi Ben Ezra':

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:

Matron Jessie Jaggard's husband used an extract from this last quotation for the inscription on her headstone in Gallipoli. Charles McKerrow's widow was therfore not the only relation to find comfort in the idea that regardless of our fate on earth, mankind has an immortal destiny that will be found in the world to come.
McKerrow was a GP in Ayrshire, with a First Class degree from Cambridge, before he took a commission in the RAMC in June 1915 and, attached to the 10th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers, crossed with them to France in August 1915. In January 1915 he had married Jean Craik and that November they had a son. His letters in December 1916 look forward to the leave he was hoping to get in late January 1917. But on 21 December Mrs McKerrow received a telegram telling her that her husband had been dangerously wounded in the abdomen by a shell. In fact he was already dead.
The Imperial War Museum has a large collection of McKerrow's papers covering the period from August 1915 to his death in December 1916. Dr Emily Mayhew has used them to write about McKerrow in this blog post for the Surgeon's Hall Museum, and in her book 'Wounded: the long journey home from the Great War'2014.


THOU LORD, THEIR CAPTAIN
IN THE WELL FOUGHT FIGHT
HALLELUJAH

LIEUTENANT FREDERICK GUNDY SCOTT


There are so many lines from this hymn that can be and have been used as inscriptions. The hymn, 'For all the saints who from their labours rest', is both rousing and consoling in its promise that Christ is with us and that at the end of our lives we shall live with him in glory. With its martial imagery and language it is particularly consoling for the relations of those who have been killed in battle. Frederick Scott's inscription comes from verse two:

Thou wast their rock, their fortress and their might:
Thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight;
Thou in the darkness drear their one true light.
Alleluia!

Scott was a student at Victoria College, Toronto when war broke out. He volunteered in the summer of 1915, was appointed to the 40th Battery Canadian Field Artillery and went overseas with them in February 1916. In July 1916 they were sent to the Western Front where they served first in the Ypres Salient and then on the Somme. In April 1917 the battery took part in the battle of Vimy Ridge. Scott was killed a few days later in the village of Vimy, hit by a shell when moving his guns to a new location.


HE WAS A MAN
TAKE HIM FOR ALL IN ALL
I SHALL NOT LOOK UPON
HIS LIKE AGAIN

CAPTAIN FRANK STEPHEN FORD


It has been very difficult to identify Frank Ford and I'm not sure that I have. This is a pity because he has a very beautiful inscription. It was chosen for him by 'Mrs Ford' and I'm definitely not sure who she was. The War Graves Commission says that his parents were William and Rebecca Ford 'of Birmingham'. I thought I may have found him in the 1871 census as a six-year-old boy born in Paddington and living with his widowed mother, Rebecca, who was 44. The records don't mention a wife so it could have been this Rebecca Ford who was the Mrs Ford who chose his inscription. However, in 1919 but she would have been over 90. This Frank Ford grew up to be a London warehouseman, which is another reason why he doesn't fit very well.
Another problem in identifying Frank Ford has been his age. If he was 47 when he died of pneumonia in 1918 then he was not six in 1871. Nor can he have been 26 in 1881 when a Frank Ford is listed as being a soldier in Canaley Barracks, Chorlton, Manchester. In 1891 there is a Frank Ford aged 26 who is a gunner in the Royal Marine Artillery in Eastney Barracks, Portsea. Then in 1901 there is a Sergeant Frank Ford, aged 31, serving in the R.M.L.I. in Gibralter. This could be our man but according to the census he was married, which the War Graves Commission doesn't mention. This Frank Ford would fit with our Ford holding the rank of Quartermaster Captain in 1918 as this is a rank traditionally held by someone commissioned from the ranks. Had he left the marines by 1914 or is he someone completely different altogether?
His beautiful inscription comes from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet and his friend Horatio are discussing Hamlet's dead father and Horatio says: 'He was a goodly king', to which Hamlet replies:

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.


NOW HEAVEN
IS BY THE YOUNG INVADED

SECOND LIEUTENANT JAMES EKIN


The idea that the dead are now happy, that they are better off where they are, and that in the case of the youthful dead, they will now be young forever, is a consistent theme in consolatory verse. This is exactly the idea behind 'Flower of Youth' a poem by Katherine Tynan (1861-1931) from which James Ekin's inscription is taken. However, Tynan takes it slightly further and like Mrs Schuyler van Rensselaer's poem, 'It Is Well With the Child?', she implies that God positively wants the companionship of these young men.

Lest Heaven be thronged with grey-beards hoary,
God, who made boys for His delight,
Stoops in a day of grief and glory
And calls them in, in from the night.
When they come trooping from the war
Our skies have many a new gold star.

The inscription comes from verse four:

Now Heaven is by the young invaded;
Their laughter's in the House of God.
Stainless and simple as He made it
God keeps the heart o' the boy unflawed.
The old wise Saints look on and smile,
They are so young and without guile.

But the real point of the poem is to reassure the bereaved:

Oh! if the sonless mothers, weeping,
And the widowed girls could look inside
The glory that hath them in keeping
Who went to the Great War, and died,
They would rise and put their mourning off,
And say: 'Thank God, he has enough!'

There was a huge crowd 'invading' heaven on the day James Ekin died: 19, 240 young British men alone. All killed on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme and among them James's elder brother Leslie who was twenty-two.
I looked up the Ekins in the 1911 census to see if there were any other children and was relieved to see that there were five of them. The youngest was only one, a boy Sidney, so he was totally safe from harm - except that he wasn't. He was killed in Tunisia on 21 January 1943 aged thirty-two whilst serving with the Second Battalion The London Irish Rifles.


THEY GAVE THEIR LIVES
THAT WE WHO LIVE
MAY REAP
A RICHER HARVEST

LIEUTENANT MURRAY STUART BENNING


Murray Stuart Bennings's inscription is taken from one specially written by the Revd T F Royds for the war dead. Royd's inscription was included in a selection published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1919 called 'Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials'. It reads:

Sons of this place, let this of you be said
That you who live are worthy of your dead.
These gave their lives that you who live may reap
A richer harvest, ere you fall asleep.

The purpose of the publication was to provide a selection of suitable extracts from the Bible and literature, Classical antiquity and the present in the hope that it would encourage war memorial committees and the bereaved to choose inscriptions of 'literary quality'.

Benning joined the army on leaving school, Uppingham, in 1912. Two years later, on the day after the declaration of war, he was promoted lieutenant, and ten days after this crossed to France with the Expeditionary Force. It was 15 August 1914. Attached to the 1st Battalion the East Surrey Regiment, he was involved in all the early fighting - the retreat from Mons and the battles of Le Cateau, the Marne and the Aisne. On 28 October 1914 the regiment took part in an attempted counter-attack at La Bassee, part of the First Battle of Ypres. Benning was wounded, perhaps in the vicious hand-to-hand fighting that developed. He died in hospital in Boulogne three days later, 1 November 1914.


HE DIED WITH HIS MEN
HE LIVES WITH THOSE
HE LEFT BEHIND

LIEUTENANT COLONEL HUMPHREY FRANCIS WILLIAM BIRCHAM, DSO


Lieutenant Colonel Bircham's widow chose his inscription, highlighting the fact that he, the officer commanding the Second Battalion the King's Royal Rifle Corps, had been with his men when he was killed during their attack on the German trenches near High Wood. As Dr Peter Hodgkinson remarks in 'British Infantry Battalion Commanders in the First World War' (2015), being with your men as they went into battle was a much respected - though very dangerous - activity for senior officers.
Bircham was thought by his men to be 'a great chap', accessible, thoughtful for their well-being and always prepared to be where there was danger. Although on 23 July his adjutant had protested that it was much too dangerous for him to be in the front line, Bircham was not to be dissuaded, 'You know very well ... where a Colonel of the Rifles should be on such occasions'. Unfortunately the adjutant was right. Bircham was hit by a shell and died later the same day. And the battalion attack failed in the face of a fierce German counter attack.
Bircham, an Old Etonian, was a regular soldier. He joined the army in 1896 and served during the South African War where he was seriously wounded and won the DSO. In 1908 he married Gladys Violet Willes but neither in the 1911 census nor in any of his obituaries are children mentioned. So, 'those he left behind' meant his wife, his father and mother, who died in 1922 and 1941 respectively and his three siblings. Gladys died in Cheltenham in 1963.


WHAT BETTER SACRIFICE

SAPPER JAMES BRADLEY


References to sacrifice in these inscriptions are usually references to the sacrifice of God's only son Jesus Christ who suffered death on the cross "for our redemption; who made there (by his one oblation of himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world" (The Prayer of Consecration from the service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer). To many relations their own sons had made a similar sacrifice to save their country.
However, I don't believe that this is the sacrifice referred to in Private Bradley's inscription. I think this sacrifice is that of 1 Samuel 15:22. Samuel rebukes Saul for not obeying "the voice of the Lord", for not destroying the spoils of war - the sheep and the oxen - but letting the people offer them up as sacrifices:
"Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice".
God asks for obedience, James Bradley obeyed the call of his country and died as a result, he was "obedient unto death" (Philippians 2:8) - "what better sacrifice".


THE REAPER CAME THAT DAY
AND TOOK THE FLOWER AWAY

LANCE CORPORAL WILLIAM EWART EATON


This inscription is an abbreviation of the last verse of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), 'The Reaper and the Flowers: a psalm of death'. Although the reaper is death this is not death the grim reaper: when he scythes the flowers, the children, that grow among the ripened grain he doesn't do it out of cruelty but because God wants them with him, to remind him of his time on earth when he too was just a child.

"They shall all bloom in fields of light,
Transplanted by my care,
And saints, upon their garments white,
These sacred blossoms wear."

And the mother gave, in tears and pain,
The flowers she most did love;
She knew she should find them all again
In the fields of light above.

Oh, not in cruelty, not in wrath,
The reaper came that day;
'T was an angel visited the green earth,
And took the flowers away.

The poem is headed by a line from 'They are all gone into the World of Light' by Henry Vaughan (1621-1695): "Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just".

In 1911 William Ewart Eaton was an apprentice joiner. He served with the 126th Field Company Royal Engineers, part of the 21st Division, and died in a base hospital in Etaples on 18 October 1917. It's not possible to tell when he was wounded but in the past month the Division had been involved in the battles of the Menin Road, 20-25 September; Polygon Wood, 26 September - 3 October; Broodseinde 4 October and Poelcappelle, 9 October.
Eaton's father, George Henry, signed for the inscription. There is no mention of the angel - and only one flower ... his son.


IN THE MIDST OF LIFE
WE ARE IN DEATH

LANCE SERJEANT JOSEPH BELL


The words of the Order for the Burial of the Dead from the Book of Common Prayer have brought comfort to mourners for centuries. This inscription comes from the prayer said by the priest at the graveside as the body is lowered into the ground.

Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the pains of eternal death. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.

The words express truths that were never more evident than on 1 July 1916 - that our lives are short, that we can be cut down like a flower at any time, and that whilst we live death surrounds us on all sides.
Joseph Bell was among almost 20,000 men killed along the Somme front on that one day. It's a distance of between fifteen and twenty miles depending on how many twists and turns of the front line you take into account. So that's a thousand bodies a mile, almost one every two yards. How on earth were they all buried?
Many bodies of course weren't buried, they just disappeared, pulverized by shells, trodden into the ground, lost for ever. Others were carried to prepared grave trenches just behind the lines. This is what happened to Joseph Bell. And, whilst the army made every attempt to bury soldiers with dignity, funeral services must have been pretty hurried and abbreviated in the days immediately following 1 July.
Joseph Bell's mother, Sarah, chose his inscription. Not only is it a form of momento mori - take care how you live as death is all around you - but, by referencing the words from this funeral prayer, Mrs Bell evokes its whole sentiment for her son: "O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the pains of eternal death ... and suffer us not, at our last hour ... to fall from thee".


IT IS WELL WITH THE LAD
MOTHER

PRIVATE FRANK SAXBY


I have come across this inscription twice and in the other example the words "the lad" are in inverted commas. The inscription carries an echo of Elisha's question to the Shunammite woman:

"Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well."
[2 Kings 4:26].

The Shunammite woman's son is dead but Elisha brings him back to life so I don't think this is the direct source of the inscription. However, it is quite possibly the indirect source.
There is a poem by the American author Mrs Schuyler Van Rensselaer (1851-1934) called 'It is Well With the Child'. First published in the magazine 'The Atlantic' it was reprinted in 1918 in 'Patriotic Pieces from the Great War'. The poem begins:

The word has come - On the field of battle dead.
Sorrow is mine but there is no more dread.
I am his mother. See, I do not say,
'I was'; he is, not was, my son. Today
He rests, is safe, is well; he is at ease
From pain, cold, thirst, and fever of disease,

Although "Sorrow is mine and streams of lonely tears", now that her son is dead the mother has nothing more to fear for him:

At eventide I may lay down my head,
Not wondering upon what dreadful bed
Perchance - nay, all but certainly - he lies;
And with the morn I may in turn arise,
Glad of the light, of sleep, of food, now he
Is where sweet waters and green meadows be
And golden apples. How it was he died
I know not, but my heart is satisfied:
Never again of all my days shall one
Bring anguish for the anguish of my son.

In its turn, Mrs Schuyler Van Rensselaer's poem quite possibly owed something to Christina Rossetti's 'Is It Well With the Child?'

Safe where I cannot die yet,
Safe where I hope to lie too,
Safe from the fume and the fret;
You, and you,
Whom I never forget.
Safe from the frost and snow,
Safe from the storm and the sun,
Safe where the seeds wait to grow
One by one,
And to come back in blow.

Except Mrs Saxby knew she could not look forward to being buried with her son.
In 1911, the fifteen-year-old Frank Saxby was a solicitor's clerk living at home in Wentbridge near Pontefract, Yorkshire, where his father was a coachman at one of the big houses. He served with the 15th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment and was killed on 20 August 1916 either in the heavy German bombardment of the Regiment's front line trenches or in the ensuing raid that evening. However, for his mother at least "There was no more dread".


SWEET JESUS HAVE MERCY
ON HIS SOUL

PETTY OFFICER PATRICK JOHN ARCHDEACON


Although I have no firm evidence for this, I would suggest that Patrick John Archdeacon was a Roman Catholic since this is a classic Roman Catholic inscription. Archdeacon died when his ship, HMS Black Prince, bombarded at close range by at least five German ships during the night of 31 May 1916, caught fire and sank off the coast of Jutland. As the circumstances of his death denied him the last rites - the necessary prayers and rituals that prepared a soul for death - Archdeacon's mother chose this formulaic prayer for her son's headstone in the hope that it would ease the progress of his soul through purgatory.
Archdeacon's is the only war grave in the churchyard in Stenbjerg, a remote community in Jutland on the west coast of Denmark. There is another member of the Black Prince crew buried at Skagen on the most northerly tip of Jutland, one in Kviberg, Sweden and two in Norway, one close to the Swedish border at Fredrikstad and one just to the west at Tonsberg.
Patrick John Archdeacon, born in Queenstown, County Cork, Ireland, joined the Royal Navy in 1900 whilst he was still 16. Aged 17 he was serving on the battleship HMS Majestic stationed at Gibralter and in 1911 was at HMS Fisgard, the naval training establishment at Portsmouth. He qualified as a petty officer in December 1911 and had been on the Black Prince since 4 April 1914.


ABIDE WITH ME

ACTING ENGINE ROOM ARTIFICER 4TH CLASS GEORGE DOIG CHALMERS


'Abide with me' are the opening words of the first verse, and the last words of every verse, of a hymn known by the same name. Written by Henry Francis Lyte in 1847, a large part of the hymn's great popularity is attributable to the tune, Eventide, written by William Henry Monk in 1861. Sung at funerals, military services, royal weddings and sporting events, it is one of the best-known hymns of all time.
The words, based around two passages from the bible, bring comfort to both the dying and to the bereaved. This is the first verse:

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.

It was apparently very popular during the First World War and it certainly featured in a set of Bamforth postcards showing a soldier praying in the trenches, kneeling by a battlefield grave, alone in No Man's Land and being held by a nurse whilst dying.

George Doig Chalmers was an engine fitter from the Govan shipyards on the River Clyde. He enlisted in the Royal Navy on 27 November 1915 and after a month's training on HMS Pembroke, the name of the naval training establishment at Chatham, he joined HMS Fortune on 27 December 1915. On the night of the 31 May/1 June 1916, during the Battle of Jutland, Fortune was hit in a firefight, caught fire and sank. There were eight survivors.
Over the next weeks a few bodies from the Battle of Jutland drifted ashore off the coasts of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. But only a very few, more than 6,000 British sailors died at Jutland, the bodies of fewer than 200 were recovered. Chalmers' body was one of those recovered and on 24 June he and another crew member, Arthur Stott, were buried in the town cemetery in Fredrikstad, Norway along with sixteen other British Jutland casualties, only seven of them identified - one from HMS Ardent, two from HMS Tipperary and two from HMS Queen Mary.


A GOOD LIFE BRAVELY ENDED

ABLE SEAMAN DOUGLAS ARTHUR LEE


Soon after 11.30 pm on the night of 31 May 1916, HMS Black Prince, which had become separated from the main British fleet, came into contact with the German battleship Thuringen. Thuringen fixed Black Prince in its searchlights and opened fire at close range. According to German records, up to five other German ships joined in, scoring twelve hits. Within fifteen minutes of first contact, Black Prince exploded and sank with the loss of the entire ship's company of 858 men.
Eighteen-year-old Lee's mother chose his inscription: "A good life bravely ended". Frankly it's too horrible to think of how Douglas Lee's life might have ended: isolated, fixed in the enemy's searchlights, fired on at close range, who knows whether he was killed outright or trapped below deck, wounded, burnt, suffocated or drowned in the open sea. Just because a ship explodes does not mean that all life is immediately extinguished, the suffering is terrible.
All we do know is that Lee's was one of the very few bodies from the Battle of Jutland to have been recovered and identified. He is buried in the Norwegian town of Tonsberg along with twenty-one other Jutland casualties, their bodies recovered by a Norwegian submarine commander. Three of the bodies came from HMS Black Prince, two from HMS Ardent, two from HMS Fortune and one from HMS Turbulent.
Douglas Arthur Lee was the child of both his parents' second marriages. His mother's first husband, Ernest William Rathke, had been a German waiter working in Harrogate, and in the 1911 census Lee's half-brother, William Ernest Rathke, entered his nationality as German.


FEAR GOD
HONOUR THE KING

COMMANDER LOFTUS WILLIAM JONES


I am cheating here because I have used this epitaph before as epitaph number 1 on the first day of the Centenary, 4 August 2014. The words come from Lord Kitchener's advice to British troops, which he issued on 9 August 1914 as British soldiers prepared to go to war. The message culminates with these words:

Do your duty bravely
Fear God
Honour the King

I am now on epitaph number 666 but Commander Jones' is the first naval epitaph I have included. This is not because few members of the Royal Navy were killed in the war but because so few of them have graves. If you take the Battle of Jutland, more than 6,000 British sailors lost their lives over the two days 31 May and 1 June 1916 yet only about 168 bodies were recovered of which around seventy-five were identifiable. It is estimated that 32,000 members of the Royal Navy lost their lives in the war. If the same ratio of deaths to buried bodies exists for the totality of naval deaths then there will only be about 900 naval graves.
Loftus William Jones won the Victoria Cross for his actions at Jutland. The commander of the 4th Destroyer Fleet, his task was to screen the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron, part of the Grand Fleet. Although his ship, HMS Shark, was disabled by German gunfire, Jones kept up the attack until eventually forced to order 'abandon ship'. Of a crew of ninety-two, there were only six survivors.
It is thought that the badly wounded Jones went down with his ship. Over four months later, on 23 October 1916, his body was washed up on an island off the west coast of Sweden at the mouth of the Gullman fjord. Buried here with some ceremony, his body was eventually exhumed on 7 October 1961 and reburied in Kviberg Cemetery on the outskirts of Gothenburg.


STEADFAST AND UNDAUNTED

GUNNER HARRY ALFRED HADLEY


Steadfast and undaunted, two wonderfully old fashioned words redolent of the Christian martyrs and heroes of the past who all faced unflinchingly the trails they knew were to come.
Harry Alfred Hadley came from St Vincent in the British West Indies where his father, Vincent Hadley, owned the Union Estate. He served with the 2nd Division Ammunition Column of the Canadian Field Artillery and was killed on 2 June 1916 when the War Diary simply notes:

Dickebusch June 22 Thursday Fine and Clear
Enemy fairly quiet on our front with a little shelling in back country.


FORGET ME NOT

PRIVATE FRANK BAKER


One of the most popular of all headstone inscriptions is the phrase "Not forgotten". I'm never quite sure whether it's meant to assure the dead man that he has not been forgotten or to tell passers-by that the man buried here has not been forgotten. But Frank Baker's inscription is different because it says "Forget me not", as though he himself is asking not to be forgotten. This could be its meaning but I think it's more likely that Ellen Baker, Frank's mother, was familiar with the Victorian language of flowers. Here a forget-me-not signifies undying love, and remembrance after death.
In Newfoundland, in the years after the First World War, people wore forget-me-nots on 1 July to commemorate Newfoundland soldiers killed in action on the first day of the Somme campaign. The custom gradually died out as people took to wearing poppies but there has been a popular move to revive the wearing of the flower on the anniversary of this day.
Frank, who in 1911 aged 15 was working in a steel works in Sheffield, was the eighth of Ellen Baker's eleven children to die. There are three columns in the 1911 census: Total Children Born Alive; Children Still Living and Children Who Have Died. In 1911 she wrote eleven, four and seven in the relevant columns.


FAREWELL MY DARLING SON
MY BEST BELOVED FAREWELL

PRIVATE ARNOLD ERNEST JONES


It was ten years before Arnold Jones' body was discovered and identified. Although he was known to have been killed between the 22nd and the 23rd September 1917, his grave was lost until it was discovered along with those of four other Australian soldiers on 24 February 1927.
His mother had instituted a Red Cross search and the files reveal that he was killed by a shell, wrapped in a ground sheet and buried on the spot. Although the grave was marked with a wooden cross, which had a tin can nailed to it with his name written inside the can, the grave was lost in the subsequent fighting.
Arnold Jones served under an alias: he called himself Arnold Ernest St Leon. The name St Leon was attached to one of Australia's famous circus families whose founder was John Jones. Arnold himself had been a tailor before he enlisted but I have a feeling that he could have been a member of the St Leon / Jones circus family.


A SON OF ULSTER
WHO DID HIS DUTY

SECOND LIEUTENANT EDWARD ALEXANDER MCCLATCHIE


The McClatchies lived in Portrush, County Antrim, where Edward's father was a National School teacher. Edward enlisted on 4 November 1915. This was before conscription was introduced in January 1916 but after the introduction of the National Registration Act in July 1915. Under this Act men were asked to 'attest', in other words to indicate by signing a form their willingness to serve when called upon to do so. It wasn't exactly compulsion but it was heavy pressure. Edward would have been the right age to have felt the need to attest. Was he 'called upon' in November 1915?
There's something about this inscription - "a son of Ulster who did his duty". It's very severe. But when you remember that Antrim was one of the Irish counties preparing armed resistance to Britain in the summer of 1914 because they felt betrayed by the British Government's preparations to introduce Home Rule for Ireland, then you can imagine that the residents of Antrim might have had mixed feelings about sending their sons to fight for Britain. Hence the emphasis on the fact that Edward McClatchie had been doing his duty. However, Edward McClatchie was a Protestant, the census says so, and as "a son of Ulster", loyal to the British Crown. There must have been many conflicted families in Ireland during the First World War - on both sides of the religious divide.


IN LOVING MEMORY
OF JIM & HIS FOUR BROTHERS
KILLED IN ACTION
UNITED IN DEATH

PRIVATE JAMES FRIEND SHAW


This is a terrible inscription, not only was twenty-year-old James Shaw killed in action but so were four of his brothers. However, what I find extraordinary is that there seems to be no information anywhere about this family tragedy. The Internet will tell you about the five Souls brothers and the five Beechey brothers but nothing about the five Shaw brothers.
From the censuses of 1901 and 1911, it appears that James was one of six brothers: Thomas, Henry, Edward, Jesse, John and James. Henry was killed on 15 September 1916, we know he's one of the brothers because he and James have the same parents according to the War Graves Commission records. There is a Jesse Shaw who was killed on 3 May 1915 serving with the Australian Infantry. There are no family details in his records but he seems to have been the only Jesse Shaw killed in the First World War and certainly an Australian website says he was Henry's brother. But who the other two brothers were - Thomas, Edward or John - it has not been possible to tell.
James, serving with the 20th Battalion the London Regiment, died of wounds received in action at Third Ypres. His father, Thomas Shaw, chose his inscription. His mother, Harriet, was alive in 1901 but dead in 1911 when father with Henry, Jesse, John and James were all boarders in a house at 50 St Donatt's Road, Lewisham.


ONE HEART AND ONE WAY
WITH CHRIST
WHICH IS FAR BETTER

CAPTAIN THOMAS LEWIS INGRAM


This inscription is a combination of two biblical quotations, one from the Old Testament and one from the New. "One heart and one way" comes from the Old Testament, Jeremiah 33:39. God says that He will gather all His people together from where in his anger and fury He has scattered them:

And I will bring them again unto this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely:
And they shall be my people, and I will be their God
And I will give them one heart, and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for the good of them, and of their children after them:
Jeremiah 33:37-39

If I have read the passage as Mrs Lilian Ingram, Captain Ingram's wife, has read it, the idea is that once the war is over, God will give all nations "one heart and one way" for them to follow for ever. "All nations" mind you, friend and foe: British, French, Russian, German, Turkish, Austrian, Italian et al, "for the good of them, and of their children after them".

For thus saith the Lord; Like as I have brought all this great evil upon this people, so will I bring upon them all the good things that I have promised them.
Jeremiah 33:42

Providing, presumably, they follow with one heart the one way God has given them.

The second quotation, "With Christ, which is far better", comes from Philippians 1:23.

For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labour: yet what I shall choose I wot not.
For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ: which is far better:
Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.
Philippians 1:21-24

It would have been much "more needful" for the men of his regiment, the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, if Dr Thomas Ingram had managed to "abide in the flesh" with them rather than to have been killed in action as he was - even if to be with Christ "is far better". Trained at the London Hospital, where the London Hospital Gazette has a full obituary, Ingram was a much decorated - DSO, MC and twice Mentioned in Despatches - and a much loved doctor. As one of the captains in the regiment wrote:

"If there was one, all of us who ever had the honour of knowing him would have given anything to see spared, it was our dear old doc."

But he wasn't spared. No one quite knows what happened but it was his colonel's opinion, based on a prisoner's evidence, that whilst he was looking for the wounded along the German wire he was taken prisoner, and when he tried to escape and he was shot.


THE LOVE
THAT MAKES UNDAUNTED
THE FINAL SACRIFICE

PRIVATE WILLIAM PEATTIE


I have to say that I admire Mrs Janet Peattie, Private Peattie's mother, she has not only chosen a beautiful inscription that is strangely uncommon, but in filling in the biographical information for the War Graves Commission she has managed to provide brief but pertinent information. Thanks to her we know that her son was an apprentice cabinet maker, that he enlisted on 1 June 1915, was wounded on 8 July 1917 and that therefore it took him ten days to die at a Casualty Clearing Station in Proven. Mendinghem, along with Bandagem and Dozinghem, were the popular names the soldiers gave to these hospitals
The inscription comes from the last line of the first verse of Sir Cecil Spring Rice's poem 'I Vow to Thee My Country'. Rice wrote the original poem in 1908 and called it 'Urbs Dei', the City of God. In 1918 he added a new first verse, the one Janet Peattie has quoted from. This replaced the old first verse and very movingly reflects the terrible sacrifice Britain has asked the nation, and especially its young men, to make. Set to music by Gustav Holst in 1921, and published in the hymn book 'Songs of Praise' in 1926, the hymn is now a firm favourite and for many years was a stalwart of Remembrance Day services. This link gives all three verses but Rice always intended the current first verse to replace the second verse that is shown in this link.
I said at the beginning that William Peattie's inscription was strangely uncommon, considering the poem's sentiments, and that it refers specifically to the war dead, I might have expected to have seen it more often, but I haven't. So this is something else I admire Mrs Peattie for. This is verse one:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.


A MERE BOY
BUT A GREAT SPORTSMAN

CORPORAL LEONARD EDWARD ROWE


We can know nothing about this young man - other than the fact that he was one of the 19,240 men killed in action on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme campaign - and that according to his mother whose chose his inscription, he was "a great sportsman". Rowe was the son of a Spanish General Produce Merchant who lived in Clapham. He served with the Second Battalion the London Regiment Royal Fusiliers whose task on the day was to divert the German artillery and their reserves from the main attack south of the Ancre. Unfortunately the Germans were expecting the British attack just where the Second Battalion were to create their diversion.


I HOPE TO SEE MY PILOT
FACE TO FACE
WHEN I HAVE CROSSED THE BAR

LANCE CORPORAL HORACE ALBERT MILLARD


This inscription comes from the last verse of one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's most popular poems: 'Crossing the Bar'. The whole poem is an extended metaphor for coming to the end of one's life, 'sunset and evening star', and dying, 'crossing the bar': the bar of sand that builds up at the mouth of a harbour and which could be said to separate the water of the harbour from that of the open sea. It really is a lovely image: death is equated with that moment when the incoming tide, which has come 'from out the boundless deep', stills for a moment before it begins to ebb, 'turns again home', carrying with it the dead person to meet 'his Pilot', Christ.

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

In 1911, seventeen-year-old Horace Albert Millard was a Civil Service boy clerk working for the Post Office. From his army number it appears he enlisted aound November 1915. He served with the 1st/5th London Regiment, the London Rifle Brigade, part of the 56th London Division, and died of wounds on 17 August 1917. The previous day the 56th London Division had taken part in the opening attack of the Battle of Langemarck. This turned out to be a very costly failure, which generated a legend that the British plans had been betrayed by a deserter. But it's more likely that the failure was due to the exceptionally soggy, rain-sodden ground, the German artillery and the existence of several undetected machine-gun pill boxes.


GOD'S FINGER TOUCHED HIM
AND HE SLEPT

LANCE CORPORAL JAMES ROSS


The poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) is a popular source for inscriptions and in particular 'In Memoriam A.H.H.', which is where this quotation comes from:

My blood an even tenor kept,
Till on mine ear this message falls,
That in Vienna's fatal walls
God's finger touched him, and he slept.
LXXXV : 5

Tennyson uses a particularly beautiful metaphor to describe the death of his twenty-two-year-old friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. And although Hallam's death - he died suddenly and unexpectedly in his sleep - can bear no relation to the way in which Lance Corporal Ross died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station in Flanders, it makes rather a beautiful inscription too.
James Ross enlisted in Ayr and joined the 12th Battalion Highland Light Infantry formed in Hamilton in September 1914. The Battalion became part of the 15th (Scottish) Division and served in France and Flanders from 10 July 1915. On 31 July 1917 it took part in the attack on Pilckem Ridge on the opening day of 3rd Ypres, Passchendaele. Ross could have been wounded then, or on 2 August when the 15th Division were subject to a fierce German counter-attack.


MY BELOVED HUSBAND
OUR DEAR SON
CHERISHED IN OUR HEARTS FOR EVER

LIEUTENANT ALEXANDER HENDERSON MILLER


I love the way that Lieutenant Miller's parents and his wife, Belle, have shared this inscription - my husband, our son. I've often wondered how it must have been for parents who had to yield their status as next-of-kin to a wife. And sometimes it will have been to a wife of only a few weeks standing. That's why I liked this inscription, which Alexander Miller's wife confirmed.
Alexander Henderson Miller was born in Keiss, Caithness, Scotland where his father, John, was a police constable. At some point after January 1911 the family emigrated to Australia. By the time he enlisted on 7 July 1915, Miller was a school teacher in Beechworth, Victoria.
He left Australia for France a year later, on 8 July 1916 and was killed in action at Polygon Wood on 25 September 1917. A single letter in the Australian Red Cross Wounded and missing files states what happened to him:

"I saw him cut in half by a big shell at Hooge Crater, Ypres on the 25th Sept. He died instantaneously, - no agony whatsoever. He just cried out a couple of times and finished"
Pte W.H. Barkiville 2866
57th Australians, C Co. 12th Pltn


"SPES TUTISSIMA CAELIS"

GUNNER MAURICE DUNCAN BENJAMIN


The word is spelt 'caelis' in the War Grave Commission's records whereas some people would spell it 'coelis' but the meaning is the same - heaven - the surest hope is in heaven. I can't work out the significance of the quotation marks though. The phrase is the motto of some armigerous British families, but I haven't been able to discover a link between the Benjamins and these families.
Maurice Benjamin was killed at Passchendaele on 26 August 1917. In 1921 the bodies of five unidentified soldiers wearing Australian uniforms and boots were discovered at map reference 28.I.29.b.20.25. The Commission's records note:

"These five Australian soldiers' remains were properly buried in blankets and the graves equally spaced and probably all Artillery men as all were dressed like cavalry men."

It's the first time I've noticed this comment, that the bodies were "properly buried", and that this meant wrapped in blankets and equally spaced out. And it turns out that they were all Artillery men, all Gunners from the same Battery and in all probability from the same gun. All killed together and buried together by people who did it properly - even though the graves were not initially found and recorded by a Graves Registration Unit - and all subsequently identified.
Despite the fact that all five men were missing presumed killed in action none of their families instituted a Red Cross Enquiry. In fact, there is a Red Cross file in Maurice Benjamin's name in which there is a copy of a letter dated "September 17th 1917", to "The Manager, Bank of Queensland, 4 Queen Victoria Street, E.C", following up "our telephone conversation this morning", which says:

"We understand that you do not wish us to make inquiries for details of his death and burial."

Maurice Benjamin worked as a teller for the Bank of Queensland in Sydney before he joined up in October 1916. He left Australia in February 1917. It was 1930 before his mother filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia and this is something else I've never noticed before,the stamp on the front of the document, which indicates the length of time that it took for these records to be compiled. In Gunner Benjamin's case:

Next-of-kin communicated with for records and relics
Letter no. 12/11 3890
Date 6 Aug 1930


JAMAS TE OLVIDAREMOS

SECOND LIEUTENANT C.H. COOKE


C.H. Cooke, whose Christian names I have not been able to discover, was the son of an Irish-born merchant trading in Chile and married to a Chilean wife. That's why his inscription is in Spanish. It means, 'you will never be forgotten'.
Cooke was seventeen when the war broke out. He immediately left Chile to volunteer for King Edward's Horse, the Imperial Yeomanry Regiment, which was gathering in London. Cooke was one of the many children of ex-patriate families living in Latin America who volunteered to fight in the war, for both the Entente and the Central Powers.
At some point he transferred to the Rifle Brigade, serving with the 2nd Battalion part of the 8th Division. On 20 September 1917 the Battalion took part in the 5th Army's successful attack on the Menin Road. Cooke was killed on the 21st in the German's fierce counter-attack.


NOTHING IN MY HAND I BRING
SIMPLY TO THE CROSS I CLING

PRIVATE FRANK CULLEN


Yesterday's inscription quoted from the first line of the first verse of the hymn 'Rock of Ages', today's quotes the first two lines of the second verse:

Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Saviour, or I die!

Twenty-one-year-old Frank Cullen was a butcher from Mallala a small community 58 kilometres north of Adelaide where the war memorial commemorates ten men "who died in defence of home and liberty". Cullen enlisted on 9 September 1916, embarked from Australia on 6 November 1916 and was killed in action on Christmas Day 1917.


ROCK OF AGES CLEFT FOR ME

PRIVATE JOSEPH PERCY COOPER


Of all the hymns quoted in inscriptions this is one of the most popular:

Rock of ages cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

It was a favourite nineteenth century hymn appearing in virtually every Protestant hymnal - of which there were fifty-two. And it was a favourite funeral hymn, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband even asked for it to be played to him as he lay on his deathbed. Christ is the Rock of Ages, from whose side the water and blood flowed at his crucifixion, the event which guaranteed man's salvation.

Private Cooper was initially listed as missing. His parents instituted an Australian Red Cross Enquiry from which it was possible to piece together what happened to him:

"Informant states that the 26th A.I.F. were going into the line at Zonnebeke at about 8 pm on Oct/4th/17 when Cooper was struck by a shell and killed instantly a piece of shell went right through his lungs."
Private V.H. Lusk
"I saw him killed on the tape just as we left the duck boards to go over at Zonnebeke on the 4th October about 4.30 am. A whizz-bang killed him and Whipler and wounded several."
Private J.S. Locke
"I saw him killed at Ypres. He was caught by a shell fragment in the chest and killed instantly."
T.S. Burns
"I buried my comrade 400 yards from Zonnebeke Church as near as possible. ... The said soldier was a dear friend of mine and ... I would like his parents to know his comrades buried him decently."
Private G. Graham


WHAT I ASPIRED TO BE
AND WAS NOT, COMFORTS ME

MATRON JESSIE BROWN JAGGARD


This is yet another of those famous quotations that I, and I suspect many other twenty-first-century readers, have never heard of. It comes from the seventh stanza of Robert Browning's thirty-two-stanza poem, 'Rabbi Ben Ezra'. To Browning, death brings the soul's release into the next stage of its journey so we should not concern ourselves too much with what happens to us in this life. Whatever happens is the will of God and he has his reasons. We are not animals so we will have doubts and uncertainties and failures; if our ambitions were so limited that we achieved them all then we would be like animals.

For thence, - a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks, -
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

Jessie Brown Jaggard died of dysentery on Lemnos barely a month after she had arrived on the island. Dysentery and typhoid were rife among the soldiers on Gallipoli and conditions in the hastily erected hospitals on Lemnos were very difficult - initially no sanitary provision, precarious and inadequate water supply, scarcity of food and the ever present heat, dust and flies - that disease spread among the medical staff too.
Born in Nova Scotia, Jessie Jaggard was a trained nurse, who gave up her career when she married. However, soon after the outbreak of war, she volunteered to join the nursing services - despite the fact that she was married, had a seventeen-year-old son and lived in the United States. She sailed for England in May 1915. On 1 August, she was despatched to Lemnos to set up the 3rd Canadian Stationary Hospital, . The blog Remembering First World War Nurses has more details about her life and death.
Her inscription was chosen by her husband, Herbert Armstrong Jaggard, a director of the Pennsylvania Railway Company.


THERE SHALL BE
NO LIGHT THERE

SECOND LIEUTENANT CHARLES LE GALLAIS EDGAR


Charles Edgar's inscription comes from the Book of Revelation and what sounds like a statement of despair turns out to be a message of hope and comfort for, in the new heaven and the new earth that is being revealed:

... the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.
And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring it their glory and honour into it.
And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there.
Revelation 21: vv 23-5

And then again in the next chapter, the very last chapter in the Bible:

And there shall be no light there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.
Revelation 22:5

Charles Edgar served in the Newfoundland Regiment, which means that his digitised records are available online and produce a mass of what would be otherwise undiscoverable material. The records reveal that Edgar was one of the original 500 Newfoundlanders to enlist, that he served in Gallipoli where he was wounded at the end of December 1915 - "Gunshot wound neck slight" and that having enlisted as a private he was commissioned on 5 June 1916, a week before he received the following telegram from Newfoundland:

Mother seriously ill, incurable; very anxious to see you. Do all you possibly can get home at once for couple of months. Mildred Edgar

The telegram was dated 12 June and on 1 July the Newfoundland Regiment was to take part in the great allied attack on the Somme. By some miracle Edgar was one of the very few survivors of the attack which saw a regiment of 780 officers and men go into action at 8.40 on the morning of the 1st of which a total of sixty-eight were available to answer their names at roll call the next day. The regiment were back in action on 14 July but by then Edgar was on his way back to Newfoundland where he had been given twenty-eight days leave.
He returned to the Front in September 1916 and was killed in action on 26 February 1917, the regimental chaplain telling his family that:

He was with a working party going towards the front line when a shell exploded, mortally wounding him. He died a few minutes afterwards having wished his men 'good-bye'.


THE SWEETEST THOUGHTS
IN LIFE ARE MEMORIES
OF DAYS THAT HAVE BEEN

PRIVATE HARRY WRIGHT


Harry Wright was a regular soldier serving with the 2nd Battalion The Queen's Roal West Surrey Regiment. On the morning of 1 August 1914 the Battalion were taking part in manoeuvres in the South African veldt 110 miles from Pretoria when they were suddenly returned to camp and told to await further orders. News had reached them that France and Germany were about to go to war and they were to return to England immediately. On 27 August they set sail from Cape Town, reached England on 19 September and went into camp at Lyndhurst. Two weeks later they embarked from Southampton for Zeebrugge. They were being rushed over to help the Belgians defend Antwerp and to stem the German's race to the sea. Events overtook them and they spent the next three weeks marching, skirmishing, digging trenches and fighting. On 29 October they were ordered to hold the road from Gheluvelt to Kruiseecke and lost twelve men killed, sixty wounded and twenty missing in capturing a number of farms east of this road. The next day, the 30th, the Battalion came under very heavy shell and machine-gun fire. This was the day Harry Wright died of wounds but we don't know on which day he received them.
Harry's mother, Annie Wright, chose his inscription, encapsulating in a few a wistful words her regret for "the days that have been" .


HIS LAURELS WON

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN SCOTT BELL


In Classical Greece the winners of athletic and poetry competitions were awarded a crown of laurel leaves. The Romans awarded them to those who won military victories. Laurel wreaths thus became a symbol of victory transmuting through the Christian era into a symbol of martial, sacrificial service.
This is how John Scott Bell won his laurels. A mechanical engineer who had studied engineering at Leeds University, he attested in May 1915 and originally joined the ranks. He was commissioned in 1917 and killed at Pilckem Ridge at the opening at the Third Battle of Ypres - Passchendaele.
John Scott Bell's eldest sister Catherine chose his inscription, his parents were both dead. For all the Classical association of laurel leaves, I can't help feeling that she might have been influenced by one of Sir Frank Dicksee's deeply romantic paintings, Victory, a Knight being Crowned with a Laurel Wreath, that and the fact that when the family were growing up they lived at 12 Laurel Terrace, Armley, Leeds.


ALL YOU HAD HOPED FOR
ALL YOU HAD YOU GAVE

LIEUTENANT WILFRED EVELYN LITTLEBOY


On their own, extracted from the rest of the poem, these are very bleak lines. Within the context of the rest of the poem the words carry a certain nobility, but not on their own:

Proudly you gathered, rank on rank to war
As who had heard God's message from afar;
All you had hoped for, all you had you gave,
To save mankind - yourselves you scorned to save.

This is verse two of Sir John Arkwright's famous poem 'O Valiant Hearts', which, set to music by Gustav Holst, was for many years a staple of Remembrance Day services. It assures the dead that with their "knightly virtue proved", their memory will be "hallowed in the land you loved", since they too have drunk Christ's "cup of sacrifice".
But Wilfred Littleboy's parents chose none of these comforting lines for their younger son who had left school in December 1914 - two terms early - in order to volunteer. Prevented by a knee injury from getting to the front until July 1917, he lasted three months before he was killed in an attack on Polderhoek Chateau near Gheluvelt.
Littleboy's father, Charles, was a wealthy ship builder in the North East of England. After Wilfred's death, the family gave land in Thornaby-on-Tees for the creation of a public park in their son's memory; set up a bursary fund at Rugby School where he had been educated, and gave money to a church near Polderhoek Chateau where the priest had helped Mrs Littleboy find her son's grave.


IN MEMORY
OF THE DEARLY LOVED SON
OF J.H. PHILLIPS OF BRISBANE

PRIVATE ROBERT SIDNEY PHILLIPS


Soren Hawkes drew my attention to Private Phillips on her Twitter account, @sorenstudio. She published this document from Phillips' Australian Red Cross and Wounded Enquiry Bureau file:

Phillips R.S. 3098
Killed Sep. 25th 1917
Was in C. Coy., Lewis Machine Gunner. He was badly wounded in the legs and body during the hop over at Ypres. I saw him immediately after he was hit, his right leg was practically off. He later drew his revolver and blew his brains out. I did not see this happen. I don't know where he was buried.
Witness: - Sgt. W.S. Ward 1884, 49th Battn

Yet again I wonder how much information discovered by the Red Cross was passed on to the next-of-kin. Six months later another witness reported that he too had been told that Phillips had shot himself and the following month, April 1918 another witness gave a more graphic description:

I saw him after he was killed on September 25th at Passchendaele; he had been blown out of a shell hole and twisted like a cork screw. He crawled back into a shell hole and blew his head off with a rifle.

Rifle is probably more likely than revolver as only officers carried revolvers but whatever the weapon it appears that Phillips did kill himself. I wonder if his father knew. I rather hope not as Robert Phillips was a Roman Catholic, he said so on his attestation form, and to a Roman Catholic suicide is a mortal sin.


SHOULD I FALL, GRIEVE NOT
I SHALL BE ONE WITH THE SUN
WIND AND FLOWERS

HENRY JAMES BEZER


This poetic inscription was written by Leslie Coulson in one of his last letters to his parents before he was killed in action on 8 October 1916:

"If I should fall, do not grieve for me. I shall be one with the wind and the sun and the flowers."

The letter is quoted in the introduction to the book of Coulson's poetry that his father published in 1917, 'From an Outpost and Other Poems'. The book sold very well, which must be how Henry Bezer's father came across the words. It's interesting that Coulson's father didn't use it as his son's inscription, or in fact any of his son's poetry, but instead chose to quote from the opening lines of John Milton's 'Samson Agonistes'.
Henry Bezer was killed by shell-fire on 22 August 1918 as the Australians slowly but surely advanced into previously German-held territory. A fellow soldier told the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau what happened:

"Informant states that they both belonged to the 107th Howitzer Battery. On 22/8/18 the Battery was in action at a place called by the boys 'Happy Valley' not far away from Bray. About half past 4 or 5 am just after the action started Bezer was killed outright by a shell, while he and Informant were working the gun to which they both belonged. Informant was right alongside him at the time and yet was not touched."

These photographs, from the Australian War Memorial Collection, show the 7th Brigade Australian Field Artillery in action on the day Bezer was killed.


INSTEAD OF LAMENTATION
THEY HAVE REMEMBRANCE

LIEUTENANT W.H. WILLIAMS


There are nine British soldiers buried in Jemappes Communal Cemetery, two from the first two months of the war and seven from the last two days. Jemappes is a few miles west of Mons - the war had come full circle.
Unfortunately I can tell you nothing about Lieutenant Williams - not his Christian names, nor his age, nor even the name of his next-of-kin; the War Graves Commission does not have a record of them. There is just the name and address, Mrs Williams, 8 Repton Avenue, Gidea Park, Romford, Kent under the form recording his inscription - his wife or his mother?
Williams' inscription is a direct translation of a lyric fragment by Simonides honouring the Greeks who died at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC:

"Of those who died at Thermopylae their fortune is glorious, and their fate lovely; their tomb is an altar, in place of lamentation there is remembrance, and pity becomes praise."

This Simonides' fragment is better known in the translation by Arthur Burrell, which was published in 'At the Front: A Pocket Book of Verse' (1915). The last three lines are more usually used as a dedication on a war memorial than as a headstone inscription:

Of them that died at Thermopylae
Glorious was the fortune: fair is the fate.
For a tomb they have an altar,
For lamentation, memory,
And for pity, praise.


WE THINK OF YOU IN SILENCE
NO EYES MAY SEE US WEEP

RIFLEMAN JOSEPH CHAMBERS


This is the kind of sentimental inscription that Sir Frederick Kenyon was probably trying to avoid when he initially announced that the War Graves Commission would reserve the right to censor inscriptions since, in his mind, it was "clearly undesirable to allow free scope for the effusions of the mortuary mason, the sentimental versifier, or the crank". This is definitely the work of a 'sentimental versifier' and regularly appeared in the 'In Memoriam' columns of local newspapers, not just in relation to war-related deaths either.
There were two versions:

We think of you in silence,
No eyes may see us weep;
But treasured in our aching hearts
Your memory still we keep.

This second version is extracted from a longer verse:

We think of you in silence,
No eyes may see us weep,
But many silent tears are shed
When others are asleep.

It was Joseph Chambers' father who confirmed the inscription. From the details on the 1911 Irish Census form we know that his mother could read but not write - and that she'd had six children two of whom had died. Chambers, a farm servant in Derryaghy, County Antrim, served with the 1st Battalion the Royal Irish Rifles and died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Bailleul two days before Christmas 1916.


TO OUR PRECIOUS SON
SO LOVED AND LONGED FOR
"UNTIL HE COME"

PRIVATE PENRYN STANLEY CHURCHILL


Penryn Churchill was his parents youngest son; there were almost ten years between him and his next brother, Herbert. A Chartered Accountant's Clerk working in London, he enlisted in November 1915 and after training embarked for France in October 1916.
On the morning of 15 March 1917, Colonel Ward of the 2nd Battalion Honourable Artillery Company, in which Churchill was serving, received orders to send out two patrols towards the village of Bucquoy. Ward was furious, those on the ground could all see that the Germans were present in great strength but Brigade H.Q. was insistent. Sent out at 2 pm that afternoon, the patrols met the expected devastating fire and lost heavily.
The Regimental History remarks that, "It is difficult to speak too highly of the gallantry and dash with which 'A' and 'B' Companies advanced, though it seemed to everyone that men were being thrown away on a very hopeless undertaking". But, although the Brigadier had protested strongly, and his protest had been backed by the Divisional Commander, Fifth Corps' reply had been that Army Headquarters insisted on the attacks being carried out "though those in authority could not have appreciated the practical difficulties of the situation". This appears to be a classic case of "those in authority" versus "those on the ground".
Churchill's inscription finishes with the words, "Until he come". This is not "Till he come" in which case it would have been a quote from 1 Corinthians 11:26 in which Christ tells his disciples that the bread of the Last Supper is to represent his body, and the wine his blood and that they are to eat and drink it in remembrance of him:

For as oft as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come.

However, the words are "Until He come" and quote a hymn by George Rawson (1807-1889) based on the same biblical episode where they are the last words of five of the six verses. Christians are to eat and drink Christ's body and blood to sustain them through their lives until "the trump of God be heard", when the dead shall be raised up.

O blessed hope! with this elate
Let not our hearts be desolate,
But strong in faith, in patience wait
Until He come.


WE FEEBLY STRUGGLE
THEY IN GLORY SHINE

PRIVATE WALTER BERRY


This inscription comes from the fourth verse of the hymn, 'For all the saints, who from their labours rest'. Written by the Bishop of Wakefield, William Walsham Howe (1823-1897), the hymn has a particularly martial tone but the rousing words and the Ralph Vaughn Williams' tune to which it is usually sung gives it a memorably haunting quality.
The saints rest from their labours on earth where Christ was "their Captain in the well fought fight". May we be as soldiers - "faithful, true and bold", and "fight as the saints who nobly fought of old", and win as they did, "the victor's crown of gold".

O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong
Alleluia, Alleluia!

The golden evening brightens in the west;
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest;
Sweet is the calm of paradise the blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

It's a hymn of hope: the hope that when we have finished feebly struggling we shall live with Christ in Glory.

Walter Berry was an iron founder from Huddersfield in Yorkshire. He served with the 7th Battalion Yorks and Lancaster Regiment, a New Army battalion, that crossed to France in July 1915 and was engaged on the Western Front from then onwards.


NOW THE DAY IS OVER

PRIVATE JOSEPH BELL


Private Bell's mother chose his inscription. It's the first line of a popular evening hymn usually sung by children:

Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh,
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky.

Twenty-one-year old Joseph Bell was killed in action on 30 December 1916 and buried in Priez Farm Cemetery, Combles. As the war progressed several of the graves in this cemetery were destroyed and lost in the subsequent fighting. Bell's was one such grave. He now has a 'special memorial' in a memorial plot in Guards' Cemetery, Combles. The memorial plaque reads:

To the memory of these 29 British soldiers, killed in action in 1916, 1917 and 1918 and buried at the time in Priez Farm Cemetery, Combles, whose graves were destroyed in later battles. "Their glory shall not be blotted out."

The quotation in the final line comes from Ecclesiasticus 44:13 and was chosen by Rudyard Kipling for the special memorial headstones that commemorate soldiers whose graves were destroyed subsequent to their known burial.


THE DAY THOU GAVEST
LORD IS ENDED

PRIVATE HERBERT HORACE ATTEWELL


Private Attewell's wife Elizabeth chose his inscription; it comes from the first line of a very popular evening hymn, which is still one of the most popular of all hymns today:

The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,
The darkness falls at Thy behest;
To Thee our morning hymns ascended,
Thy praise shall hallow now our rest.

Attewell, a plasterer, was born in England, as was his wife. They married in England in 1904 but by the time their son Wilfred Cecil was born in 1913 they were living in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Attewell volunteered in Ontario in September 1915, served with the 52nd Battalion Canadian Infantry and died of wounds at a field ambulance dressing station on 9 July 1916.


HERE IS ONE AT REST
WHO LOVED HIS HOME WORLD BEST

CHARLES EDWARD BLACKBOURN


There is no recorded next-of-kin for Private Blackbourn in the War Graves Register but his father filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia so perhaps he chose his inscription too. Interestingly, the inscription doesn't say that Charles Blackbourn sacrificed himself for love of his 'home world' but that 'he loved his home world best' - better than what?
Blackbourn was a volunteer not an unwilling recruit. There was no conscription in Australia. In October 1916, as the tide of willing volunteers dried up, the Government held a referendum to find out whether the public would support its proposals for conscription. The public's answer was 'no'. And it was a bigger 'no' when the Government held a second referendum on the issue in December 1917.
But Blackbourn had volunteered long before this, despite the fact that he 'loved his home world best'. Perhaps his family wanted to emphasise on his headstone that here was no gung-ho soldier but a home-loving boy who did what he saw was his duty and as a consequence died of wounds at a field ambulance dressing station far away in Brandhoek, Belgium.


PLUTOT MOURIR QUE SALIR

LANCE CORPORAL DOUGLAS BRAUND KENT


The sense of this inscription must be 'rather death than dishonour' although the word 'salir' means smear, tarnish or stain not dishonour. The French themselves would write, 'plutot la mort que le deshonneur' (the database won't take the accents).
Lance-Corporal Kent's wife, Dorothy, chose his inscription; the wife who had tried to divorce him in October 1908, four years after they were married, but whose petition had been struck out in October 1909. I can't tell what happened after that: there is no sign of either Douglas or Dorothy in the 1911 census, but their three-year-old daughter, also Dorothy, was living with her grandmother.
Douglas Kent, a First Class Clerk in the Estate Duty Office at Somerset House, served with the 15th Battalion the London Regiment, the Prince of Wales' Own Civil Service Rifles. His army number indicates that he volunteered in September 1914. He died of wounds a year later when the regiment were taking part in support duties in preparation for the Battle of Loos.


HIS LAST WORDS AT HOME
GOD BE WITH YOU
TILL WE MEET AGAIN

GUARDSMAN HENRY YOUNG


As he left home, Guardsman Young quoted from a Methodist hymn of which 'God be with you till we meet again' is both the first and the last line of every verse, and the last line of the chorus too.
The hymn asks God to guide, uphold and 'securely fold you', 'put his arms unfailing round you', 'keep love's banner floating o'er you' and 'smite death's threatening wave before you'.
What is rather strange is that for Henry Young, in the section where the next of kin are usually named, it says 'Father of Ronald Young, of Glyn Neath, Glamorgan'. In the 1911 census, Henry, then a worker in a gunpowder factory, had been married for less than a year to 'Kate Young' and they had no children, so Ronald Young was less than four when he lost his father. Henry Young's inscription was chosen by Mrs H. Morgan; was this the former Mrs Young, the mother of Ronald?


HIS CAPTAIN SAID
"NO BRAVER SOLDIER EVER LED
MEN INTO BATTLE

LIEUTENANT ERIC STARMAGE HAMILTON LANE


Eric Lane was born in Nova Scotia and was working for the Bank of Montreal when the war broke out. He volunteered in November 1915 and initially served in Canada,where he was put to guarding munitions. In May 1917 he crossed the Atlantic and in February 1918 he joined the Canadian 85th Battalion, the Nova Scotia Highlanders, in France.
An obituary on the Bank of Montreal's memorial website, which will have been provided by his family, states that at the time of his death he was Second-in-Command of 'D' Company. The obituary tells us that:

"During the Canadian attack which broke the Drocourt-Queant line in front of Arras on September 2nd 1918, he was killed while leading his men through enemy wire, in the face of intense machine-gun fire from a strong enemy outpost."

Eric Lane's father chose confirmed his inscription, which must come from a letter from his Company Commander. It proves yet again the value family's placed on these letters of condolence.


"EVERYBUDDY'S BUDDY"

PRIVATE P.F. HISLOP


The quotation marks are definitely there but what are the words a quotation from? Perhaps this is just what everyone said about Private Hislop, whose Christian names I haven't been able to discover. However, there's just a chance that they are a quote from a popular song.
It took years for the War Graves Commission to complete these cemeteries and one of the wonderful thing about their records is that all amendments and alterations show on the original document - unlike today when an amendment to a Word document overwrites what was there before. There are numerous dated amendments to the Railway Cutting Cemetery report forms, the latest being 6 May 1925. This would mean that there was plenty of time for Hislop's next-of-kin, Mr D. Hislop - who was not his father - to quote from a song written in 1920. The song is called 'Everybody's buddy'. It may not be exactly 'everybuddy's buddy' but it's close, and the lyrics are very appropriate. This is an extract:

Buddy, he was everybody's Buddy from the time he was a kid.
He'd get the coal, chop the wood, he'd even run the errands for the neighbourhood.
Buddy, he would help the kids to study, he was everybody's friend.
One day the angels in the heavens above
Found out they needed someone up there to love -
They called for Buddy, our Buddy - I wish they'd send him home again.


EVER IN
THE THOUGHTS OF MOTHER
MY DARLING SON
WHO MOURNS YOU ALWAYS

LANCE SERJEANT ARTHUR JOHNATHAN PARSONS


Mrs Parsons, Arthur Johnathan's mother chose his inscription and no, I haven't spelt his name wrongly, that's how it appears on all the documents. She was a widow, her husband having died in 1904 when Arthur was seven and his sister, Alice, two. In the 1911 census Mrs Parsons describes herself as 'domestic'; Arthur, aged 14, was working as a 'boy in deposit office'. Their accommodation in St Thomas's Street, Islington, had three rooms, and that included counting the kitchen as a room.
Arthur volunteered in 1914, served in Gallipoli during 1915, and transferred to the Western Front early in 1916. He was killed in action in the Fusiliers' diversionary attack at Gommecourt on 1 July 1916, one of the 57,450 casualties - killed, missing, wounded - suffered by the British Army on the Somme that day; one of the 19,240 men killed.
'Boys' like Arthur Parsons had become valuable soldiers by 1916, the fact that at nineteen he was a Lance Serjeant is an indication of his quality. It won't only have been his mother who missed him.


ETERNAL REST
GOD GRANT YOUR SOUL
MY OWN DEAR DARLING BOY
FROM FATHER

SERJEANT PATRICK WALSH


Patrick Walsh came from Killinick, County Wexford and served not with an Irish regiment but with the Grenadier Guards. The position of Irish soldiers who served in the British army, whether in Irish or English regiments, is illustrated by the fact that it wasn't until June 2013 that a memorial to the more than 800 Wexford men who lost their lives in the First World War was commissioned. In announcing it, the Mayor of Wexford said that he knew it would be controversial in some places but that time had moved on, 'these people left Wexford in good faith and deserve to be commemorated'.
On the 19 August 1918 the Battalion war diary recorded that the 'Commanding Officer lectures all Officers and N.C.O.s in the morning on the forthcoming battle. The Bttn. bathes. Rifle and L/Guns inspected by Armourer Sergeant.' The 'forthcoming battle', which took place on the 21/22/23 August, was the attempt to recover the Albert-Arras railway line.
The first part of John Walsh's inscription suggests, by its reference his son's soul, that the family were Roman Catholics. The second parts articulates an informal affection not often expressed by fathers. I wonder what Serjeant Walsh would have thought about being referred to as a 'dear, darling boy'!


GOD ALONE KNOWS
HOW I MISS YOU DEAR ONE
AS IT DAWNS ANOTHER YEAR

PRIVATE DAVID WALTER HUGHES


Private Hughes' wife sends a message of such heartfelt loneliness and long-term grief - she doesn't say 'as it dawns another day' but 'another year' - that it's rather a surprise to find that at the time of confirming the inscription she is now the wife of another man.


I LOVE HIM STILL

PRIVATE ARTHUR H JACKSON


Sometimes it is the simplest words that are the most moving - "I love him still". This is what Mrs Betsy Jackson, Private Jackson's mother, wanted to say on his headstone and this is what she did say.
Life does not appear to have been easy for Betsy Jackson. In the 1881 census she is the wife of Samuel Jackson, agricultural labourer, and the mother of two children, William and Arthur. In the 1891 census, William and Arthur are inmates of the workhouse in Driffield, Yorkshire, whilst Betsy and her eight-year-old daughter, Alice, are living in North Dalton where Betsy is a charwoman and the head of the household. Betsy is still a charwoman in 1901 and she and Alice are still living in North Dalton but unmarried Alice is the mother of an eight-month-old son, Arthur E Jackson. And in 1911 Alice is in the Driffield workhouse having given birth to another son two days earlier.
None of this is an attempt to pass judgement but just to show how things were in the Jackson family - not easy. When the war broke out William Jackson joined the navy and Arthur the 13th Battalion the East Yorkshire Regiment, the 3rd Hull's Pals, which was formed in August 1914. After training the regiment went to Egypt in December 1915 and were then transferred to France in May 1916, where Arthur was killed three months later.


JUST A MOTHER'S SON
AND SOMEONE'S DARLING

RIFLEMAN LEONARD ALFRED COLLIS


The mother was Laura Alice Collis and I am presuming that the 'someone' was Leonard Collis's wife, Mary Edith, who he had married on the 3 April 1915. However, by the time Mary Edith, Leonard's next-of-kin, came to chose his inscription she had married again and was now Mrs Hallifax. I can't tell whether Leonard's father was still alive.
According to his army number, Leonard joined up sometime between 10 February and 5 April 1915. He served with the 9th Battalion the London Regiment and was killed in action on 1 July 1916 in the London Division's diversionary attack at Gommecourt.


OUR SON

CORPORAL GEORGE SCOTT BLACK


This is such a wonderful inscription, so anonymous and yet so possessive - "Our son". Mr and Mrs William Black make no attempt to identify themselves on the headstone, they just wanted the world to know that George Scott Black was "our son".
Braidwood, New South Wales, has put together a folder on Corporal Scott as part of its centenary commemorations. Among the documents is his attestation form - he attested on 2 March 1915 - his active service record, with its record of his hospital admissions for diarrhoea and dysentery, and the 56 days Field Punishment No. 2 he received on 4 April 1916 for using insubordinate language to his superior officer.
There is also a letter from Mrs Black to Base Records telling them that she had taken out insurance on her son's life and now wanted to claim against it but that the insurance company had told her that the telegram from the army was not sufficient proof of her son's death. The company required a medical certificate, could they advise her as to how she might go about getting this extra proof.


LADDIE IN KHAKI
WE ARE THINKING OF YOU
DAD, MUM AND LITTLE NORA

SERJEANT HENRY LEWIS BURT


Many, many families pledge in their headstone inscriptions that they will never forget the dead soldier, this use of the present continuous makes the statement more active, 'we are thinking of you' rather than the usual, 'You will never be forgotten'. Was 'Laddie' his parents' diminutive for their son? 'Little Nora' was his four-year-old sister.
In the 1911 census it appears that Henry Burt was the servant and hairdressing assistant of a Dutch tobacconist and hairdresser in Hornsey - where he had been born and brought up. He enlisted in October 1914 and went to France in April 1915 with the Machine Gun Corps. Invalided home in December 1915, he transferred to the Tank Corps and returned to Belgium in May 1917.
Burt served with 18th Company, F Battalion who were engaged in a combined tank, artillery and infantry action along the St Julien-Poelkappelle Road during 20-22 August. Burt was wounded on the 22nd and died two days later.


MUSIC, WHEN SOFT VOICES DIE
VIBRATES IN THE MEMORY

PRIVATE GEORGE BELCHER


George Belcher's sister chose his inscription, she was his next-of-kin since their father and mother had died in 1901 and 1903 respectively. George was her only sibling. The inscription comes from a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley called "To ...", published in 1824.

Music when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou at gone,
Love itself shall linger on.

George and Louisa Belcher were brought up by an uncle and aunt. Before joining the army in October 1915, George worked as a clerk at the Railway Passengers Assurance Company, and his sister as an elementary school teacher. He served initially with the 13th Battalion the London Regiment but at the time of his death he was attached to the 8th Battalion the Royal Irish Rifles. The regiment was part of the 36th Ulster Division, which went into action outside Ypres on 2 August 1917. Belcher died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek on the 5th.


DEAR LADDIE
ALWAYS CHEERFUL AND WILLING
ALWAYS AND HAPPY AND BUSY

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILFRED CHARLES GOULDEN


William Goulden's mother confirmed this inscription, I wonder whether it is her speaking? Somehow these don't sound like the words of either a senior officer or a friend, they are more affectionate, more intimate - who else would address this young officer as "dear laddie"?
Goulden was killed whilst the 2nd Battalion were in the trenches at Belle Vue. Having been out of the line since 16 January they had only just gone in again on 11 February. Goulden, the Battalion Intelligence Officer, was killed the next day but the regimental history gives no details of his death.
Educated at Christ's Hospital, Horsham, Goulden left school in 1916 and straight away took a commission in the Middlesex Regiment. His father too was an army officer. Captain F.C. Goulden served in the South African War - from where he was invalided home in 1902 - and in Nigeria during the First World War.


THEY WIN OR DIE
WHO WEAR
THE ROSE OF LANCASTER

LIEUTENANT LEONARD COMER WALL


"We live or die who wear the rose of Lancaster" is the motto of the 55th (West Lancashire Division), which they adopted from a poem that Leonard Comer Wall had himself written.
It was during the First World War that the 55th Division took the red rose of the House of Lancaster as their emblem. This apparently prompted Wall, a young officer serving with the Division, to write a poem, which was published on 13 April 1917 in the Liverpool Daily Post. It's actually more a piece of patriotic verse promoting Lancashire than a poem:

Red Roses

When Princes fought for England's crown,
The House that won the most renown,
And struck the sullen Yorkists down,
Was Lancaster.

Her blood-red emblem stricken sore,
Yet steeped her pallid foe in gore,
Still stands for England evermore,
And Lancashire.

Now England's blood like water flows,
Full many a lusty German knows,
We win or die - who wear the rose
Of Lancaster.

Wall was killed two months later, on 9 June 1917, and the following announcement appeared in the Liverpool Daily Post on the 14th:

"WALL - June 9 killed in action in his 21st year, Leonard Comer Wall (Lieutenant R.F.A.) only and most-beloved child of Charles Comer and Kate Wall, Hill Top, West Kirby, and the affianced husband of Irene Dorothy Bryan, Braxted Rectory, Sevenoaks, Kent. (We win or die who wear the rose of Lancaster)

Either the death announcement or the original poem came to the attention of General Jeudwine, the 55th's Divisional Commander, who ordered that the final words should become the Division's motto, which they did. And at the end of the war all 55th Division graves had an enamel badge, with the rose and the motto, attached to their wooden cross. When the time came for Mr and Mrs Wall to chose an inscription for their son's permanent headstone, they chose the last line of his poem, having changed the word "we" to "they".

There is another lovely story associated with Lieutenant Wall, an officer in the Royal Field Artillery. Wall was killed by shrapnel, which injured his horse, 'Blackie', and killed his groom. After the war, "Blackie' returned to England and when he eventually died in 1942 this notice appeared in the 14 December edition of the Liverpool Daily Post:

"At the Horses' Rest (R.S.P.C.A.), Hunts Cross, on December 10, BLACKIE, truest comrade in England, France and Flanders (1915-1917), of the late Leonard Comer-Wall, Lieutenant, A Battery, 275th Brigade, RFA, 55th Division, and the late Driver Frank Wilkinson, his groom. Ubique."

This was twenty-five years after the death of Blackie's rider and groom. I wonder who inserted it? Leonard Wall's father died in 1928 but his mother was still alive. Two days later, the 'Gloucester Citizen' elaborated on the story reporting that, Blackie, "was buried with the medals of his master, Lieut. Leonard Comer Wall ... who while riding 'Blackie' was killed in France." The story is repeated several times on the Internet but I haven't discovered whether it is true or not.
Blackie has a headstone, which reads:

'Blackie'
Aged 35 years
A Battery - 275th Brigade R.F.A. 55th Division
France and Flanders 1915-1918

Does this tell us anything else? Yes, that although his rider and groom were killed in 1917, someone in the Wall or Wilkinson family kept track of the horse and brought him home to England in 1918 to live out his days in peace. Someone who cared enough to insert a notice of his death in the local paper and to erect a headstone for him. My money would be on Leonard's mother, who died in 1954.


THAT FROM THIS
GREAT BIG WORLD
YOU'VE CHOSEN ME

SECOND LIEUTENANT REGINALD OTHO WEBER


Somehow I just assumed that these were the words of a hymn with the meaning that from this "great big world" God had picked out Reginald Weber for a special destiny. However, they don't come from a hymn, they come from a song by the American composer Jerome Kern from the musical, 'The Girl From Utah'. The song is a love duet, 'They Wouldn't Believe Me'. The relevant verse reads:

And when I tell them,
And I'm certainly am going to tell them,
That I'm the man whose wife one day you'll be.
They'll never believe me,
They'll never believe me,
That from this great big world
You've chosen me!

Reginald Otho Weber was the youngest son of Frederick Weber, a wealthy, German-born fur trader, now based in London. Weber served with the 3rd Battalion the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment but at the time of his death was attached to the 8th Battalion. They went into the front line on 30 August 1917, where they remained until the 5th September. During that time the regimental history records that Weber and eight Other Ranks were killed.
Strictly speaking, Weber died of wounds - "gunshot wounds to spine" - in No. 17 Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek. His death was announced in The Times on the 8 September where his wounds were described as "shell wounds".
Interestingly there is one other casualty with the surname Weber buried in Lijssthenthoek Military Cemetery - Gefreiter Karl Weber of the German army.



PASS FRIEND - ALL'S WELL!

LIEUTENANT STEPHEN REGINALD PARKE WALTER


"Pass friend - all's well!" is the sentry's reply to someone who gives the correct response to his challenge: "Halt, who goes there!". It is a not uncommon inscription on war memorials in this country with its double sense that we who pass by are able to do so because those who died made it safe for us. In this it reflects the Simonides-based epitaph: "Tell England ye that pass this monument, we died for her and here we rest content". In its second sense it implies that those who died correctly met the challenge of life and have therefore been allowed to pass into eternal life.
I know that Stephen Walter was educated at Wellington College otherwise I might have thought he was a Harrovian, perhaps his father was. This is because the refrain in one of Harrow's patriotic, school songs is, "Pass, Friend, All's well", which is used as a dedication on a memorial in the School. The second verse reads:

You stand where your brothers stood,
And pray where your brothers prayed,
Who fought with Death as brave men should,
Not boasting and not afraid.
For the blood and the lives that your brothers gave,
For the glory that you share,
The message comes from beyond the grave,
The challenge "Who goes there - you?
Pass, Friend, All's well."

There is another possible source, a piece of patriotic verse by "G.W.T.P." who is otherwise anonymous. This begins:

All's well, all's well with England!
Pass to your great reward,
All you whose lives were given
That freedom be restored.
Who faced your task undaunted,
And for our honour fell.
In answer to the challenge:
Pass, friend, all's well!

At 6.05 on the morning of 31 July 1917, DH5 no. B369, piloted by twenty-year-old Lieutenant Stephen Walter, took off from Droglandt to take part in a four-aircraft ground attack on the German lines. The cloud base was low and just north of Vlamertinge Walter's port wings were sheared off by an unseen balloon cable. The aircraft crashed to the ground and Walter was killed. Walter was an 'ace', having shot down six enemy aircraft during July 1917.
The only child of his parents, Stephen and Marion Walter, they dedicated a stained glass window to his memory in St Mary's East Farleigh and installed beside it his original battlefield grave marker, which his friends had made out of his aeroplane propeller.


WE ALWAYS THINK
OF YOU DEAR SAM
AND SHALL UNTIL WE DIE

SERGEANT SAMUEL GEORGE JUBILEE BEAUCHAMP


Sam Beauchamp died of gas poisoning in a Casualty Clearing Station near Poperinge on 15 October 1917. Whilst there is no specific information about when exactly he was gassed, the Germans had launched a mustard gas attack on the British trenches in the region on the night of 11/12 October 1917 so it could have been then.
I like this inscription. So many families used deeply conventional, poetic phraseology when they picked an inscription that this is refreshingly simple.
Beauchamp's father chose it, his mother having died in 1912. So who were the "we" who would always think of him? The answer is Amelia, Frederick, George, Victor, Gladys, Eric, Florence, John and Sydney, his nine brothers and sisters, the last of whom died in the 1980s.


FAREWELL MY SON
YOUR LIFE IS PAST
LOVED BY YOUR DEAR FATHER
UNTIL THE LAST

RIFLEMAN HENRY HERBERT


The War Graves Commission's register says that Henry Herbert was killed in action but if so why was he buried at a Casualty Clearing Station cemetery? Those who were killed in action were buried in cemeteries close to the front line, Lijssenthoek was several kilometres behind it. During May 1917 the regiment had been in a quiet sector of the line, digging trenches and strengthening parapets at Spoil Bank. They had last been in action on 7 April in a trench raid described in this posting on the 1914-1918 Invasion Zone Forum. It's likely that this in when Henry Herbert was wounded. The War Graves Commission's records state that Rifleman Herbert served with 'D' Company 1st/18th Battalion London Irish Rifles, whose Company Commander, Captain John Tierney, was also wounded that day.
James Herbert, a former blacksmith turned builder's labourer, chose his son's inscription. Although mothers are sometimes specifically mentioned on headstones, even when the father is still alive, it sounds as though Mrs E Herbert was dead. It is a direct, personal and poignant message.


TELL MOTHER I SENT HER
MY DEAREST LOVE

RIFLEMAN FRANK OSBORNE


As last messages go, this is pretty heartbreaking. Nineteen-year-old Frank Osborne died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek on 3 April 1917. Casualty Clearing Stations were a half-way house between the battlefield and the base hospitals; it took the less seriously wounded who could spend up to four weeks there before being returned to their units, and it kept those who were too badly wounded to travel any further down the casualty evacuation chain.
There is no information as to the nature of Frank Osborne's wound but one imagines that he was one of those too seriously wounded to be moved ... but not too seriously wounded to be able to send his mother his "dearest love" before he died. It was his mother, Mrs Charlotte Osborne, chose his inscription.


CHARACTER IS DESTINY

LIEUTENANT JOHN EDWARD RAPHAEL


The original quote comes from Heraclitus (c.535-475 BC), the meaning being that a man's character shapes his fate. The words appear on 'Jack' Raphael's headstone inscription in Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, and on his memorial in St Jude's Church, Hampstead-Garden-Suburb. His obituary in the Marquis de Ruvigny's Roll of Honour ends with the words, "If character is destiny, then his is assured", which is the dedication in the front of his posthumously published book, 'Modern Rugby Football'.
Raphael was a sportsman, playing both international rugby and county cricket. Educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St John's College, Oxford, he was a barrister at Lincoln's Inn when the war broke out. He joined up immediately, initially taking a commission in the Duke of Westminster's West Riding Regiment and then transferring in June 1915 to the 18th Battalion the King's Royal Rifle Corps, which was raised by his uncle, Major Sir Herbert Raphael. By June 1917 he was ADC to Major-General Lawford, General Officer commanding the 41st Division.
This did not stop him making periodic visits to the front line, which is what he was doing on 7 June 1917, the opening day of the Battle of Messines, perhaps curious to see the results of the nineteen mines blown that day along the Messines Ridge. Injured by a shell that exploded just in front of him, which killed his batman, Raphael died four days later.
There is a postscript to this story. Jack Raphael was his parents only child. His father died during the war. In 2014 a story appeared in the Daily Express. Apparently, one day in 1929 a well-dressed elderly woman made a visit to the cemetery at Lijssenthoek and sought out the gardener. It was Mrs Rapahel, Jack Raphael's mother. She had a request: when she died she wanted her ashes to be buried in her son's grave. She knew this was strictly against the War Graves Commission's rules, which is why she went directly to the gardener and not through any official channels. She died thirteen months later and the gardener on receiving the parcel containing her ashes promptly did as she had asked.


"HE WEARS IMMORTAL HONOUR &
IS JOINED WITH THOSE
WHO FOUGHT FOR ENGLAND
AND ARE DEAD"

CAPTAIN ADIE WALE


My interest in Adie Wale was aroused by his exquisite stained glass memorial window by Richard J. Stubington in St Mary's Church, Lapworth, Warwickshire, which features in Peter Cormack's equally exquisite book Arts & Crafts Stained Glass. If he had such a beautiful and original memorial did he have an equally original inscription? It certainly comes from an unusual source even if the sentiment isn't unusual.
It comes from Killed in Action, by the writer and Liberal politician R.C.Lehmann, 1856-1929. Lehmann was a major contributor to Punch and this is where the poem originally appeared. It was then included in 'The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch', published in 1918. 'Rupert', the subject of the poem, was a mature, married man killed leading his men over the top in an attack, Adie Wale was a single man aged 24 who was killed when a German plane bombed No. 3 Canadian General Hospital at Doullens on the night of 29-30th May 1918. But despite these discrepancies, there are similarities that Adie Wale shares with 'Rupert':

"When the great summons came he rushed to arms,
Counting no cost and all intent to serve
His country and to prove himself a man."

Wale was an undergraduate at Oxford when the war broke out - a panel in the window shows him, encouraged by an angel, discarding his gown in order to join up. Wale abandoned his studies and was commissioned into the Royal Artillery on 13 October 1914. The window shows a gun crew in action and in another panel the wounded Wale being blessed by Christ.
Adie Wale, educated at Uppingham School, was the only son of William Henry Wale a Birmingham mattress manufacturer, who chose his inscription.


"CROWNED WITH THE SUNSHINE
OF IMMORTAL YOUTH"

CAPTAIN IVAN PROVIS WENTWORTH BENNETT


If Ivan Bennett had not had such distinctive initials his body would probably never have been identified. Shot in the head whilst leading an attack on Trones Wood on 13 July 1916 (this was the day of the attack in which he was killed even though the War Graves Commission gives his date of death as the 14th), his body was not recovered from the battlefield until it was discovered in December 1931. There was no identity disc on the body, which was wearing an officer's tunic with the buttons of The Queen's West Surrey Regiment, but among the effects discovered with it was a whistle, a cigarette holder and a pencil case engraved with the initials I.P.W.B.
Bennett was buried in the cemetery adjacent to the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. This cemetery was designed to hold the bodies of 300 French and 300 British soldiers of which only 61 British and 57 French bodies were identified. The intention was to symbolise the joint sacrifice made in this region by the soldiers of both nations, especially the unidentified 'missing' whose names were among the 72,000 recorded on the memorial.
Ivan Bennett's inscription was chosen by his cousin Mrs Dorothy Joyce Bousted (nee Husey-Hunt). His mother was still alive, widowed in 1908 when her husband, from whom she was separated, committed suicide in Bournemouth. Following which, Ivan, who was 17 and in the Lower Sixth at Wellington College, left school and became articled to a firm of solicitors in Guildford. On the outbreak of war he took a commission in The Queen's, went to France in July 1915, and was promoted Captain that November.
Ivan was one of five children, three boys and two girls. One of his brothers, Vere Cyril Wentworth Bennett, died of pneumonia in Italy in October 1918 whilst serving with the Royal Garrison Artillery. His mother chose his inscription - "Honourable, loving and beloved". She was still alive when Ivan's body was discovered but neither she nor one of the sisters chose his inscription. In the 1901 census, ten-year-old Ivan is staying with his uncle and aunt and their five-year-old daughter Dorothy Joyce Husey-Hunt in Hove, Sussex. His parents and siblings were living in Bedford. Does this mean that his cousin had a particularly close relationship with Ivan, is this why she chose his inscription?
The lines come from 'Rupert Brooke', a poem by Alfred Dodd published in 1918 in a small collection called 'The Ballad of the Iron Cross'. The poem echoes the style and rhythms of Brooke's 'The Soldier' and outlines Dodd's belief in the survival of the spirit after death, not as in the Christian belief in eternal life but as in the world of Spiritualism.

"If I should die before I've reaped my mind
Of all its fruits - its tares as well as grain,
Think not half-empty hands have toiled in vain
A meagre harvest ... scattered to the wind!
Think not that destiny hath dealt unkind
With heart-emotions, ... surging thoughts of brain,
And that my sheaves are rotting in the rain,
Washed by the pitiless years I've left behind.

Think, rather, this: That I on other fields
Have joined the happy reapers who are free
To garner all the wealth that summer yields, ...
Thoughts beauteous with the fire of holy truth, ...
And, unafraid of winter, think of me,
Crowned with the sunshine of immortal youth."


HOW SHALL I DECK MY SONG
FOR THE LARGE SWEET SOUL
THAT HAS GONE
AND WHAT SHALL MY PERFUME BE
FOR THE GRAVE OF HIM I LOVE

LIEUTENANT HORACE MICHAEL HYNMAN ALLENBY MC


Horace Allenby was Field Marshall Lord Allenby's only child. His inscription comes from 'When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloomed' by the American poet Walt Whitman. The poem is an elegy on the death of President Abraham Lincoln, which becomes a meditation on death and on the grief of the living, leading the author to the conclusion that it's the living who suffer not the dead.
In the writer's dreams he sees the dead from the American Civil War:

"I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men - I saw them;
...
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest - they suffer'd not;
The living remain'd and suffer'd - the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd."

The lines Lady Allenby chose for her son's inscription indicate the impossibility of finding words to describe his "large, sweet soul", and question how can she make his death bearable, "what shall my perfume be for the grave of him that I love".
Horace Allenby was nineteen when he was killed. He had left school, Wellington, in 1915 and after attending the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich was gazetted into the Royal Horse Artillery in February 1916. At this point he was still only 18. He served with "T" Battery and in February 1917 was awarded a Military Cross "for conspicuous gallantry in action", which included rescuing a wounded man under heavy fire.
On 29 July, just before the opening of the Third Battle of Ypres, Horace Allenby was hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel and died in a Canadian Casualty Clearing Station five hours later. This was just a month after his father had arrived in Cairo as commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. It was another month before his parents received the devastating news at which, according to General John O'Shea, Allenby wept inconsolably.

NB: This inscription has 120 characters, including spaces, and is almost twice the length suggested by the War Graves Commission. With its link to the blog post, it was even too long for Twitter. This has meant that for Twitter I have had to shorten it by writing 'How'll' rather than 'How shall' and putting '&' instead of 'and'. The full, correct inscription is as above.


HE WAS OURS & WE'LL REMEMBER
FROM HIS WIDOW & CHILDREN

CORPORAL BENJAMIN ANDERSON


This is a remarkably plain inscription - "He was ours & we'll remember". Corporal Anderson's wife, Jeanie, chose it and it's almost as if she's saying, we're not going to share him or our feelings with anyone else thank you. It's interesting how she refers to herself as "his widow" and not his wife as other women prefer to. Again she has not made any attempt to soften the situation.
Benjamin Anderson, a painter with Harvey Bros in Edinburgh, was a serving soldier during the Boer War and for some years afterwards. He was called up as a reservist in August 1914 and was killed near Ypres on 25 April 1915 leaving not only a widow but a family of six.


OUR YOUNGEST SON
"I CAME OUT WILLINGLY TO
SERVE MY KING AND COUNTRY"

SECOND LIEUTENANT ERIC RUPERT HEATON


Eric Heaton's inscription is taken from the last letter that he wrote to his parents, the day before he was killed in his first action.

"Tomorrow we go to the attack in the greatest battle the British Army has ever fought. I cannot quite express my feelings on this night and I cannot tell you if it is God's will that I shall come through but if I fall in battle then I have no regrets save for my loved ones I leave behind. It is a great cause and I came out willingly to serve my King and Country. My greatest concern is that I may have the courage and determination necessary to lead my platoon well."
[Quoted from 'If You're Reading This ...: Last Letters from the Front Line' by Sian Price]

Heaton's job was to attack towards the Hawthorn Redoubt and capture the crater created by the blowing of a huge mine. He was wounded minutes after the attack began. A convincing case has been made that he is one of the soldiers seen falling to the ground in Geoffrey Malins' film 'The Battle of the Somme'. Initially listed among the missing it wasn't until November that his body was found. He is buried in Hawthorn Ridge Cemetery in the same grave as Lance Corporal JS Heape.

Eric Heaton, who was studying dentistry at the University of London, volunteered on the outbreak of war. He was the youngest of the fours sons of the Revd Daniel Heaton a Wesleyan minister.


"WHO HAD IT NOT IN HIM
TO FEAR"
R.I.P.

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN WALTER REES MORGAN


"If it can be any consolation to you in your grief, I think you ought to know the high regard in which he stood. As for this last ordeal, I know he faced it without misgiving, and with that quiet courage and sense of duty which he always possessed."
Letter to Morgan's family from a brother officer

And what was "this last ordeal?" It was to lead his men in an assault on the German trenches near Mailly-Maillet on the morning of 1 July 1916. In his letter of condolence, Morgan's captain wrote: "The last time I saw him he was leading his men in the open under very heavy fire, in a manner in which I knew he would". It was whilst doing this that Morgan was "hit on the head by some shell splinters and killed instantaneously".
Morgan's older brother chose his inscription, both parents were dead. It's very definitely a quotation since there's no mistaking the quotation marks and this being the case it must come from 'The King's Byways' (1902) by the best-selling novelist Stanley J. Weyman who wrote swashbuckling stories set mainly in sixteenth and seventeenth-century France. In this novel it is Antoine, a young page in the court of Henry of Navarre, who "had it not in him to fear", and it is this fearlessness that saves the day for the King at the siege of Cahors where Antoine is killed. Might not brothers have read and admired the story together, which would explain its choice?


A WHITE MAN
AND TRUE FRIEND
SADLY MISSED

SAPPER VINCENT O'SULLIVAN


There's something rather moving about this inscription. Vincent O'Sullivan had no family; the best the War Graves Commission could come up with was that he was a 'native of Ireland'. And no family included no wife.
So where did the inscription come from? It was written by Mr S.J. Millane, Brown Hill, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. And who was he? We only know who he was because it was Millane who filled in O'Sullivan's form for the Roll of Honour of Australia and in the section that asks for the form-fillers relationship to the soldier he has written, "friend and partner". In this context he would have meant partner in business, and what was the business - prospecting. Otherwise all Millane knew about his friend was that he was "about 40 years" and that he had served in the Boer War having enlisted in Ireland.
It's what Millane says that is so touching; this burly prospector - I am imaging things here - refers to O'Sullivan as his sadly missed true friend and describes him as 'a white man'. By this he does not mean a man with a white skin but a man who was good company, decent and trustworthy - a good bloke.
Vincent O'Sullivan, who described himself on enlistment as a miner, served as many miners did in the Australian Tunnelling Corps. Here they laid cables and dug saps, trenches, dug-outs and mines. There is no record of what happened on 11 August 1918 but three miners from the 3rd Australian Tunnellers died that day and were buried in Hersin Communal Cemetery Extension.


HE DIED DOING HIS DUTY
YOUNG, BEAUTIFUL & BRAVE
FOR CHRIST & HONOUR'S CAUSE

RIFLEMAN JAMES ALEXANDER WALTER ORBELL


Eighteen-year-old James Orbell was the son of a tobacconist in Lee High Road, Lewisham, London SE. Mrs J Neil of Coodham, Kilmarnock, Ayrshire chose his multi-layered inscription. I do not know who she was. Duty, honour and Christ are given as the motivators of this boy who was 'young, beautiful and brave'.
There are several literary sources for this phrase: Alexander Pope in his translation of Homer's Iliad describes Euphorbus as "thus young, thus beautiful, Euphorbus", and then several lines later as "brave Euphorbus". A Gothic tale, 'The Fortunes of de la Pole', which appeared in 'Tales of the Wild and Wonderful' published in 1825 and sometimes attributed to George Henry Borrow describes the murdered de la Pole, a popular and much-loved young man, as 'young, beautiful and brave' and there are other examples of poets using the phrase, but when it comes down to it the most likely source of this inscription is a verse referring to dead soldiers that sometimes appeared in newspaper 'In Memoriam' columns:

He died in the midst of his duty, young, beautiful and brave,
Like Christ he thought first of others, but himself he could not save.


HE SAID
"TO DIE FOR GOD
OUR KING AND OUR COUNTRY
IT IS GRAND"

RIFLEMAN EDWARDS THOMAS


Thomas Edwards' mother has quoted her son's own words on his headstone: "To die for God, our King and our Country, it is grand". Thomas Edwards' army number indicates that he volunteered between 5 August and 7 September 1914, within the first month of the outbreak of war. The regiment saw action during the Second Battle of Ypres early in 1915, suffering very heavy casualties at Frezenberg Ridge on 8 May . Edwards died of wounds in hospital at Boulogne on 10 May.


IN THE PRIME OF LIFE
HE WAS CUT DOWN
A.L.

PRIVATE WILLIAM (TOPPER) HAREWELL


I've not seen a man's nickname included in the official records before but the War Grave Commission includes the name Topper, either in inverted commas or in brackets, with the rest of William Harewell's proper names.
Topper Harewell was 47 when in died - "in the prime of life", at the peak of his abilities. Miss A Lowe chose his inscription - and included her initials at the bottom of it, but there is no indication as to what her relationship was to him. However, whoever she was her blunt description of Harewell as having been "cut down" pays no lip service to him 'giving' or 'sacrificing' his life, the implication is rather that it was taken away. At 47 the chances are that Harewell was a volunteer, even if he had been a volunteer into the regular army many years previously as his age and his service with the 1st Battalion could suggest.
Harewell died of wounds in hospital at Boulogne on 16 July 1916. There is no record of when or where he was wounded.


WHOM THE GODS LOVE

DRIVER MEARNS LAWRENCE DUIRS


Those "whom the gods love" die young. It is an ancient aphorism attributed to the Greek playwright Menander, 342-292 BC. The meaning being that the world of the dead is so much better than the world of the living that those whom the gods love aren't made to wait so long to get there.
Why is the world of the dead so much better? Many poets from Byron and Shelley to Binyon have explained:

Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
from ADONAIS An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Whom the gods love die young" was said of yore,
And many deaths do they escape by this:
The death of friends, and that which slays even more -
The death of friendship, love, youth ...
from DON JUAN by Lord Byron

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grown old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
FOR the FALLEN by Laurence Binyon

Mearns Lawrence Duirs was nineteen when he died in Kenya on 31 December 1915 whilst serving as a driver with the East African Mechanical Transport Corps based in Voi. I have not found a cause of death but the job of a driver, transporting food and provisions to troops guarding the Uganda railway, was both arduous and dangerous as described by Valentine Dolbey in his book Sketches of the East Africa Campaign. The heat, disease, wild animals (man-eating lions), breakdowns, the state of the roads, land mines and German raiding parties all meant that death lurked along every mile. On 31 December 1915 it found Driver Duirs.


OUR BUGLES SANG TRUCE

PRIVATE JAMES DUFF CAMPBELL


This inscription comes from the first line of 'The Soldier's Dream' by Thomas Campbell, 1824-97. Private Campbell's mother chose it.

"Our bugles sang truce, for the night-cloud had lower'd,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpower'd,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die."

And what was the soldier's dream?

"Methought from the battlefield's dreadful array
Far, far I had roam'd on a desolate track:
'Twas Autumn, and sunshine arose on the way
To the home of my fathers, that welcomed me back."

Surrounded by the sights and sounds of his home and his loved ones, the soldier vows never to leave it again. But then he wakes up and realises that it was all just a dream.

"But sorrow return'd with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away."

James Campbell served with the 13th Battalion the Royal Scots, a New Army battalion. He was killed when the regiment was in the trenches near High Wood where their casualties, from German shelling, were in the region of 30 a day.


FULL LASTING IS THE SONG
THOUGH HE, THE SINGER, PASSES

LANCE CORPORAL EDWARD HOLT HOLME


The inscription is a quotation from George Meredith's 'The Thrush in February'. The poem itself is in a sense a Darwinian exposition of the purposes of life - to work throughout the generations for greater civilization, greater humanity. To this end, there are those who cleave the way and those who follow, "we breathe but to be sword or block". However, whilst this may be the meaning of the poem I believe the meaning of the inscription his father chose is much simpler, though very beautifully expressed - his son might be dead but he will not be forgotten.
Edward Holme was an engineering clerk before the war. He joined the 20th Battalion the Manchester Regiment, formed in November 1914, and after training crossed with them to France in November 1915. After a relatively quiet time, the regiment took part in the attack on 1 July 1916 in which 110 members of the regiment, including Edward Holme, were killed.


I OWE ALL
TO MY ANGEL MOTHER

PRIVATE DONALD ANGUS MORRISON


I find this kind of inscription so interesting: interesting because it's not the the sort of thing people usually say on headstones; interesting because it was Morrison's father who confirmed it, and interesting because I can't think what it really means. What is obvious, however, is that David Morrison loved his mother and that his father was happy to confirm this on his son's headstone.
David Morrison was a police constable in Roberta, Nova Scotia. He enlisted in September 1914 and arrived in France with the first Canadian Contingent on 12 February 1915. He died of wounds in hospital at Boulogne three months later on 8 May.
Morrison served with the 16th Battalion Canadian Infantry, the Canadian Scottish, which was involved in the action on 22-23 April at Gravenstafel Ridge. It was here that the Germans first successfully used chlorine gas along a four mile section of the line held by French colonial troops. The French suffered something in the region of 6,000 casualties. Without knowing what had happened, the Battalion War Diary reported, "French refugees, pouring in and French soldiers principally Zoaves in flight. Looked as if French had been routed ... We were to check the German advance". The writer finished the report of the day by concluding that it had been 'a very arduous time' and by referring to the 'many wounded and dead'. This could have been when Morrison was wounded.


SON OF JOHN M CLARK
BUTCHER
DUNDEE, SCOTLAND

SERGEANT ANDREW MURDOCH CLARK


Andrew Murdoch Clark was one of his parents ten sons. Sometime before the 1911 census he emigrated to South Africa and from there he joined the 4th Regiment South African Infantry known as the South African Scottish. The regiment was formed from the Transvaal Scottish and the Cape Town Highlanders and wore the Atholl tartan.
Clark was wounded in the South Africans first engagement at Delville Wood in July 1916 and then killed on the first day of the Battle of Arras, 9 April 1917.
It’s an interesting inscription firmly linking John Clark’s South African son back with his family and home in Scotland.


WHO DARED
TO NOBLY STEM
TYRANNIC PRIDE
BURNS

SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT GOLDIE MILLER


Robert Burns' praise of the cottager's simple virtues does very well as a praise for the contribution 2nd Lieutenant Robert Goldie Miller made to the stemming of the Kaiser's 'tyrannic pride'. The quotation comes from Stanza XXI of 'The Cotter's Saturday Night':

O Thou! who pour'd the patriotic tide,
That stream'd thro' Wallace's undaunted heart:
Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride,
Or nobly die ...

Robert Goldie Miller was a Scotsman educated at Dollar Academy, Glasgow. When the war broke out he was working as an accountant in London. He originally joined the Stock Exchange London Battalion, was commissioned into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in June 1915 and then transferred into the Royal Flying Corps as an observer. There is no information as to how he met his death. His father, William Goldie, confirmed his inscription.


KILLED
WHILE TRYING TO BRING IN
A WOUNDED COMRADE
UNDER FIRE

PRIVATE HERBERT FRANCIS HEELY


The 2nd Battalion of the Honourable Artillery Company's war diary casts no light on this incident. It merely comments that, having gone into the front line on 5 December, on the 6th the, "enemy shelled front line severely. Inter company relief very difficult to effect. Pts. Levy PS. - Ebsworth HE. - Heely HF. killed. 6 wounded."


DEATH HAS MADE HIS DARKNESS
BEAUTIFUL WITH THEE

SERGEANT WILLIAM HENRY MAY MM AND BAR


This lovely inscription comes from Tennyson's In Memoriam, LXXIV - the darkness of death has been made beautiful by this man's presence. The War Graves Commission's records say that the inscription was chosen by Mrs L May. I can't tell who this is as William May's mother was called Selina and his father, Charles.
Twenty-two-year-old William Henry May was a sergeant with a Military Medal and Bar when he died of wounds in hospital in Etaples on 1 October 1918, having been wounded, according to the 3rd Battalion Canadian Infantry War Diary on 27 September.
This is an excellent war record for a young man who in the 1911 census was an inmate in the reformatory school in Kingswood, Somerset. Whilst here boys were educated and taught a trade and some were given grants to help them emigrate once they were released. William May went to Canada. Here he joined up in September 1914, giving his trade as an actor. He served throughout the war and was wounded seven times before he died.


"THE FIRST BORN IS MINE"
SAITH THE LORD

PRIVATE JOHN BEDE CARROLL


John Bede Carroll was indeed his parents' first born child but the inscription they chose for him is chilling - their God is a savage God. The text comes from Numbers 3:13

"Because all the first born are mine; for on the day that I smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt I hallowed unto me all the firstborn in Israel, both man and beast: mine shall they be: I am the Lord."

John Carroll was 16 when he enlisted on 23 May 1915, giving his age as 18. He served in Gallipoli from September 1915 until the evacuation in December. In March 1916 he transferred to the Western Front with the rest of the Australian contingent. According to his father, writing on the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia, John Carroll served as a stretcher bearer throughout the Battle of Pozieres, July-August 1916, and was fatally wounded at Factory Corner, Flers. He does not give a date for this but in November 1916 Australian medical units were posted to caves in this area. Conditions in the region were by now truly appalling, the rain having reduced the terrain to thick, deep, viscous mud, making fighting or the carrying of either casualties or supplies virtually impossible.


OUR ALL

PRIVATE ARTHUR FORDHAM CHAUNTLER


There's not really much one can say about this inscription as in two short words, just six letters, Mr and Mrs Chauntler have said everything.
Arthur Chauntler was his parents only son. He had an elder sister, Dorothy Louise, but there were no other children in the family.
In October 1914, Arthur Chauntler was a clerk in the War Office but he appears to have joined the HAC very soon after this. He served with the Second Battalion which landed in France in October 1916 where it took part in the Battle of the Ancre, 13-18 November 1916. Chauntler died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station in Contay on 30 November. There is no information as to how or when he received his wounds.


WHEN THE FIELDS
ARE WHITE WITH DAISIES
I'LL RETURN
IN LOVING MEMORY

PRIVATE GEORGE EDWARD BEAVIS


George Beavis' inscription comes from a popular Irish song written some time around the end of the nineteenth century. The words of the song originally referred to a sailor:

"I once stood in a harbour, as a ship was going out,
On a voyage unto a port beyond the sea.
I watched the blue-clad sailor, as he bade his last farewell
To the lassie who he loved most tenderly.
I heard the sailor promise to the lassie now in tears,
"When the fields are white with daisies I'll return."

During the war, Bamforth produced one of their three-card picture postcard series featuring this song. The card with the first verse shows a sailor but the card with the words of the chorus shows a khaki-clad soldier.
What is a bit strange about this inscription is that it was chosen by his mother, Mrs Sarah Jane Beavis, not by a wife or sweetheart. However, it must be for the words of the second verse that she chose it. The sweetheart learns that the ship has sunk and as she stands there weeping she hears a voice reassuring her that they will meet again:

"God has spared me for your keeping, and the promise once I made,
When the fields are white with daisies I'll return."

George Beavis died of wounds in a casualty clearing station in Dickebusch. According to a letter from the Officer in Charge of the 1st Field Ambulance, written on 1 February 1918 to the Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau:

" ... he was admitted to the Dressing Station of this Ambulance on the night of 20.9.17 with shell wound of right leg, the wounds being so extensive as to necessitate amputation of the leg. He was suffering a good deal from shock, and died next morning. The burial took place at Military Huts Cemetery Dickebusch."


CHARLEY, YOUR PLACE IS VACANT
IN OUR HOME
WHICH CAN NEVER BE FILLED

PRIVATE CHARLES JOHN MANN


The vacant place or vacant chair was once a common euphemism for death. The idea probably predates the American Civil War but a song from that era, recorded in 1915 by John McCormack, spread its popularity beyond the shores of America. It was originally written to mourn and honour a dead Union soldier:

At our fireside, sad and lonely, often will the bosom swell,
At remembrance of the story how our noble Willie fell;
How he strove to bear our banner though the thickest of the fight,
And uphold our country's honour in the strength of manhood's might.

And it kept that association into the First World War. The original song referred to the family gathering for Thanksgiving but is relevant to all family occasions. These are the words of the chorus:

We shall meet but we shall miss him
There will be one vacant chair.
We shall linger to caress him
While we breathe our evening prayer.

Charles Mann was killed in action in January 1917. Buried close to the front line, his body was exhumed in August 1920 and reinterred in Lesboeufs. 'Charley's' father confirmed his inscription - giving it added poignancy by addressing his son rather than the reader.


FOUR YEARS OF WEARY WAR
THEN CAME ETERNAL REST

LIEUTENANT JAMES REID


It looks to me as though James Reid was already serving with the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment when the war broke out. My evidence for this is slim but Reid served with the 1st Battalion, which was the Regular Army battalion. His inscription refers to four years of war. This could mean that he volunteered in 1914. However, on 2 December 1915 the London Gazette reported, "Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, Serjeant-Major James Reid to be Second Lieutenant. Dated 23 December, 1915." Reid could have been a volunteer but to be a serjeant-major in December 1915 suggests he was a regular soldier with pre-war service.
Reid died of wounds in hospital in Rouen on 8 October 1918. There's nothing to say how or when his wounds were incurred. The 1st Battalion the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment fought on the Western Front throughout the war, taking part in virtually all the major battles from Mons to the Sambre. Prior to 8 October their most recent engagements had involved the attacks on the St Quentin Canal between 29 September and 2 October. James Reid might have been wounded here, after "four years of weary war". Reid's wife, Louisa Reid, chose his inscription. Their is no hint of triumphalism or heroism about it.


R.I.P.
HIS SLEEPING EYES
HOLD VISIONS
OF AUSTRALIAN SKIES

SECOND LIEUTENANT JACQUES MONTAGUE D'ALPUGET


Jacques Montague D'Alpuget was killed in action in France on 17 July 1916. His sister, Blanche, chose his inscription. It comes from a poem by Nina Murdoch called 'Jacques', published in the University of Sidney magazine, 'Hermes', in August 1918, "In memory of Lieut. Jacques M. d'Alpuget (54th Battn. A.I.F.), Athlete and Soldier, killed in action in France. He lies buried in an old orchard, three miles behind the firing line".
Nina Murdoch, who became a well-known Australian traveller, journalist, author and broadcaster, was a friend of Jacques d'Alpuget's sister, Blanche. History does not relate what she was to Jacques.
The poem begins:

The calmness of the orchard's breast
Was broken for a little season,
When he that loved all clean things best -
Rigour of sport, the warrior's zest
And kindliness and gentle reason -
Was carried there to take his rest.

The writer takes comfort from the apple blossom spilling on his grave, the song-bird's trill and the sunbeams keeping "laughing watch" - "Where in this, is cause to weep?" The inscription comes from verse 4.

Now when summer swoons and sighs
Memory on him lays her finger.
Shut behind his quiet eyes
Are visions of Australian skies,
And when Spring days about him linger,
Boronia fragrance to him flies.


EVERYWHERE
WHERE DUTY AND GLORY LEADS

SECOND LIEUTENANT ALFRED JOHN HUNT


Alfred Hunt served with the Royal Field Artillery whose regimental motto - Quo fas et gloria ducunt - translates as, where right and glory lead. Mrs Bessie Hunt, who chose this inscription, changed the word 'right' to 'duty'. Her son had seen a meteoric change in his military status since the beginning of the war having been promoted from corporal to sergeant and then commissioned as a second lieutenant all in a matter of weeks.
Alfred Hunt had been at the front since August 1914 as a letter to his mother, written on 27 October makes clear. He was wounded in the head by shrapnel on 25 November and died in hospital three days later having never regained consciousness.
On 18 July 1915, his younger brother, Frank, serving with the 13th Hussars, was killed in action aged 18. His inscription reads:

To live in hearts
We leave behind
Is not to die


HE GAVE HIS YOUTH
THAT THE WORLD
MIGHT GROW OLD IN PEACE

SERGEANT LEONARD TUNBRIDGE


Nineteen-year-old Sergeant Leonard Tunbridge died of wounds at 4 pm on 29 August 1916, having been admitted to the Casualty Clearing Station with a gun shot wound in his abdomen at 10 pm the previous night. Born in England, he and his parents had emigrated to Australia in 1912.


WE DREAMT
GREAT THINGS FOR YOU
GOD INTERVENED
AND SO THE DREAM CAME TRUE

CAPTAIN FRANK WOOLFE HALDINSTEIN


Frank Haldenstein was the son of the wealthy boot and shoe manufacturer, Alfred Isaac Haldinstein, of Bally and Haldinstein, Norwich. His grandfather, his father's father, had emigrated from Prussia in the 1840s and married Rosa Soman, the daughter of David Soman, who had fled France during the French Revolution. He was educated at Norwich Grammar School and Christ Church, Oxford . Here he befriended the socialist politician and economist Harold Laski, who wrote in the preface to his 1919 book, 'Authority in the Modern' State, that:

"This book would have gone to my friend Frank Haldinstein ... but his name has been added to the list on which the Oxford of my generation will write with undying pride.
When I look back on certain magic nights at Oxford and re-read these pages in the light of their memory, I realise how halting they are compared to the things they would have said. But I take it that for them the one justification of this conflict would have been the thought that we who are left are trying in some sort to understand the problems of the state they died to make free. To have known them was an education in liberty."


I COUNT MY LIFE WELL LOST
TO SERVE MY COUNTRY BEST

CAPTAIN GEORGE JOHN LORNE SMITH


George Smith's wife chose his inscription, one assumes she's speaking for him here, that this is what he would have said. George Smith was an accountant before the war, working with the Reliance Loan Company in Chatham, Ontario.


HE LEFT NO WILL
BUT GOOD WILL
AND THAT TO ALL MANKIND

CORPORAL HARRY JOHN MATHEWSON


This is both a lovely and a pointed inscription, Harry Mathewson may have left no will, but what he did leave was a feeling of good will to all mankind, and all mankind has to include the Germans. It's a generous inscription too, chosen by Mathewson's mother whose son was killed in action nineteen days before the end of the war.
There was no compulsion on a soldier to make a will but their pay books - which they had to keep with them at all times - had a will form in the back. The will didn't require witnessing, just signing and dating by the soldier himself. Of course, Mathewson could have made a will but his pay book might not have been recovered from his body.


SOFTLY AT NIGHT
THE STARS ARE SHINING
ON A COLD AND SILENT GRAVE

BOMBARDIER JOSEPH HARRISON


In the 1911 census, Joseph Harrison, a married man with three young children, was a dock labourer in New Holland, Lincolnshire, a port on the Humber estuary. In 1901 he had been a gunner with the Royal Marine Artillery based at the shore station, HMS Tamar, in Hong Kong.
His wife, Florrie, chose his inscription.


COULD I BUT KNEEL BESIDE
THE GRAVE OF HIM
WE LOVED SO DEAR
HIS MOTHER

BOMBARDIER WILLIAM J SWETMAN


Mrs Swetman expressed a regret that was common to so many families. The decision not to repatriate the bodies of soldiers - actually, it goes further than that - the decision to forbid the repatriation of soldiers' bodies, caused families much extra grief, but the War Graves Commission was intransigent. They did not want there to be any division between those who could afford to repatriate their relation's and those who couldn't. This was one of the reasons they would not allow private headstones in their cemeteries - all the dead were to be treated equally, regardless of wealth, rank or social status.


HE DIED
FOR THE GREATEST CAUSE
IN HISTORY
EVER REMEMBERED

MAJOR BENJAMIN BENNETT LEANE


This is horrible - you've read of men being blown to pieces by a shell but people don't usually give the details. Major Leane's wife must have instituted a Red Cross enquiry - I hope they didn't tell her everything. I have pieced together the evidence of a number of witnesses:

"I saw Major Leane blown to pieces. I saw his head and pieces of his shoulder." "A shell took him square and blew him to pieces." "A whizz-bang hit him and blew him to pieces. The only thing we could find was his head and a leg." "I searched for his body and eventually found his head and face almost uninjured." "His brother, Colonel Leane, went out and collected the remains." "His brother picked up his head and what was left of him and buried it somewhere I think behind the line." "His brother recognised his head and buried him himself."

The death of Major Benjamin Bennett Leane who died "for the greatest cause in history".


IN PROUD AND SWEETEST MEMORY
OF OUR DARLING (BERTIE)

PRIVATE BERTRAM WALTER DRIVER


Private Driver's mother chose this inscription, somehow that fact is not surprising: the use of the word 'sweetest' and the afterthought of adding her son's diminutive, Bertie - in brackets. 'Bertie' was killed in the 23rd Division's attack on Le Sars.


JESUS WEPT

PRIVATE JOHN MCDONALD


"Jesus wept", St John 11:35, as he shared in the grief surrounding the death of Lazarus, causing those around him to say, "Behold how he loved him!" Jesus then raises Lazarus from the dead, not as in the terms of the resurrection to eternal life but to full life. This is just after Jesus had told Martha, Lazarus' sister:

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?
And she saith unto him, Yea, Lord: I believe thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.

Is this the meaning of the inscription Nulina McDonald chose for her son, John, who died of wounds in No.8 General Hospital, Bois-Guillaume, Rouen.


ONLY ONE IN THOUSANDS
BUT ALL THE WORLD TO US
DAD AND MUM

AIR MECHANIC 2ND CLASS ALBERT EDWARD SPARROW


Albert Sparrow was killed in "a railway collision" - about which I have been able to discover nothing - nine days after the end of the war. His parents' inscription needs no elaboration


BELOVED SON OF A. & M. ROSS
OUR BOY
LIFE'S HIGHEST MISSION
FULFILLED

PRIVATE WALLACE ROSS


Wallace Ross was admitted to hospital in Rouen on 11 November, dangerously ill with a gun shot wound to his head. He died six days later - 'Life's highest mission fulfilled': to die for your country.
It was his sister, Catherine MacDonald, who filled in the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia and confirmed Wallace's headstone inscription, their parents would appear to have been dead.
Wallace Ross, a rubber worker from Northcote, Australia, enlisted in July 1915 and embarked from Australia on 23 November as part of the reinforcements for the 5th Battalion Australian Infantry. Withdrawn from Gallipoli in mid-December, the battalion served briefly in Egypt before being transferred to the Western Front where it was heavily involved in the Somme campaign at Pozieres. Ross was wounded on 26 July with a slight gun shot wound to the head. He was back in action after two months. And then two months later he was dead.
Three years after the death of her brother, Catherine MacDonald gave birth to a son whom she named Douglas Wallace Ross MacDonald.



BROTHER TO A.H. HODGES
13TH BTN. KILLED AT GALLIPOLI

PRIVATE CHARLES FREDERICK HODGES


It was nine months before Charles Hodges' parents discovered his fate, nine months in which the
Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau had tried to find witnesses who had seen what had happened to him. Eventually they tracked down Corporal L O'Neill who told them definitively:

"On 14th November at 5 am we were attacking; we failed in our objective and retired to our front line which we held. I saw Hodges after we had got back to our lines about 9 am go outside our trench; there were wounded men inside the trench and he had to go outside to get passed them. A sniper hit him in the head and he died about two minutes after. I was right alongside of him."

Mr and Mrs Hodges therefore did eventually find out what had happened to this son, but they never found out about his elder brother, Albert Henry. He went missing in Gallipoli on 22 August 1915 in the unsuccessful Australian assault on Hill 60. His body was never found and curiously there is no record of his parents instituting a Red Cross search for him. Albert Hodges is commemorated on the Lone Pine memorial in Gallipoli and on his brother's grave in France.


WE'LL MEET AGAIN
WHEN THE BARRAGE LIFTS

ABLE SEAMAN JOHN CARRUTHERS FARQUHARSON


"When the barrage lifts": for many years The Times carried an In Memoriam notice on 1 July to the 9th and 10th Battalions the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, which concluded with the words, "Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts". This was the toast the acting adjutant gave on 30 June 1916, the eve of the opening of the Somme offensive, in order to avoid having to toast the Commanding Officer, whom he loathed.
Able Seaman John Farquharson did not serve in the KOYLI but instructions about barrages were just as pertinent to him as they were to any infantryman since that is what he was. Farquharson served with the Nelson Battalion, Royal Naval Division, used as an infantry division throughout the war, first in Gallipoli and then in France. He was killed in action on 13 November 1916 in the assault on Beaumont-Hamel.
And what were the instructions about barrages?

The object of the artillery barrage is to prevent the enemy from manning his parapets and installing his machine guns in time to arrest the advance of our infantry. ... The barrage must, therefore, be sufficiently heavy to keep the enemy in his dug-outs and shelters as long as possible, and sufficiently accurate to allow the infantry to get so close to the trench attacked that, when the barrage lifts, they can cover the remaining distance before the enemy can prepare to receive them.
[Artillery in Offensive Operations April 1916]

When the barrage lifts is therefore the final signal to rush the enemy trenches. In this inscription does it mean when the war is over, when life is over, is it connected to 'We'll meet again'? Whatever the answer, the idea of meeting again was a great comfort to bereaved relations, especially when, as is the case with the Farquharsons, two of their sons were killed.


HERE LIES A FATHER'S HOPE
A MOTHER'S PRIDE
AND A WIFE'S DEPENDENCE

PRIVATE JOHN PRENTICE


In twelve spare words James Prentice describes a world of loss: for himself, his wife and his son's wife, Robina. Note how for Robina what she has lost is her dependence, the financial support her husband provided. War widows received a pension: 20 shillings a week if there were no children. However, by the time Becourt Military Cemetery was finalised, in 1933, Robina Prentice had married again.
Three soldiers from the 10th Battalion The Cameronians died on 23 August, two were buried beside Field Ambulance stations and one is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial. There is no record of what caused their death.


YE BABBLING WINDS
THROUGH SILENCE SWEEP
DISTURB YE NOT
OUR LOVED ONE'S SLEEP

PRIVATE THOMAS GRANT HAMILTON


This lovely inscription comes from Robert Burns' 'Ode for General Washington's Birthday' 1793, which, whilst hailing Washington also laments Scotland's loss of independence:

Where is that soul of Freedom fled?
Immingled with the mighty dead,
Beneath that hallow'd turf where Wallace lies
Hear it not, Wallace! in thy bed of death.
Ye babbling winds! in silence sweep,
Disturb not ye the hero's sleep,

Thomas Hamilton's parents use 'loved one' rather than 'hero'; I wonder if they knew the circumstances of their son's death? Thomas Hamilton was executed on 3 October 1916 for striking a senior officer. The officer, a Second Lieutenant, had put him under open arrest for having a cigarette in his mouth during the mid-day stable parade, and then had refused to hear Hamilton's explanation. Hamilton lost his temper and hit him.
Brought to trial on 20 September Hamilton was found guilty and condemned to death. In ninety per cent of cases death sentences were commuted but the Commander of the 6th Division decided that "the state of discipline in this unit requires an example". General Rawlinson felt that the Second Lieutenant hadn't handled the situation well and that Hamilton should receive seven years penal servitude but Haig disagreed and Hamilton was executed on 3 October.
Did his parents know? Yes. Until November 1917 the next-of-kin of the executed received a letter stating:

I am directed to inform you that a report has been received from the War Office to the effect that ___ was sentenced after being tried by court martial to suffer death by being shot, and his sentence was duly executed on ___.
[Babington For the Sake of Example. Paladin 1985, page 83]


JOINED 1914
I HAVE ONLY DONE MY DUTY
AND HAVE NO REGRETS FOR RESULT
SICKLE TRENCH, POZIERES 1916

SECOND LIEUTENANT GORDON MINTER FRIEAKE


It took Gordon Frieake eight days to die. Wounded on the 23/24 July when the 1st/4th Ox and Bucks formed part of the Fourth Army attack on Pozieres Ridge, he was evacuated to one of hospitals at Rouen where he died on 1 August. The 1st/4th War Diary has been transcribed and gives full details of the attack. Frieake was in D Company
There are no quotation marks round the words, I have only done my duty and have no regrets for result, but it must be Gordon Frieake speaking, whether before he was wounded or afterwards there is no way of knowing.
Gordon Frieake was the only child of his parents' second marriages. He had eight step-siblings. Educated at Ardingley College, he joined the Territorial Battalion of the London Rifle Brigade in 1914 when he was seventeen. He received a commission in the 1st/4th Ox and Bucks in April 1916 and died just over four months later.


THE LORD GAVE
THE LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY
BLESSED BE
THE NAME OF THE LORD

CAPTAIN BASIL HALLAM RADFORD


Job's words, [Job 1 21-2] after God has tested him to the limit by taking away his wealth, his possessions and finally his children, provide a sober contrast to what the public knew of Captain Basil Radford. To them he was Basil Hallam, who in 1914-5 played the most popular character on the English stage, Gilbert the Filbert the Knut with a K, alongside the sensational American revue star, Elsie Janis. Hallam was a public idol, a superstar, more than fifty years after his death Cecil Beaton remembered him as having "an attraction that was devastating to all ages and sexes". From her autobiography, 'So Far So Good', Elsie Janis obviously agreed with Beaton!
What was a Filbert? He was the early twentieth century equivalent of a fop or dandy, beautifully described by Owen Rutter in his
'Song of Tiadatha"
.

He was what we call a Filbert,
Youth of two and twenty summers.
You could see him any morning
In July of 1914,
Strolling slowly down St James's
From his comfy flat in Duke Street.
Little recked he of in those days,
Save of socks and ties and hairwash,
Girls and motorcars and suppers;
Little suppers at the Carlton,
Little teas at Rumpelmayer's,
Little weekend down at Skindles;

The Passing Show played to packed houses through 1914 and into 1915 with Hallam still playing Gilbert to great acclaim despite the fact that he was a young man of military service age. However, after the sinking of the Lusitania on 8 May, he couldn't do it any more. Americans in London were outraged and conflicted, could/would/should the US maintain her neutrality? Elsie for one declared that she was about as neutral as "cyanide of potassium". Hallam announced he was leaving the show, Elsie announced she would leave too, describing their last night as making "any opening night I have ever had seem colourless by comparison".
Hallam joined the RFC and served in the Kite Balloon section in the skies over the Somme where, just over a year after enlisting, he was killed falling from his balloon. Despite the fact that hundreds must have seen him fall the facts are disputed. Was the balloon being pulled in when it broke away, did it break loose in a high wind or was it brought down by enemy fire? Were there two men or three on board, was Hallam wearing a parachute which snagged or did he not have one? Gerald Gliddon, writing authoritatively for the Western Front Association, states that the balloon broke free in the wind and that Hallam had no parachute. Balloon crew, unlike pilots, were provided with parachutes, one for each man, the pilot and the observer. But there were three men in the balloon that day, there was a friend with them who had gone for the ride. Hallam gave him his parachute and jumped rather than fall into enemy hands. Raymond Asquith, who was among those who watched it happen, described it as a frightening death, even to look at".


NOTHING BUT WELL AND FAIR
AND WHAT MAY QUIET US
IN A DEATH SO NOBLE

SERJEANT LESLIE COULSON


Leslie Coulson was a pastoral poet with a lyrical love of nature. Even after he went to war nature featured prominently in his poetry, it still referred to lanes and larks and cornflowers but against this now the guns thundered, the shells screamed and the dead lay, causing him to ask:

Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?
Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?
Who gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards?
Who spread the fields with flesh and blood and brains?

His father included this poem, found among Coulson's effects after his death, in the short collection he published in 1917: 'From an Outpost and Other Poems'.
Like so many soldiers, Coulson's life and war service was sanitised and romanticised by the people remembering him. His father wrote: "He was gentle and affectionate, and like all sympathetic natures shrank from inflicting pain", quoting his Colonel's words: "A gallant hero; one of the best men we ever had, loved and honoured by all". That may be, but Coulson himself didn't shirk the fact that his hands had been "trained to kill".
Leslie Coulson was a journalist, the assistant foreign editor of the London Standard. He enlisted in September 1914 went overseas in December and served in Malta, Egypt and Gallipoli before being sent to France in April 1916. By now with the 12th London Regiment, The Rangers, who were heavily involved on the Somme, Coulson was shot in the chest on 7 October in an attack on Dewdrop Trench and died the next day.
Frederick Coulson quoted from the opening lines of Milton's 'Samson Agonistes' for his son's inscription:

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

Nothing for tears? Only the fact that Leslie Coulson would never go home:

When I come home, and leave behind
Dark things, I would not call to mind,
I'll taste good ale and home-made bread,
And see white sheets and pillows spread.
And there is one who'll softly creep
To kiss me ere I fall asleep,
And tuck me 'neath the counterpane,
And I shall be a boy again
When I come home!
[When I Come Home. Leslie Coulson]


IN DREAMS WE SEE YOU
ON THE BATTLE PLAIN
WOUNDED, CALLING IN VAIN

PRIVATE LYELL POCOCK


This is surely no dream, the vision of your seventeen-year-old son lying wounded on the battlefield, calling in vain for help, is the stuff of nightmares not dreams. Lyell Pocock was wounded on 15 October during the Battle of Pozieres and died the same day. His parents never instituted a Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau search so there is no record of the circumstances of his death. Mr and Mr James Pocock were haunted by their imaginings and managed to find the words of a song to represent them.
'When this Cruel War is Over', written in 1862 and dedicated to "Sorrowing hearts at home", was the most popular song of the American Civil War whether with Unionists or Confederates. Lyell Pocock's inscription is an adaptation of the second and third verses:

When the summer breeze is sighing, mournfully along,
Or when autumn leaves are falling, sadly breathes the song.
Oft in dreams I see thee lying on the battle plain,
Lonely, wounded, even dying, calling but in vain.

If amid the din of battle, nobly you should fall,
Far away from those who love you, none to hear you call -
Who would whisper words of comfort, who would soothe your pain?
Ah! the many cruel fancies, ever in my brain.

Whilst the announcements of his death in the local Bendigo papers describe Lyell as 18, James Pocock was very precise when he filled in the circular for his son's entry on the Roll of Honour of Australia: his son was seventeen and six months. This means that he was sixteen and five months when he enlisted in September 1915, and still sixteen when he embarked from Australia on 25 January 1916.


ETERNALL GRATITUDE
FOR THE SHORT ENJOYMENT
OF SO SWEET A MERCIE

SECOND LIEUTENANT STEPHEN KNOWLES


This tender inscription has a very obscure origin. It comes from a monument in the church of St Mary the Virgin, Gilston, Hertfordshire, dedicated to the four-year-old daughter of Sir John Gore and Lady Gore, Bridget, who died in 1657:

" ... who Being the most desired Fruit of many prayers, and the joy of her Mother's heart, was without reluctancie, most chearfullie resigned to God that gave her in the 4th yeare, the blossome of her age, the 10th of February 1657. In testimony whereof & of her dearest affection to her most ravishing memorie, shee hath erected this small monument & deposited in the hands of the Officers of this Parish 60L. to be disposed in land, and the revenue of it for a perpetuall pious and charitable Anniversary of her eternall gratitude for the short enjoyment of so sweet a mercie."

Stephen Knowles was born and brought up in Bolton in Lancashire where both his parents were also born and where his father was a master cotton spinner. How was his mother, who chose the inscription his father having died in 1912, familiar with a monument in a Hertfordshire church? The inscription had been printed in 'The Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire', 1826, and again in 'The Christian Remembrancer', 1841, but Mrs Knowles spells it as it appears on the monument and neither of these publications do.
Educated at Repton School and destined for Pembroke College, Cambridge to read medicine, Stephen Knowles joined up on the outbreak of war and was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade on 15 May 1915. He went to France on 6 December and died on 24 October 1916 of wounds received in action the previous day during an attack on the German trenches at Gaudecourt. The Times announcement of his death six days later describes him as a "dearly loved and most loving" son - "Eternal gratitude for the short enjoyment of so sweet a mercie".



IN PROUD MEMORY
SHALL WE NOT ALSO
TAKE THE EBB
THAT HAD THE FLOW

SECOND LIEUTENANT FRANK SIDNEY CHESTERTON


Frank Chesterton's wife, Norah, chose this inscription from a poem by W.E. Henley called 'What is to Come'. Henley was an influential literary figure at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, best known now for his poem 'Invictus' with its ringing last lines:

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

'What is to Come', though far less well known is a tender, bittersweet poem, very appropriate for a wife's farewell:

What is to come we know not. But we know
That what has been was good - was good to show,
Better to hide, and best of all to bear.
We are the masters of the days that were;
We have lived, we have loved, we have suffered ... even so.
Shall we not take the ebb who had the flow?
Life was our friend? Now, it it be our foe -
Dear, though it spoil and break us! - need we care
What is to come?
Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow,
Or the gold weather round us mellow slow;
We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare
And we can conquer, though we may not share
In the rich quiet of the afterglow
What is to come.

Frank Chesterton was a successful architect working mainly in London and the Home Counties, particularly in Knightsbridge and Kensington where much of the rebuilding of the High Street during the early years of the twentieth century came from his designs. He was also a partner in the family's residential property business, Chesterton and Sons, which his grandfather had started and which his son Oliver successfully expanded into one of London's largest estate agencies.
There's no indication that Frank Chesterton had been a Territorial and the fact that he served with C Battery, 92nd Brigade, a New Army battalion, would appear to confirm this. He saw service on the Somme and he died at a Casualty Clearing Station of wounds received the same day, 11 November 1916.


FOR HOME AND GLORY
INSERTED BY HIS MOTHER
HELEN MCLAUGHLAN
R.I.P.

PRIVATE PETER MCLAUGHLAN


This doesn't say hope and glory as in 'Land of', but home and glory, the words coming from 'In the Pale Moonlight', a music hall song sung by Vesta Tilley, the male impersonator, whose fame reached its peak during the First World War. 'In the Pale Moonlight' relates a series of stories in which people are caught out trying to be what they aren't. However, the last verse has a complete change of tone.

In the pale moonlight, 'twas an awful sight,
Upon a field of battle.
Lay boys in red who'd fought and bled,
Amidst the din and rattle.
Now the fight was done the victory won,
And on that field so gory,
Were the boys who fought as Britons ought,
For country, home and glory.
It's British courage, it's deeds like these
Makes England the mistress of land and seas.

It's obvious from the reference to 'boys in red' that the song predates the First World War since the British army stopped wearing red jackets when khaki was introduced in 1902. However, for Helen McLaughlan and her Scottish sons, pride in "British courage and its deeds", despite the numbers who "fought and bled", which included her son, survived the bloodshed of Flanders.
Peter McLaughlan was the youngest of Helen Maclaughlan's four sons. He served with the 5th/6th Battalion The Cameronians, Scottish Rifles, and was killed on the Somme on the last day of the campaign - "For home and glory".



PER CRUCEM AD LUCEM

SECOND LIEUTENANT DAVID CUTHBERT THOMAS


This is 'Dick Tiltwood', the young subaltern immortalised in Siegfried Sassoon's 'Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man'. Although Sassoon writes under a pseudonym, George Sherston, and disguises everyone in the book with pseudonyms, he doesn't disguise their qualities nor his feelings towards them. This is his first impression of Tiltwood:

"Twilight was falling and there was only one small window, but even in the half-light his face surprised me by its candour and freshness. He had the obvious good looks which go with fair hair and firm features, but it was the radiant integrity of his expression which astonished me. ... His was the bright countenance of truth; ignorant and undoubting; incapable of concealment but strong in reticence and modesty. In fact, he was as good as gold, and everyone knew it as soon as they knew him."

Sassoon tells us that 'Dick' was the son of a country parson, which was true of David Thomas. His father was the Revd Evan Thomas of Llanedy Rectory, Pontardulais in Glamorganshire. To Sassoon:

"Generations of upright country gentlemen had made Dick Tiltwood what he was, and he had arrived at manhood in the nick of time to serve his country in what he naturally assumed to be a just and glorious war. ... he was a shining epitome of his unembittered generation which gladly gave itself to the German guns and machine guns - more gladly, perhaps than the generation which knew how much (or how little some would say) it had to lose."

'Dick' was killed by a sniper whilst out with a wiring party. The bullet entered his throat but didn't kill him outright. He was taken to the dressing station but despite the fact that the Battalion doctor had been a throat specialist before the war he hadn't been able to save him.
Sassoon attends his funeral that night:

"... we stood on the bare slope just above the ration dump while the Brigade chaplain went through his words; a flag covered all we were there for; only the white stripes on the flag made any impression on the dimness of the night. ... A sack was lowered into a hole in the ground. The sack was Dick. I knew Death then."

David Thomas's epitaph, 'Per crucem ad lucem", through the cross to the light, or by suffering to heaven, confirms what Sassoon has already told us about him. The phrase summarised a monastic ideal that became the ideal for knightly piety and is therefore eminently suitable for someone who, "was a shining epitome of his unembittered generation which gladly gave itself to the German guns and machine guns".
It may not be insignificant that 'per crucem ad lucem' was the title of Cardinal Mercier's impassioned, patriotic and inspirational sermon in St Gudale's Cathedral, Brussels on 21 July 1916, Belgian Independence Day. Published as a pastoral letter, which eventually circulated round the world, it encapsulated Mercier's belief that 'per crucem as lucem', from sacrifice flashes forth light, therefore victory will prevail.


THE WORLD WAS SWEETER
FOR HIS LIFE
AND LIFE LIVES -
POORER BY A FRIEND. A.V.R.

LIEUTENANT ALFRED VICTOR RATCLIFFE


Alfred Ratcliffe wrote his own epitaph - not for himself but for a friend, 'G.C.H.', who died in 1912. The poem, 'A Broken Friendship', was first published in 1913 in 'A Broken Friendship and Other Verse" and then anthologised with some of his later poetry in several collections of soldier poets. Ratcliffe's mother chose the lines for his inscription although very oddly the family later placed a private stone in front of his War Graves Commission headstone, which obscured the original inscription. The plaque reads, "A very dearly loved son and brother".
The verse from which the original inscription comes is the last verse of the poem:

And through the darksome ways of strife
This thought shall lustre till the end,
The world was sweeter for his life,
And life lives - poorer by a friend.
[Harrogate August 1912]

The way the words are laid out in the inscription has led some people to think that the lines were written "by a friend" but no, it's that Ratcliffe's life is poorer by the loss of a friend.
There is an echo of a poem by Gerald Massey, 'In Memoriam, Earl Brownlow' in this last verse:

And Life is all the sweeter that he lived,
And all he loved more sacred for his sake,
And death is all the brighter that he died,
And Heaven is all the happier that he's there.

Ratcliffe, educated at Dulwich College and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, was killed on 1 July 1916. His senior officer having been killed earlier in the day, Ratcliffe was commanding the company at the time of his death. A fellow officer told his mother that "from where we found his body he must have led it pluckily and well".


LEGION D'HONNEUR
IN REMEMBRANCE OF MY
BELOVED HUSBAND
AND IN GLORIOUS EXPECTATION

MAJOR WILLIAM LA TOUCHE CONGREVE, VC, DSO, MC


Billy Congreve had been his wife's 'beloved husband' for exactly seven weeks when he was killed by a sniper. Just 25 when he died, he was marked for a great military future being bold, resourceful, utterly dedicated and a natural leader. All these qualities were on maximum display during the first weeks of the Somme Campaign, and it is for his actions during the two weeks 7 to 21 July - constantly performing acts of gallantry and by his personal example inspiring all those around him with confidence at critical periods during the operations - that he was awarded the Victoria Cross. An award that his father also held.
Both Congreve's parents served in the war, his mother in the Red Cross as a nurse and his father, Lieutenant-General Walter Congreve, in command of the XIII Corps during the Battle of the Somme. Being in the same region the two men saw a lot of each other and thus it was that Walter Congreve was able to visit his dead son before his burial: "(I) was struck by his beauty and strength of face ... I never felt so proud of him as I did when I said goodbye to him. I myself put in his hand a posy of poppies, cornflowers and daisies ... and with a kiss I left him."
One of his fellow officers - who are always left annoyingly anonymous in these war memoirs! - wrote of him, "I don't think there was ever anyone like him; he was absolutely glorious, and even when he was ADC, all the men knew and loved him - which is unusual." Mrs Congreve uses the word glorious in the headstone inscription - "in glorious expectation". When her husband died she was expecting a baby who was born on 21 March 1917 and named Mary Gloria.
In 1919 Pamela Congreve married William Fraser. He had been their best man.

Armageddon Road: A VC's Diary Billy Congreve
edited by Terry Norman 1982, reprinted Pen & Sword 2014


WE LOVED HIM DEARLY

PRIVATE FREDERICK GRINDLEY


Most families observed the conventions in some way or other when choosing a headstone inscription, but not all of them. Frederick Grindley's family didn't. They put, "We loved him dearly" as a simple statement of fact, which is all the more effective for it.
And who were the "we" who loved him dearly? There were his parents, Thomas and Ann, although it's possible that Ann was dead by the time the inscription was chosen, and his three brothers: Joseph, Henry and Arthur. Joseph, his older brother, signed for the inscription.
Frederick was a Lance Corporal in the Shropshire Light Infantry in the 1901 census, and a house painter in Islington in 1911. He enlisted in Birmingham and was mobilised from there on 20 March 1916.
Grindley served with the 7th Battalion the King's Shropshire Light Infantry which took part in the weather-postponed attack at Serre at 5.45 am on 13 November. The attack failed to gain its objective, thwarted by mud, mist, early officer casualties and the strength-in-depth of the enemy.


HE WAS THE LIGHT AND LIFE
OF A HAPPY HOME

SECOND LIEUTENANT ALEXANDER BALFOUR HARE


This "happy home" consisted of a mother, father, two brothers and a sister who lived in Leith, Midlothian, where Alexander Hare was born. His father, Edward Hare, was a boilermaker, who had been born in Boston in the United States of America, but otherwise the Hare family were firmly Scottish, as was Alexander's mother's family.
A star pupil at Leith Academy, Alexander Hare went on to Edinburgh University where he took a 1st in History and was President of the University Fabian Society. He then taught for a year at George Watson Academy where their records relate that, "In his desire to serve his country he underwent a serious surgical operation, and, having been pronounced fit, was gazetted to the R.F.A."
Hare was killed on 31 October when a high explosive shell hit his dug-out.


BORN IN EDINBURGH
HE FOUGHT FOR SCOTLAND
AND FOR SOUTH AFRICA

PRIVATE ALEXANDER TOD


Private Alexander Tod served with the 3rd South African Regiment, which attacked with the South African Brigade at Delville Wood on 15 July 1916 - "a corner of death. When the Brigade withdrew on the 20th two thirds had become casualties. It had been a titanic struggle, which the History of South Africa in the Great War attempts to explain:

The six days and five nights during which the South African Brigade held the most difficult post on the British front - a corner of death on which the enemy fire was concentrated at all hours from three sides, and into which fresh German troops, vastly superior in numbers to the defence, made periodic incursions only to be broken and driven back - constitutes an epoch of terror and glory scarcely equalled in the campaign.

Alexander Tod went into battle on the 15th and didn't answer at roll call on the 20th. His date of death in the War Graves Commissions' records is therefore given as "Between 15/07/1916 and 20/07/1916". For eighteen years his fate was "missing, believed killed in action". Until 1934 when three bodies in a single grave were discovered at map reference 57c.5.18.b.65.20. Tod still had his identity disc, the other two men had to be reburied as unidentified British soldiers - USBs.
By 1934 both Tod's parents were dead and it was his sister who chose his inscription. She makes no bones about where her brother's loyalties had lain - "He fought for Scotland and for South Africa".


FRAMED IN THE PRODIGALITY
OF NATURE
YOUNG, VALIANT, WISE

LIEUTENANT ERNEST EMANUEL POLACK


With these words, Shakespeare's Richard III describes the young prince Edward of Westminster, killed fighting for the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471:

A sweeter and lovelier gentleman,
Framed in the prodigality of nature,
Young, valiant, wise and, no doubt, right royal,
The spacious world cannot again afford;

Nature richly endowed this young man with every gift it could bestow, it will never be able to afford to be so lavish again.
Joseph Polack chose this inscription. He and his wife, Sophia, lost two of their sons in the war, Ernest's elder brother, Benjamin, had been killed in Mesopotamia only three months earlier on 9 April 1916. Sophia herself died on 28 March 1918, before the end of the war.
Joseph was a schoolmaster, a Jewish minister and the master of the Jewish boarding house at Clifton College, Bristol. Both his parents were German Jews, born in Hamburg, who had come to England in 1853.
Two letters from Ernest Polack survive, both published in Laurence Housman's 'War Letters of Fallen Englishmen', and in both of them he quotes Shakespeare. In one, to the father of a friend who has been killed, he quotes Friar Francis from 'Much Ado About Nothing', and in the other, his last letter to his parents on the eve of the opening of the Battle of the Somme, from 'Anthony and Cleopatra', 'Julius Caesar', and a misquote from 'Hamlet'. It therefore only too appropriate that his father should quote from Shakespeare for him.
Benjamin Polack has no grave and is commemorated on the Basra Memorial.


WE KNOW THAT HE ABIDETH IN US

CORPORAL EDWARD DWYER VC


My eye was caught by a pencilled note at the bottom of a standard page in one of the Commission's cemetery registers: "* This headstone is to be engraved at the Commission's expense". Curious, I looked to see if I could work out why the Commission had decided to pay for this inscription. The man had no recorded next-of-kin but what he did have was the Victoria Cross. His name was Edward Dwyer and at the time it was awarded he was the youngest soldier to win the award.
Wounded soon after incident, Dwyer was sent back to England to recover where, lionised by the public and the press, he became something of a celebrity. You can hear him talking - and singing! - in this interview.
Dwyer won his VC for "most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty at "Hill 60" on 20th April, 1915", single-handedly fending off an enemy advance when the rest of his platoon were either dead or wounded. In an interview published in the Daily Chronicle War Budget 8 July 1915, and republished by the Western Front Association, Dwyer, with typical British self-deprecation, says, "They gave me the VC because I was in a dead funk at the idea of being taken prisoner by the Germans".
Dwyer's celebrity was undoubtedly used and promoted by the Government for recruiting purposes, and much of what he says in his interviews will have been suggested by them. Nevertheless, it may be Government propaganda but it's Dwyer's words; to the 'slackers' who grouse about the conditions they'd have to put up with if they volunteered, "I say that if the officers can put up with the grub and the grind, and men with money can serve as privates who've always lived soft before, nobody has any right to be too particular".
Dwyer returned to the front, it is thought at his own request, and was killed in an attack on the German lines at Guillemont on 3 September 1916. His inscription, the Commission records don't say who chose it, comes from the First Epistle General of John Chapter 3, verse 24:

And he that keepeth His commandments dwelleth in Him, and He in him. And thereby we know that He abideth in us, by the spirit which He hath given us.


FELLOWSHIP IS HEAVEN
AND THE LACK OF FELLOWSHIP
IS HELL

BRIGADIER GENERAL PHILIP HOWELL


British First World War generals are meant to be ancient, incompetent, callous and out of touch, swigging claret in their chateaux, unaware of what's going on on the front line. Obviously this is an exaggeration but the stereotype still holds good in many people's minds.
Brigadier General Philip Howell bore no resemblance to this model. For a start he was only 37 when he died. Professor Gary Sheffield sums him up in his book 'Command and Morale': "Howell was an intellectual, something of a Bohemian, and a political radical". You can see the nature of the man from this letter he wrote to his wife in September 1915 after he had been at the front for more than a year:

"It is VILE that all my time should be devoted to killing Germans whom I don't in the least want to kill. If all Germany could be united in one man and he and I could be shut up together just to talk things out, we could settle the war, I feel, in less than one hour. ... Shall I desert and see if any of them will listen on the other side?"

Howell was one of General Haig's proteges; Haig saw great potential in him. However, General Gough considered him a thorn in his side since Howell was always arguing with him. Howell objected to the automatic top-down control Gough expected and felt that the man on the spot should not always be overruled. Howell frequently visited the front line trenches in order to see the situation for himself and it was whilst on one of these solo reconnaissances that he was killed by a stray shell just behind the front line at Authuille.

His wife, who was also an unusual and adventurous person, chose his inscription. It sounds like a forthright statement of what life is going to be like now that she has lost his fellowship. She may have meant this but the quotation comes from William Morris's novel about the Peasant's Revolt, 'A Dream of John Ball'. Morris holds that fellowship - mutual respect and mutual support - should be the basis of a new society. For Morris it was a political statement, a socialist statement, and Mrs Howell in all probability meant it as such in this inscription.

"Fellowship is heaven, and the lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and the lack of fellowship is death:"
A Dream of John Ball IV
William Morris


ELSKET OG SAVNET
AF MODER OG SOSKENDE

LANCE SERJEANT JORGEN KORNERUP BANG


Jorgen Kornerop-Bang was a Dane, a master builder from Silkeborg in Northern Jutland, a Danish national athlete, the winner of fourteen Danish decathlon championships, the holder of nine Danish javelin records who died as a Lance Serjeant in the British army.
Denmark was neutral in the First World War, a position she maintained with some difficulty. Mindful of Belgium's fate, she was keen not to give Germany any reason to invade across her southern frontier from Schleswig-Holstein. But many Danes still felt a residual hostility towards Germany over her occupation of these two provinces. Denmark mobilized her reserves, 50,000 men, to defend her borders. Germany called up the young men of Schleswig-Holstein to fight for the Fatherland. A small number of Danes, it's estimated to be in the region of about 85, joined the French army. It's not known how many joined the British but Jorgen Kornerop-Bang must have been one of them.
He served with the 17th Battalion the Royal Fusiliers, the City of London Regiment, who made use of his javelin skills by putting him in charge of grenade throwing. Unfortunately he was killed when a grenade exploded prematurely.
Kornerop-Bang's inscription is in Danish. It means, 'Loved and missed by mother and siblings'. It is said that one of his brothers, Johannes, also served in the British army and died at Verdun on 12 October 1918. However, none of Jorgen's siblings were called Johannes, there isn't a Johannes Kornorop-Bang in the War Graves Commission registers and if there were he wouldn't have died at Verdun since that is the one place where the French always fought on their own. It's possible that Johannes was a cousin, one of the 85 Danes who volunteered to fight in the French army.


AQUILA NON CAPTAT MUSCAS

LIEUTENANT D'ARCY REIN WADSWORTH


Aquila non captat muscas - the eagle does not catch flies, what kind of an epitaph is this? It's a Latin proverb, an admonishment to spend your time on worthwhile endeavours not to waste it on trivia, not to get distracted but to concentrate on your goal, just as an eagle only pursues quality prey not flies.
Employed at the Bank of Montreal, D'Arcy Rein Wadsworth enlisted in May 1915 and was commissioned into the Canadian Infantry the following month. Sent to England in June 1916 with the 75th Battalion, he was in Flanders by August and on the Somme in September. Sometime during these months Wadsworth attended a bombing course and afterwards was appointed battalion bombing officer. On 14th October the battalion came out of the trenches at Tara Hill and two days later Wadsworth was mortally wounded whilst taking bombing practice when one of the bombs exploded prematurely. The battalion diary has the bald details. He died two days later.


HE VOLUNTEERED
HE THOUGHT IT WAS HIS DUTY
HE DIED THAT WE MIGHT LIVE

PRIVATE JOHN THOMAS JARDINE


Mrs Robina D. Duncan of Waskada, Manitoba, Canada, chose this inscription. It's not been possible to discover who she was or how she knew John Jardine but it sounds as though she did know him because of her choice of words, "he thought it was his duty.
Jardine was born in Edinburgh in 1896 where in 1901 his father, Thomas, was a building contractor's book keeper. There is no sign of the Jardines in the 1911 census, were Thomas and his wife Agnes dead or had they emigrated to Canada?
Jardine served with the 8th Battalion Canadian Infantry and was killed on the 11 November 1916 in all probability when the 8th Battalion helped take Regina Trench during the Battle of the Ancre Heights since the action is one of their battle honours.
The final line of the inscription, 'he died that we might live', with it conscious reference to Christ's sacrifice, comes from 'Hail! - and Farewell!' in a collection of verse by John Oxenham entitled 'All's Well' Some Helpful Verse for These Dark Days of War. John Oxenham was the pseudonym of the novelist, poet and hymn writer William Arthur Dunkerley. During the war his self-published poetry sold hundreds of thousands of copies and provide the source for more than one headstone inscription.

They died that we might live, -
Hail! - And Farewell!
- All honour give
To those who, nobly striving, nobly fell,
That we might live!

That we might live they died, -
Hail! - And Farewell!
- Their courage tried,
By every mean device of treacherous hate,
Like King's they died.

Eternal honour give, -
Hail! - And Farewell!
- To those who died,
In that full splendour of heroic pride,
That we might live!


YR YDYM NI YNER GARU EF
AM IDDO EF YN GYNTAF
EIN CARU NI

PRIVATE THOMAS ROSSER DAVIES


A Welsh wife chose this Welsh inscription for her Welsh husband who was killed on 19 October 1916 whilst serving with the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles. The family came from Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, Wales, Davies was born in Ammanford and his wife's address after his death was in Ammanford. There is nothing to suggest that Davies was ever in Canada, he could just have been drafted into the Canadian Mounted Rifles to replace their casualties rather than having been a Canadian.
Davies' inscription is a quote from the First Epistle of John Chapter 4 verse 19, "We love him because he first loved us". Did his wife, Mrs Annie Davies, notice the next verse: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" Or was she purposely making a veiled criticism about war?
There is no information about how Davies met his death but as the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles were not in the trenches on the day he died, and as he's buried at Contay British Cemetery where two Canadian Casualty Clearing Stations were based, he is most likely to have died of wounds received between the 9th and the 13th October when the battalion were last in the front line. For these four days the battalion war diary records that 13, 2, 37 and 17 other ranks were wounded on each of the successive days, days when it usually described things as "situation normal with intermittent shelling" and occasionally, "hostile enemy activity".


BIRTHLESS
DEATHLESS AND CHANGELESS
REMAINETH THE SPIRIT
FOR EVER

PRIVATE ERNEST GEORGE DORNBUSCH


This is an unusual inscription from an unusual source, the Bhagavad-Gita a Hindu scripture. It's an interesting inscription too, especially for a machine gunner. Krishna argues:

"Thou grievest where no grief should be! thou speak'st words lacking wisdom! for the wise in heart mourn not for those that live, nor those that die. ... He who shall say, "Lo! I have slain a man!" He who shall think, "Lo! I am slain!" those both know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain! Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; never was time it was not; end and beginning are dreams! Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever; death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!"
The Bhagavad-Gita Book 2

There's another interesting aspect to this inscription. There were only three Dornbusches killed in the First World War and buried in War Grave Commission cemeteries and the other two are German soldiers: Kanonier Hermann Dornbusch and Obermatrose Karl Johann Dornbusch. Is this why the Australian National War Memorial records his name as Ernest George Dornbush, without the telltale 'c'? This is the way he spelt his name when he enlisted, and the way his mother spelt her name when she signed the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia, although someone has written on the outside of this form, "correct name Dornbusch".
George Ernest Dornbusch was born in London. His parents emigrated to Australia when he was five months old and settled in Sydney where he attended Sydney Grammar School. On enlistment, Dornbusch described himself as an engineer. His mother on the Roll of Honour goes further and describes him as a "sheep shearing machinery expert". He enlisted in April 1915, served in Gallipoli and France and was killed on 14 November 1916.
A Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau search revealed that he had been killed by a shell.

"I was in company with this man in an attack near Fleurs. I was injured by the shell that killed Durnbush. ... I knew him well, we were in the same gun coy. ... This man was killed instantly but I can give you no details re his burial. I saw him lying dead before I was my self removed to the clearing hospital."
C. Mallard
Dartford Hospital
8.3.17

Durnbusch was buried in a shell hole and after the war his body was reinterred in Warlencourt British Cemetery.


KILLED AT
THE SCHWABEN REDOUBT
SUAVITER IN MODO
FORTITER IN RE

LIEUTENANT ALFRED ROYAL BRADFORD


On 14 October 1916 the 1st Battalion the Cambridgeshire Regiment, together with the 4/5th Black Watch, succeeded in not only capturing but also in holding the Schwaben Redoubt, an event described by General Haig as "one of the finest feats of arms in the history of the British Army". The redoubt, an "all-important hill-top, which dominated the field of battle for many miles in every direction" was constructed of trenches, dug outs and machine gun emplacements. Six attempts had been made to capture it since 1 July, and many hundreds of men had been killed in the attempts.
The regiment's success was a matter of great pride in Cambridgeshire, which explains why Marcus Bradford, manager and later owner of the University Arms Hotel, mentioned it on his son's headstone inscription. We don't know how Bradford was killed but Lt Colonel Clayton, in the 'The Cambridgeshires 1914-1919', writes that at the end of the day, after the Cambridgeshires had achieved their stunning victory:

"I went out into the still, starlit night. By the entrance to my dug-out lay the body of my brave intelligence officer, Bradford. Fearless in life, he had done his work nobly. I am afraid I sobbed like a child; but I was not ashamed of this breakdown."

A month earlier Bradford, then the battalion machine-gun officer, had risked his life in trying to rescue three officers, Shaw, Adam and Butlin, all wounded in a failed raid. "All night long heroic effort were made to rescue the three officers, especially by Lieut. Bradford, Lewis gun officer, who seems to have kept numbers of the enemy at bay by his individual exertions". [Arthur Innes Adams p. 244] The attempt ultimately failed and had to be abandoned but that's how Bradford earned the adjective 'brave'.
The Latin quotation, forming the second part of the inscription, casts a little more light on Bradford's character: 'Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re', gentle in manner, resolute in deed. The quotation comes from 'Industria ad Curandos Animae Morbos' written by the Jesuit priest Claudio Acquviva (1543-1615).


AGED 17 YEARS
R.I.P.

PRIVATE HUGH AUBREY COCKERTON


"Sep.10 [To Mrs Sorley]
I am writing on behalf of a gallant youngster in my company, and I believe known to you. His age is I suspect not more than 17 now, and he has been out some while, and though he is an excellent sturdy youngster his nerves are obviously not strong enough for the racket of this existence, which is now-a-days more violent than usual. The point therefore is that his parents or guardian can write and claim him back, by producing a birth certificate, only he himself is apparently entirely in the dark as to who his guardian is - he has of course no parents. So I wonder if you could make representations in the right quarter and collect a copy of his birth certificate and get the thing done: he isn't a fellow I want to lose, but I feel it partakes rather of cruelty to animals to keep him out here just at present."
[Letter from Captain Arthur Innes Adam, Cambridgeshire Regiment, who was killed six days later (16.9.16), see previous epitaph]

The 'gallant youngster', Private Hugh Aubrey Cockerton, died of gas poisoning on 2 October before anything could be done to send him home. His father had died in 1907 and although his mother was still alive, she died four months later in February 1917.
A Miss Cockerton chose his inscription, perhaps one of his several sisters, making sure that from now on there should be no mistake about his age. An elder brother, John Richard William Cockerton, was killed in action on 9 November 1914 and is commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial.


AWAKE AND SING
YE THAT DWELL IN DUST

CAPTAIN ARTHUR INNES ADAM


There could be an element of joy in this headstone inscription, joy that after four years with no news of her son's fate, Mrs Adela Marion Adam eventually discovered that he had died on the day that he went missing and that the Germans had buried him. In 1920 she published a memoir of her son, 'Arthur Innes Adam', in which she was forced to conclude, "Exhaustive enquiries in Germany, and through several neutral countries and America, have failed to discover the least vestige" of his fate, "there is no glimmer to lighten the impenetrable darkness".
In their history of the Cambridgeshire Regiment, ≈'The Cambridgeshires 1914-1919', Riddell and Clayton record how on 16 September Lieutenant Shaw led an attack on a German strong point, which failed. Shaw withdrew his men successfully but went back when he discovered one man was missing. Captain Adam went with him. He was not meant to have been there but, as the History relates [pp55/6]:

"Under the scheme for the attack Shaw was to be the only officer with the party; but they were all mere lads, and who could blame one so young and fearless for desiring to be with those he commanded in their hour of danger? He had worked for his men day in and day out, and loved them all. As a soldier he was wrong, but as a man he felt he could not leave them."

Both Shaw and Adam were shot and wounded. Another officer went out to find them. He too was shot. During the night another party was sent out but had to be withdrawn as it grew light. The following night a patrol went out and discovered, "All traces of the wounded officers and stretcher-bearers had disappeared".
In September 1920 the Graves Registration Unit located Adam's body in Achiet-le-Petit Communal Cemetery German Extension. And in 1924 it was exhumed and reinterred in Achiet-le-Grand.
Arthur Innes Adam was a prize-winning scholar at Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford. He never returned for his final year but took a commission in the Cambridgeshire Regiment, relieved that his extreme shortsightedness hadn't in the end prevented him from foreign service. He was full of ability and potential but his mother concluded her memoir by saying, "It is idle to enquire what he might have become; let us sing Laus Deo for what he was".
But we might allow ourselves to speculate. On 2 November 1915 he wrote to his sister, Barbara, saying that for the last two years he had had 'a kind of hope in him' that some day they might be able to work together towards lessening the misery caused by wrong-doing. And that "at least, if I am killed, I will now have mentioned the idea to you ..." . Barbara Adam married Jack Wootton in September 1917. He died of wounds six weeks later. In 1958 Barbara Adam, "an acknowledged expert in criminology, penology, and social work" [Oxford DNB], was created Baroness Wootton of Abinger. What might her brother have done too?


SLEEP AFTER TOIL
PORT AFTER STORMY SEAS
EASE AFTER WAR

CAPTAIN OSWALD ALEXANDER HERD


On 21 September 1916, the 14th Battalion Durham Light Infantry went into the trenches near Guillemont between Trones and Bernafray woods. The following day, from noon until 6 pm, they came under sustained artillery fire. On the evening of the 23rd they moved up into the front line and were under constant fire throughout the night. At 8 am on the morning of the 24th the Germans launched an infantry attack on the British trenches. They were driven back, the British guns opening up in retaliation. Unfortunately the British shells fell short and one dropped into a 14th Battalion trench killing Herd and three other soldiers.
Captain Herd's mother, Constance Herd, confirmed his inscription, a quotation from Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queen.

Is not short pain well born, that brings long ease,
And lays the Soul to sleep in quiet grave?
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.
Edmund Spenser 1552-1599
The Fairie Queen: Book 1 Canto IX


REST IN THE LORD
& WAIT PATIENTLY FOR HIM

SERJEANT WILLIAM ECCLES HOLT


Serjeant Holt's widow quotes from Psalm 37 verse 7: "Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass."
The words form the opening lines of a beautiful aria from Mendelssohn's Elijah:

O rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him,
And he shall give thee thy heart's desires.
Commit thy way unto Him, and trust in Him,
And fret not thyself because of evil doers.

Holt had already served 12 years with the army before the First world War broke out. In 1897, when he was 18, he had enlisted with the Royal North Lancashire Fusiliers and served with them in South Africa during the Boer War being present at the relief of Kimberley. He retired, time expired, in 1909. On the outbreak of war in 1914, he joined the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, and went with them to France in February 1915. Holt survived the fighting of First Ypres and of both Delville and High Wood but was killed on the morning of 10 September by a shall which exploded among the working party he was bringing out from a night's work in the trenches.
A married man and the father of two daughters, his son was born eight weeks after his death. He was baptized William Eccles Holt.


AMOR PATRIAE

PRIVATE THOMAS JAMES REYNARD


'Amor patriae' means 'love of country,' however, the phrase has far greater associations than this straight translation indicates. It's a quote from Virgil: "Vincit amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido." Aeneid:823, and is an attempt to explain the very difficult decision Brutus took for the love of his fatherland. And the difficult decision? He had his two sons executed for treason. Brutus is always seen as the great Roman example of the man who loved his country above all else, even above his sons, but Virgil considers that he was also driven by an excessive lust for praise, "immensa cupido".
In this inscription, who was it who loved their fatherland, the land of their birth? Thomas James Reynard was born on the Isle of Wight in 1887 but baptised in South Africa the following year. He had lived in South Africa all his life. And his elder brother, Fred Henry Reynard, since he was about 6. Both Thomas and Fred served in A Company 1st Regiment South African Infantry, and both were killed on 18 October 1916 in an attack on the Butte de Warlencourt. Only Thomas has a grave and an inscription, Fred is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.
Love of the mother country, Britain, was strong throughout the Empire, even among the young. It would not have been at all unusual for Thomas and Fred to have felt they were fighting for her. But, love of the mother country must have been strong in their parents too. It was their father, Charles Reynard, who confirmed the inscription. Is it too fanciful to think that he is hinting that he blames himself for his sons' deaths, that his desire for reflected glory meant that he encouraged his sons to take part in the war that killed them. We'll never know.
John Buchan in his 'History of the South African Forces in France' describes how A Company, together with B and C, attacked at 3.40 am on the morning of 18 October. Conditions were atrocious, it was raining heavily and the ground was a quagmire. Of the 100 men of C Company, 69 became casualties but of A and B companies there was virtually no trace. The Kings Own Scottish Borderers later took the ground and in his memoir, 'Three Years With the 9th Division', Lt Colonel WD Croft wrote of coming across, "a large party of South Africans at full stretch with bayonets at the charge - all dead". By the 20 October the South Africans were back where they had started from. John Buchan summarised the situation, "So ended the tale of the South Africans' share in the most dismal of all the chapters of the Somme".



THE YOUNGEST
OF THREE BROTHERS
WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES
FOR HUMANITY

LANCE CORPORAL OSWALD RAYMOND GOODYEAR


A combination of the Newfoundland Regiment's digitised records and an acclaimed family memoir, The Danger Tree, written by David Macfarlane one of the surviving brother's grandsons, means that a great deal is known about Raymond Goodyear and his five brothers, two of whom, like him, were killed in the war.
Stanley Charles Goodyear
enlisted on 8 September 1914, the first brother to do so. He was closely followed by Josiah Robert on 19 September. Harold Kenneth enlisted in February 1915, Oswald Raymond on 23 November whilst Hedley John waited until 28 March 1916. Kenneth was wounded on 1 July 1916, Raymond was killed on 12 October, Josiah was wounded on 21 November, Stanley was killed on 10 October 1917 and Hedley on 22 August 1918.
Both Kenneth and Josiah were invalided out of the army: Kenneth's gunshot wound in his left elbow meant it would not bend beyond a right angle, and Josiah's gunshot wound in his right thigh made it difficult for him to walk far.
Hedley did not serve with a Newfoundland Regiment but with the Canadian Infantry. A graduate of Victoria University, Toronto, he was teaching at Regal Road Public School when he enlisted. The letter he wrote to his mother on 7 August 1918, the eve of the opening of the battle of Amiens, became famous as 'the last letter home of Hedley Goodyear' and was regularly read at Armistice and Memorial Day services. It was believed that Hedley had been killed the after writing it. However, the letter he wrote on 17 August, in which he told his mother that he was "hun-proof", really was his last letter home. He was shot by a sniper and killed instantly on the 22nd.
Stanley has no grave and is commemorated on the Newfoundland Memorial. Hedley is buried in Hillside Cemetery on the Somme, his inscription reads:
Beneath this stone
A hero sleeps
Who gave his life
For humanity.


M.A. HONS. GLASG.
B.A. HONS. OXON.

SECOND LIEUTENANT GRAHAM BRYMNER THOMAS JARDINE


Graham Jardine was a scholar - as his parents have implied on his headstone inscription - the top scholar of Glasgow Academy in 1908, the holder of two prizes at Glasgow University and of a Lodge Exhibition at University College, Oxford. In July 1915 Jardine took a commission in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and in May 1916, attached to the 5th Battalion the Cameron Highlanders, went to France. He was killed five months later in an attack on the Butte de Warlencourt.
These are the bare bones of his life. However, in the Marquis de Ruvigny's Roll of Honour, a friend has provided us with a brief personal insight:

"I never met a man who had less fear of death. We talked of it more than once ... He always said that to give one's life for a cause one believed in was the most intense kind of self-realization that anyone could achieve."


A SOLDIER OF RABAUL
GALLIPOLI & FRANCE
HIS DUTY DONE

PRIVATE JAMES FREDERICK BUCKLAND


Private Buckland's inscription is a reminder of a forgotten episode from the earliest days of the war. In September 1914, at Britain's request, the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force invaded the island of New Britain, part of German New Guinea, in order to take out a strategically important wireless station at Rabaul, which would otherwise have been of great value to the German East Asiatic Squadron. The successful struggle, known as the Battle of Bita Paka, was the Australian's first military engagement of the war. According to his inscription, Private Buckland was part of this Force.
As a member of the 19th Battalion Australian Infantry, many of whose members had also been part of this Force, Buckland served in Gallipoli from 21 August to 19 December 1915 and then in France until his death in November 1916 during the battle of Flers. Conditions by now on the Somme battlefields were truly appalling and it was the attackers who had the worst of it. Any gains the Australians made was into a devastated landscape whereas the defenders were withdrawing into relatively untouched territory. After this, 'Almost as bad as Flers' became the yardstick against which the Australians would measure conditions.
It was in these conditions that Private Buckland went missing on 14 November. An Australian Red Cross file records his family's attempt to find out what had happened to him - and the difficulties of doing so.
"He is in hospital in England. I am certain of this. Men in the Bn. have heard from him."
Private Cox 26.2.17
"Private Griggs ... told me in Nov. last that he had seen Buckland killed. He was blown up in a trench at Flers.".
Private Williamson 8.6.17
"I saw Buckland at Weymouth about six weeks ago, in the Westham camp. He had an arm off ..." Cooper E. 10.9.17
However, six months earlier, on 3 March 1917, the Australians had captured a frontline German trench and removed a wallet from the body of an otherwise unidentifiable Australian soldier. The wallet belonged to James Buckland and a week later was handed to his brother, Private CM Buckland. The body was buried as James Frederick Buckland but as late as October 1919 there's a letter in the Red Cross file showing that they were still checking: "No trace in Germany".


ALTAR SERVER
OF S. MARY'S PARISH CHURCH
WOOLWICH

PRIVATE HERBERT CYRIL DAVIS


It was not unusual for families to record biographical details of the dead man on his headstone: school, university, profession - chartered accountant, butcher, newsagent, poet. Herbert Davis was a printer, as his father had been before him, but his sister, Ada Moss, chose to record the fact that he had been an altar server at St Mary Magdalene, Woolwich.
Herbert Davis served with the 1/7th Battalion the London Regiment, a territorial battalion. He was killed in action on 7 October 1916 in yet another failed attack on the Butte de Warlencourt. This ancient burial mound may only have been 50 to 60 ft high but it gave the Germans an advantageous position from which to survey the surrounding flat lands. The Australians eventually captured the Butte in April 1917, the Germans took it back in March 1918 and it was recaptured by the British for the last time in August.


"THIS HAPPY-STARRED
FULL-BLOODED SPIRIT
SHOOTS INTO
THE SPIRITUAL LAND" R.L.S.

PRIVATE FRANK WILLIAM TROTMAN


This is such a strong and appropriate inscription that it is quite extraordinary that it's not found more often. It comes from Aes Triplex, a famous essay by Robert Louis Stevenson in which, knowing that he himself doesn't have long to live, he urges people to rush headlong into life even if death is just round the corner: better to be taken at the flood than at low tide. Aes triplex is Latin for triple brass, battle armour was made of triple brass and thought to be indestructible. To Stevenson, someone who dies in the fullness of life is therefore similarly indestructible. The following long but edited passage gives an indication of Stevenson's meaning:

"It is better to lose life like a sprendthrift that to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than die daily in the sick room. ... does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the Gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye. ... In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. ... the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.
Aes Triplex
Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson wrote of the dying trailing crowds of glory, Wordsworth originally associated them with the new-born. To Wordsworth we don't enter the world in "utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home".

Mr WG Trotman of 88 Lower Kennington Lane, London SE11 signed the form to confirm Frank Trotman's inscription. This was probably his father, George Trotman of Trotman & Co, tea dealers and grocers operating from that address. Frank was educated at St Olave's Grammar School, worked for London County Council, he's commemorated on their war memorial, and was killed in action on 7 October 1916 in the attack on Transloy Ridge.


A MOTHER'S LOVE LIES HERE

PRIVATE WILLAIM OGSTON CRAIB


The report of William Craib's death in the Aberdeen Evening Express refes to both his parents so it's interesting that the inscription only refers to his mother. However, the privileging of mothers' grief is something that is noticeable in a number of personal inscriptions.
In a sense, Mrs Mary Craib had already lost her son once. Born in Aberdeen, William Craib left school, worked in the docks and then went to Canada, to work on the Grand Trunk Railway. In 1913 he went to Australia and when he enlisted in April 1915 he was working at the Brisbane gasworks. Craib sailed for Egypt in May, served in Gallipoli from September to December and was then transferred with the 26th Battalion to the Western Front, arriving in France in March 1916. Between 28 July to 7 August the 26th Battalion took part in the battle of Pozieres; Craib died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Puchevillers on the 6th.
Three months earlier the Craigs had finally learnt that their eldest son, George, missing in action since the 25 September, was dead, killed at the battle of Loos. George's body was never found so he has neither grave nor inscription.


LIFE IS SERVICE

SECOND LIEUTENANT MAURICE EDWARD KOZMINSKY


'Life is service' comes from a very famous quotation but whether it was Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) or Rabindrath Tagore (1861-1941) who wrote it the Internet can't decide. It could of course be neither. However, this is the full quote:

I slept and dreamed that life is all joy. I woke and saw that life is all service. I served and saw that service is joy.

Maurice Kozminsky enlisted in May 1915, received a commission in July, was promoted Lieutenant in January 1916, and sailed from Australia in March. After a spell in Egypt, he joined the 7th Battalion in France and on 22 July 1916 went into action with them at Pozieres.
The Australian success at Pozeires on the 23rd came at a huge price and had costly consequences too. Since their's had been the only success, the Germans subjected the area to their greatest artillery barrage yet, a frenzy of savagely remorseless bombardment. By the 29 July the 7th Battalion's losses were so great that they had to be withdrawn. However, they were in action again on 15 August. Kozminsky was killed on the 19th.
In June 1917, Kozminsky's family asked if the Australian Red Cross could find out what had happened to him. The reports do not make for pleasant reading: "he was hit by machine gun fire in left side thigh and stomach and later on got one arm blown off by shell". "I saw him on the stretcher with one arm off and shot through the abdomen". "He left no message, being too weak to speak". Kozminsky was described by one witness as "the whitest man that ever went into action", and by another as "a Russian, and a favourite with the boys and a game sort of fellow".
In fact, the Kozminsky family were not Russian. Abraham Kosminsky, Maurice's father, was 14 when he arrived in Australia from Poland. He built up his business interests there until by 1912 he was Chairman of Austral Hat Mills Ltd, where Maurice was a director and a prominent members of Melbourne's Jewish community.


HE TAKING DEATH ON HIMSELF
SAVED HIS COMRADES

CORPORAL GERALD EDMONDS PATTINSON


The British Army used tanks in battle for the first time at Flers-Courcelette on 15 September 1916. Corporal Pattinson was a member of C14 (No. 509) under the command of Second Lieutenant Francis Arnold. C14 took part in the attack on Bouleaux Wood but after using its machine guns to good effect it ditched in a shell hole. Pattinson and three other crew members attempted to dig it out but were attacked by German grenade throwers. When a grenade landed among the group Pattinson picked it up to throw it back but it exploded and killed him. The full story is told here.
This is the action that gave rise to his inscription with its distinct echo of the sacrifice that Christ himself made: - "He saved others; himself he cannot save," St Matthew 27:42.
The Pattinson family must have had a difficult war since Mrs Pattinson was a German citizen, born in Hamburg in 1851, and at the time of the 1911 census they had a German domestic servant in the household.


KILLED IN ACTION
IN HIS TWENTIETH YEAR

LIEUTENANT EDWARD WYNDHAM TENNANT


A simple inscription, which speaks volumes about the soldier's parents. Edward Wyndham Tennant celebrated his nineteenth birthday on 1 July 1916, barely two months before he was killed. He had been at the front since August 1915, in other words, since he was just eighteen. Army policy decreed that no soldier should be allowed to serve overseas until he was nineteen, unless he had his parents' permission. Lady Glenconner, in her memoir of her son, says that, "On account of his efficiency as an officer he had the honour of being especially selected to go out to France, although Brigade Orders had just been issued that no one should leave England before nineteen years of age". Edward's parents would have had to have their permission too, just as John Kipling and Yvo Charteris's parents had done, with similar tragic consequences.
Edward Tennant left Winchester in the summer of 1914, a year early, with the intention of spending some time in Germany studying the language prior to a career in the Diplomatic Service. This meant he was free to join up the moment war broke out, when he was only just seventeen. Many of the first volunteers were similarly youthful and many of their parents felt angry with the Government because it had delayed introducing conscription until January 1916. This delay meant that it was their young sons who were bearing the brunt of the fighting rather than older men. From the inscription they chose, it looks as though the Glenconners felt this way too.
As socially prominent people, Lord and Lady Glenconner received many, many letters of condolence. All of them contained quotable extracts, any of which could have formed a headstone inscription, but they wanted to make their point. However, they did quote from a letter on their son's memorials in Salisbury Cathedral and in the churches near their family homes in Wilsford and Traquair. The letter came from a private soldier in his platoon - "When danger was greatest his smile was loveliest". The full extract reads:

"When things were at their worst he would pass up and down the trench cheering the men, and it was a treat to see his face always smiling. When danger was greatest his smile was loveliest. All was ready to go anywhere with him, although he was so young".

Edward's final letter to his mother was published by Laurence Weaver in his collection, 'War Letters of Fallen Englishmen'. Brief extracts illustrate his mind:

"tomorrow we go over the top ... I am full of hope and trust, and pray that I may be worthy of my fighting ancestors ... I feel rather like saying 'If it be possible let this cup pass from me,' but the triumphant finish 'nevertheless not what I will but what Thou willest,' steels my heart and sends me into this battle with a heart of triple bronze ... Brutus' farewell to Cassius sounds in my heart: 'If not farewell; and if we meet again, we shall smile',"

Edward was killed by a sniper two days later.


AMICUS USQUE AD ARAS
GUS AM BRIS AN LA
AGUD AN TEICH
NA SGAILLEAN

SERJEANT ALASDAIR MARTIN


Serjeant Martin's inscription combines a Latin saying with a Scottish Gaelic quote from the Old Testament. Look up the Latin saying - Amicus usque ad aras - and ninety-nine times out of a hundred you will be told that it translates as 'a friend to the altars', with the meaning 'a friend until death'. This is no doubt the meaning Alasdair Martin's mother intended But, despite its acquired meaning, it's worth making the point that this is not what the words originally meant. Plutarch records them being said by Pericles, and they do indeed translate as 'a friend to the altars'. Roman oaths were taken at altars, it was like swearing on the holy bible. So Pericles was telling his friend, who had asked him to lie for him, that although he was his friend he was not prepared to lie on oath for him.
The second part of the inscription, 'Gus am bris an la agud an teich na sgaillean' is a quotation from the Song of Solomon 4:6, 'Until the day break, and the shadows flee away'. It's a popular inscription in any language. And, like the Latin inscription above, its actual meaning has been replaced; it's now a reference to the time when the living will be reunited with their dead. In the Song of Solomon it's the words of a lover who is relishing being in her presence until the day breaks.
Six soldiers died on 23 October 1916 and were buried at map reference 57c.T.9.b.2.8. In August 1919 the Graves Registration Unit exhumed their bodies and was able to identify five of them as being members of the 2nd Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, including Sergeant Martin. They were re-buried them in the Guards' Cemetery, Lesboeufs.


I WILL GO FORTH
WHEN I FALL IT MATTERS NOT
SO AS GOD'S WORK IS DONE

LIEUTENANT HERBERT WILLIAM HITCHCOCK


The Imperial War Museum has a close-up photograph of a Mark 1 tank ditched in a trench, A13 HMLS "We're all in it" stencilled on its side. The IWM description says that this Mark 1 tank first went into action at the Battle of Messines in June 1917, but in fact "We're all in it" first went into action on 13 November 1916, and was put out of action that same day, the day Lieutenant Herbert Hitchcock, the officer in charge, was killed. A second photograph shows the same tank from a different angle. Two wooden crosses can just be seen on the edge of the photograph; it's possible that they are the graves of Hitchcock and one of his crew, Gunner Miles, since their bodies were discovered and buried close by the next day.
On 13 November 1916, the 3rd Division attacked the northern edge of the Schwaben Redoubt with the assistance of three tanks. That was the plan. Tank A13 was to cross No Man's Land and the German front line, turn north and advance up the line, crushing the barbed wire as it went, put a machine-gun nest out of action, deal with another strong point and then wait at the village of St Pierre or further instructions. In the event, A13, Hitchcock's tank, was the only one to start. It made it across No Man's Land before getting stuck. Hitchcock and two crewmen got out and were immediately shot. The third man was wounded and pulled back into the tank, which then started up again and moved off before crashing through the roof of a German dug out and becoming irretrievably stuck. At this point the crew released a carrier pigeon asking for help. Help arrived about an hour later in the form of the Notts and Derby Regiment and the survivors were rescued.
When the war broke out, Herbert William Hitchcock was studying Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was described as a "hard-working, rather silent student, with a quiet determination and a great capacity for thinking things out". In March 1915 he took a commission in the 10th Norfolk Regiment, transferred to the Machine Gun Corps and then to the Heavy Section, the first part of the army to use tanks.
Hitchcock's parents chose his inscription. Although quite well known as a quotation it comes from a once celebrated poem, "A Life Drama', from a now little-known Scottish poet, Alexander Smith (1829-1867). This extended passage from the final section of what is a very long poem throws more light on the meaning of the inscription.

My life was a long dream; when I awoke,
Duty stood like an angel in my path,
And seemed so terrible, I could have turned
Into my yesterdays, and wandered back
To distant childhood, and gone out to God
By the gate of birth not death. Lift, lift me up
By thy sweet inspiration, as the tide
Lifts up a stranded boat upon the beach.
I will go forth 'mong men, not mailed in scorn,
But in the armour of pure intent.
Great duties are before me and great songs,
And whether crowned or crownless when I fall,
It matters not, so as God's work is done.
I've learned to prize the quiet lightning-deed,
Not the applauding thunder at its heels
Which men call Fame. Our night is past;
We stand in precious sunrise, and beyond
A long day stretches to the very end.


THE PURPOSES OF LIFE
MISUNDERSTOOD

PRIVATE CHARLES DOYLE


Mrs Elizabeth Doyle, Charles Doyle's mother, makes no attempt to wrap her son's death in religious, patriotic or chivalric language. To her, life is for living, not killing. Given the chance to express herself publicly, even if only on his headstone, her response to her son's death is uncompromising - 'the purposes of life misunderstood'. But Mrs Doyle had another reason to be unimpressed by the war, her husband Charles Edward Doyle had volunteered to fight, despite being beyond the age of military service, and had been killed in Mesopotamia/Iraq just five months before her son.
Charles Doyle served with the Royal Army Medical Corps and in September 1916 was a member of the 18th Field Ambulance unit attached to the 6th Division. On the 21 September they went into the trenches at Morval on the Somme and on the 24th the unit's war diary recorded, "one of our stretcher bearers killed by a shell & one wounded by shrapnel". The dead stretcher bearer was Charles Doyle.
Charles Edward Doyle, a serjeant in the 6th Battalion the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, part of the 13th Division, went with it to Gallipoli in August 1915. Following the evacuation, in January 1916 the Division was sent to Mesopotamia to reinforce the Tigris Corps in their attempt to relieve the Anglo-Indian garrison under siege at Kut-el-Amara. On 6 April it met the Turks and after three days savage fighting, when four Victoria Crosses were won and the effective strength of the Division was reduced to 5,328 men, it was stopped at Sanna-i-Yat on the 9th, the day Serjeant Doyle was killed. Whether he orginally had a grave or not he doesn't now and is commemorated on the Basra Memorial, he was 42.
It's interesting to note that Mrs Doyle hadn't always expressed herself in this manner over her son's death. On 18 October 1916 the following announcement appeared in the Manchester Evening News:

DOYLE C - In loving memory of my dear son Private C Doyle 20001 RAMC who fell in action September 24 1916
Mother, sisters, brothers
A good life is often too short
But a good name endureth for ever


ONE GIFT HE HAD
ONE ROYAL GIFT HE GAVE

CAPTAIN ARNOLD MCLINTOCK


The 3 September 1916 was a black day for the West Riding of Yorkshire. The 49th (West Riding) Division went into action at Thiepval with very heavy casualties, the 1st/5th Battalion the Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment receiving 350 casualties out of the 450 men in the initial attack, 106 of them killed. Captain Arnold McLintock, described as Lieutenant McLintock in the 1st/5th Battalion War Diary, led A Company in an assault on the Pope's Nose. It's difficult to determine exactly what happened but it whilst there were reports that the German front line was taken the positions couldn't be held. McLintock and many of the Battalion, initially listed as missing, were not declared dead until July 1917.
Arnold McLintock was a partner in his uncle's woollen mill business, to which he had been apprenticed since the age of 15. The company manufactured cloth and ironically, due to the demand for khaki cloth, business in these mills boomed during the war years. The 1st/5th were Territorials and A Company was formed from men in the Huddersfield, Meltham area. Posted to France in April 1915, they first saw action at Aubers Ridge the following month.
Mary McLintock, Arnold's mother, chose his inscription - 'One gift he had, one royal gift he gave'. The words come from a longer passage that is sometimes found on memorial dedications but without any attribution. The gift that McLintock and so many others gave was, of course, their lives, their futures.

Ever for him life's brilliant banners wave,
Borne on the breeze of man's courageous spell;
He shall not know the weary bitterness
That haunts me still, he slumbers but too well.
One gift he had, one royal gift he gave
A gift that meant for him the summer sun,
Youth's glorious hopes; the lover's ecstasy,
Life's fair adventure scarcely yet begun.
One gift he had, one royal gift he gave
Proud to exchange it for a soldier's grave.


FLY ON, DEAR BOY
FROM THIS DARK WORLD OF STRIFE
ON TO THE PROMISED LAND
TO ETERNAL LIFE

MAJOR JAMES THOMAS BYFORD MCCUDDEN, VC, DSO AND BAR, MC AND BAR, MM


This is the epitaph of an amazing man - just looks at his awards: VC, DSO and Bar, MC and Bar and MM, the latter, the Military Medal, revealing that Major McCudden began his service career in the ranks. In fact, James McCudden joined up well before the outbreak of war as a Boy Bugler in the Royal Engineers. It was 1910 and he was only 14. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in April 1913 as an Air Mechanic. Much as he wanted to, he wasn't accepted for flying training until December 1915. He was too good a mechanic for the RFC to want to lose him. However, it was these mechanical skills that made him into one of the RFC's most successful pilots. He understood his aeroplane, knew how it worked and was able to tweak the engine to get the very best out of it. By the time he died, in July 1918, he had accounted for 57 German aeroplanes and was ranked seventh in the list of the war's most successful aces: two of the six above him were German, two Canadian and one French. The only UK airman with more victories was Edward Mannock with 61.
McCudden made his first flight as an operational fighter pilot in June 1916, achieved his first 'kill' on 4 September and received his commission on 21 January 1917. Much of the early part of 1917 was spent in the UK as a flying instructor. Following what the RFC called 'Bloody April', when their losses were three times those of the German air force, McCudden's skills and advice were in much demand. He returned to France in August and on 2 April 1918 was awarded a Victoria Cross for "most conspicuous bravery, exceptional perseverance, keeness and very high devotion to duty". At this time he had shot down 54 enemy planes, twice shooting down four in one day, once in only one and a half hours. McCudden achieved three more victories before he was killed on take off returning from a trip to England.
He had just delivered the manuscript of his memoir, 'Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps', to the publishers. Much better known by the title it was given when republished in 1930, 'Flying Fury - Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps', the original title speaks volumes about McCudden's modesty and dislike of heroising. If you are looking for an account of daring deeds you are not going to find it here, but if you want to know exactly what it was like to be a member of the Royal Flying Corps from virtually the second year of its existence then this is the book for you.
Much has been written about James McCudden, and much of it is available on the internet. However, the research done by Jonathan Saunders on the Great War Forum is particularly interesting about his family. He had three brothers: the eldest, William, died in a flying training accident on 1 May 1915; his younger brother, John, was killed in action on 18 March 1918 and youngest brother, Maurice, died following an operation in December 1934. All three brothers are commemorated on William's grave in Maidstone Road Cemetery, Chatham, Kent. Their sister's husband is also commemorated here: Arthur Scott Spears was killed on 27 May 1915 when HMS Princess Irene exploded off Sheerness whilst being loaded with mines. Three hundred and fifty-two lives were lost and wreckage from the explosion was found over 20 miles away. William's grave is also his father's. On 3 July 1920, William McCudden Senior accidentally fell out of a moving train and died two days later.
The inscription on this memorial reads:

Fly on dear boys from this dark world of strife
On to the land of promise, to eternal life.
They are not dead, such spirits never die,
They are unquenchable, they only sleep.

The last two lines are the inscription on John McCudden's headstone in St Souplet Military Cemetery, France, and the first two are close to the words on James'. Neither appear to be quotations. The only other incidence of James' inscription to be found on the Internet is on the grave of Second Lieutenant William Palmer RFC. Palmer was killed during flying training in Lincolnshire on 15 September 1917 when his plane crashed on his first solo flight. He is buried in a private grave in St Andrew's churchyard, Ham. The Palmers lived two streets away from the McCuddens in Kingston-upon-Thames. Did they confer?


FOR DUTY DARED AND WON

SECOND LIEUTENANT FREDERICK SEYMOUR ANDREWS


Shot down on 16 April whilst artillery spotting over the German lines, Lieutenant Alphonso Pascoe and his observer Frederick Seymour Andrews became the German flying ace Baron von Richtofen's 45th 'kill'. According to Richtofen, the British BE2e was flying at an altitude of 800 metres when he approached unseen from behind and made his attack. Pascoe momentarily lost control of the plane, managed to steady it and then lost control again. The plane plummeted the last 100 metres to the ground. Both Pascoe and Andrews were badly wounded, Pascoe survived, Andrews died of his wounds thirteen days later.
A South African from Harrismith in the Orange Free State, Andrews travelled to Britain to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps. Gazetted Second Lieutenant in March 1917 he was posted to 13 Squadron and shot down the following month. Superior tactics and aeroplanes were giving the German Luftstreitkrafte, the German Imperial Flying Service, huge superiority at this time, so much so that to the RFC April 1917 became known as Bloody April, their losses being approximately three times those of the Germans.
Andrews' inscription, "Duty dared and won" sounds like a quotation but doesn't appear to be. It has echoes of "Who dares wins", but is too early to be associated with the SAS's motto. The closest is a popular memorial inscription much used in the war but without any accredited author:

For his heart's perennial gladness,
For the years scarce touched by sadness,
For the duty dared and done,
For the Crown of Life well won,
We thank Thee, Lord.



GOD IS OUR REFUGE
AND STRENGTH
A VERY PRESENT HELP
IN TROUBLE

PRIVATE DONALD MCCALLUM


God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.
Psalm 46: 1-3

Despite this devastating blow to their lives, James and Emma McCallum can still affirm their unshakeable faith in God - "their refuge and strength" - on their son's headstone.
At the time of the 1911 census, James McCallum was head forester at Canford Magna, Lord Wimborne's estate in Dorset. Ten years earlier he had been a forester on the Dundas estate in Dunira, Perthshire. Donald was working up here as a forester before he joined up in February 1915. He was 17. Sent to France In August 1916 he was killed in action three months later in the capture of Beaumont-Hamel.
Beaumont-Hamel had been one of the objectives of the 1 July but had proved to be so heavily fortified that it was virtually impregnable. Eventually, on 13 November, the 51st Division and the 63rd Royal Naval Division, launched a much postponed attack across ground made almost impossible by three weeks of heavy rain. However, with the benefit of surprise and the help of thick fog, by the end of the day they had achieved their objective.
McCallum and thirty-two other members of the 6th Battalion the Black Watch, all killed on 13 November, were buried in Hunter's Cemetery. This tiny cemetery, with a total of only forty-one burials, was called Hunter's Cemetery after the Revd Hunter, Chaplain to the 6th Battalion, who with the Revd Gordon spent "the days following the fight, searching the battlefield under continuous shell fire, and so well did they carry out this work that every missing man of the Battalion was accounted for". [History of the Black Watch in the Great War Vol. 2 p.152 Wauchope]
Donald McCallum is commemorated in both Canford Magna and Comrie, where two of Sir George Dundas's sons are also commemorated.



WELL PLAYED! LAD

RIFLEMAN SAMUEL GUNN


"Well played! Lad", the sort of thing said to someone as they come off the cricket pitch having made a century, or scored the winning goal in a close fought football match, is what Samuel Gunn's mother chose for his headstone inscription. It speaks of affectionate approval.
Samuel's family came from Nottinghamshire where there was a famous sporting family called Gunn that included William and his nephews John and George who all played cricket for Nottinghamshire and England in the early years of the nineteenth century. However, despite the same surname and his sporting inscription, there is so far absolutely nothing to link Samuel Gunn with William, John and George Gunn.
The sporting Gunn family founded Gunn and Moore a sports equipment company in Nottingham. Samuel Gunn's father owned a hosiery business in Ruddington where Samuel also worked. He served with the 1st Battalion The King's Royal Rifle Corps and was killed on 27 July 1916 in defending a determined German counter-attack on Delville Wood. Sergeant Albert Gill, also of the 1st Battalion KRRC, won a Victoria Cross for his part in this action.


LIFE'S WORK WELL DONE
LIFE'S VICTORY WON
NOW COMES REST

CORPORAL PERCY CHARLES BUFFIN


This inscription has a strange history. It comes from the first verse of a poem written in 1879 by Edward H. Parker for a friend's funeral, He based it on the words from The Epistle of St Paul to the Hebrews 4:9, "There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God". Translated into Latin by another friend, W.H. Crosby, both the English and Latin versions were published in the New York Observer on 13 May 1880. It received no further publicity until over a year later when much to Parker's surprise a slightly amended first verse appeared on the plaque placed on the assassinated US President James Garfield's coffin.

Life's race well run,
Life's work well done,
Life's crown well won,
Now comes rest.

Following a clamour in the newspapers, the author of these lines was eventually traced back to Edward H. Parker. Although Parker's original first verse was slightly different:

Life's race well run,
Life's work all done,
Life's victory won,
Now cometh rest.

The difference was explained by the fact that someone had come across the Latin version first, Not realising it had originally been written in English they had freely translated it, improving the scan, so they thought, as they went. This is the version that was picked up, circulated and became extremely popular all over the world. It's popularity boosted in 1882 by its publicised usage on the headstone of one of Queen Alexandra's faithful servants.

Like many parents, Percy Charles Buffin's thought it an appropriate inscription for their soldier son. Father, Frederick Buffin, owned a grocery business at 455 Kings Road, Chelsea, Percy, one of five children, was an apprentice printer. Aged 17 in 1909 he joined the London Division,Territorial Force, so when war came in 1914 he was a trained soldier. He served with the 5th Battalion the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and was killed in their attack on Delville Wood on 24 August 1916.



HOMO PLANTAT HOMO IRRIGAT
SED DEUS DAT INCREMENTUM

SECOND LIEUTENANT GEOFFREY ARTHUR WARD


Homo plantat homo irrigat sed deus dat incrementum (Man planteth and watereth but God giveth the increase) is both the motto of the Merchant Taylors' School, where Geoffrey Ward had been a pupil, and the first two lines of the chorus of its school song:

Man plants, man waters,
But God bestows growth.
Man plants, man digs,
Man waters and tends carefully,
But it is only by God's cherishing
That he produces growth.

The 7th Battalion The Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment was heavily engaged in the Somme campaign from the first day and throughout the whole of July. Most of August was spent in the comparative quiet of Flanders before it returned to the Somme at the end of August. Second Lieutenant Ward was killed in action on 30 September during the closing stages of the 18th Division's attack on the Schwaben Redoubt. Brought into the action on 26 September, by the time the 7th Battalion were withdrawn on 5 October they had lost all but one of the officers who had gone into action on the 26th, together with 70 soldiers.
Mrs Geoffrey Ward chose her husband's inscription. She also added some extra biographical details to the War Graves Commission register, noting that he had enlisted in August 1914 so was a very early volunteer, and that his father had been the scholar Henry Leigh Douglas Ward (1825-1906) of the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum.


I AM THE RESURRECTION
AND THE LIFE

SECOND LIEUTENANT CYRIL HARRY SHEPARD


"Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."
St John 11: 25-6

Cyril Shepard's inscription is taken from the opening words of the Church of England's Order For the Burial of the Dead and is a quote from St John's gospel. For the next-of-kin, comfort could be derived from the Christian promise of eternal life, and from the reference to the funeral service, which none of them had been able to attend - and which many must have feared had not been properly conducted.
Cyril Harry Shepard was Ernest Shepard's older brother. Ernest, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, served with the Royal Artillery during the war, Cyril with the 9th Battalion the Devonshire Regiment. In June 1916 both were on the Somme, Ernest's guns pounding the German's trenches, Cyril and his men waiting to attack on 1 July. Come the 1st July, Cyril and 160 men from the 8th and 9th Devonshires were killed almost immediately. Many of them were caught by a machine gun positioned exactly where Captain Martin had predicted one would be from the plasticine model he'd made of the area. He'd hoped the British bombardment would have put it out of action - it hadn't.
Later that same day the survivors buried their dead in the same forward trench from which they had launched their attack, marking the grave with the famous words:

The Devonshires held this trench
The Devonshires hold it still

Some days after the battle Ernest found his brother's grave, remarking in his diary that he was grateful to feel so near to Cyril. He returned several times, telling his wife, Florence, that "it's such a strange feeling, I feel as if the place were a kind of home, and I feel we're kind of greeting each other. I always dream of after the war when you and I can go there together and I expect Rosemary & Ethel [sister] will come too". So as not to lose the place, he marked up a trench map with the reference F17 a.9.6. putting a tiny cross on the precise spot. According to the information beside this map in the House of Illustration exhibition, 'EH Shepard: An Illustrator's War', Ernest returned to the grave for years after the war was over.




THEY SHALL BE MINE
SAITH THE LORD
THAT DAY
WHEN I MAKE UP MY JEWELS

CAPTAIN MARK TENNANT


And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.
Malachi 3: 16-17

These words from the Old Testament form the basis of a well known children's hymn When he Cometh:

He will gather, He will gather
The gems for His kingdom;
All the pure ones, all the bright ones,
His loved and his own.

It wasn't just children who appreciated the hymn. In his autobiography, Drawn from Memory, Ernest Shepard recalls hearing it "sung by Welsh voices on a dusty shell-torn road in Picardy, as a battalion of Welch Fusiliers marched into battle".
The Scots Guards were involved in the attack at Lesboeufs on 15 September 1916. Mark Tennant was killed the next day. As Cynthia Asquith reported in her diary, "He had got through the battle all right, and had gone across to another trench to congratulate his brother-in-law, Ian Colquhoun, on both their escapes; on his way back, Ian saw him blown to bits by a stray shell".
Cynthia's mother-in-law, Margot Asquith, was Mark's aunt. Margot lost her step-son, Raymond Asquith, on the 15th September, Mark on the 16th, and another nephew, Edward Wyndham Tennant, on the 29th. Mark's sister, Frances, was married to Cynthia's brother Guy, whose brothers Hugo, Lord Elcho, and Yvo had already been killed.
In 1920, Mark's youngest brother, John Tennant, dedicated his wartime memoir, In the Clouds Above Baghdad, to his brother Mark, commenting in the foreword, "life is respectable and comfortable - and safe. The majority of us who have survived this war are no doubt doomed to die in our beds; when that moment arrives how we shall envy that gay company who went before, sword in hand and faces to the enemy, flower of a generation".
John Tennant was killed on 7 August 1941 in a flying training accident whilst on active service. He was 51.




I HAVE FELT
WITH MY NATIVE LAND
I AM ONE WITH MY KIND

SERJEANT FRANCIS ALBERT HAWES


Serjeant Francis Albert Hawes was the son of a professional soldier, Staff Serjeant Francis Anthony Hawes, who chose his inscription. It comes from the penultimate line of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem, Maud (1855).
For all the hilarity of its most famous line: "Come into the garden Maud", this is a dark, cynical and controversial poem. Who knows whether Francis Anthony was aware of this. It's likely however that he was impressed by the last two stanzas, which tell of a country (Britain) that has lost for a little its lust for gold, and its love for "a peace that was full of wrongs and shame", and is prepared to embrace war in order that "God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar". Tennyson was referring to the Crimean War. Many will have seen a similarity with the Great War. Now, "The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire" has begun to burn -

"Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind
It is better to fight for the good, than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign'd."

To have been a serjeant at 25, less than two years after the outbreak of war, it's possible that Francis Albert Hawes was a professional soldier like his father. He served with the heavy guns, the Royal Garrison Artillery, and died on 11 July 1916.


... AT TWENTY COULD DIE
IN THE OLD AGE
OF A COMPLETE UNSPOTTED LIFE

PRIVATE FRANK CARBUTT


Frank Carbutt was his parents only child. Born and brought up in Lincolnshire where his father was the head teacher in a council school, his inscription comes from 'Little England', a novel by Sheila Kaye-Smith published in 1918 about the impact of the Great War on an English rural community.
In the novel, Tom Beatup has been unwillingly conscripted, unwillingly because he doesn't think his father and younger brother can manage the farm without him. He is in love with Thyrza and contemplates the time when he will have to say good-bye:

"The parting when it came would be terrible. He might break down over it as he had broken down before. But he had all the soldier's solid fatalism and scorn of the future, and was, perhaps, strengthened by the inarticulate knowledge that if he were to die tomorrow he died a man complete. From the lumbering, unawakened lad of two years ago he had come to a perfect manhood, to be husband and father, fulfilling himself in a simple, natural way, with a quickness and richness which could never have been if the war had not seized him and forced him out of his old groove into its adventurous paths. If he died, the war would but have taken away what it had given, a man; for through it he had in a short time fulfilled a long time, and at twenty-two could die in the old age of a complete unspotted life."

The final sentence echoes the Old Testament Wisdom of Solomon 4:13 - He being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time.


TRUMPETER
WHAT ARE YOU SOUNDING NOW

PRIVATE FRANK PLOWS


This inscription comes from what was at one time an immensely popular song, The Trumpeter. Written and composed in 1904, it was a mainstay of many wartime concerts. Stirring without being patriotic, rousing without romanticising war, the song in fact declares that war is hell, although this line is often omitted in the recorded versions:

"There's a madd'nin' shout as the sabres flash out,
For I'm soundin' the 'Charge,' - no wonder!
And it's Hell!" said the Trumpeter tall.

The trumpeter sounds reveille in the first verse, the charge in verse two and the rally in the last verse. Splendidly sung in this YouTube version the final verse is hardly more than whispered:

Trumpeter, what are you sounding now?
(Is it the call I'm seeking?)
"Lucky for you if you hear it at all,
For my trumpet's but faintly speakin'.
I'm callin' 'em home - come home! come home!
Tread light o'er the dead in the valley,
Who are lyin' around face down to the ground,
And they can't hear me sound the 'Rally.'
But they'll hear it again in a grand refrain,
When Gabriel sounds the last 'Rally.'"

Eighteen-year old Frank Plows went to France with the 18th Battalion the Durham Light Infantry, the Durham Pals, in March 1916. He was killed on the 25 June, five days before the battalion went into action on the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916.


BEFORE THY FACE
AT THY RIGHT HAND
ARE PLEASURES EVERMORE

PRIVATE DONALD STEWART


This inscription conflates two verse from Psalm 16.

Verse 8: I have set the Lord always before me: because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
Verse 11: Thou wilt show me the path of life: in Thy presence is fulness of joy; at Thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.

Donald Stewart was a reservist. Having served with the Seaforth Highlanders in India for six years, he was called up on the outbreak of war. The 2nd Battalion crossed to France on 23 August 1914 as part of the original Expeditionary Force. The battalion fought at Le Cateau, Nery, the Marne, the Aisne and Messines. Stewart died of wounds in a base hospital at Etaples on 16 October but it's not possible to tell when he was wounded.
His inscription speaks of his father's absolute belief in God. Father, Murdo Stewart, a carter, had at one time been a missionary at Arivruach, a small community in the centre of the Isle of Lewis no more than 15 miles from Stornoway where the family lived. A missionary? Yes, for the Free Church of Scotland, the part that had remained outside the 1900 union with the United Presbyterian of Scotland, formed.
Murdo needed his faith. His wife and a daughter died before the First World War in which two sons, Donald and James, both died, and his youngest son, Neil, died whilst serving with the Merchant Navy in the Second. Murdo himself died in 1949.





GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

PRIVATE ROBERT MORRIS


Robert Morris was the last Newfoundland soldier to be killed on Gallipoli and very nearly the last Allied soldier to die on the peninsular. The War Graves Commission gives his date of death as 7 January but Anthony Stacey, in recalling the circumstances of Morris's death in his memoirs, 'Memoirs of a Blue Puttee' says it was on the 8th. It was just hours before the final Allied withdrawal and Morris was sitting with a group of fellow Newfoundlanders eating their last meal when a shell burst among them wounding several soldiers and killing Private Robert Morris. He was buried immediately and by dawn the next morning there were none but the most severely wounded left on the peninsular. These were looked after by a skeleton medical staff and the chief medical officer who hoped to negotiate with the Turks for permission to allow a Red Cross ship to take them off the next day.
Robert Morris's inscription - Gone but not forgotten - is one of the most popular of all personal inscriptions in both civilian and military cemeteries.


HENEFAIL, LLANFAETHLU
ANGELSEY

PRIVATE W HUGHES


There is something rather poignant about this inscription - Henefail is the old smithy in the village of Llanfaethlu on the Isle of Anglesey. Private Hughes' mother wanted to make sure that anyone who should chance to pass her son's grave on the remote Gallipoli peninsular should know that this is where her son belonged.
The Royal Welsh Fusiliers were involved in holding off the Turkish attack at Gully Ravine on 7 January and I am assuming that Private Hughes died as a result of this action. Rather sadly, the Fusiliers had been evacuated from Suvla on 19 December but had been brought back to Helles on the 26th.


THEIR GLORY SHALL NOT BE BLOTTED OUT

PRIVATE THOMAS BULL


Almost a month after the evacuation of Suvla and Anzac, the Turks were getting very suspicious about British activities at Helles: was the increased activity evidence of preparations for another evacuation or for a new attack? General Otto Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission to the Ottoman Empire, decided to find out. At noon on 7 January 1916, he launched a Turkish bombardment of the British trenches. After four hours, Turkish troops charged the British lines. However, they met with such strong resistance, a combination of small arms fire and naval gunnery, that they withdrew. The strength of the defence convinced von Sanders that the British army was still on Gallipoli in force and wasn't about to go anywhere.
In fact, from 35,000 at the end of December, the British presence at Helles was now down to 19,000 men. Two thousand more were due to leave that night, the 7th/8th January, and then the last 17,000 on the night of the 8th/9th.
Seventy nine men died on Gallipoli on 7 January, only eight of them have graves, and of these, five are special memorials to men who are "Believed to be buried in this cemetery". These special memorials commemorate men either "believed to be" or "known to be" buried in the cemetery. They are graves lost as the tide of war either moved over or away from them, either destroying them or abandoning them to the elements, as would have been the case on Gallipoli. In addition to the above words, most of them carry the inscription: "Their glory shall not be blotted out". The words, quoted from Ecclesiasticus 44:13, were chosen by the poet Rudyard Kipling, the War Graves Commission's literary advisor. The passage talks about the praise due to famous men and then turns to those "which have no memorial; who are perished as though they have never been; and are become as though they had never been born". It is such as these whose "glory shall not be blotted out" for "their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore".
This is the inscription on Private Thomas Bull's grave - "Believed to be buried in this cemetery: Their glory shall not be blotted out". It is the inscription on many Gallipoli headstones although by far the greatest number of the Gallipoli dead have no grave and are commemorated on the five memorials to the missing located around the old battlefields.
Thomas Bull lived in Swansea, where his father was a colliery worker. He enlisted in 1914 and served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in Gallipoli from July 1915. He was evacuated with them from Suvla at the middle of December. But, on 26 December, after a week's rest, the 13th Division, including the Fusiliers, were sent to Helles to reinforce the troops there. They were caught in the Turkish attack on 7 January and Bull was killed. He was 16.


O LOVE THAT WILL NOT
LET ME GO, I REST MY WEARY
SOUL ON THEE

DRIVER ALBERT CHARLES BODY


Seventeen men died on Gallipoli on 6 January 1916, only five of them have graves; Albert Body is one of them. A house decorator from Swansea, he enlisted in 1914 and served as a driver with the Army Service Corps. He was quite possibly killed by the heavy Turkish shelling of the Helles beaches, which were crowded with mules, wagons and fatigue parties trying to load as much equipment and supplies onto the lighters before the final evacuation scheduled for two days time.
His inscription comes from the first verse of a hymn written in 1882 by George Matheson, O Love That Will Not Let Me Go.

O Love, that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be


I HEAR THE VOICE
THAT CALLS ME HOME

ABLE SEAMAN JAMES ALLAN MCWALTER


The hymn from which this inscription comes,
The Hour of My Departure's Come, first appeared in 'Scottish Psalms and Paraphrases', 1781.

The hour of my departure's come;
I hear the voice that calls me home:
At last, O Lord! let trouble cease,
And let thy servant die in peace.

James McWalter came from Inverness and served with the Anson Battalion Royal Naval Division. He was killed in action on 4 June 1915 during the Third Battle of Krithia.


AND DOUBTLESS UNTO THEE
IS GIVEN A LIFE
THAT BEARS IMMORTAL FRUIT

MAJOR VICTOR REGINALD BROOKE, DSO


Following a distinguished military career in South Africa and India, Victor Brooke went to France at the beginning of August 1914 with the General Headquarters Staff where, as a fluent French speaker, he was the liaison officer with General Sardet's Cavalry Corps. On 24 August, he took part in the 9th Lancers' cavalry charge at Audregnies. According to an eye witness, as the Germans advanced in good order and in great numbers, General de Lisle ordered the 9th Lancers to charge and stem their advance.

"At the word of command, [they] mounted their horses and rode steadily at the enemy. It was Balaclava over again. The squadrons rode to death, and the colonel, so we were told, said that he never expected a single lancer to return. In the face of a torrent of shot and shell from guns and rifles, they dashed on until they found themselves against two lines of barbed wire, where men and horses fell over in all directions. This ended the charge."

The regiment lost heavily, out of the four hundred that had ridden out over a quarter never returned. Victor Brooke was wounded and died five days later in Chateau d' Annel. Among the many words of tribute, Lord Kitchener, whose ADC Brooke had been in South Africa, wrote that Victor Brooke had been one the best staff officers he had ever had. And Lady Minto, that Brooke had been an ideal military secretary to her husband, Lord Minto: "An indefatigable worker himself, he had that rare gift of getting the best out of others

His brother, Alan Francis Brooke, later Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, chose his inscription from Tennyson's long poem 'In Memoriam A.H.H.', which was dedicated to Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam. The full verse reads:

And doubtless unto thee is given
A life that bears immortal fruit
In those great offices that suit
The full-grown energies of heaven.


"WE ARE ABLE"

LIEUTENANT PHILIP DENYS DOYNE


"We are able" is the answer the disciples James and John gave to Jesus when, on his way to Jerusalem to his crucifixion and death, he asked them, "are ye able to drink the cup that I drink?" [Mark 10:38-9 Revised Version]. Philip Doyne's mother used the words for her son's inscription - yes he too was able to follow his Lord even though it meant going to his death.
On the outbreak of war in 1914, Doyne, a graduate of Keble College Oxford, took a commission in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry instead of taking up his place at Ely Theological College. He embarked for France on 3 August 1915. He went home on leave that Christmas, returning to France on 28 December, the same day the battalion moved into new trenches. He went out that night to inspect the wire in front of the German trenches and was caught by machine gun fire and killed. A brother officer in writing to his mother confirmed not only Doyne's bravery but also his Christian commitment:
"He was a man, brave and absolutely fearless. When there was dangerous work he was not one to send others, but to go himself. He always knelt down before going over the top of the trenches."


"HIS MEMORY LONG
WILL LIVE ALONE
IN ALL OUR HEARTS"
TENNYSON

LIEUTENANT FRANCIS WILLIAM BIRD


Frank Bird was born in 1884 in Harbury, Warwickshire where his father was a painter, plumber and glazier. At some unknown date he emigrated to Canada, where he enlisted in the Canadian Infantry on the outbreak of war and returned to Europe to fight. He died on 10 August 1916 at a Field Ambulance Station at Reninghelst, Flanders. Bird's inscription was chosen by his mother, Mrs Ellen Jane Bird, who was still living in Warwickshire. It comes from "To J.S." a poem written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson for his friend James Spedding following the death of Spedding's brother, Edward. Full of tender comforting words, all of which must have been felt to be appropriate, the poem concludes:

Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul,
While the stars burn, the moons increase,
And the great ages onward roll.
Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet.
Nothing comes to thee new or strange.
Sleep full of rest from head to feet;
Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.


HE WAS THE SOUL OF HONOUR

ABLE SEAMAN GEORGE LOWDON


"He was the soul of honour" may not be the sort of thing we would say about someone today but we can still understand what the words imply. A popular term of approval during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its earliest appearance in print seems to have been in 'The Adventurers, or Scenes of Ireland in the Reign of Elizabeth', a series of fictionalised scenes published anonymously in 1825. Here it was used of the Elizabethan Irish patriot, O'Moore - who was in fact an implacable enemy of British power in Ireland.

"O'Moore was a model of perfect beauty; he might have served to guide the chisel which gave life to the Apollo. But this was his least recommendation; he was a brave soldier, and a skilful leader of his clansmen. He was eloquent in conversation, an accomplished scholar, a poet in his native language, generous, kind-hearted, and a lover of truth and justice. ... It was said of O'Moore, that in his whole life he was never guilty of a bad or an equivocal action. He was the soul of honour, and every quality he possessed had a certain perfection and brightness about it, that made it look superior to the same quality in any other man; or perhaps the lustre it seemed to possess was derived from the reflected brightness of his other virtues, as diamonds in a bouquet add to each other's splendour"

George Lowdon was a miner from Blaydon-on-Tyne in County Durham. He joined the Royal Naval Division in November 1914 and served with Hawke Battalion on Gallipoli from 30 May 1915 until his death on New Year's Day 1916 seven days before the last troops left the peninsular.


THE LORD GAVE AND
THE LORD TAKETH AWAY
BLESSED BE HIS NAME

PRIVATE SAMUEL EWING


According to the Book of Job, there was once a good man called Job who feared God and eschewed evil. He was the greatest of all the men in the east with seven sons and three daughters, 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 she asses and a very great household. One day God told Satan that Job had "none other like him on earth, a perfect and an upright man". Satan's reply was that Job found it easy to be a good man because God had looked after him and given him so much; he wouldn't be like this if things went wrong. God challenged Satan to see if this was true and one by one Job lost everything he possessed until finally a great wind blew down the house where all his sons and daughters were gathered and killed them all. And what was Job's response? He shaved his head and tore his clothes and fell down and worshipped saying:

"Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."

Many relations, like Samuel Ewing's mother, chose these words as a headstone inscription. Like "Thy will de done" and "Not my will but thine be done" these inscriptions are the ultimate in the unquestioning acceptance of what people took to be the will of God.
Samuel Ewing served with the 6th Battalion The Highland Light Infantry, the City of Glasgow battalion. Posted to Gallipoli in May 1915, the batallion fought in many of the campaign's major battles - Gully Ravine, Achi Baba, Krithia - until the evacuation of Cape Helles on the night of the 8/9th January 1916. Ewing was killed nine days before the battalion was withdrawn.


PRIDE OF OUR HOME WAS HE
WE GAVE HIM UP O GOD
FOR COUNTRY AND FOR THEE

PRIVATE GEORGE SIMMS


Private George Simms was a fisherman from Pilley's Island, Notre Dame Bay, Newfoundland. He embarked from Newfoundland in March 1915 and arrived on Gallipoli in September. He died of wounds, "shell wound leg and abdomen severe", received in action at Cape Helles on the same day - 30 December 1915. Among the effects returned to his mother were his identity disc, cigarette case, a packet of photographs and letters, and a bible, the latter confirming the devotion to God that his inscription also implied.


ONLY CHILD OF
REV J CAIRNS O.B.E., C.F.

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN ANDERSON GIBSON CAIRNS


Ten days before the withdrawal from Cape Helles, the British were busy reinforcing the barbed wire in front of their trenches, strengthening their defences as their numbers on the peninsular gradually diminished. Twenty-one-year old John Cairns was killed on the night of the 29 December whilst in charge of one of these wiring parties.
A law student in Edinburgh, John Cairns was already a member of the territorial battalion of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers when the war broke out. Volunteering for foreign service, he went with the regiment to Gallipoli and was killed just before the final evacuation.
The Reverend John Cairns, his father, was a Presbyterian Minister and Chaplain to the Forces. His mother, Helen Anderson Gibson Cairns died in 1894, the year John Cairns was born.


I STRUCK ONE CHORD OF MUSIC
LIKE THE SOUND OF
A GREAT AMEN

PRIVATE GRAHAM WELLESLEY HOPPER


Although long forgotten, these lines come from one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century, 'A Lost Chord', written by Adelaide Anne Procter in 1860. Procter was said to be Queen Victoria's favourite poet and her national popularity to have been second only to that of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Procter died in 1864 but in 1877 the poem's popularity received a further boost when Sir Arthur Sullivan set it to music, calling his song 'The Lost Chord'. Although it can be sung by either men or women, the original poem is thought to be a comment on women's lives, domestic harmony - or disharmony - and religious doubt. It is sung here by Dame Clara Butt.
Improvising one day at the organ, while her mind was "weary and ill at ease", the poet unconsciously struck a single, calming, exquisitely harmonious chord that for that moment brought peace and meaning to her life before it trembled away into silence. The sound could only be described as "like the sound of a great Amen" in that it embodied deeply religious emotions that were beyond expression in words.
Nineteen-year-old Gerald Hopper died of wounds at a casualty clearing station in Lijssenthoek on 12 November 1916. His widowed mother chose his inscription. Did she mean that she had come to terms with the death of her son and found peace, or as the last verse of the poem suggests, did she only expect to find the peace she had once experienced whilst her son was alive after her own death?

It may be that Death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in Heaven
I shall hear that grand Amen.


SOLDIER SLEEP THY WARFARE'S
O'ER
DREAM OF FIGHTING DAYS NO
MORE

RIFLEMAN ARTHUR KNIGHT BARRETT BARRETT


Arthur Cochran's inscription comes from the end of verse one of a three-verse song,
Soldier, Rest! Thy Warfare O'er, in Sir Walter Scott's long poem, The Lady of the Lake.

Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er,
Dream of fighting fields no more;
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Morn of toil, nor night of waking.

Rifleman Cochran served with the London Regiment (Prince of Wales' Civil Service Rifles) and died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Lijssenthoek on 21 February 1917. The youngest of six children, his widowed mother chose his inscription.


NOT A DRUM WAS HEARD
NOT A FUNERAL NOTE

PRIVATE WILLIAM CHARLES COLLINS


Private William Collins' inscription is the first line of what was at one time an extremely well known poem by Charles Wolfe, 'The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corruna' . In 1809, during the Peninsular War, Moore won a famous defensive victory over the Napoleonic General Sarrazin, but died of wounds before the end of the day.
Wolfe's poem, written in 1816, was much anthologised throughout the nineteenth century. In 1861 it was included in Palgrave's Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. In 1907 a new edition, with additional poems, was published and this edition was reprinted every year for the next ten years. In fact, it was reprinted twice in 1916, 1917, 1919 and 1920, and three times in 1918.
Moore was buried hurriedly, with no ceremony, at the end of the battle. His grave was dug by his men with their bayonets and his body was wrapped in his cloak since there was no coffin. It was a real soldiers' death.

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
Oe'r the grave where our Hero we buried.

...

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone -
But we left him alone with his glory.

[The first and last verses of this eight-verse poem]

Private William Collins was killed in action in Flanders, a month before the battalion transferred to the Somme in preparation for the Guards' attack at Lesboeufs on 15 September.


NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD M.B.
KILLED BY SHELL FIRE

CAPTAIN ARNOLD BOSANQUET THOMPSON


Arnold Thompson was educated at Haileybury, New College, Oxford and the London Hospital. Qualifying as a doctor in 1914, he worked at Poplar Hospital until February 1915 when he was commissioned into the RAMC. Sent to Gallipoli at the end of April, he arrived on 7 June. Promoted Captain in October, he was still on the peninsular after the evacuation of Suvla and Anzac and was killed by shell fire on Christmas Day 1915.
His elder brother, Roger Eykyn Thompson, was killed in action on 12 April 1918. The brothers are commemorated on a bronze plaque in St Mary's Church, Kippington with a quote from William Blake's For the Sexes, The Gates of Paradise:

The suns light when he unfolds it
Depends on the organ that it beholds it


MY SON, MY SON
HOW HARD OH GOD TO SAY
THY WILL BE DONE

PRIVATE ALEXANDER GEORGE WHITE


These simple words, chosen by Private White's mother, carry a deep resonance. 'Thy will be done', from the Lord's Prayer, is a much used inscription, the words a bleak acceptance of God's will. The previous inscription, Private Thomas Stapleton's makes it clear that what was God's will wasn't the family's - "Not my will but thine O Lord". Private White's shows with searing clarity how hard it was to accept God's will when it meant that you had to accept the death of your son. And the words "my son, my son" are not simply a mother's lament for her dearly loved son but they are the deeply anguished words uttered by King David when he learnt of the death of his rebel son, Absalom, his favourite child:

And the king was much moved, and went up to the Chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
[2 Samuel 18:33]

Alexander White served with the 11th Battalion Australian Infantry, which took part in the opening of the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, the Black Day of the German Army, when the Australians were part of the greatest single advance made by the Allies in a single day. White was killed two days later, on the 10 August, in the Allied attack on the German-held town of Lihons.


NOT MY WILL O LORD
BUT THINE BE DONE

PRIVATE THOMAS STAPLETON


The Lord's Prayer appears in both the Gospel of St Matthew (6: 9-13) and in St Luke (11:2-4) but the words most people are and would have been familiar with come from the Book of Common Prayer:

Our father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name;
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done,
In earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
But deliver us from evil.

The fourth line of the prayer, Thy will be done, is a very popular inscription and indicates the bleak acceptance of God's will. However, Private Stapleton's family make it clear that whilst his death may have been God's will, it was not their's. And this too is a popular inscription. The words echo those spoken by Jesus in the hours before his arrest in Garden of Gethsemene: "Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done" (St Luke 22:42); "O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done" (St Matthew 26:42).

Thomas Stapleton, serving with the Lancashire Fusiliers, was killed in action on the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916.




GOODNIGHT, THOUGH LIFE
AND ALL TAKE FLIGHT.
NEVER GOOD-BYE

LIEUTENANT ROLAND AUBREY LEIGHTON


A wink from Hesper, falling
Fast in the wintry sky,
Comes through the even blue,
Dear, like a word from you ...
Is it good-bye?

Across the miles between us
I send you sigh for sigh
Good-night, sweet friend, good-night:
Till life and all take flight,
Never good-bye

Roland Leighton's inscription comes from the last lines of this poem by W.E. Henley. In May 1915, he had written to his fiancee, Vera Britain, from the Front: "A little poem of W.E. Henley's came into my head last night as I walked across the fields in the starlight. Do you know it?" He copied the lines out for her and Vera recorded in her diary, "I shall cherish this poem as long as I live". In fact the last lines became a familiar way for them to sign off their letters to each other.
The poem also had a significance for Roland's mother, the romantic novelist Marie Connor Leighton, and it was she who chose it for Roland's headstone. However, by altering the first word of the penultimate line from "Till" to "Though", she completely altered the sense. Nevertheless, it's what she wanted to say - "Though life and all take flight, never good-bye". Saying good-night was a ritual, ever since Roland had been a small boy he had always asked her to go and say good-night to him once he was in bed and this inscription was her eternal good-night.
You can read more about Roland Leighton and his death on my blog post.




ENLISTED AUGUST 1914
LIVE THOU FOR ENGLAND
I FOR ENGLAND DIED

CORPORAL RICHARD WHITAKER LEITH PEMELL


Richard Pemell volunteered in August 1914 and look at the date he died - 25 October 1918, just seventeen days before the end of the war, killed in the capture of Heestert. His wife chose his inscription, drawing attention to the fact that he had been a very early volunteer. The rest of the inscription originally comes from a suggestion in The Times, which on 16 February 1918 published this little notice:

For a Memorial Tablet
True love by life - true love by death - is tried:
Live thou for England - we for England died.

It's signed A.C.A. who is thought to have been Arthur Campbell Ainger (1841-1919) who taught Classics at Eton for nearly 40 years. Ainger was the author of a number of hymns including, 'God Moves in a Mysterious Way'.

The inscription is not uncommon on war memorials where it reads "we for England died" as opposed to "I" as here.


FORTH FROM THE CONFLICT
UNASHAMED HE PASSED
VICTORIOUS ON HIS WAY

CAPTAIN THOMAS CHARLES RICHMOND BAKER, DFC, MM AND BAR


Before the war, Captain Baker DFC, MM and Bar was a clerk with the Bank of New South Wales. Enlisting in July 1915, he served originally with the 6th Australian Field Brigade. He won his first Military Medal in December 1916 and the Bar in June 1917. That September he applied to join the Australian Flying Corps as a mechanic and was accepted instead for flying training. He began active duty in June 1918 and was credited with seven aircraft and one balloon destroyed, and four planes brought down. Then on 4 November, when returning from a bombing raid, his plane was brought down behind enemy lines. His body was not recovered.
There is an extensive Australian Red Cross file on the incident, which is well worth reading. Extraordinarily it contains a request to the "Commanding General of the Flying Corps" from the Commander of Flying Squadron 5 for an acknowledgement of "the 26th air victory of the Airshipdriver Lieut. von Hantelman", who says:

"At 11.35 noon I attacked near Le Chesne a single-seated flying machine and shot it down. The adversary was smashed to pieces in falling down. von Hantelmann."

Why is the document in English, who is writing to who? The document is stamped Australian Red Cross Society, Prisoner of War Mission, Berlin W.8, Wilhelmstrasse, 70. Is it a translation of the German documents concerning the incident, translated so as to help the Red Cross locate Baker's body?
In September 1920 an unknown British Flying Officer's body was exhumed and reburied in Escanaffles Communal Cemetery. The exhumation report stated that the body was too broken and decayed for there to be any indication as to its hair colour or height, the clothing had rotted away and there was no identity disc, in fact there was nothing to identify the body other than the date of death, 6.11.18 - which wasn't of course the date Baker was shot down.
The bottom of the report has a pencil note - "Copy to Dame Livingstone". Dame Adelaide Livingstone was a remarkable American woman who, at the end of the war, "was appointed the Army Council head of the War Office mission to trace British soldiers reported as ‘missing’ in France and Flanders. In this capacity she travelled widely in Europe, managing a staff of officials from both Germany and England. Between 1920 and April 1922 she was assistant director of Graves Registration and Enquiries in central Europe, with headquarters in Berlin and with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. For her wartime services she was among the first women to be created DBE in 1918." [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography]
Thomas Baker's body was eventually identified and his mother was given the opportunity to chose an inscription. This comes from verse 6 of a poem written by Harold Begbie in 1905 called 'Trafalgar Day - the Good End':

Dishonour tarnished not his flag, no stain upon his battles lay,
Forth from the conflict, unashamed, he passed victorious on his way;
Forth from the conflict, unashamed, with thanks to God, without a sigh.
So died for England's sake, this man, and whispered it was sweet to die.
Draw near and mark with reverent mind
How die the Captains of Mankind.


WHO LIVES, IF ENGLAND DIES
WHO DIES, IF ENGLAND LIVES

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM REGINALD HARTLEY


Before the sun rose on 20 December 1915, the last men slipped away from shores of Suvla and Anzac. But the killing went on at Helles, in fact it was stepped up in order to encourage the Turks to look in that direction rather than further north. On 19 December the British fired a series of mines and ordered the infantry, including the Lancashire Fusiliers, to occupy them. This is probably when Second Lieutenant Hartley was mortally wounded. He died the next day.
His widowed mother chose his inscription, which seems to accept her son's death if it meant that England would survive. It's not actually a quote but it's close enough to assume that it's based on Kipling's 1914 poem, For All We Have and Are, which ends:

No easy hope or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
Bur iron sacrifice
Of body, will, and soul.
There is but one task for all -
One life for each to give.
What stands if freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?


BROTHER BILL A SNIPING FELL
WE MISS HIM STILL
WE EVER WILL

TROOPER WILLIAM ALBERT BAKER


The end of November 1915 saw the Gallipoli peninsular in the grip of a huge storm and on the 28th the first snow fell. The conditions were absolutely terrible, men literally froze to death and certainly couldn't function properly. In addition, when the snow stopped falling it had transformed the landscape, highlighting the khaki-clad soldiers against the white background. Is this how sniper William Baker was spotted and killed?


REACHED THE FARTHEST
OBJECTIVE TILL THE DAWN BREAK
AND SHADOWS FLEE

SERGEANT EDRIC DOYLE KIDSON


It's not immediately obvious what Sergeant Kidson's inscription, or rather the first four words of it, means, even though his mother intended it to be very specific. However, there are a number of clues: first the date of his death - 25 April 1915, the first day of the Gallipoli landings - second the cemetery, Baby 700, one of the first objectives on the first day, and third Edric Doyle's battalion, the 12th Australian Infantry, the covering force for the landings. The 12th landed at 4.30 am and within hours small parties had reached the peak of Baby 700. But by the evening they were unable to hold the position and were forced to withdraw. Allied forces never reached this position again during the whole Gallipoli campaign - and nor was Edric Kidson ever seen again after this action.
Enquiries by the Australian Red Cross elicited confused reports - Kidson was a prisoner in Constantinople; he had returned to Australia having been wounded; he was alive and well on the peninsular in October 1915. But Corporal Reddrop reported that "he accompanied informant right out to Gaba Tepe, when acting as a covering line. He (Kidson) was not with the company when they were ordered to retire."
Once the war was over, Kidson's body was discovered, identified and buried near where he had been killed. And after all the confusion, his mother was determined that people should know exactly what had happened. She filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour for Australia with more than usually precise details.

Date of death: 25th April 1915 (before noon)
Age at time of death: 22 years and 3 months
Any other biographical details likely to be of interest to the Historian of the A.I.F., or his Regiment: He as acting Platoon Commander did reach on the extreme heights of Gallipoli an objective never afterwards obtained and that a few hours after the landing at dawn.

This is why Edric Doyle Kidson's inscription reads: "Reached the farthest objective". The second part of the inscription is a popular choice based on the Old Testament Song of Solomon: Until the day break and the shadows flee away.


ENGLAND IS A GARDEN, ILL
WEEDS GROW APACE, KEEP OUR
GARDEN WEEDED. L.P.J.

LIEUTENANT LESLIE PHILLIPS JONES


Leslie Phillips Jones' inscription come from his essay 'The Garden of England', which was included with some of his poems in 'Youth. A Song', published after his death. The essay is dated July 1914, was Jones aware of the international situation? He claims that, "England is a cultured garden, her people are the tended flowers, tended mutually by each other". But he warns that love of country, patriotism, is not the same thing as jingoism. And the danger of jingoism is that "the dazzling splendour of colour, flags and bloom flashing bravely in the golden sun masks the grim, hidden, ever-rising realities". Jones concludes that to maintain our country we should remember the old proverb, "'Ill weeds grow fast' so we must keep our garden weeded".
The majority of the poems in the volume were written in 1913 but the one titled 'War' has 'Aug 5th 1914' handwritten in the margin of the digitised copy. The poem is a ringing call to arms following "One lustful despot's passion for might and power":

Then England strips for action,
Dissembles party faction,
Prepares her armies' traction,
For God, for King, for Right!

And soon the din of battle is blasting every land:
...
Then young men, scholars, sages,
As England nobly rages,
Join ye the war she wages
For God, for King, for Right!

Jones was one of these scholars. In October 1914 he was gazetted into the Royal Berkshire Regiment rather than starting his first term at Oriel College, Oxford. Promoted Lieutenant in February 1915, he sailed for the Dardanelles on 20 May where he was attached to the 2nd Battalion the Hampshire Regiment. He died of wounds within days of his arrival.
The War Graves Commission gives the date of his death as 6 June, 'Youth. A Song' says it was the 7th, which in itself says something about the situation on the peninsular during the Third Battle of Krithia. Launched on 4 June, the Allies made very modest gains and suffered huge casualties. The Hampshire Regiment lost 3 officers and 25 soldiers killed, 11 officers and 43 soldiers wounded, and 1 officer and 31 soldiers missing. Consequently, when the Turks counter-attacked on 6 June the Battalion was under the command of eighteen-year-old Second Lieutenant George Raymond Dallas Moor. The ferocity of the Turkish attack spread fear and panic in the British lines and caused the officerless men to retreat in confusion. Realising how dangerous the situation was, Moor left his trench and dashed across the open ground to halt the rout, stemming the panic and leading the men back to retake their former line. For this action he was awarded the Victoria Cross. BUT, in order to stem the panic among the men he had used his revolver on them. No one exactly knows how many men he shot, nor whether he killed any of them but some have objected to man being awarded a VC for shooting his own men. Of course the award was not for shooting his own men but for averting a dangerous situation and who knows how many men's lives he saved as a result.
Who also knows when and where Lieutenant Jones was wounded but perhaps we can assume that it was before the rout on the 6th or he would have been the senior officer.


AT REST IN PEACE

PRIVATE ROBERT ANDREW LOMAX PURVES


This inscription isn't a request by Robert Purves's father that his son may rest in peace but a statement that his son IS at rest in peace. Why do I think so? Read this ...

"I have shot myself as I cannot stand the hardship & sufferings of this life any longer, and there is no chance of getting home to see my parents whom may God bless and comfort in their trouble. Mr Clarkson and Mr Collins are two fine officers and I hope they will come through this war safe and sound. Any of my pals can have what they wish of my things here.
Goodbye & good luck to everyone.
R A L Purves"
Quoted from Those Who Fell in the Great War National Archives of Scotland Reference SC70/8/418/2

Would you agree with me that Robert Purves's parents, who chose the inscription, must have known what their son had done? Mind you, I don't think that anyone else necessarily did. Mr and Mrs Purves entered their son's death in the Marquis de Ruvigny's Biographical Record of all Members of His Majesty's Naval and Military Forces who have Fallen in the War with the words, "joined the 9th Bttn The Royal Scots 6 Feb 1916: served with the Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders from 14 July, being attached to the 5th Bttn The Scottish Rifles, and was killed in action at Fricourt Wood, Mametz, 29 August following". And when both parents were dead, one of their daughters included these words on their headstone in St Martin's New Burial Ground in Haddington, "Also their son Robert who was killed in the Great War".


MY LIFE I GAVE
FOR MY COUNTRY'S GOOD
& THEY TOOK IT FROM ME
WHERE I STOOD

PRIVATE HARRY WILFRED PAYNE


This inscription, which appears in Trefor Jones' On Fame's Eternal Hunting Ground, has a ring of Kipling's famous epitaph:

I could not look on death, which being known,
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.

Harry Payne was a volunteer - My life I gave for my country's good - but who were the "they" who took his life from him "where I stood?" Was he bound to a post and executed? As it happens, the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau has the answer. Payne's family wrote to enquire about the circumstances of his death and the Bureau learnt from a witness, Private A Wolland, that:

"There was a lull in our fighting at the time and Payne was looking over the parapet pointing out something in the German lines to a comrade. While his head was exposed he was struck by a rifle bullet from a German sniper. He was wearing a steel helmet but the bullet went right through ... he was removed to a dressing station in the rear of our lines, but died on the way there."

Few families knew the exact circumstances of their relation's death but the Payne's did and reflected it in their son's inscription.


A GOOD SON
A GOOD CITIZEN
A BRAVE MAN

PRIVATE REGINALD HASTINGS COOK


A lovely tribute from a father to his son - what more could a father want his son to be, except alive of course.
Reginald Hastings Cook enlisted on 25 May 1915, sailed for Gallipoli on 14 July and was killed on 25 November.

"He was killed a half past six on the 25th November, a Friday at Larges Post. Detailed with three others for patrol duty and whilst climbing out over the trench was shot right through the head by a Turkish sniper about fifteen yards off, who must have gained the knowledge in some way that the patrol was to start from this point and lay in waiting. Death was instantaneous. Buried the following morning at eleven o' clock in a cemetery close to Shrapnel Green. The memorial service was held over the grave at two thirty. Cook was very great friend of informant. The above facts were taken from informant's diary."
Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau files


A GOOD SOLDIER

MAJOR JAMES HERBERT STAVEACRE


This fine, unemotional epitaph was chosen for Jimmy Staveacre by his brother, Wilson, but it speaks nothing less than the truth. The Stockport 1914-1918 website covers his life in some detail. A member of the 4th Volunteer Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, when the South African War broke out he transferred to the Cheshire Yeomanry so as to be able to go and fight. In 1908, when the Volunteers were disbanded, he joined the Territorials. At the outbreak of the First World War Stavacre was keen to "get stuck in" but disappointed when his battalion was sent to Egypt rather than the Western Front. However, on 3 May 1915 they were sent to Gallipoli, and a month later Jimmy Staveacre was dead, shot through the head whilst passing ammunition to his men in the firing line. As a good soldier his last words were to his Sergeant Major, "Never mind me. Carry on".


HE GAVE HIS SWEET YOUNG LIFE
WHAT FOR?

LIEUTENANT JOSEPH JACKSON BROWN


There is not really much to say about this inscription; I think we get the message. Some parents were happy to spell out the various noble causes for which their son died but not Lieutenant Brown's. They ask "What for?" not "for what?". They are not questioning the cause for which their son fought, but what was the point of his death - "what for?".


AN ONLY SON
"TO WHAT PURPOSE
IS THIS WASTE?"
S. MATT. 26.8

LIEUTENANT ROBERT LESLIE CARPENTER


"To what purpose is this waste?" is the question the disciples indignantly asked Jesus after a woman has poured a box of precious ointment over his head. They claimed that the ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor rather than wasted in this way. But Jesus told them that the woman "hath wrought good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always".
Is there a message here? Did Robert Carpenter's parents mean that what might look like a waste of their son's life in fact had a higher purpose? Somehow I don't think so. Somehow I think that they were questioning the purpose not only of their son's death but that of all the young men who lay buried with him in the battlefields of the world.
Robert Carpenter was educated at Whitgift Grammar School and commissioned into the 17th Battalion The London Regiment on 6 May 1914, before the outbreak of war. He was killed at Loos on 26 October 1915, the battalion's first engagement.


THE PITY OF IT

CAPTAIN ARTHUR REGINALD FRENCH, 5TH BARON DE FREYNE


Lord de Freyne's inscription was chosen by his wife, Lady Amabel. The meaning would seem to be self evident - the pity of all these thousands of young men buried along the battlefields of the Western Front - but this is not what Lady Amabel meant. 'The Pity of It' is the title of a poem written by Thomas Hardy in 1915 in which he asks how it can have happened that "kin folk kin tongued even as are we", in other words the Germans and the British who have ancestral and linguistic ties, can now be fighting and killing each other with such savagery. Hardy concludes that the two countries must have been stirred up by war mongers, "by gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are", and hopes that they and their descendants "perish everlastingly". Patriots strongly disapproved of the poem, but strangely the Germans translated it and approved of it.
Lady Amabel was the controversial wife of the 5th Baron de Freyne. Controversial only because she was the daughter of a Scottish innkeeper who met her husband while she was working a London hotel. Outraged by the social disgrace his son had brought the family, the 4th Lord de Freyne cut off his son's allowance. Consequently, Arthur Reginald disappeared to America where apparently he served as a private in the US army. Following his father's death in 1913, he returned to Britain to take up his inheritance.
On the outbreak of war, Lord de Freyne took a commission in the South Wales Borderers and was killed in the Battle of Aubers Ridge on 9 May 1915. His younger half-brother, George Philip, was also killed in action on the same day serving with the same regiment in the same action. Another half-brother, Ernest Aloysuis, died of wounds on 16 August 1917, and a third, Edward Fulke, died as a German prisoner-of-war two days after the end of the war. Arthur's eldest half-brother, Francis Charles, inherited the title
Arthur's half-brothers all had deeply conventional Roman Catholic inscriptions: George, who was buried beside his brother in Cabaret Rouge British Cemetery, has "On whose soul sweet Jesus have mercy", the same inscription as on Ernest's headstone in Dozinghem Military Cemetery, whilst Edward's has the words from the Requiem Mass, "Pie, Jesu domine dona ei requiem". But the "controversial" Lady Amabel wanted to say something different - that 'brother' had been set against 'brother' by war mongers - "the pity of it".

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like 'Thus bist,' 'Er war,'

'Ich woll', 'Er sholl', and by-talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird
At England's very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threat and slaughters are.

Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be
At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame
Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,

'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;
May their familiars grow to shun their name,
And their brood perish everlastingly.'

Thomas Hardy 1915


SLAIN BY THE HAND
OF A RUTHLESS FOE
OUR BOY IS AT REST
WITH GOD WE KNOW

PRIVATE WILLIAM BRADBURY


William Bradbury was a hairdresser from Wallasey in Cheshire. He joined the 3rd Cheshire Regiment in April 1917, a month before his nineteenth birthday, he transferred to the 8th Inniskilling Fusiliers and went with them to France on 27 June that year. He died just under two months later, on 17 August, from wounds received in action at Passchendaele the previous day.
William's elder brother, George, had enlisted a month earlier and died on 7 November 1918 from illness contracted on active service.
The War Graves Commission did not allow relatives to insult the Germans, see my article His Loving Parents Curse the Hun, but they did allow William Bradbury's parents to call them "a ruthless foe". His brother George's inscription was chosen by his wife and is much more conventional - "His duty nobly done R.I.P.


HERE LIES ONE OF
THE BEST AND BRAVEST LADS
SLAIN BY THE ENEMY'S HAND

SAPPER EDWIN COOK


Edwin Cook, a former miner and a member of 175 Tunnelling Company Royal Engineers, was killed in a front-line mining accident. The sappers had set their charges in a mine shaft they had dug when the Germans fired one of their own mines close by. As soon as the dust had settled, the sappers rushed down into their own shaft to inspect the damage and were overcome by fumes, whether methane or poison gas is not clear. Cook and three other sappers died, along with five men from the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons who tried to rescue them.


DID HE DIE IN VAIN?

PRIVATE JOHN PAUL


Private Paul's wife asks an unusually direct question: "Did he die in vain?". Whilst she doesn't actually assert that he did, the mere raising of the question casts doubt on her belief in the cause for which her husband died.
Paul, serving with the South African Infantry, was killed at Delville Wood. 3,150 men of the South African Brigade entered the wood on 14 July 1916 and when they were finally relieved on the 20 July there were only 750 of them left, the rest were casualties - killed, wounded, missing.
Paul was initially one of the missing. It was not until February 1935 that his body was located at map reference 57c.S.18.s.45.90. He was buried at London Road Cemetery and Extension, Longueville, where 3,114 of the 3,873 burials are unidentified. Paul, originally one of the unidentified, was later identified by his knife and fork, which were all marked J. Paul, and by his General Service tunic, kilt and boots.
His kilt - John Paul, born in Scotland, had emigrated to South Africa from where he volunteered to serve with 4th Regiment the South African Infantry, the South African Scottish. Raised from the Transvaal Scottish and Cape Town Highlanders, they wore kilts of the Atholl Murray tartan.
Interestingly, it's the long delay between Private Paul's death and the discovery of his body that may explain the suggested negativity of his inscription. The economic depression, unemployment, the deteriorating situation in Europe and the publication of Sassoon, Graves and other anti-war memoirs had by now caused some to question the cause for which their menfolk had died. It looks like Mrs Florence Paul was among them.


YOU MAY REST ASSURED
THAT I SHALL HAVE
DONE MY DUTY

CAPTAIN JOHN EDWARD NEWDIGATE POYNTZ DENNING


The source of this inscription is Jack Denning himself, from the last letter he wrote to his parents on the eve of battle.

Sept 24th '16
10.30 am
My own Dearest Mother & Dad,
This may or may not be my last letter to you, as we are in for it I think tomorrow. I sincerely hope it will be successful. At all events I am determined to go in and win as I know you would have me do. I know you may think this is rather ridiculous especially if I come through alright.
But you may rest assured that should I get pipped I shall have done my duty, and always remember it is far better to die with honour than to live in shame.
This must necessarily be a short letter as we are moving shortly.
The main object is that to please me, do not worry if I do get pipped.
...
Well darlings, best love to all I know. I am
Ever your loving Boy,
Jack

What happened the next day is recorded in the 1st Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment War Diary :

Two minutes before zero bayonets were fixed and the battalion "stood to" ready to go over the parapet. Each man carried an extra bandolier and a Mills bomb in addition to the complement of bombs carried by the Battalion and Company Bombers.
As the hands of the watches touched zero Captain J. Edes and Captain J.E.P.N. Denning, commanding A and C Companies respectively, followed by their men, sprang over the parapet of Gap Trench and advanced in quick time in two lines with a frontage of two platoons each company, fifty yards between the two lines. A Company was on the right, C on the left.
Both companies had advanced about fifty yards when they came into the enemy's artillery barrage from the right and machine-gun fire from the right front. In spite of heavy casualties, there was no wavering until the brigade front line was reached. ...
By this time Captain Denning and all the senior N.C.O.s of C Company had been wounded, and it was found necessary to re-organize the front line.

Denning was taken to a Casualty Clearing Station but he died the next day. The attack on Gueudecourt failed.
Jack Denning was the eldest of five brothers. Gordon Denning served in the Royal Navy during the First World War and died of tuberculosis in 1918; Reginald Denning served in the army rising to the rank of Lieutenant-General and receiving a knighthood at the end of his career; Alfred Denning, Lord Denning also served in the army and afterwards become a High Court Judge and Master of the Rolls, and Norman Denning, too young to serve in the First War, who became Director of Naval Intelligence after the Second. Despite the surviving brothers' glittering successes, Lord Denning always maintained that the two brothers who died in the war were the best of them.


I FELL: BUT YIELDED NOT
MY ENGLISH SOUL
THAT LIVES OUT HERE
BENEATH THE BATTLE'S ROLL

SERJEANT JOHN WILLIAM STREETS


He died for love of race; because the blood
Of northern freemen swelled in his veins; arose
True to tradition that like mountain stood
Impregnable, crown'd with its pathless snows,
When broke the call, from the sepulchred years
Strong voices urged and stirr'd his soul to life;
The call of English freemen fled his fears
And led him (their true son) into the strife.
There in the van he fought thro' many a dawn,
Stood by the forlorn hope, knew victory;
Proud, scorning Death, fought with a purpose drawn
Sword-edged, defiant, grand for Liberty.
He fell; but yielded not his Englsih soul -
That lives out there beneath the battle's roll.

Serjeant Street's inscription comes from one of his own poems, An English Soldier, first published in September 1916 in Erskine MacDonald's Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men and later in a collected edition of his own poetry, The Undying Splendour , May 1917 . However, his mother slightly altered the words of the original so that where Streets wrote "He fell", Clara Streets has changed it to "I fell", and where the final line reads, "That lives out there" she has put, "out here" so that Streets is now speaking directly to the reader from his grave.
John William Streets left school at 14. Although he won a place at the local grammar school he chose instead to go to work in the local colliery. As the eldest of 10 children, the family could do with the money he earned. In the 1901 census he was 15 and working as a colliery pony driver, driving the ponies that pulled the tubs from the coal face to the bottom of the shaft. By the 1911 census he was a hewer, working at the coal face.
Despite leaving school, Streets continued to study, teaching himself Latin and Greek and taking a correspondence course in French. He painted and drew, sang in the choir at his local Wesleyan Chapel and taught at the Sunday School. Surviving notebooks reveal his love of the Derbyshire countryside around Whitwell where the family lived, and his developing interest in poetry and writing.
Streets enlisted in the 12th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, the Sheffield Pals, and went with them to Egypt in December 1915. Two months later the battalion transferred to the Western Front and three months after this they took part in the attack on the heavily fortified village of Serre on 1 July 1916. At the end of the day Streets was missing having been known to have been wounded. It was May 1917 before Street's body was found, identified and buried, the same month that Undying Splendour was published.
He was a good soldier, as confirmed by a senior officer in the regiment, Major Alfred Plackett, in a letter to Streets' publisher in April 1917:

I understand you are publishing a book of the verses of Sergt. J.W. Streets. If his verses are as good as his reputation as a soldier you may rest assured that the book will be a great success.
... He was conspicuous amongst a battalion of brave men who formed the left wing battalion of the great Allied advance on the 1st July. He fell along with the remainder of his comrades, and he died as he had lived ... a MAN.
Need I say more?
It was a privilege to command such men.




ONE OF "NATURE'S GENTLEMEN"
AND THE BEST OF HUSBANDS
(RELIGION)
BAPTIST AND THEOSOPHIST

GUNNER ERNEST LORD


This epitaph solves one thing - it proves conclusively that the War Graves Commission did not count punctuation marks as characters - unlike Twitter. A scribbled figure beside this inscription notes that it has 70 characters, which there are only if you don't count the brackets, the apostrophe and the quotation marks. That's still four more than the War Grave Commission's 66 character limit, but as this project has already noted, some inscriptions are much longer than 66.
According to his wife, Ernest Lord was one of nature's gentleman, see epitaph 217, a phrase describing a man who had all the qualities of a gentleman without being born to his station in life.
It's very interesting that she is so specific about his religion - Baptist and Theosophist - not a combination that either church could have been happy with.
Theosophy's three main objectives were:
1. to promote the brotherhood of man without distinction of race, colour, religion or social position.
2. to select universal world ethics from a study and comparison of ancient world religions.
3. to study and develop the latent divine powers in man.
Theosophy received a boost from the First World War, for some because of its interest in the brotherhood of man but for others their interest lay in the study and development of "the latent divine powers of man", which often meant spiritualism, communication with the dead usually through a spirit medium.
Gunner Ernest Lord was killed in action on 29 April 1918


SUN OF MY SOUL
THOU SAVIOUR DEAR
IT IS NOT NIGHT
IF THOU BE NEAR

SECOND LIEUTENANT ALEC GORDON BOULTON


Sun of my soul Thou Saviour dear,
It is not night if Thou be near;
O, may no earthborn cloud arise
To hide Thee from Thy servant's eyes.

Alec Boulton's inscription come from the first verse of John Keble's popular evening hymn and was chosen by his mother. The son of Major-General C.F.Boulton, Alec Boulton was born in India, served in the South African war, where he was taken prisoner, and in 1916 was on the Special List as an army interpreter with the 129th Duke of Connaught's Own Baluchis. He was also an Assistant Provost Marshal at the Third Army Headquarters in Doullens. He died of pneumonia in hospital at Beauval on 19 February 1916.


MY CHUM

SECOND LIEUTENANT FRANK POCKETT MCCORMICK


Edith McCormick not only lost her husband but the inscription she chose for him indicates that he was also her dear friend. Frank Pockett McCormick came from Toxteth, Liverpool. He served originally with the 18th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers, the 1st Tyneside Pioneers, a Pals battalion raised in Newcastle. After being wounded he was transferred to the 9th battalion and was serving with them when he was killed on 9 September 1918. Frank was very much a New Army officer, not by any means drawn from the old officer class, his father was a railway porter and he himself had been a shipping clerk.


EVER IN THE THOUGHTS
OF HIS LONELY MOTHER

PRIVATE ARTHUR HALLEY


Arthur Halley was one of his widowed mother's three children. In the 1911 census he was a boarder at the Blue Coat School, Colmore Street, Birmingham. The school, which was a charity school, educated 250 children - boys and girls - from poor families. By 1911 his mother was married to a new husband and had six step children living at home.
To have been killed when he was and at the age he was, Arthur Halley must have been a volunteer. Although conscription had been introduced in January 1916, Arthur, at 18, was too young to have been conscripted. He was killed in action on the Somme two days before the launch of the big offensive. His step-brother, Edwin Howard Bates, who was the same age as Arthur, had been killed in action in Gallipoli on 10 August 1915.


A JOLLIE GOOD BOOKE
WHEREON TO LOOKE
WAS BETTER TO ME THAN GOLD

CORPORAL HUGH MILFOY GILCHRIST


This is a lovely inscription but an unusual epitaph. Do we think that Hugh Gilchrist loved books and reading? Chosen by Gilchrist's father, the use of the past tense, "was better to me", rather than the present tense as in the actual verse, would suggest that he did.
No one quite knows who wrote the verse but it's thought to be an old song.

O for a booke and a shadie nooke, eyther in-a-doore or out;
With the grene leaves whisp'ring overhede, or the streete cryes all about.
Where I maie reade all at my ease, both of the Newe and Olde;
For a jollie goode book whereon to looke is better to me than golde.

Hugh Gilchrist was born in Edinburgh in 1892 but by the time of his enlistment he and his parents were living in Toronto. He was killed in action on 8 August 1918 when the Canadians recaptured Caix on the first day of the Amiens Offensive, which ended one hundred days later in the Allied victory.




AND THY NEIGHBOUR
AS THYSELF

PRIVATE ANDREW NOEL YOUNG


When Jesus was asked, "Which is the first commandment of all?" he answered:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
St Luke 10:27

According to St Mark 12:30-1, “there is none other commandment greater than these”, and to St Matthew, “on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”. This being the case, the 1914-18 war shows that mankind has spectacularly disregarded God’s law, something Mrs Lucy Young was keen to highlight in the inscription she chose for her son.
Andrew Noel Young was born in Glasgow on the 10 December 1897. He attested in Victoria, Canada, on 1 November 1917 giving his address as a hotel in Los Angeles, his name as Andrew Macdonald, and his father’s name as James Macdonald. At some point this has been corrected on the form. Young’s father was called Andrew Young and in 1917 he and his wife lived New Jersey, USA. However, despite the fact that the United States entered the war on the side of the allies on 6 April 1917, Young preferred to enlist in the Canadian rather than the US army – nascent loyalty for the land of his birth, or to escape parental disapproval?
He served with the 7th Battalion Canadian Infantry and was killed on the opening day of the Battle of Amiens when the battalion crossed the River Luce and took the village of Cayeux, “with very slight loss having met with no organised enemy resistance during the advance” [Battalion War Diary]. Young was one of the two soldiers killed that day.


FOR ENGLAND, HOME AND BEAUTY

PRIVATE WILLIAM KIDD


This inscription originates in a song written by S.J. Arnold in 1811, which laments the death of Admiral Lord Nelson. The general tenor of the work can be judged from the following extracts:

Three cheers our gallant seaman gave,
Nor thought of home or beauty.
Along the line this signal ran,
England expects that ev'ry man
This day will do his duty!

And from the next verse:

Too well the gallant Hero fought,
For England, home and beauty.
He cried as 'midst the fire he ran,
"England shall find that ev'ry man
This day will do his duty.

And finally:

In honour's cause my life was past,
In honours cause I fell at last,
For England, home and beauty."

Stirring stuff but the only trouble was that Nelson's enemy were the French who were now now our allies. For this reason it's possible that William Kidd's father had the words of another song in mind, For England, Home and Beauty' ' by Private E Growcott of the Worcestershire Regiment. Growcott pays tribute to the men who came from all over the Empire "To fight for England's honour, and the King upon his throne". William Kidd had emigrated to Canada before the war but his parents were still in England. Growcott's words could well have resonated with them. But a word of warning - Growcott's words are not an improvement on Arnold's!

The call to arms, the trumpets heard, in lands across the foam,
Canada hears, they have no fear, the sons of England's home.
God bless the sons of Canada, each one will play his part,
For in the near future, their glorious deeds at heart,
Bravo! Bravo! Canadians thy praise is heard at last,
Across the sea, it's echoed loud, Well done! 'twas a noble task,
Hurrah! Hurrah! for Canada thou hast done a loyal duty,
And Canada's sons shall man our guns -
England, home and beauty.

William Kidd, who had enlisted in Edmonton on 10 December 1915, was killed in action on 9 August 1918, the second day of the Battle of Amiens.


HE GAVE HIS ALL FOR FREEDOM
THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD TO SAVE

PRIVATE ADON SMITH


Adon Smith was an American citizen, the son of Adon and Emilie T Smith of 233 West 48th Street, New York. According to the 87th Battalion Canadian Expeditionary Force Nominal Roll, Adon Smith had previously served in the US Army. He was taken on the Canadian strength on 21 January 1916 and was killed in action sometime between the 21st and the 22nd October 1916 during the Canadian assault on Regina Ridge. The Battalion War Diary in recording what had happened throws light on the reason for Smith's date of death being so imprecise:

"D" Company reinforced the Battalion during the night of Oct. 21-22. During the attack and the following two days there were 281 casualties, of all ranks, including all but one of the officers who participated in the attack."

His mother confirmed his inscription, passionately stating the cause for which she believed her son had given his life.


I WILL BE EQUAL
TO ANY DUTY REQUIRED OF ME
NO MATTER WHAT IT COSTS

PRIVATE ROBERT M DOYLE


Robert M Doyle was an American citizen who on 7 March 1917 enlisted in the Canadian Machine Gun Corps, the same day that he separated from his wife Georgia "by mutual agreement". They had been married for seven months.
His father, living in Louisville, Kentucky, chose his inscription and one has to assume that he was quoting his son's own words: "I will be equal to any duty required of me no matter what it costs".


IN HIS OWN WORDS
TO FIGHT FOR FREEDOM

CAPTAIN EARL ARTHUR SHELTERS


Earl Arthur Shelters was an American citizen from Clinton County, New York who joined the Canadian Mounted Rifles to fight for Britain and her Allies at a time when America was still insisting on a position of strict neutrality. His attestation papers do not specify his place of birth, probably on purpose since joining a foreign army would endanger his American citizenship. He was killed in action at Vimy Ridge on 7 April 1917, the day after America entered the war on the side of the Allies.
And why did Earl Arthur Shelters enlist in an army of the British Empire? His father gives the answer on his headstone inscription:
"In his own words
To fight for freedom"


OF PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

LIEUTENANT DILLWYN PARRISH STARR


Dillwyn Starr's inscription simply records that he came from Philadelphia, USA. His father, who confirmed it, was not only flagging up the fact that Dillwyn was an American citizen serving in the British Army but probably wanted to ensure that Dillwyn was a member of the Philadelphian Starrs, a socially prominent Philadelphian family.
Dillwyn seems to have been a charmingly charismatic figure who never really settled to anything before the war broke out when his sense of adventure immediately drew him to the action. Arriving in England on 24 September 1914, he joined the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps and served with them in France until that December. However, according to his father, "He disliked the idea of being protected by a red cross on his sleeve, while so many about him were enlisted to do soldiers' work".
He therefore joined the Armoured Motor Car Division, which was attached to the Royal Naval Air Service. US citizens who joined foreign armies risked losing their citizenship. Dillwyn got round this by claiming he was a Canadian and simply didn't provide a birth certificate to prove it. Many Americans were furious and ashamed by President Wilson's attitude to the war and openly did what they could to aid the Allied war effort. Many British people were furious too and Dillwyn wrote how he was "constantly in hot-water about home, as all here know I am an American".
In March 1915 he went with his unit to France and was immediately involved in the battle of Neuve Chapelle. In May they were transferred to Gallipoli. Dillwyn served there until November when the unit was disbanded and he came home. By now he was determined to join the infantry and get back to France. In January 1916 he was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards where he adopted with relish all the pursuits and habits of an English officer and gentleman.
The regiment embarked for France on 11 July 1916, ten days after the launch of the Somme offensive. Writing home on 19 August after his first experience of the front line Dillwyn told his parents:
"Have just been relieved from the front line and moved to the reserve trenches and only wish that I may never get it any worse than I have this time. There was one casualty this morning when a Sergeant got hit in the leg by shrapnel. It is the kind of wound that I am looking for."
On 15 September the Guards attacked at Lesboeufs. In Dillwyn's words, "They hope here that we shall break through the German lines, but I have my doubts". Eight days later the Guards did capture Lesboeufs but Dillwyn had been killed on the 15th. He had led his platoon across No-Man's-Land against "a perfect storm of shells and a hail of machine gun bullets". They reached the German trenches where "Dillwyn fell, just as he was springing upon its parapet, with his face to the enemy, shot through the heart and killed instantly".
Dillwyn's parents received numerous letters of condolence, many of them expressing their gratitude for what Dillwyn, an American had done.

"You must be proud to have a son who died so nobly fighting not for his country but what must be accounted far higher, for the cause of Humanity and on the side of God. If we regard our own countrymen as heroes he is far more. America may be proud to rear such men."
Rev. Geo. F. Carr, D.D. Amberley Vicarage, Sussex

For, as the Rev. Doctor Carr went on to express in his parish magazine:
"He, as an American citizen, could have stood out of this war. His country and people were in no danger, but he saw this country and her Allies fighting, as he believed, for the cause of right, and he was willing to give his life for his high principles and lofty ideals."

After the war, Dillyn's father, Louis Starr published a memoir of his son, The War Story of Dillwyn Parrish Starr.


THINE IS A LIVING WAY
IN DEATH IT HATH NO PART

LIEUTENANT LELAND KELLY WILLSON BARRETT


Leland Kelly Willson Barrett, the son of a Canadian father and an American mother, served in the Royal Air Force.
Barrett was born in Texas, attended Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. America entered the war on the side of the Allies on 4 April 1917. Three months later, Barrett enlisted in the British Royal Air Force in Canada. Why he didn't join the American forces isn't clear. He served with 82nd Squadron in France on artillery spotting and photo reconnaissance duties and was killed when his plane crashed flying into fog just after take off. He and his observer died in the subsequent explosion and fire.
It isn't immediately obvious what his inscription means: "Thine is a living way in death it hath no part". It's based on Hebrews 10:19/20:

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus,
By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh;

There is no death because Christ's death has bought man eternal life.


MY TIMES ARE IN THY HANDS

SECOND LIEUTENANT JAMES CONRAD THAANUM


James Thaanum had been in France for less than a month when the house where he was billeted received a direct hit. He died of wounds the following day.
By the time the war was over, Thaanum's parents lived in America: Maplehurst Dairy Farm, Winthrop, Maine. However, James Conrad was not a US citizen. Born in Dumfries, Scotland, where his mother's parents lived, he had been educated at Wallasey Grammar School, Cheshire and was an engineering graduate of Edinburgh University. He was working in Glasgow when the war broke out.
He enlisted early in the war and went abroad after 9 months on 20 July 1915; he was dead just over three weeks later.
His inscription quotes a popular text from Psalm 31:15 - "My times are in thy hand", on which W.F. Lloyd, 1791-1853, based a hymn of the same name.

My times are in thy hand;
My God, I wish them there;
My life, my friends, my soul, I leave
Entirely to thy care.

And Christopher Newman Hall a poem:

My times are in thy hand!
I know not what a day
Or e'en an hour may bring to me,
But I am safe while trusting thee,
Though all things fade away.
All weakness, I
On him rely
Who fix'd the earth and spread the starry sky.


SOLDAT SANS PEUR
ET SANS REPROCHE
TOMBE SUR LE CHAMP D'HONNEUR

CAPTAIN HAROLD BURKE MC


On his inscription, Captain Burke's family associate his name with two of France's most respected soldiers.
The "soldat sans peur et sans reproche" - soldier without fear and beyond reproach, or the fearless and faultless knight - was the description given by contemporary chroniclers to Pierre du Terrail (1476-1524), the Chevalier Bayard. As he lay dying, mortally wounded in battle, his one time friend and now enemy, Charles duc de Bourbon, expressed his sorrow but was told by Terrail:
"Sir, there is no need to pity me. I die as a man of honour ought, doing my duty; but I pity you, because you are fighting against your king, your country, and your oath."
The second soldier is Theophile Malo (1743-1800) who served with the 46th Regiment and for his renowned bravery and modesty - he refused the promotion to high rank that he deserved - was named by Napoleon the "first grenadier of France". Killed in action at Neuburg, when the roll was called after the battle another grenadier stepped forward and said, "Tombe sur le champs d'honneur", fallen on the field of battle. On Napoleon's orders, his name continued to be called with the same response, a custom that was observed for at least 100 years after his death - and is still observed whenever the 46th's colour is paraded.
During the First World War the phrase was used for French soldiers killed in battle.
Harold Burke enlisted as a private in August 1914. He served throughout the Gallipoli campaign rising rapidly through the ranks until he was commissioned Second Lieutenant in September 1915. Promoted captain in August 1916, he won the Military Cross for his "sound judgment and good leadership" at Ypres on 20 September 1917. On 23 August 1918, just before the Australians were withdrawn from the front, he was killed outright when a shell fired by his own side landed short and exploded beside him.


STILL SERVING HIS KING

LANCE CORPORAL CHARLES EDWARD SOPER


Charles Soper was one of the 19,240 British soldiers killed in the service of their King and country on 1 July 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme. His mother chose his inscription - Still serving his King - however, this king is no longer King George V but God. Many psalms and hymns make this association: Psalm 145, 'I will extoll Thee O my God and king'; George Herbert, 'Teach me my God and king, in all things Thee to see'.
Charles Soper was the son of Thomas Henry Soper of the photographers Soper and Stedman. Following their father's death in 1903, the two children, Charles and Cecilia, were sent to the London Orphan Asylum in Watford where children were educated by a charity whose aim was to "maintain, clothe, and educate respectable fatherless children of either sex, who are without means adequate to their support". The name makes it sound a terrible place but it's worth taking a look at the buildings and facilities to see if it makes you think again.


I BORE YOU ON EAGLE'S WINGS
AND BROUGHT YOU UNTO MYSELF

CAPTAIN STEPHEN GARRETT


Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagle's wings, and brought you unto myself
Exodus 19:4

Captain Garrett's wife, Mary, the mother of his four children, chose the inscription. It's a lovely image - a soaring eagle, swooping down with speed and power to carry the person off to safety, or in this case to God's keeping.

Stephen Garrett was a Director of the family engineering company Messrs Richard Garrett & Sons , manufacturers of agricultural machinery at the Leiston Works in Suffolk. Educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Cambridge, he was the youngest and most able of three brothers, the one on whom the future of the company was to depend. His death may well explain the fact that the company went into receivership in 1932.

Captain Garrett was killed at Neuve Chapelle at the head of his men, many of whom came from the Leiston Works. His elder brother, Colonel Frank Garrett, commanded the 1st 4th Battalion Suffolk Regiment from its arrival in France in November 1914. However, after several weeks he was hospitalised with a nervous breakdown, unable to take the death of his men, many of who were his own employees whose wives and children he knew.

Later in 1915, the Christchurch Tramway Board imported a road roller from the Leiston works, which they named Neuve Chapelle in honour of Stephen Garrett and the men from the works who had been killed in the action.


A GOOD LIFE
HATH BUT A FEW DAYS
BUT A GOOD NAME
ENDURETH FOR EVER

CAPTAIN WILLIAM HAROLD NICHOLLS


Captain Nicolls' inscription was chosen by his wife. It comes from Ecclesiasticus in the Book of the Apocrypha.

Have regard to thy name; for that shall continue with thee above a thousand great treasures of gold.
A good life hath but a few days: but a good name endureth for ever.
Ecclesiasticus 41:12-13

'Name' was a great preoccupation after the first world war. The names of the dead were recorded on memorials all over the Empire, great effort being exerted to ensure that no name was excluded. The statement "Their name liveth for evermore", the words from Ecclesiasticus 44:14, were carved onto Lutyen's Stone of Remembrance in all but the smallest war cemeteries, and was often the dedication on memorials in churches, villages, schools etc, all over the world. A similar sentiment was expressed on the the next-of-kin memorial scroll, "let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten", although here the responsibility for the names living for evermore lies with the generations who come afterwards. Name, or as in the case of this inscription, a good name, also has to do with renown, something that is above 'great treasures of gold' and which will endure for ever.

Billie Nicholls had emigrated to Australia and was working in the crockery department of Messrs Cribb and Foote, Ipswich, Queensland, when war broke out. He enlisted in the Australian Infantry and served throughout the Gallipoli campaign, earning a commission. The newspaper report of his death tells that he was so popular with his fellow soldiers that they all clubbed together to buy him a complete officer's kit.
Nicholls was born in Wales and his parents still lived there. In September 1916 he married Lily May Fuell in Holy Trinity, Llandbradach, South Wales. Returning to the front after a short holiday, he was killed on 26 January 1917. A shell dropped on the dugout where he had just gone for a rest and he was killed by concussion. This was the general conclusion of an Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau search, most of the witnesses assuring his wife that his body appeared untouched.


LET THOSE WHO COME AFTER
SEE TO IT THAT HIS NAME
BE NOT FORGOTTEN

CAPTAIN WILLIAM CALHOUN


Private Calhoun's inscription comes from the last lines of the memorial scroll sent to the next-of-kin of every man killed in the war. Written on high quality paper in calligraphic script, the scroll outlines the qualities of the dead man and of the sacrifice he had made.

"He whom this scroll commemorates was numbered among those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom.
Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten."

The final decision on the wording was made by Dr Montague Rhodes James, the author M.R. James, Provost first of King's College, Cambridge and then of Eton. The scroll acknowledges the fortitude and endurance of the men and asks the future to ensure that their names are not forgotten . There is no expression of gratitude, this had come in the letter of condolence from King George V that followed receipt of the news of the casualty's death:

"The Queen and I offer you our heartfelt sympathy in your great sorrow.
We pray that your country's gratitude for a life so nobly given in its service may bring you some measure of consolation.
George R.I."

And with a note from the King accompanying the memorial plaque all next-of-kin received once the war was over.

"I join with my grateful people in sending you this memorial of a brave life given for others in the Great War.
George R.I."


STILL TO MEMORY DEAR
FROM HIS LOVING FATHER
UNCLES, AUNTS AND COUSINS ALL

PRIVATE RICHMOND NELSON


There's an element of Uncle Tom Cobley and all about this inscription, everyone seems to have got in on the act. But do you notice anything? There's no mother. Richmond Nelson's mother, Rebecca, died in 1895 at the age of 27. And there are no brothers or sisters either.
Richmond Nelson served on Gallipoli from 30 May 1915 to 4 January 1916, very nearly the final day of the evacuation. After this, he was invalided home to England due to illness, but had recovered enough to be sent to France in September 1916. Nelson was wounded, possibly at Grandcourt, on 5 February 1917. His wounds were sufficiently serious for him to be sent to a base hospital in Etaples, where he died 20 days later.


REST IN THE LORD
LOVING MEMORY
FROM NELL AND CHARLES

DRIVER EDWARD ALBERT FOLLINGTON


Edward Albert Follington was one of David and Jane Follington's seven children. The family came from Augathella, a small settlement based round a watering hole in Queensland, where Edward worked as a labourer.
The inscription was chosen by one of Edward's brothers, Charles, but I can't work out who Nell was. Charles and Albert's two sisters were called Florence May and Mary Jane, and Charles' wife was called Mary. Perhaps Nell was a 'special friend'.
The family instituted an Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau search, which revealed that Edward and two other drivers had been killed by a shell, which burst beside them on the road where they were loading ammunition for the guns. The three of them were hastily buried close by, but after the war their bodies were exhumed and re-buried in the Guards' Cemetery, Lesboeufs.

Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him
Psalm 37:7


DEAR FRANCIS
LOVE TILL WE MEET AGAIN
UNCLE, AUNTIE
WILLIE, ELEANOR

SERJEANT FRANCIS WILFRED HOLT DYSON


The Eleanor on this inscription was Francis Dyson's only child and his next-of-kin, a fourteen-year-old daughter who by her father's death became an orphan. Willie was his brother, an officer in the East Yorkshire Regiment, and Uncle and Auntie were Walter and Marion Rowley of Alder Hill, Meanwood, Yorkshire, who brought the brothers up after both their parents died.
Francis, who was born in Riga then in Russia, was educated at St Edward's, Oxford. He emigrated to South Africa, where he worked as a mining engineer, married, had a child, was widowed, and served in the Boer War. However, by the time war broke out in 1914 Francis Dyson was farming in Australia. He enlisted within days of the outbreak and sailed for Egypt on 20 October. He served in Gallipoli throughout the campaign and after further service in Egypt was posted to Europe in June 1916. Having spent three years almost constantly in action, he was killed by a shell at Villers Bretonneux on 24 April 1918. A shell exploded yards from him whilst he was taking an ammunition column up to the batteries. He was hit in the chest, fell from his horse and "died one minute later".
After the war, in memory of their nephew, Walter and Marion Rowley paid for a memorial shrine to the forty-eight men of Meanwood who'd lost their lives in the war. Eleanor continued to live with the Rowleys. She married in 1927 and died at the age of 30 in 1935.
We have very little personal information about Francis Dyson but it's worth noting that his daughter's full names were Emma Winifred Eleanor, Emma having been the name of his mother who died when he was born. And, the name of his farm in Konagaderra, Victoria, was Alder Hill, the name of his uncle and aunt's house in Yorkshire. So this rolling stone, whose life took him from Riga to England, South Africa, Australia, Egypt, Gallipoli and France, remained sentimentally attached to his mother and to the home of his youth.


LOVED HUSBAND OF EMOND
AND DEAR DADDY OF ROLLO

PRIVATE TASMAN FOSTER BARKER


Emond, Tasman Foster Barker's young widow, made sure that even in far-off France people should know that he was her "loved husband" and the "dear daddy of Rollo". Emond and Tasman married in 1916 and James Rollo was born the same year. And in November that same year, Tasman, a coach builder from Colac, Victoria, enlisted. He left Australia on board HMS Ballarat on 19 February 1917. Two months later, on 25 April 1917, Ballarat was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Cornwall, sinking the next day. However, all 1,752 passengers and crew survived.
Tasman died on 21 April 1918 of wounds received in the first battle of Villers Bretonneux. His brother Rollo, a Second Lieutenant in the Australian Heavy Artillery had been killed two months earlier in a motorbike accident in France.


DULCE ET DECORUM EST
PRO PATRIA MORI

SERJEANT FRANK COAD


It may seem incredible to us that after the savaging Wilfred Owen gave this line from Horace anyone would want to use it for their son's headstone inscription. But at this period, Horace was still more powerful than Owen.
Owen's poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, describes the disgusting and degrading reality of death in battle with the 'old lie' that "It is sweet and meet to die for one's country. Sweet! and decorous!" The translation is Owen's own from a letter to his mother. Others translate 'decorum' as right, appropriate or glorious.

...
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from his froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Owen is talking about the process of dying in battle, denying that there is anything sweet, meet, right, decorous or glorious about it. Horace did not mean that there was, he was simply asserting that to die for your country, to be prepared to die for you country, was the mark of a good man and would bring him glory. And what is glory? According to Cicero, "true glory lies in noble deeds". Both in Horace's day and in 1918, dying for your country qualified as a noble deed.

Frank Coad was killed on 14 March 1917 during the South Staffordshire's costly and unsuccessful night attack on the German trenches near Bucquoy.


SPLENDIDO

CAPTAIN HENRY MASON BOUCHER, MC


Splendido, this proud inscription was chosen by Captain Boucher's mother. The word means excellent.

Boucher had an excellent war record. When war broke out he was working with the Chinese Maritime Customs Service in China. Returning home immediately to volunteer, he was commissioned into the Somerset Light Infantry going with them to France in September 1915. Never far from the fighting, Boucher was eventually wounded on the Somme early in September 1916 and hospitalised in England. He returned to the front early in 1917 and then was more severely wounded at Inverness Copse in August 1917 and again hospitalised in England. On recovery he was sent to Ireland and was serving there when the Germans launched their Spring Offensive on 21 March 1918. On 2 April, he was ordered from Ireland to France to join the 1st Battalion to help stem the German onslaught.

On 14 April the Somerset Light Infantry were involved in repulsing a particularly fierce German attack. Two days later, according to the citation in the London Gazette:

"This officer encouraged his men to press on through heavy machine gun fire by going ahead of them. Later, when the enemy counter-attacked under cover of heavy trench-mortar and shell fire, he dashed up to the front line and rallied some posts which were wavering, and pushed in supports and reserve Lewis guns, breaking up the counter-attack."

For this he was awarded a posthumous military cross. He was killed by machine gun fire on 23 April 1918 when supervising his men into the trenches as they relieved the Hampshire Regiment.

Henry Boucher was educated at Haileybury. Much of the information for this article has come from the Herts at War website.


FIDUS ET AUDAX

LIEUTENANT ROBERT GORDON SLADE


Fidus et audax, faithful and brave, is the motto of the Slade family of Maunsel House, Somerset. Robert Gordon Slade's father was a manufacturing confectioner in Harrogate. It looks as though this could have been a family business and from the 1911 census that two of the sons, Arthur and Leonard, were working in it. However, a gravestone in Harlow Hill Cemetery, Harrogate gives the later history of the family. Arthur died in 1911 and Leonard whilst serving with the Royal Flying Corps in 1915. Robert Gordon Slade, serving with the Royal Field Artillery, died of wounds in hospital in Belgium on 18 April 1918, and the youngest daughter, "dear Marjorie", in 1924.


VITAI LAMPADA TRADUNT

SECOND LIEUTENANT BRIAN GEORGE CASSAN SIMPSON SIMPSON


Vitai lampada tradunt, they hand on the torch of life, is a quotation from De Rerum Natura a poem by the Roman philosopher Lucretius. It is also the motto of the Shore School, Sidney Church of England Grammar School, where Brian Simpson was educated. Here, as one of their best shots, Simpson was in the rifle team, as he was at university too.
There are two versions of his death. One version has him climbing a tree overlooking the German trenches in order to observe the fire of his guns. The other has him climbing a tree, in full view of the Germans, in order to shoot a sniper. Both versions have Simpson being shot as he climbed down. Knowing his record with a gun it is quite likely that he was trying to get a sniper. He is said to have died peacefully in his sleep in hospital a week after being wounded.
There is an obituary of Simpson in the Shore School magazine, Hermes (August 1918), and on the St Paul's College website taken from the university magazine, The Pauline. Here a friend wrote:

"We recall him in his room at College - amidst the smoke and laughter of many friends, and surrounded by those pictures of his choice which invariably called forth the good-humoured banter of men less artistic than himself."

When the war broke out, Simpson was in London studying sculpture. He joined the army on 4 August 1914, enlisting first in King Edward's Horse before taking a commission in the artillery. He then transferred to the Trench Mortars to get closer to the action.
The idea of the torch of life being handed from generation to generation was a common image. It appears in John McCrae's In Flanders Fields:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

'Vitai Lampada', the torch of life, is the title of Sir Henry Newbolt's most famous poem, which was greatly admired by the pre-First World War generation and has been greatly ridiculed pretty much ever since. I rather like it.

There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight
Ten to make and the match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

The sand of the desert is sodden red, -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -
The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
The regiment's blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"
Sir Henry Newbolt 1892


PERSTA ATQUE OBDURA

SECOND LIEUTENANT FRANK COLLETT REEVE BEECHEY


Persta atque obdura, be steadfast and endure - if ever there was an appropriate inscription for a family this is it. Mrs Amy Beechey, the widow of a Church of England clergyman and Frank Beechey's mother, lost five of her eight sons in the war, and of the three who returned one was crippled for life.
Frank Beechey was injured by a shell that blew his legs off. A witness described how he lay out in No-Man's-Land from "dawn to dusk" until a doctor was able to crawl out and administer morphine. Frank was 30 and was the second of the brothers to die.
His older brother, Barnard who was 38, had been killed a year earlier, on the first day of the Battle of Loos, 25 September 1915. Barnard had gone to France in July, reporting to his mother that he had been sick three times during the Channel crossing. On 5 September he told his mother: "I really am all right and don't mind the life only we all wish the thing was over, and those who have been out the longest wish so most of all." Three weeks later "the thing was over" for Barnard, killed in a charge at the German trenches. His body was never found and he is commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial.
Harold Beechey was the third brother to die. He had emigrated to Australia in 1913 and was serving with the 48th Battalion Australian Infantry when he was killed at Bullecourt on 10 April 1917. Enquiries from the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau elicited the information from a witness that,

"We were digging a dug-out on the night of April 1917 on the railway line between Lagnicourt and Bullecourt when the Germans sent a couple of shells over and he was severely wounded about the body and legs. He died two hours afterwards and was unconscious most of the time".

The eldest of the brothers, Charles, was the next to die. Aged 36 in 1914, he was initially too old for military service and joined up later than his brothers. He was serving in East Africa with the Royal Fusiliers when he died of wounds caused by machine gun fire on 20 October 1917. He was 39. He is buried in Dar-es-Salaam War Cemetery where his inscription reads: Requiescat in pace.
Two months later, on 29 December 1917, Leonard died of wounds in hospital in Rouen having been gassed and wounded at Bourlon Wood. His last letter to his mother, from his hospital bed, concluded with the words: "My darling mother, don't feel like doing much yet. Lots of love, Len".
In April 1918, Mrs Beechey was invited to be presented to King George V and Queen Mary when they visited Lincoln Guildhall. When thanked for her sacrifice she is reputed to have told the Queen, "It was no sacrifice, Ma'am, I did not give them willingly". However, Michael Walsh, whose book on the brothers, Brothers in War reports the meeting with the King and Queen only has this to say: "if she felt anger she did not show it when their Majesties thanked her for her sacrifice". And in fact, Lady Cecilia Roberts, the local MP's wife who Amy Beechey had thanked for helping her secure a pension, replied, "you are very brave and very gracious over all that concerns you - you set a great example to us all".
Michael Walsh describes 'persta atque obdura' as the Beechey family motto, a fact confirmed by the Reverend Canon St Vincent Beechey, founder of Rossall School in Fleetwood, in his book 'Rossall School its Rise and Progress', 1894. The quotation comes from the Satires of Horace Book II, Satire V, line 39.


HE SET US ALWAYS AN EXAMPLE
OF CHEERFULNESS AND COURAGE

MAJOR OWEN REGINALD SCHREIBER MC AND BAR


This inscription sounds as though it's a quotation from a letter of condolence since it's exactly the kind of thing that commanding officers wrote to parents. And no doubt because they quoted it on their son's headstone, the words did bring Owen Schreiber's parents a measure of comfort .
At 23 when he was killed, Owen Schreiber was young to be a major but then he came from a military family. His father, Lt. Colonel Acton Lemuel Schreiber RE, commanded the Royal Engineers in the 1st Division of the British Expeditionary Force that crossed to France in August 1914, and ended the war as a Brigadier-General. Owen Schreiber was showing similar promise. He had been awarded a Military Cross in January 1916, and a bar to it in November that same year.
The Schreibers had two children. Their eldest son, Edmund Charles Acton Schreiber, also served with distinction during the First World War and like his father ended his military career, at the Second World War, as a Brigadier-General.


"BUT O THE HEAVY CHANGE
NOW THOU ART GONE
... AND NEVER MUST RETURN"
MILTON

SECOND LIEUTENANT VALENTINE LANG STUART SEARLE


The quotation comes from John Milton's Lycidas, his lament for a young friend who drowned in 1637 when crossing the Irish Sea.

"For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:" [8/9]

"But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return:" [37/8]

Eighteen-year-old Valentine Searle died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station in Belgium and was buried in the big hospital cemetery at Lijssenthoek. His mother confirmed his epitaph.


"AND SOME WE LOVED - "
OMAR

LIEUTENANT JAMES FRANCIS SIMPSON


This abbreviated inscription, chosen by Lieutenant Simpson's mother, comes from verse XXII of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling time has prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.

Fitzgerald's poetry beautifully captures the fleetingness of both life and youth. James Simpson was 19. The mother of another very youthful officer quoted from another verse of the poem for her eighteen-year-old son Warren Kemp Smith's inscription.


LIGHTEN OUR DARKNESS
WE BESEECH THEE O LORD

LIEUTENANT CHRISTIAN CRESSWELL CARVER


Christian Carver's inscription comes from the service of Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer:

"Lighten our darkness we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy, defend us from all perils and dangers of this night."

The prayer is not just that God will literally defend us from the perils of the dark but that He may shine a light into the dark night of our souls, when we are in despair.

Christian Carver left school, Rugby, in 1914 and went straight to the RMA, Woolwich. Commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in April 1915, he went to France that June when he was still only 18. He served there and in Flanders for the next two years. On 23 July 1917 his dug out received a direct hit. His men dug him out and got him away to hospital as quickly as possible but he had been badly wounded. A friend immediately wrote to Carver's mother, telling her: "I have just left him in an ambulance, and he was conscious and has every chance of pulling through. He was hit in the top of the leg." But Carver died that night.

A memorial book Christian Cresswell Carver, consisting of Carver's letters, and of letters of condolence sent to his parents, was printed for private circulation in 1920. The book has been digitised by the Bodleian Library.


SO HE PASSED OVER
& THE TRUMPETS
SOUNDED FOR HIM
ON THE OTHER SIDE

LIEUTENANT CUTHBERT FARRAR SAVAGE


Cuthbert Savage's inscription comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and refers to the death of Mr Valiant-for-Truth:

"When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the Riverside, into which as he went he said, Death where is thy sting? And as he went down deeper he said, Grave, where is thy victory? So he passed over, and all the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

And why did the trumpets sound? Because, for those who die in Christ, "the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed", [I Corinthians 15:52] meaning that for those whom the trumpets sound the Christian promise of eternal life is assured.

Educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford, Cuthbert Savage was studying law in Vancouver, British Columbia, when the war broke out. He enlisted in the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada and arrived in England in January 1915, where he was commissioned into the Northumberland Fusiliers. He went with them to France in August 1915.

On 20 June 1917, Savage was wounded by a shell which burst at his feet outside Battalion HQ at Dickebusch. He died that night in a Casualty Clearing Station at Poperinghe from "multiple gun shot wounds and compound fractures of the humerus and the knee".

A friend who knew him well described him as:

"a gallant lad - handsome as a young Greek god, courteous, charming and gifted. I have many memories of him, ski-ing down steep snow slopes with such grace, skill and daring, dancing and laughing and jesting with his friends, or discussing serious matters with earnestness and intelligence."
Memorials of Rugbeians Who Fell in the Great War, Volume V

Cuthbert Savage was the only son of Canon Edwin Sidney Savage, Rector of Hexham, and Sibyl, daughter of the Very Revd FW Farrar DD, Dean of Canterbury.


HE DIED FOR ITS COLOURS
AND SHED HIS HEART'S BLOOD FOR THE FLAG

PRIVATE LAURENCE RALPH STONE


Private Stone's inscription illustrates the impact of patriotic propaganda. Recruiting posters encouraged men to rally round the flag, whilst poetry from the South African War still cast its spell. Poems and Songs on the South African War (1901), featured an anonymous verse, The Union Jack, with the lines:

It's only a small piece of bunting,
It's only an old coloured rag,
Yet thousands have died for its honour,
And shed their best blood for the flag.

All this sentiment played into Private Stone's inscription but whereas for a soldier, 'the colours' usually mean the regimental flag, here it's the red, white and blue of the union flag around which, "Britons conquer, or die, but ne'er yield".

And how did Private Stone "shed his heart's blood"? A friend, reported:
"I saw him killed on the 30.12.17 at Warneton. He was caught by a shell and killed instantly. We were in the line at the time. I knew him very well, I went to school with him at Callie, W.A. His people are box manufacturers there. He was buried on New Year's morning at a little cemetery at Red Lodge near Warneton, I saw his grave, which was marked with a cross bearing his number, name and unit.
Pte. H Campbell 6423"
Report Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau files


SHOT WHILE LEADING HIS MEN
OVER THE TOP
HE WAS LOVED
BY ALL WHO KNEW HIM
A BRAVE SOLDIER
AND A GALLANT GENTLEMAN
OF NEVER FAILING CHEERFULNESS
& CONTEMPTUOUS OF DANGER"
"PEACE, PEACE, HE IS NOT DEAD
HE DOTH NOT SLEEP
HE HATH AWAKENED
FROM THE DREAM OF LIFE"

CAPTAIN GUY CHARLES BOILEAU WILLOCK


There are well over 66 characters in the above inscription, the number permitted by the War Graves Commission, and more than the 140 characters, which is Twitter's (old) limit. In fact it has a grand total of 204 characters. Why did the War Graves Commission allow it? It seems that the Commission used its discretion, if a family insisted - and could pay for it - it was allowed. It was more important that next-of-kin accepted the non-repatriation of bodies, and the uniform headstone than they limited their inscription to 66 characters.
Colin Bale in his ebook A Crowd of Witnesses: Epitaphs on First World War Australian War Graves mentions the case of Lieutenant Hugh McColl whose inscription ran to 124 characters. Bale explains this preferential treatment by the fact that Hugh McColl's father was a prominent Australian politician. This could be the reason, even though there's no documentation to support it. However, plenty of prominent people had dead sons, including the former British Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith and King George V's aunt, Princess Beatrice of Battenberg, and they didn't claim any special concessions from the Commission. In any case, Captain Guy Willock's relations don't appear to have been particularly prominent people anyway. His father, Charles Johnstone Willock, came from a military family in India and was a London barrister who died in March 1919, too early to have had any influence on his son's headstone inscription. Guy's mother, Maud, had died before the war.
The online Masonic Roll of Honour explains the War Graves Commission's preferential treatment by claiming that Guy Willock was Queen Victoria's nephew, but there doesn't appear to be any supporting evidence for this.
Guy Willock died leading his men over the top in an attack on the German trenches on the first day of the battle of Loos, 25 September 1915. Ten months later, the East Surrey Regiment famously kicked footballs across No Man's Land in their attack on the German trenches on the first day of the battle of the Somme, I July 1916. In this they were only doing what the Irish Rifles, Guy Willock's regiment, had done on 25 September. One of these footballs has survived and is among the regiment's most precious relics. In 2011, photographer Michael St Maur Sheil was given permission to take the football back to the battlefield where he photographed it on Captain Guy Willock's grave.
Several senior officers wrote letter of condolence to Charles Willock and an amalgam of these letters provide the wording for much of his son's inscription. 'The senior major' wrote: "Guy was one of our most valued officers, loved by all who knew him, of never failing cheerfulness in the most trying circumstances, and contemptuous of danger". Brigadier-General Thwaites wrote of how he had to "deplore the loss of a brave soldier and a gallant English gentleman".
The quotation that follows comes from Shelley's Adonais, his elegy on the death of John Keats - a not uncommon inscription.
With both parents dead, who composed Guy Willock's inscription? It appears to have been his step-mother, Edith Mary Willock, mother of Guy's half sister, Joan Mary Boileau Willock, who was 6 when her half-brother was killed.


BEHIND THE DARK CLOUD
IS A SILVER LINING

RIFLEMAN ERNEST FREDERICK WALDEN


It was John Milton (1608-1674) who first wrote about clouds and silver linings with the implication that even in the darkest night of sorrow there can be a glimmer of hope.

Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
I did not err: there does a silver cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
Comus 1634

The American author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) took up the idea rather more bracingly:

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
The Rainy Day 1842

W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) used the saying in The Mikado (1885): Yum-Yum weeping as she remembers that her bridegroom is to be beheaded in a month is told by him: "Don't let's be downhearted! There's a silver lining to every cloud".

It wasn't weather clouds but smoke clouds that had silver linings in a set of WW1 Bamforth postcards - cigarette smoke clouds. The three cards each carry a verse of what might loosely be called a poem with an image of a dreamily smoking soldier who is urged to "only gaze at the smoke clouds and never despair, for there's bound to be some silver lining somewhere".

It was probably, however, the chorus from the popular patriotic song, Keep the Home Fires Burning (1914) by Ivor Novello (1893-1951) that gave the phrase its biggest circulation:

Keep the home fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning.
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.
There's a silver lining
Through the dark clouds shining,
Turn the dark cloud inside out
'Til the boys come home.

Ernest Walden enlisted before he was conscripted and was killed in action five weeks before the end of the war. A profile of the family has been prepared by Margaretha Pollitt Brown for Wanstead United Reform Church.


AND WITH THE MORN
THESE ANGEL FACES SMILE

LIEUTENANT ALAN MCDONALD STEVENSON


Lieutenant Stevenson was killed in an aeroplane collision in Egypt. The War Grave Commission records his age as 19 but a family gravestone in Barbour Cemetery on the Rosneath Peninsular states that he was "in his 19th year".
His inscription slightly misquotes the fourth verse of John Henry Newman's hymn, 'Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom'.

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on.
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!
John Henry Newman 1801-1890


HIS SUN IS GONE DOWN
WHILE IT IS YET DAY

GUNNER JOHN ALDER CHESHIRE


The meaning of the inscription is clear - John Cheshire was too young when he died. There is however a stronger meaning than this: it is against nature for the young to die before their time, as it would be if the sun really did set before the end of the day.
The inscription is adapted from Jeremiah 15:9, but the bible says, "her sun is gone down while it was yet day". "Her" in this context is Jerusalem, which has fallen to the Babylonians as a consequence of the city's loose living. Moralists like the Baptist preacher, Joseph Belcher (1794-1859), warned,
"Let the blooming youth who may honour these pages with a perusal, remember that "his sun may go down while it is yet day" and let him seek, therefore, to be favoured with the genial influence of that moral sun which never sets".
There is no implication that John Cheshire was not guided by "that moral sun" before his death but rather that he was in the full bloom of his youth when he was cut down.


NOT LEFT TO LIE
LIKE A FALLEN TREE
NOT DEAD

CORPORAL WILLIAM HENRY GILLIAM


William Gilliam, a shop assistant in Croyden, enlisted in November 1914. Born on 30 May 1899 that means he was 15. He was 18 when he was killed in Belgium in April 1917.
His inscription comes from verse three of 'God of the Living', a hymn by John Ellerton (1826-1893). It expresses the comfort his parents received from their belief in eternal life.

Not spilt like water on the ground,
Not wrapped in dreamless sleep profound,
Not wandering in unknown despair
Beyond Thy voice, Thine arm, Thy care;
Not left to lie like a fallen tree;
Not dead, but living unto Thee.


THE HEIGHTS HOLD PEACE

MAJOR VALENTINE FLEMING, DSO, MP


This is a really obscure inscription, something that seems rather appropriate for Valentine Fleming, father of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels. But what does it mean, where does it come from?
Chosen by Evelyn Fleming, Major Fleming's wife, it is not a quotation. The source is possibly 'In Excelsis' by the American author Henry van Dyke (1852-1935), published in his collection, 'Music and Other Poems' 1904.

Two dwellings, Peace are thine.
One is the mountain-height,
Uplifted in the loneliness of light
Beyond the realm of shadows, - fine,
And far, and clear, - where advent of the night
Means only glorious nearness of the stars,
And dawn, unhindered, breaks above the bars
That long the lower world in twilight keep.
Thou sleepest not, and hast no need of sleep,
For all thy cares and fears have dropped away;
The night's fatigue, and the fever-fret of day,
Are far below thee; and earth's weary wars,
In vain expense of passion, pass
Before thy sight like visions in a glass,
Or like the wrinkles of the storm that creep
Across the sea and leave no trace
Of trouble on that immemorial face, -
So brief appear the conflicts, and so slight
The wounds men give, the things for which they fight.

In this reading of the inscription,'The heights hold peace' because from the mountain height, "all thy cares and fears have dropped away", leaving, as verse two confirms: -
Thou, from thy mountain-hold,
All day, in tranquil wisdom, looking down
On distant scenes of human toil and strife ...

Valentine Fleming was a wealthy banker and the Conservative Member of Parliament for South Oxfordshire. Already a member of a yeomanry regiment, the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars, Fleming went with them to France on the outbreak of war. He was killed in May 1917 in a German bombardment at Guillemont Farm. The Flemings had four sons, including Peter the travel writer, Ian the author of the James Bond novels, and the youngest, Michael, who was wounded at Dunkirk and died of his wounds in October 1940 whilst a German prisoner-of-war.
Both Valentine and his son Michael are commemorated in a stained glass window in St Batholomew's Church, Nettlebed.


THE GATES ARE OPENED
AND HE HAS ENTERED INTO REST

PRIVATE ARTHUR JAMES HOLMAN


In the 1911 census, fourteen-year-old Arthur Holman from Bethnal Green in London was learning the confectionary trade. Eight years later he died of dysentery in hospital in Cairo whilst serving with the 1st/10th Battalion London Regiment. His widowed mother chose his inscription; it references the gates of heaven through which the righteous shall pass into eternal life:

I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.
The Lord hath chastened me sore: but he hath not given me over unto death.
Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will praise the Lord:
This gate of the Lord, into which the righteous shall enter.
Psalm 118 v 17-20

It is a thought that comforts Mrs Holman because these are the gates that few find:

Enter ye at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
St. Matthew 7:13-14


REST WELL
BRAVE, TRUE HEART

LANCE CORPORAL ARTHUR MCDONALD LAWRIE BARRIE


This inscription has the ring of Braveheart about it, and strangely enough it turns out to have a connection with William Wallace. The phrase appears in Book One of the Scottish philosopher and writer Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present:

"If the union with England be in fact one of Scotland's chief blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was not the chief curse. Scotland is not Ireland: no, because brave men rose there, and said, "Behold, ye must not tread us down like slaves; and ye shall not - and cannot!" Fight on, thou brave true heart, and falter not, through dark fortune and through bright. The cause thou fightest for, so far as it is true, no farther, yet precisely so far, is very sure of victory."

However, like many of the inscriptions in this project, the person who chose it, in this case Arthur Barrie's mother, could have been completely unaware of the connection. The phrase was popularly in use to describe historical figures, for example Abraham Lincoln, or heroes in romantic novels. But, the Scottish connection is very strong in the family of Edinburgh based Arthur McDonald Lawrie Barrie, who served and died in the Cameron Highlanders, that I have a feeling that perhaps Mrs Barrie did know her Carlyle.


WHAT IS TO BE WILL BE
DEARLY LOVED SON OF
MARGARET AND SAMUEL HOGAN

PRIVATE GEORGE HENRY HOGAN


It was one of Abraham Lincoln's maxims that, "What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree". And what was 'to be' for Margaret and Samuel Hogan? Their son, George, wounded on 11 April 1918 by a bomb from an aeroplane, died of his wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station the next day. The details are given in the Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau Files, "bomb wounds buttock punctuating abdomen arm right".


SON OF JOHN AND ROSE SEDDING
OF THIS PARISH

LANCE CORPORAL GEORGE ELTON SEDDING


Both John and Rose Sedding, Lance Corporal Sedding's parents, had been dead for 24 years when he died in Hampstead General Hospital from wounds received in action twelve days earlier. Nevertheless, George Elton Sedding's inscription simply identifies him by his relationship to them, and to the fact that they had once lived in "this parish". Sedding was buried in the churchyard of "this parish", St John the Baptist, West Wickham.
In fact, George Elton Sedding's father had done more than just live in the parish of St John the Baptist, West Wickham. As the influential Arts and Crafts church architect, John Dando Sedding, he had remodelled the church soon after he moved to the village in 1889, and he and his wife are themselves buried in the churchyard.
George had been an orphan from the age of 9. He and his siblings were brought up by their aunt and uncle in Upper Wimpole Street. Their uncle was a distinguished physician, Oswald Auchinleck Browne, whose wife, Alice, was Rose Sedding's sister. However, they too died in 1908 and 1909 respectively and George and his sister, Dorothy, set up home in 3F Hyde Park Mansions where in the 1911 census he described himself as a designer and worker in metals (gold and silver).
The 1910 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society catalogue contains numerous examples of his work: altar crosses, processional crosses, pendant jewellery, buckles. Much of this work was probably done in partnership with Martin Travers, at that time a fellow Anglo-Catholic, who like Sedding had also attended the Royal College of Art.
At the outbreak of war, George Sedding enlisted in the Norfolk Regiment. He was determined not to accept a commission, feeling that he could better continue his work of spreading the word of God if he remained with the soldiers as their equal rather than their officer. He took specialist courses in scouting and signalling and was trained in the use of the field telephone. He went out to France in May 1915. On Monday 11 October 1915, the 7th Norfolk's took part in the attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt. Sedding was hit by shrapnel in the hand and thigh. His companions placed him for safety in a shell hole where he was found by stretcher-bearers that night who managed to bring him in. But he couldn't be moved again until the following afternoon. Then began the long evacuation down the casualty chain back to Britain. By the afternoon of Sunday 17 October he was in Hampstead General Hospital. But the thigh wound had become septic and as the infection spread and the fever tightened its grip, his condition deteriorated. By the evening of Friday 22 October he was unconscious and he died at noon the next day.
After Sedding's death his brother, Edward, edited a memoir, 'George Sedding: the life and work of an artist soldier', published in 1917 by the Letchworth Garden City Press. Martin Travers designed the title page. It combined some of the wild flowers, honeysuckle and willow herb that he would pick and put in a jam jar in his trench, with Anglo-Catholic iconography, and with images of St Dunstan, the patron saint of metal workers, and St George.
George Sedding was once described as "the pious son" of John Dando Sedding, even though he was not ordained like his brother Edward. However, in 1926 the Society of St Peter and St Paul published a 'Portrait of Six Christian Heroes'. The heroes were: Appian, Alban, Athanasius, Francis de Sales, Ignatius Loyola and George Elton Sedding.


I'M BIDDING YOU
A LONG FAREWELL
MY HUSBAND KIND AND TRUE

PRIVATE ALEXANDER MCGECHIE


Alexander McGechie's inscription was chosen by his wife and comes from an old Irish ballad, Lament of the Irish Emigrant written by Helen Selina Blackwood, Lady Dufferin (1807-1867), at the time of the Great Irish Famine. The singer, on the verge of emigration, addresses his dead wife who he will leave behind in the churchyard where they were married:

I'm bidding you a long farewell,
My Mary - kind and true!
But I'll not forget you, darling!
In the land I'm going to;
They say there's bread and work for all,
And the sun shines always there.
But I'll not forget old Ireland,
Were it fifty times as fair.

In other verses the husband expresses what his wife's loss means to him, and there's no reason to doubt that Mrs McGechie felt the same about the loss of her husband:

But I miss the soft clasp of your hand,
And your breath warm on my cheek,
And I still keep list’ning for the words
You never more will speak.

And you were all I had, Mary,
My blessin’ and my pride:
There’s nothin’ left to care for now,
Since my poor Mary died.


THIS IS THE HAPPY WARRIOR,
THIS IS HE

CAPTAIN EDWARD STANLEY RUSSELL, MC


"Who is the happy warrior? Who is he, that every man in arms should wish to be?" Wordsworth asked the question in his 1807 poem and his answer was a man who was brave, modest, faithful, resolute, diligent and magnanimous, an honourable man, a man of high endeavour guided by reason and duty, a home loving man and thus "more brave for this, that he hath much to love".
A hundred years later and the term happy warrior had been transmuted through GF Watt's 1884 painting of the same name, and though numerous attributions to famous men whose lives had been triumphantly dedicated to noble struggles, into a widely used term of praise for a certain type of man, a thoroughly good sort..
Before the war, Stanley Russell had been a Unitarian minister at Ullet Road Church, Liverpool. In September 1914 he enlisted as a private in the Liverpool 'Pals' and in February 1915 was commissioned into the Herefordshire Regiment. He served in Gallipoli and Palestine and won the Military Cross in April 1917 during the First Battle of Gaza. He was killed in the second battle in November that year.
In an unpublished memoir by the Rev. Arnold H. Lewis, quoted in the Christmas 1918 edition of The Bookman, Stanley Russell is described as:
"a man of great personal charm and variously gifted: an accomplished reciter, a speaker and preacher of originality and power, a clever writer. He was unusually handsome and of a most engaging address. Unfailing good temper and a deep understanding of and love for human nature and an indomitable spirit gave him influence and leadership alike at the university, in the Church and in the Army".
Lewis's manuscript was lodged at Manchester College, Oxford and provides the information for
'Killed Fighting for their Country: Two Unitarian Ministers by Alan Ruston on the website Faith and Freedom.


A SOLDIER TO THE BACKBONE
BELOVED OF HIS MEN

LIEUTENANT ALEC WHITWORTH BRYDON


There is splendid pride in this inscription - a soldier to the backbone - all the more so because Alec Brydon was not a regular soldier rather an electrical engineer, a partner in the firm of Rhodes, Brydon and Company of Stockport in Cheshire.
On the outbreak of war, Brydon enlisted in the University and Public School Brigade. In September 1914 he was commissioned into the Cheshire Regiment before transferring to The Queen's in March 1915. Posted to Gallipoli at the end of July, he landed during the night of 7/8 August. The situation there was extremely serious and Brydon and his men were immediately involved in the fighting. On the evening of 31 August, whilst leading a machine-gun detachment into the front-line trenches, he was shot through the head by a sniper. A detailed obituary of Brydon appeared in the Institute of Electrical Engineers World War I Honour Roll.


HE SERVED HIS COUNTRY AS A HERO
AND WAS FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH

PRIVATE BRANSOME STRIDE


In February 1920, James Stride, Bransome's father, wrote from Newfoundland to acknowledge receipt of his son Ambrose's memorial scroll, and to describe the comfort he had received from the King's message of sympathy. However, Bransome was still in hospital in England and his condition was causing increasing concern. He died later that month.
Bransome Stride enlisted in December 1917. He joined his battalion in the field on 9 July 1918 and was wounded on 26 October with a gun shot wound in his right leg. Passed rapidly down the casualty chain, he was in England by 29 October, where his right foot was amputated the next day. Whilst he appears to have recovered fairly well from this, and in July 1919 was fitted with an artificial foot, in the intervening time he appears to have caught influenza, which turned to pneumonia from which he never seemed to recover. By September 1919 he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was transferred to a sanatorium, where he died in February 1920.
Among Bransome's records, on the amazing Newfoundland Regiment and the Great War site, there is a pathetic letter that he wrote in November 1919 to Major Timewell, the regiment's Chief Staff Officer in London. "I am sorry to trouble you but I am very anxious to get home. I am now fited (sic) with my leg and can get about with the help of a stick ..." A draft of soldiers from the Newfoundland Regiment had been repatriated in July 1919 but Bransome Stride had not been thought fit enough to travel. He never got home.
Later that year, James Stride and his wife, Naomi, chose a personal inscription for their son,

He served his country as a hero
And was faithful until death

This time the inscription was inscribed unchanged, other than the fact that the word 'until' was changed to 'unto', whereas the inscription James Stride chose for his other son, Ambrose, is completely different from the one on his headstone.


FROM THIS EARTH
THIS GRAVE, THIS DUST
MY GOD SHALL RAISE ME UP
I TRUST

PRIVATE AMBROSE WILLIAM STRIDE


This is not the inscription Ambrose Stride's father chose. The Newfoundland Regiment has the most amazing website and database with the digitised documents of all its soldiers, including Ambrose Stride's. Among the wealth of detail is a letter with the inscription James Stride originally chose for his son:

When duty called
You quickly obeyed,
You fell a hero
Our country to save.

I don't know how the change came about. There's nothing offensive about the original epitaph so there's no reason for the War Graves Commission to have censored it. However, it appears that all the Newfoundland Regiment's inscriptions were mediated through the London office of the Director of Graves Registration and Enquiries Newfoundland Contingent. Somewhere along the way the original inscription got changed.
The actual inscription is from a poem attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) and is surprisingly rare:

E'en such is Time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wander'd all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.

Ambrose Stride, a fisherman from Notre Dame Bay, Newfoundland, died of "accidental injuries" according to the War Graves Commission Cemetery Register. The documentation in the website is much more specific. Ambrose Stride was dangerously wounded on 18 June 1916 when a bomb accidentally exploded, damaging his right eye. He died the next day.
In January 1920, James Stride acknowledges the receipt of his son's 1914-15 Star and Memorial Scroll, together with the "words of sympathy from His Majesty the King ... they are indeed acts of comfort to me in my great loss and sorrow". The letter continues, " ... my boy Bramson is still very ill at London, which makes my sorrow still greater". Bransome died in London on 13 February 1920.
[James Stride spells his son's name variously but the War Graves Commission spell it Bransome]


THEY CARRY BACK BRIGHT
TO THE COINER
THE MINTAGE OF MAN

SECOND LIEUTENANT YVO ALAN CHARTERIS


Yvo Charteris was the youngest son of the Earl and Countess of Wemyss, members of that aristocratic social group known as The Souls. He was still at school, Eton, when the war broke out, but in February 1915 persuaded his parents to let him leave and join up. He was immediately commissioned into the King's Royal Rifle Corps but transferred in April to the Grenadier Guards. The regiment went to France on 11 September 1915 and Yvo was killed five weeks later.
Yvo's eldest brother, Hugo, Lord Elcho, the heir to the earldom, was killed in April 1916. After the war, both their mother, Mary Wemyss, and their sister, Cynthia Asquith, published their records of these years. Both books give an insight into a rarely covered aspect of the war, the hopes, fears and grief of a family. The Wemyss may have been born to wealth and privilege but the mother and the sister speak for all mothers and sisters in their beautifully written books.
Yvo's inscription comes from the last verse of A.E. Housman's 'A Shropshire Lad, XXIII',

They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man.
Those lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

The young soldiers who are being returned to their maker, God, are mint-perfect examples of manhood, untouched by the decay of age.

Two Sons of the Souls: Hugo and Yvo Charteris


HEART AND SOUL OF A BOY
SIMPLE AND CHEERY
NEVER TO GROW OLD
NEVER GROW WEARY

SECOND LIEUTENANT WALTER HENRY ALEXANDER DAMIANO


Walter Damiano's parents beautifully capture their son's qualities in the first two lines of this headstone inscription, and then express the essence of Laurence Binyon's poem, 'For the Fallen'.

They shall not grown old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, not the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Second Lieutenant Damiano died of wounds received on the first day of the battle of the Somme when,
"The 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, with the 4th Division began to advance at 9 am, immediately encountering heavy enfilade fire from Beaumont-Hamel. At 9.05 am two runners arrived and informed Major Walsh, the commanding officer, that the attack was to be postponed. He managed to stop part of C and D companies advancing. However for the rest of the battalion, already in No-Man’s-Land, the recall order came too late. At 12 noon, when the order was finally received from Corps HQ to attack and consolidate the position, Walsh reported that this was impossible. Of the twenty-three officers and 480 men who had assembled that morning, fourteen officers and 311 men were now casualties. The order had to be amended and Major Walsh was now told to collect all available men to defend the British front-line."
The Irish at the Somme


HE BORE HIS PAIN
HOW HE SUFFERED
NONE CAN TELL
PEACEFULLY AT REST

GUNNER JOHN WILLIAM CHARLES MCGREGOR


From his epitaph, I thought Gunner McGregor must have died of terrible wounds nineteen days after the end of the war so I was a bit surprised to discover that he'd died of broncho-pneumonia, probably brought on by influenza as was the case with so many casualties of the Spanish Flu epidemic. However, it certainly made me think of what it must have been like to die of pneumonia in the days when there was little that medicine could do to help.
McGregor was admitted to 41st Stationary Hospital on 30 November and died the same day. Unfortunately, the clerk who typed up the report incorrectly read died as disch. (discharged) so no notification was sent to his next-of-kin. The mistake wasn't realised until the end of January 1919 when a telegram arrived at the London office of the Australian Red Cross asking for information with the comment that, "he is said to be wounded and in hospital in London". Unfortunately, he wasn't.
John McGregor's elder brother, Osswild Daniel, had been killed in action on the 5 November 1916.


WEEP NOT FOR ME
I'M FREE FROM PAIN
MY EARTHLY DUTY'S DONE

PRIVATE WILLIAM EDWIN HALE


William Hale died of wounds in a base hospital in Boulogne. There's no indication of when he was wounded or of the nature of his wounds - other than the implication made by his mother on his headstone inscription that by his death he would be free from pain ... having done his earthly duty.


MOTHER DEAREST CHILD
WIDOW'S DEVOTED ONLY CHILD

LANCE CORPORAL CYRIL DAVID BOSTON


Mrs Mary Boston had four children but David Cyril was the only one who survived. In the 1891 Census her husband, David, is a waiter and she has a four month old baby, Arthur. I can't find the family in the 1901 Census and by 1911, David is an invalid, Mary is an office cleaner, and eleven-year-old Cyril David is a schoolboy. The family live in Dacre Chambers, Strutton Ground, charity housing in an impoverished area of Westminster. By the time Mrs Boston came to compose a personal inscription for her son, she was a widow.


HE GAVE ME HIS USUAL SMILE
AND A WORD OF CHEER AS HE PASSED

PRIVATE ALFRED SPENCER BUTTERWORTH


I've woven a human story around this inscription but I'm sure I'm not imagining things. Someone who knew Alfred Butterworth was with him when he died and was able to tell his parents that he "gave me his usual smile and a word of cheer". "His usual smile", they couldn't have said this if they hadn't known him. But don't get the idea that Alfred died comfortably in a hospital bed. In August 1919 his body was brought in for reburial from map reference D 28 b 2.3, indicating that his had been a front-line, battlefield death.
As intended, the words must have brought comfort to the parents who chose them for their son's headstone inscription.
Alfred was the eldest child of John Butterworth, a woollen spinner from Saddleworth in Yorkshire. In 1911, twelve-year-old Alfred was working as a piecer in a woollen mill, someone, usually a child, who speedily repaired broken threads as the cloth was being woven.


HE FOLLOWED THE STARS
TO ETERNITY

SECOND LIEUTENANT HUMPHREY HAMILTON WILSON


Humphrey Wilson joined the army in March 1917, when he was still only 17, and immediately transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. He got his wings in June that year and the following month was posted to France. He served there until 19 February 1918 when his plane crashed in No Man's Land.
According to his Captain, "He was one of the stoutest and best pilots we had in the squadron. He never came down unless his job was finished, and he was always keen to go up. He had done some wonderful work, especially taking photographs. This squadron has been congratulated on its photographs, and this was mainly due to his work"
The Royal Flying Corp's motto, 'Per ardua ad astra', through rough ways to the stars, became the motto of the Royal Air Force when it was established on 1 April 1918. Humphrey's parents developed the motto to its logical conclusion for their son's inscription - 'He followed the stars to eternity'.
Gunner William Wilson, Humphrey's brother, had been killed exactly 5 months earlier, on 19 September 1917. Both brothers are commemorated on a memorial in the Foreigners' Cemetery, Motomachi, Yokohama, Japan where their father had been working when Humphrey was born.


QUIET SLEEP
AND A SWEET DREAM
AND THE LONG TRICK'S OVER

GUNNER WILLIAM ST JOHN WILSON


William Wilson's inscription comes from the last verse of John Masefield's Sea Fever:

I must go down to the sea again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

It's an appropriate epitaph for a man who began life in the Merchant Navy. He transferred to the Royal Navy on the outbreak of war, served on HMS Tiger, and then transferred to the Royal Field Artillery in October 1916.

He died on 19 September 1917 of wounds received the previous day. His brother Humphrey was killed in action on 19 February 1918.


HE SLEEPS AN IRON SLEEP
SLAIN FIGHTING
FOR HIS COUNTRY

SERGEANT THOMAS J. PATTEN DCM


Thomas J Patten was born in England, served with a Canadian Regiment, Princess Patricia's Light Infantry, and the Mr BM Patten who chose his inscription lived in Albany, New York. Thomas Patten, a veteran of the South African War, enlisted in Ottawa on 24 August 1914. He was killed at Bellewaerde Ridge during the battle of Frezenberg when the regiment suffered huge losses, NCOs stepping up to fill the places of dead officers in seeming rapid succession. Patten's body was exhumed from the battlefield in 1920 and identified by a torch he had been carrying.
His inscription comes from the American William Cullen Bryant's 1871 translation of The Iliad. The lines follow the death of the young Trojan Iphidamus:

Unhappy youth! he slept an iron sleep, -
Slain fighting for his country far away
From the young virgin bride yet scarcely his.

In America these words have resonated down the years, even being used to commemorate US soldiers killed in Vietnam. But other translations don't have such a noble ring:

He fell and slept an iron sleep; wretched young man, he died,
Far from his newly-married wife, in aid of foreign pride
George Chapman 1616

Stretched in the dust the unhappy warrior lies.
And sleep eternal seals his eyes.
Alexander Pope 1720

So there the poor fellow lay, sleeping a sleep as it were of bronze, killed in defence of his fellow citizens.
Samuel Butler 1898


FROM OUT OF THE DARKNESS
CAME HIS LOVING VOICE

BOMBARDIER LIONEL ROWLAND BIDWELL


Whose loving voice? Has God's loving voice spoken to Lionel Bidwell's parents through the darkness of their grief, or have they heard their son's voice at a spiritualist seance? Much as I like the idea of the latter I feel it's probably the former. The inscription is not a direct quote but it's based on the sort of idea found in this evangelist hymn:

Hark! there comes a whisper
Stealing on your ear;
Tis the Saviour calling,
Soft, soft and clear:

With that voice so gentle,
Do you hear him say?
Tell Me all your sorrows;
Come, come away!

At the cross of Jesus
Let your burden fall,
While He gently whispers:
I'll bear it all.

Lionel Bidwell was a twenty-three-year-old nursery gardener from Preston in Lancashire


AN AUSTRALIAN HERO

PRIVATE HAROLD ROY BENZLEY


This Australian hero, a clerk from Sunbury, Victoria, enlisted on 12 May 1915 and embarked from Melbourne for Egypt on 16 July 1915. He was on board the Southland when it was torpedoed in the Aegean by UB-14 whilst en route to Gallipoli from Egypt on 2 September 1915.
He eventually landed on Gallipoli and his war record reads:

"admitted to 6th Australian Field Ambulance, Anzac, 31 October 1915 (influenza); transferred to 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Station, Anzac, 3 November 1915 (enteric); evacuated and disembarked Alexandria, 9 November 1915; admitted to No 15 General Hospital, Alexandria, 9 November 1915; proceeded to England, 16 November 1915; admitted to County of London War Hospital, Epsom, England, 27 November 1915. Proceeded overseas to France, 7 June 1916; marched into 2nd Australian Division Base Depot, Etaples, France, 8 June 1916."

Two months later he was "admitted at this station (3rd Casualty Clearing Station) 6th August 1916 suffering from gun shot wounds head, with compound fracture of skull. He died the same day".

A hero may be defined as someone who is admired for their courage and their brave deeds, but never forget R.C. Sherriff's definition in Journey's End. The main character, Captain Stanhope, is perceived to be a hero but as he openly confesses to Hibbert, "Sometimes I feel I could just lie down on this bed and pretend I was paralysed or something - and couldn't move - and just lie there till I died - or was dragged away." But others are sticking it so we have to too. "Don't you think it worth standing in with men like that? - when you know they all feel like you do - in their hearts - and just go on sticking it because they know it's - it's the only thing a decent man can do."

Brave deeds or sticking it - either way, those who fought deserve the appellation 'hero'.


THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS
PRAISE THEE

SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT ASTLEY FRANKLIN EMINSON


Robert Eminson's inscription comes from the Te Deum, a hymn of praise to God that forms a regular part of the Church of England's service of Matins.

We praise thee, O God:
We acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth praise thee:
The father everlasting.
...
The glorious company of the Apostles: praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets: praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs: praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world: doth acknowledge thee;
...

Robert Eminson was killed trying to bring in a wounded man. Scotter Parish Council website quotes eyewitness accounts of the circumstances of his death; the exact details vary but the end result was the same:

"There were a good many casualties and on the following morning your son observed a wounded man lying outside the trench, unable to get in by himself. He at once crawled out to him but found there would be some difficulty in getting him through the wire. It was after going out for the third time to reconnoitre a way in through the wire that the enemy machine gun caught him. The Battalion doctor went out to see if he could do anything, but your son was already dead."

"The wounded man was Sergeant Samuel Yerrell of the Northants. With both arms shattered by a bomb, he was helped back to the lines. Too exhausted to negotiate the barbed wire, he collapsed. "Then a Second Lieutenant jumped out of our trench and went to help them... a German fired at them, the bullet passing through Sam's back and right through the officer's heart. The officer was killed instantly, and poor Sam died an hour later... The brave officer...was Lieutenant Eminson.'"

Robert Eminson was an entomologist. Educated at Epsom College and Downing College, Cambridge, he went out to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in January 1913 to conduct research into the tsetse fly. He came home in January 1915 to join up.


ONLY SON OF
MAJOR GENERAL SIR RH EWART

LIEUTENANT RICHARD HENRY CHARLES EWART


Charlie Ewart was killed whilst "bravely maintaining touch between two halves of his Company, and working a machine gun out in front of their position. There he was hit and died the same day of multiple gun shot wounds" [Eagle House Magazine].
Richard Henry Charles Ewart was the only son of Major General Sir Richard Ewart who himself had a distinguished war record serving as Deputy Director of Supplies and Transport (Indian Army) on the Western Front 1914-1915, and Deputy Adjutant and QMG with the East African Expeditionary Force 1915-1918.
After the war Ewart served in Berlin as British Red Cross Commissioner for the Repatriation of British prisoners-of-war and President of the Inter-Allied Commission for the Repatriation of Russian prisoners. His first wife, Richard's mother, died in 1898.


HE WAS OUR ONLY CHILD

PRIVATE CHARLES FRANK STEPHEN LUSTY


Can there be a more bleak inscription? It says everything there is to say about Mr and Mrs Charles Lusty's grief.
Private Lusty was killed in the 42nd Infantry Brigade's attack on The Harp and Telegraph Hill, which formed part of the German's 'Siegfried Stellung', the Hindenburg Line. Possession of the high ground in this area was giving the Germans a huge strategic advantage. The attack, on the opening day of the battle of Arras, was successful.


NO NO NO OH GOD
NOT FOR NAUGHT

SECOND LIEUTENANT HAROLD HARDING LINZELL MC


This inscription heads Chapter 4 of 'The Quick and the Dead, Fallen Soldiers and their Families in the Great War by Richard van Emden. We can read it as Harold Linzell's mother railing against God for her son's death, and desperately pleading that it shouldn't be in vain. But is this what she meant?
There's a hymn by the Scottish hymn writer Horatius Bonar of which these are the first two verses:

Go, labour on! spend and be spent,
Thy joy to do the Father's will:
It is the way the master went;
Should not the servant tread it still?

Go labour on! 'tis not for naught
Thine earthly loss is heavenly gain;
Men heed thee, love thee, praise thee not;
The master praises: what are men?

It is your joy to do God's bidding, why should you not tread the difficult way God's son trod, what does it matter what men say because God will reward you in the end: "Soon thou shall hear the Bridegroom's voice, The midnight peal, "Behold I come!"
Harold Linzell enlisted in September 1914 and served as a private until September 1915 when he was commissioned into The Border Regiment. That December he was awarded a Military Cross, the citation reading:

"For conspicuous gallantry. After a heavy bombardment the enemy exploded a mine and Second Lieutenant Linzell showed great courage and ability throughout the night in leading and directing the working and wiring parties, who put the crater in a state of defence. Although bombed frequently by the enemy, he succeeded in carrying out the work before daylight."

Linzell kept a diary from 1 January to 30 June 1916. This was edited by MA Argyle and published in 1981 as Fallen on the Somme: the war diary of Second Lieutenant HH Linzell. According to a review in Great War Forum, the diary looks as though it was a series of aide memoires for future reference. The fact that it survived its owner, who was killed in an attack at Fricourt, is attributed to the note inside the front cover:

"In the event of the owner losing this diary or of being "whizz banged, crumped, bombed, bayonetted or sniped" with fatal results to the said person, please forward (risking 'Base Censor') to Mrs FL Linzell, Corner House, The Grove, Finchley, London.

Mrs FL Linzell was his mother although the War Graves Commission records that twenty-one-year old Harold Linzell had a wife, Mrs Eva Linzell.




OUR DARLING "UFFIE"

LIEUTENANT KENNETH PARNELL HENSTOCK


"Uffie", Kenneth Parnell Henstock, was the twenty-one-year-old son of Colonel F.T. and Mrs Henstock. He became one of the first officers to die in the war when he was killed in action on 23 August 1914 during the battle of Mons. Reports say that he "fell leading his platoon" which was "completely annihilated". "Uffie" is described as "our darling", but by the time Mrs Isabella Henstock came to to choose her son's inscription her husband was dead. He saw war service but died on 10 April 1917 at the age of 55.


TOWARD THE SUNRISING
JOSHUA 1:15

LIEUTENANT IVOR CYNRIC SALUSBURY-JONES


The ancients referred to the east as toward the sunrise, or sunrising, but Mrs Salusbury-Jones is specific, the context of the phrase is Joshua 1:15.

Until the Lord have given your brethren rest, as he hath given you, and they also have possessed the land which the Lord your God hath given them: then ye shall return unto the land of your possession, and enjoy it, which Moses the Lord's servant gave you on this side Jordan toward the sunrising.

Despite providing the context, I don't really understand what Ivor Cynric Salusbury-Jones' mother meant by the phrase. Without the specific reference the phrase carries the implications of new down, resurrection, eternal life.

Ivor's brother, Merfyn Harman Salusbury-Jones was killed in action on 11 August 1918. His body was never found and he is commemorated on the Vis-en-Artois Memorial.


HE IS NOT DEAD
HE HATH AWAKENED
FROM THE DREAM OF LIFE

LIEUTENANT FRANCIS ARTHUR RALFS


Francis Ralfs' inscription comes from stanza XXXIX of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Adonais: an Elegy on the Death of John Keats', 1821.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

The poem is an obvious source for those mourning young men dead before their time: they will not grow old as we shall, and fear and grief will not touch them any moew. The lines from next stanza, XL, 'He hath outsoar'd the shadow of our night' were an even more popular inscription. They were used for the novelist Storm Jameson's brother, Second Lieutenant Harold Jameson, who was killed when he crash landed in flames on 5 January 1917.


PEACE WAS THE PRIZE
OF ALL HIS TOIL AND CARE

CAPTAIN DAVID HENDERSON


Captain David Henderson was the eldest son of the Rt. Hon. Arthur Henderson MP, a leading Trade Unionist, Labour politician and Labour member of Asquith's Coalition Government. David Henderson too was a Trade Unionist; he was a member of the British Steel Smelters' Union and worked in the office of John Hodge, the Labour MP for Manchester, Gorton.
Arthur Henderson was opposed to the Government taking Britain into war but nevertheless, once she was at war he supported it. His son, David, enlisted a month after the outbreak in September 1914. He was gazetted Second Lieutenant in February 1915 and obtained his captaincy that June. He was killed in action on the Somme on 15 September 1916, the same day as the Prime Minister's son, Raymond Asquith.
David Henderson's inscription comes from 'A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness, Oliver, Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland' by John Dryden (1631-1700). Cromwell was admired by the Labour Party for his radical politics but was still a controversial figure even at the beginning of the twentieth century for his republicanism and his suppression of Ireland.
In supporting the war, Arthur Henderson had wanted not simply a British victory but a just and democratic peace. As Labour Foreign Secretary, 1929-1931, he supported the League of Nations, sought the resolution of international incidents by diplomatic means and worked hard to support the peace his son's death had bought. Arthur Henderson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1934: "Peace was the prize of all his toil and care".


I THANK MY GOD
UPON EVERY REMEMBRANCE
OF YOU

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN SCUDAMORE


"I thank my God for every remembrance of you," Philippians 1:3
Nineteen-year-old John Scudamore was the only child of Brigadier-General and Mrs Scudamore of Yarrowfield, Mayford, Sussex. Educated at Eton, he went to Sandhurst in 1914 and was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifle Corps in May 1915. He went to France the following month and was killed in action at Loos on 25 September 1915.


KNOWN UNTO GOD

LIEUTENANT JOHN KIPLING


At one time this burial was simply identified as 'A Lieutenant of the Irish Guards', and it carried the inscription 'Known unto God'. This was the formula that Rudyard Kipling had devised for all unknown burials. Where absolutely nothing was known about the body the headstone read: 'A soldier of the Great War. Known unto God'. This was adapted to include any scrap of information that could be discovered about the dead man, for example, a Canadian soldier, a German soldier, a British Private, a Corporal of the Black Watch, a Lieutenant of the Irish Guards. It just so happens that this particular Lieutenant of the Irish Guards is now thought by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to be Rudyard Kipling's own son.
On 27 September 1915, two days after the opening of the battle of Loos, John Kipling led his platoon under heavy fire over a mile of open country towards their objective at Chalk Pit Wood. By the end of the day it was realised that he was missing and despite extensive enquiries his body was never found, or perhaps it was.
More ...


NO MAN IS GREATER
IN GOD'S EYES
THAN HE THAT GIVETH
HIS LIFE FOR OTHERS

SERJEANT HARRY WELLS VC


"When his Platoon Officer had been killed he took command and led his men forward to within fifteen yards of the German wire. Nearly half the Platoon were killed or wounded, and the remainder were much shaken, but with the utmost coolness and bravery, Serjeant Wells rallied them and led them forward. Finally, when very few were left, he stood up and urged them forward once more, but while doing this he was killed. He gave a magnificent example of courage and determination."
VC Citation, London Gazette, 16 November 1915
Harry Wells was the son of an agricultural labourer. In 1904, two years after leaving school, he joined the army. He was 16. He retired in 1911 and went to work as a barman at the Beaver Inn in Ashford, Kent. When war broke out he rejoined the army and was rapidly promoted to serjeant. He was killed in the attack on Le Routoire Farm during the battle of Loos.


GOOD OLD FRANK
AU REVOIR FROM ALL AT HOME

PRIVATE FRANK STRANGER


Private Stranger was admitted to hospital on 15 March 1918 suffering from multiple gunshot wounds to the head, legs and right forearm. He died of wounds eight days later. He was one of three brothers originally from Guernsey who were all killed within two months of each other: Frank on 23 March, George on 11 April and Harry on 11 May.


HE IS DEAD
OUR BEAUTIFUL BOB
HE WAS THE LIFE
AND LIGHT OF OUR HOME

PRIVATE ROBERT GORDON ALDERMAN


'Bob' was one of Frederick and Charlotte Alderman's six children, five of whom were sons. In 1911 he was still living at home with his parents and two of his brothers, working as a gas fitters labourer.


DEAR OLD JACK

SERJEANT ROBERT JOHN CALLANDAR


Robert John Callander was a marine insurance clerk from Wallasey in Cheshire. He enlisted in The King's, a territorial battalion of the Liverpool Regiment, in February 1913 and went with them to France on 1 November 1914. Treated for wounds in June, September and October 1915, he eventually died on 11 August 1916 from the wounds he'd received two days earlier at Guillemont. His mother confirmed his inscription.


PEACEFUL BE
THY REST DEAR CHARLIE
'TIS SWEET
TO BREATHE THY NAME

PRIVATE CHARLES TREWIN


Charles Trewin was a Cornishman born in Camborne where his father was an iron moulder. He served with the Durham Light Infantry and died of wounds received in action near Ypres where the 20th Battalion were fighting to reclaim ground won by the Germans during their Spring Offensive.
His inscription, a conventional piece of memorial verse, was confirmed by his sister Lily.


DEAR OSCAR
ALWAYS REMEMBERED

PRIVATE OSCAR GRIMES


Oscar Grimes was reported wounded, missing in action on 5 November 1916 during the Battle of Flers. A month later his mother, Martha Grimes, instituted a Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau search. Confirmation of Oscar's death didn't come until August 1917 but by this time Martha Grimes was dead having died two weeks after instituting the search. Since Oscar's father was already dead it was his brother who chose his inscription, "Dear Oscar always remembered".


THANK GOD FOR GLYNNE

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN GLYNNE MORRIS


John Glynne Morris was a lace finisher from West Bridgeford in Nottinghamshire. He originally joined the Army Cycling Corps where he rose to the rank of Lance Corporal before being commissioned into the Notts and Derby Regiment. He was severely wounded on the night of 12/13 September and died ten days later at a field ambulance station in Reninghelst.


AU REVOIR LLEW

PRIVATE LLEWELLYN BRICK


"Au revoir LLew", a simple farewell to Private Llewellyn Brick who came from Lindley, a suburb of Huddersfield, Yorkshire. Before the war, Llewellyn Brick worked in the woollen industry as a machine tenter - someone who stretched the newly dyed cloth over a frame to dry - as did several members of the family: father, Austin, was a worsted worker, and sister Edith a hank winder. Austin Brick originally came from Newtown, Montgomeryshire (Powys), which perhaps explains the Welsh name he gave his son.


I WAS EVER A FIGHTER
SO ONE FIGHT MORE
THE BEST AND THE LAST

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN HENRY MORRIS ARDEN


Lieutenant Colonel Arden's inscription is a quotation from Robert Browning's poem 'Prospice' in which the poet expresses a bold determination not to hide from death but to meet it head on.
John Henry Morris Arden was a professional soldier who served throughout the South African War and the Sudan Campaign and retired from the army in 1912. He rejoined immediately war broke out and went to France with the Expeditionary Force. He was awarded the DSO at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, was badly wounded in July 1915 and then again on 1 July 1916. What exactly happened next is unclear.
According to Flight magazine, 15 August 1918, "After his recovery he was given a Staff appointment and was made commandant of an RFC Cadet Wing. Having been asked to undertake an important work of military organisation in the Near East, he is reported to have died at Cairo shortly after his arrival in Egypt."
The Roll of Honour for Cambridgeshire tells a slightly different story. Arden "Died 22/7/1918 at Aboukir, Egypt, aged 44, from self-inflicted wounds, while serving with No. 3 Cadet Wing RAF."
If this is true it casts a different light on his inscription, which was chosen by his brother-in-law, Edward Hilliard, Bursar of Balliol College, Oxford. In fact the inscription and the whole poem now read less like someone who was not afraid of death and more like someone who was keen to meet it.

Fear death? - to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained.
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so - one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!


"GOD AND ST.GEORGE"

PRIVATE NORMAN FRANK PERKINS


Before Shakespeare had King Henry V cry 'God for Harry, England and St George', medieval knights used the phrase 'God and St George' as an oath, a dedication, a battlecry and a blessing. 'For God and St George' was also the title of a patriotic song composed by Reginald Stoneham and published in 1914. Unfortunately, although I can see that this song exists I cannot find the words to it anywhere on the Internet. I suspect that that says something about its quality!
Private Perkins was killed on the 9 April 1917, the first day of the battle of Arras, in an assault on the German redoubt at Point-du-Jour close to Athies.


IT IS A FAR, FAR BETTER THING
THAT I DO
THAN I HAVE EVER DONE

PRIVATE DAVID BEST


I found this inscription in Trefor Jones' On Fame's Eternal Camping Ground: a study of First World War Epitaphs in the British Cemeteries of the Western Front. He notes that despite its appropriateness he has only seen it used this once on a war grave cemetery headstone. I agree with him about its appropriateness and I too have never seen it used anywhere else.
David Best was a seventeen-year-old boy serving with the Tyneside Scottish when he died of wounds received on the Somme.
The words come from the last line of Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities. They are spoken by Sydney Carton who during the French Revolution sacrifices his life for the love of a married woman. The woman's husband has been sentenced to death. Carton has the husband rescued and substitutes himself. On his way to the guillotine Carton tells a companion in the tumbril:

"I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens 1859


HERE, A BOY
HE DWELT THROUGH ALL
THE SINGING SEASON

CAPTAIN EDWARD HENRY COURTENAY THORP


Edward Thorp was born in Bengal, India and educated at Clifton College, Bristol. He was gazetted into the Devonshire Regiment in April 1916 and from September 1916 served in France, Belgium and Italy before being killed in action in the capture of Bucquoy on 21 August 1918.
His inscription comes from the last verse of Robert Louis Stevenson's poem 'In Memoriam F.A.S.' written to commemorate an eighteen-year-old boy, Francis Albert Sitwell, who died of consumption in Davos in 1881. The words apply just as appropriately to a twenty-year-old soldier killed in action in France in 1918.

YET, O stricken heart, remember, O remember
How of human days he lived the better part.
April came to bloom and never dim December
Breathed its killing chills upon the head or heart.

Doomed to know not Winter, only Spring, a being
Trod the flowery April blithely for awhile,
Took his fill of music, joy of thought and seeing,
Came and stayed and went, nor ever ceased to smile.

Came and stayed and went, and now when all is finished,
You alone have crossed the melancholy stream,
Yours the pang, but his, O his, the undiminished
Undecaying gladness, undeparted dream.

All that life contains of torture, toil, and treason,
Shame, dishonour, death, to him were but a name.
Here, a boy, he dwelt through all the singing season
And ere the day of sorrow departed as he came.


RAYMOND WHO HAS HELPED
MANY TO KNOW
THAT DEATH IS NOT THE END

SECOND LIEUTENANT RAYMOND LODGE


And how had Raymond helped many to know that death is not the end? By speaking to his parents through a spirit medium and describing the world he now found himself in with enough detail about his past life to be able to convince them that it was really him.
Second Lieutenant Raymond Lodge was killed in action on 14 September 1915. On 25 September his mother (M.F.A.L.) "who was having an anonymous sitting for a friend with Mrs Leonard, then a complete stranger, had the following spelt out by tilts of a table, as purporting to come from Raymond: - TELL FATHER I HAVE MET SOME FRIENDS OF HIS.
M.F.A.L. - Can you give any name?
YES. MYERS."
Frederic Myers, 1843-1901, was a founder member of the Society for Psychical Research of which Raymond's father, Sir Oliver Lodge, was also a member. But Sir Oliver was no ordinary credulous bereaved relation, he was a senior scientist, a physicist who had done extensive research in the fields of electromagnetism and radio. He had been Professor of Physics at University College, Liverpool from 1881 to 1900 and was now Principal of Birmingham University.
The war saw a huge growth of interest in spiritualism, the belief in the survival of the human personality after death and the ability of the living to communicate with this personality. Those interested in the subject included people with genuinely scientific enquiring minds, as well as the superstitious, the ignorant and the flagrant deceivers. They did not believe they were cranks but open minded, free thinkers as opposed to closed minded traditionalists. After all, magnetism, electricity and radio waves were all various forms of long distance communication which had been unknown until recently so why not telepathy and communication with the dead.
A year after his son's death, Sir Oliver wrote a book about his communications with his son called 'Raymond or Life and Death with examples of the evidence for survival of memory and affection after death'. It was a best seller and ran through many editions but was also ridiculed by many of Sir Oliver's colleagues in the scientific community. Despite this, some years later when the permanent cemeteries were constructed and the Lodge's got their chance to choose a headstone inscription for Raymond, which looks as though it was in 1922 seven years after his death, they reiterated their belief in Raymond's survival:
Raymond who has helped
Many to know
That death is not the end


LEPAA RAUHASSA
RAKASTETTU
JA KAIVATTU

SAPPER ANDREW MYLLYMAKI


Andrew Millymaki's inscription is in Finnish and means 'Rest in peace beloved, deeply missed'. Sapper Millymaki was born in Canada to Finnish parents. They were among the many Finns who emigrated to Canada in the later part of the 19th Century, Driven from Finland by the increasing Russianisation of the country and lured to Canada by the plentiful opportunities it offered.
Andrew Millymaki was born in White Fish, Ontario but his parents soon moved to settle in New Finland in Saskatchewan. He was studying Engineering at Queen's University, Ontario when the war broke out and enlisted almost straight away on 23 August 1914. He was killed on the Somme two years later.


GALLIPOLI APRIL 25TH 1915
JANUARY 8TH 1916
FRANCE MARCH 1916
FEBRUARY 28TH 1917

MAJOR GUY HORSMAN BAILEY


Major Guy Horsman Bailey's father, Colonel Edward Horsman Bailey, encapsulated his son's military career on his headstone inscription. Guy Bailey took part in the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915, the first day of the campaign, and served there until the last Allied troops were withdrawn on 8 January 1916, the very last day of the campaign. He went to France in March 1916 and was killed nearly a year later on 28 February 1917. Peter Bell, on the Bledington War Memorial site, offers additional information:
"He was hit in the side by a piece of shrapnel from an airburst shell as he ran to the gunpits from his dugout to retaliate to the German shell fire. He was carried back to the dugout and attended by the doctor but he died about half an hour later."


SO PASSED A BRAVE SOLDIER
A GALLANT GENTLEMAN
AND A RADIANT SOUL

SECOND LIEUTENANT RICHARD WILLIAM BYRD LEVETT LEVETT


Milford, November 1916
Tonight is probably the last night I shall be at Milford before going to the front and I am writing this in case I don't come back.
I know how much you will feel it if I go under but don't forget that I shall have died for the best cause a man could have died for and as long as my death has been worthy of a Levett and a Rifleman you must only feel proud and happy.
...
I want everything to go on at Milford as if I was coming back one day: you know how fond of the place I was and I should hate to think that the old place was suffering through the break in one generation so please do everything as if I was away for a time only, and in every way keep the family traditions going.
That is one of the saddest things of the war, the way so many traditions have lapsed.
I don't want any mourning or anything to be disarranged for me.
...
Ever your loving and happy son,
R.B. Levett
Floreat Etona
Letters of an English Boy Being the Letters of Richard Byrd Levett pp 191-2
Spottiswoode, Ballantyne and Co. Ltd 1917

As his Company commander's letter made clear, Richard Levett was killed by the British barrage, a fact confirmed by Major Stafford the Battalion commander, "Your son was right under our barrage when he was killed, and there is no doubt that by keeping his men forward, he prevented the machine guns coming into action and thus saved many casualties. In consequence the attack was a brilliant success".
The "old place" referred to by Richard Byrd Levett in his letter is Milford Hall in Staffordshire, which has been in the Levett family since 1749, and in the Byrd family for longer than that. As a result of Richard Levett's death, on the death of his father in 1928, the estate passed to his sister, Dyonese, whose descendants still own it.
There is a splendid marble effigy of Richard in St Thomas's Church, Walton-on-the-Hill, Staffordshire. Dressed in the uniform of an officer of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, he lies recumbent under a Gothic awning decorated with family and regimental coats of arms.


A FINE BOY
SO FRANK AND FRIENDLY
SO FULL OF ENERGY
AND KEENESS

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM TORDIFF JOHNSTON


William Johnston's inscription sounds like a quote from a letter of condolence. The writer's opinion is supported by other letters that his mother received, all quoted in Johnston's obituary in 'The Roll of Honour: a Biographical Record of all Members of His Majesty's Naval and Military Forces who have Fallen in the War'. From his Colonel: "Your son was a most excellent officer, and had the respect and affection of his men and fellow officers." He was "quite as cheerful in the trench as out of it and a great help in trying moments to his brother officers". From the Chaplain: "He was always so cheery and bright that it did anyone good to be with him." And from a brother officer: "Johnny was the most lovable and fascinating person I ever knew, and a great favourite with all, officers and men".


OUR IDEAL SON
A GENTLE, TENDER, BROTHER
A STEADFAST FRIEND

PRIVATE HAROLD MARCUS SARGANT


According to Harold Sargant's father, who completed the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia, his son "volunteered to restore the line of communication in the big push under very heavy shell fire and his officer said he just completed it when a shell burst and killed him."
Sargant, whose qualities are beautifully described on his headstone, was a farmer before he enlisted in 1916. He embarked from Australia on 9 November that year and was "21 years all but 12 days" when killed in action on 4 April 1918.


A CHEERFUL VOICE
A SMILING FACE
ALAS NO ONE
CAN FILL HIS PLACE

PRIVATE HORACE HOBAN SIMPSON


Horace Simpson was a 21-year-old Labourer from Prahran, Victoria who enlisted on 10 August 1915. He embarked from Australia on 15 September 1915 and served with the 5th Battalion Australian Infantry who were at that time on Gallipoli. Withdrawn from Gallipoli in December 1915 the battalion was sent to Egypt to defend the Suez Canal. In March 1916 it was transferred to the Western Front. Over the next two years the battalion saw action at Pozieres on the Somme, at Ypres both in the winter of 1916-17 and then later that spring and was involved in the German Spring Offensive of 1918. After three years of action Simpson was killed on the second day of the great Allied offensive launched near Amiens on 8 August 1918 that eventually brought the war to an end.


BRIGHT, INTELLIGENT LAD
WAS RESPECTED & LOVED BY
ALL HIS REGIMENT

LANCE CORPORAL SYDNEY JAMES ARMSTRONG SAWYERS


This inscription has the ring of a letter of condolence from Sawyers' senior officer. However, unlike many letters, this sounds as though the officer actually knew Sawyers and recognised him to be a "bright, intelligent lad".
Sawyers' mother filled in the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia and she described him as a photographer who had also worked in "postal services". Other sites describe him as a miner. He lived in Norseman Western Australia, a gold mining town, so Sawyers certainly could at one time have been involved in the gold industry. He enlisted on 5 July 1915, embarked for Europe on 1 October that year and died of wounds just under a year later on 7 September 1915 at No. 49 Casualty Clearing Station, Contay.


TALL, EAGER
A FACE TO REMEMBER
A SPIRIT
THAT BRIGHTENED OUR HOME

SERGEANT ALLAN FREDERICK BATH


There is a photograph of Allan Frederick Bath on the Australian War Memorial site. It's estimated that it was taken on or about 15 September 1915, the date I imagine that he first got his uniform. He's standing in a photographer's studio in front of a rather incongruous painted rural backdrop. He looks very young. The War Graves Commission gives his age at death as 25. His father, on the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia, says he was 20. He certainly looks 19 in this photograph rather than the 24 he would have been had the War Graves Commission been right about his age. His father also adds the extra information that after his death two letters were found in his knapsack, one from his captain and one from his major, recommending him for a commission. This, together with his inscription and the fact that he was a sergeant at 20 show his quality.
Bath was killed at Pozieres on the Somme on 5 August 1916. His body was not discovered until March 1929 when it was identified by his disc, a piece of his tobacco pouch inscribed with the initials AB and a fountain pen.


OUR LAD
RUDDY OF HAIR
AND STRONG OF LIMB

PRIVATE LEWIS NORMAN SHEPHERD


This is such a wonderful inscription: tender, proud and direct. It gives us a vivid image of this red-headed, well built, twenty-one-year-old butcher from Penguin in Tasmania who died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station in Puchevillers. Lewis Shepherd's brother, Ernest Victor Shepherd, was killed in action at Armentieres five months later on 2 January 1917.


ALWAYS LOVING,FEARLESS
UNSELFISH AND CHEERFUL
GOD TOOK HIM

PRIVATE LIONEL GUNDRY SIMMONDS


We get a good indication of Lionel Simmonds' character from the description his father chose for his inscription: loving, fearless, unselfish and cheerful. Born in 1893 in Yatton, Somerset, Simmonds emigrated to Canada in 1912 and remained there, working on a farm in Halcyonia, Saskachewan, until he enlisted on 9 December 1915. He was killed in action at St Eloi on 9 September 1916.
The last line of the inscription, 'God took him' comes from Genesis 5:24, "And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him". Enoch didn't die, God took him. Lionel Simmonds isn't dead, he's living with God.
Lionel Simmonds had a younger brother, Austin Gundry Simmonds, who joined the Friends Field Ambulance in October 1914 when he was 16, and served with them in France until September 1916 when he was old enough to apply for a commission. He was serving with the Special Reserve in Athlone Barracks in Ireland when he was accidentally drowned in Lough Ree on 2 June 1917 aged 19.


A GALLANT HERO
WITH A GOLDEN VOICE
AND LOVED BY
ALL WHO KNOW HIM

BOMBARDIER THOMAS FRANCIS LONG


Among all the conventional descriptions of the dead - gallant hero, loved by all - you occasionally get a glimpse of a real person: Bombardier Thomas Francis Long had a golden voice. From his family circumstances I don't imagine it was a trained voice. Thomas Long's mother was a washerwoman and his father was dead. In the 1911 census he was working as a clerk and living in Kennington so he had neither the money nor the time for formal lessons but he still had "a golden voice" and his mother recorded the fact for posterity on his headstone inscription.
The 187th Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery was raised in Fulham in 1915 and arrived in France in May 1916. Bombardier Long died of wounds a year later at a field ambulance station near Reninghelst in Belgium and was buried close by.


R.I.P.
THERE'S NOT A JOY
THE WORLD CAN GIVE
LIKE THAT IT TAKES AWAY

LANCE CORPORAL GEORGE HENRY BROOKES


The full inscription on George Brookes' grave reads:
Two soldiers
Of the Great War
9666 Lance Cpl
G.H.Brookes
Royal Warwickshire Regt.
26th August 1914. Age 25
R.I.P.
There's not a joy
The world can give
Like that it takes away
Unknown soldier
Lancashire Fusiliers
26 August 1914
Known unto God

Lance Corporal Brookes was killed at Le Cateau three days after he'd arrived in France. The Royal Warwickshires left England on the morning of 23 August, disembarking at Boulogne where they were rapturously greeted with gifts and kisses by the French crowds. That evening they marched to Le Cateau, which they found chaotically crowded with refugees, troops and ammunition columns. From then until his death Brookes would have marched, skirmished, bivouacked and dug in. Private R.G.Hill's diary gives a vivid account of the Royal Warwickshires during these days. It's possible that Brookes was wounded on the 25th either in a disastrous, over enthusiastic and unauthorised attack or during the German's bombardment of their position. Hill recounts how the wounded at the dressing station were all captured that night. This would explain why Brookes was buried by the Germans under a wooden cross inscribed with the words, "145 Englische Krieger" 26.8.14.
It wasn't until October 1920 that his body was exhumed and identified by his cap badge, lance corporal's stripe and the service number on his trousers, although this was misread as 9606 instead of 9666. His bones were obviously intermixed with those of an unidentified soldier from the Lancashire Fusiliers. The bones couldn't be separated so the soldiers remain buried together.
The bottom of the exhumation form has the words "Dame Adelaide Livingstone informed". At the end of the war this remarkable American woman was appointed the Army Council head of the War Office mission to trace British soldiers reported as 'missing' in France and Flanders.
"In this capacity she travelled widely in Europe, managing a staff of officials from both Germany and England. Between 1920 and April 1922 she was assistant director of Graves Registration and Enquiries in central Europe, with headquarters in Berlin and with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. For her wartime services she was among the first women to be created DBE in 1918."
[Oxford Dictionary of National Biography]
Private William Henry Brookes was presumably identified by the work of Dame Adelaide's department.


RANGATIRA PAKU

LIEUTENANT GEOFFREY WALTER GAVIN MAIDENS CATO


This inscription is written in Maori and I had to apply to the Twitter community to find out what it meant. By return Mark Vent (@MarkVent) and S Disbrey (@dizzernp) replied that it meant Little Chief, their translation confirmed by Sharon Marris (@JournoKiwi). I had thought it meant something like noble fame but as you can see, it doesn't.
Had Lieutenant Cato not joined the Royal Flying Corps he would not have had a headstone inscription at all. The New Zealand Government objected to the imposition of a charge of 3 1/2d for each letter, believing it to be discriminatory, and so banned inscriptions for their soldiers. The Canadian Government felt the charge to be equally discriminatory but rather than banning inscriptions decided to pay for them all themselves. Cato's service in the Royal Flying Corps as opposed to a New Zealand regiment meant the ban didn't apply to him. British families could choose whether they wanted to pay for an inscription or not.
The War Graves Commission believed that families would welcome the opportunity of making some sort of contribution to commemorating their dead. However, I wonder whether the Commission realised just how poor some families were. Poverty is surely one of the reasons for the many blank headstones and the very short inscriptions like R.I.P. The Commission did waver the charge in numerous cases but some families will not have gone ahead in the first place because they knew they wouldn't be able to pay.
Geoffrey Walter Gavin Maidens Cato, who appears to have sometimes gone under the name Reginald Maidens Cato, grew up in Napier, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. He left for Britain in 1916 to join the Royal Flying Corps. He trained at Oxford Flying School, getting his wings in May 1917 at which point he went to France. He survived for six months despite crash landing twice.
However, on 6 November 1917, Cato took off at 2.55 pm. No one knows whether he completed his patrol or whether it was aborted but within half an hour of take-off his plane broke-up and crashed into Lake Dickebusch. Cato and the observer were both killed, drowned. It could have been enemy action or a fault with the machine but there was a suspicion that Cato, known for his fondness for 'stunts', aerobatics, had put the plane into too steep a dive and it had broken up.


DAD'S & MUM'S DARLING
AT REST

PRIVATE HORACE WILLIAM BROWN


In the space beside the question'What was his Calling?",on the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia, Private Brown's father has written, 'State School Head Teacher'. Horace Brown was 23. It might seem unusual for someone to be a head teacher at so young an age but Brown had been teaching for eight years, as his father explains with I imagine no little pride:
"Obtained State School merit certificate at age of 13 years. Appointed junior teacher at age 15 years. Appointed Head Teacher at Baringhupp* East State School, Victoria at age of 20 years."
* It's difficult to read this word but I think it says Baringhup



YET HE IS HERE
WITH US TODAY
A THOUSAND THINGS
HIS TOUCH REVEAL

DRIVER WALTER GEORGE BIRKETT


Who is 'he', the person whose touch is revealed in a thousand things? I think it's the dead soldier, Walter Birkett, but I could be wrong and 'he' could be God. However, I don't think it is.
There was a huge popular interest in spiritualism during the 19th and early 20th centuries and this interest mushroomed during and after the First World War. People were desperate for some word from their dead sons and husbands and mediums provided them with this comfort - whether they were complete charlatans or not.
In fact the war encouraged the belief in ghostly manifestations with legends and images like the Angels of Mons , and the White Comrade . And after the war the Australian artist and former soldier, Will Longstaff, painted a series of extremely evocative images of soldierly ghosts haunting old battlefields and newly erected war memorials: the Cenotaph, Vimy Ridge, the Menin Gate, the coast of Belgium and Gallipoli. It all brought comfort to the thousands of people whose hopes for the future had been so radically altered by the death of their men.
This is why I think that Walter Birkett's inscription references his parents' belief in their son's continuing presence rather than in God's.
Birkett was born in Kingston Jamaica in the British West Indies in December 1892. He came to Canada with his parents and in 1914 was living in Cooksville, Toronto. He was a teamster and carried his experience as a wagon driver into the army where he served with the 2nd Division Ammunition Column of the Canadian Field Artillery. He died of wounds at a Field Ambulance station on 8 August 1916.

The source of the quotation is actually a poem by Claude Burton called An Unknown Grave.
4 January 2018


ONLY SURVIVING SON
OF THOMAS
4TH LORD RIBBLESDALE
AND CHARLOTTE HIS WIFE

LIEUTENANT THE HON. CHARLES ALFRED LISTER


Despite his wonderfully privileged life, epitomised by John Singer Sargent's magnificent swagger portrait, the 4th Lord Ribblesdale did not have a fortunate life. His wife died in 1911, his eldest son and heir was killed in Somaliland in 1904 and his only surviving son died of wounds in 1915. As a result the Ribblesdale title became extinct on his death.
His son, Charles Lister, also enjoyed a privileged existence. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he mixed in glittering social and political circles. However, whilst at Oxford he expressed an interest in social issues and became a leading member of the Fabian Society. He later joined the Independent Labour Party and whilst nothing may have come of all this, the experience was certainly informative for him and as A.J. Balfour pointed out it was better than "running an actress".
Lister joined the Foreign Office in 1911 and served two years in Rome before being sent to Constantinople. Once war broke out he could have stayed in the Diplomatic Service but he decided he wanted to join up. Lister took a commission in the Royal Naval Division, serving in the Hood Battalion along with Rupert Brooke. In fact he was part of Brooke's burial party on the island of Skyros following Brooke's death from septicaemia just two days before the Gallipoli landings
Lister landed on Gallipoli on 29 April 1915 and was wounded three times in the following four months' fighting; the third time the wounds proved fatal. He was evacuated on a hospital ship. Whilst on board he wrote to his father saying that he had been "struck in the pelvis and my bladder being deranged, and slight injuries in the legs and calves ... My doctor is quite happy at the way things are going." Unfortunately Lister died on 28 August 1915, two days after writing this letter.


STAUNCH TO THE END
AGAINST ODDS UNCOUNTED

LANCE CORPORAL WILLIAM TUNNAGE ABBOTT


This is a line from the third verse of Laurence Binyon's famous poem 'For the Fallen'. Published in The Times on 21 September 1914 the fourth verse has become as well known as any lines associated with the war:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Verse three reads:
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their face to the foe.

Before the war, William Abbott worked as a clerk in the accounts office of the Great Eastern Railway. He joined up in January 1916 and was promoted Lance Corporal on 5 February 1917. He was killed in an attack on the heavily defended German trenches at Bucquoy a month later.

"At 11 am the following morning [15 March 1917] Col. Ward received orders to send two strong patrols forward into Bucquoy, and expostulated with the Brigade-Major, telling him that it was hopeless, and that the position was held in considerable strength, as the enemy had been seen moving about outside their trenches in the early morning. This was repeated to the Brigade Commander on the telephone, but the answer was that strong patrols must be sent. A platoon from "A" and "B" Companies was therefore sent forward in extended order at two o'clock in the afternoon. Before they had advanced some hundred yards they came under heavy fire, and of course lost heavily. This was reported to Headquarters and orders were received to move the Battalion towards Bucquoy, but no sooner did "D" Company show up in the open than they were heavily shelled. ...
It is difficult to speak too highly of the gallantry and dash with which "A" and "B" Companies advanced, though it seemed to everyone that men were being thrown away on a very hopeless undertaking."
The Honourable Artillery Company in the Great War 1914-1919 pp 304-5
Edited by Major G. Goold Walker DSO, MC
Published London 1930

I don't imagine that William Abbott's father, who chose his son's inscription, can have had any idea how well his choice of inscription matched the circumstances of his son's death: Staunch to the end against odds uncounted.


A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE

FRANCIS JOHN COOMBES


Jack Coombes, a painter from Newtown, Sydney, New South Wales, was born in England in Luton, Bedfordshire. He emigrated to Australia with his parents in 1898 when he was 6. I can't tell whether his father was still alive at the time of his death, nor whether he had any brothers or sisters. It was his mother who was described as his next of kin, she also filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia and instituted a search via the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau. While two witnesses say that he was sniped "through the forehead, death being instantaneous", another man, who looks as though his name was Company Sergeant Major H.S.A. Creehy, has another tale to tell; you can decide whose is the most likely.

"Informant states that on 31/9/18 the Battalion was holding the line in a trench at Villers Bretonneux. About mid-day when they were resting in a trench Coombes was hit by a shell and died about two minutes afterwards. Informant was with him when he died. He was conscious and asked informant to remember him to his mother. Informant saw him fall, being only about 4 yards away from him at the time and had been speaking to him just before. Informant added that Coombes was a fine fellow and was well liked by his men. If Coombes' mother cares to write to him he will go and see her if she lives in Sydney."

I have a feeling that the informant (Creehy?) was a very kind man and that he possibly knew there was a close relationship between mother and son. If so he hoped her son's 'last words' would bring her comfort.


THE SUPREME SACRIFICE

CORPORAL ROBERT JAMES ANDREW


Corporal Robert James Andrew was killed in action at the retaking of the summit of Mont St Quentin on 1 September 1918. The next day the Australian Infantry took Peronne. These were among the finest actions of the Australian forces during the whole war and their casualties were very high.
Corporal Andrew's wife instigated an Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau search for her husband. The results show how difficult it was to ever ascertain exactly what had happened to a soldier. Added to this was the fact that a Private GV Andrews, who also served with the 24th Infantry, in the same Company, was killed during the same battle on the same day. However, it seems as though witnesses were all speaking about the same man: "Andrew was from Victoria, tall, very thin, fair hair, about 26 years" [Sgt JH Bond 14.11.18.] but there is not much agreement about he died.
"I didn't see Andrew, who was a M/Gunner in my D.XV. killed instantly by a m.g.bullet through the head at Mont St Quentin about 4 pm."
"Andrews was in the trench waiting to go over when he was hit by a piece of shell and killed right out. I saw this."
"He was killed with four others by a shell in the dugout ... It happened about 4.10 pm before our hop over, and Fritz was busy strafing us at the time."
"I saw Morris D.Coy. S/B and Andrew D.XVI both killed instantly by the same shell alongside of me at Mont St Quentin about 6 pm in front line of trenches before the hop over."
"Casualty was advancing at Mont St Quentin when a machine gun bullet entered his side killing him instantly."

Corporal Andrew's wife, Rhoda, used the title of Sir John Arkwright's famous poem, 'The Supreme Sacrifice' for her husband's headstone inscription. The poem is much better known as the hymn 'O Valiant Hearts', which for many years was sung at Remembrance Services until its sentiments went out of fashion.


HE MADE THE GREAT SACRIFICE
MY ONLY SON

LANCE CORPORAL S.J. CLEGG


The Great Sacrifice by James Clark, painted in 1914, shows a dead British soldier lying out on the battlefield at the foot of a ghostly image of Christ on the cross. The message is obvious - the soldier's sacrifice and Christ's are as one. The painting was sold to raise money for a war relief charity and Queen Mary bought it for her husband's aunt, Princess Beatrice, whose son, Prince Maurice, had been killed on 27 October. The painting hangs as a memorial to him in St Mildred's Church Whippingham on the Isle of Wight.
Numerous prints were made from the painting, and several of them can still be found in churches where they were hung in memory of the dead. The painting was also the inspiration for many memorial stained glass windows.
Mrs ME Franklin, Lance Corporal Clegg's mother, chose the inscription. I have not been able to discover either his Christian names or his age.
Paul Breen has written an article about the painting on the Imperial War Museum War Memorials Archive Blog.


VIVAT SHIRBURNIA

SECOND LIEUTENANT HAROLD GOSTWYCK MAY


Vivat Shirburnia - long live Sherborne the centuries-old independent school in Dorset where Harold Gostwyck May had been a pupil from 1902 to 1907, and briefly, in the autumn of 1914, a master. The inscription was chosen by his father, Richard Cooke May, a stockbroker, who lived at Sherborne, 77 Woodside Green, Croyden, Surrey.
May joined the army soon after the outbreak of war and was commissioned into the Dorsetshire Regiment. He had been out in France for less than three months when he was wounded in a German attack at St Eloi on 14 March. In a letter from his hospital bed to the headmaster of Sherborne, Nowell Smith, May recounted what happened.
"Suddenly the most awful hail of shrapnel came over the the crest of the dugouts. A whole battery fired high velocity shrapnel for over an hour - down came the trees, up came tons of earth. The men scurried up into the trench pretty quick and one shell burst alongside me and sent me toppling down the hill into a pond at the bottom ... it felt like being hit on the thigh at footer, though of course the shell made a beastly mess of the leg."
'Vivat Shirburnia, Sherborne School and the Great War 1914-1918' pp 44-5
Patrick Francis, 2014
After nightfall stretcher bearers carried him to the Battalion dressing station, from there he was taken to a Casualty Clearing Station in Poperinghe and then by train to a base hospital in Boulogne. Once here it was decided that his leg needed to be operated on but May failed to survive and died on 27 March.
There are details and a photograph of May on the Sherborne School Archives website.


LOVE MEANS SACRIFICE

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN WILLOUGHBY SCOTT DSO


In 1914, John Scott was a barrister at the Inner Temple who had served as a regular officer with the Royal Artillery in the South African War. He retired in 1908. but joined the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars with the rank of Captain. When the war broke out he went to France with the regiment in September 1914. In January 1916 he was gazetted Lieutenant-Colonel in the Somerset Light Infantry and was killed leading them in an attack during the Battle of the Scarp on 23 April 1917.
His adjutant, who was wounded beside him, later wrote to Scott's wife to tell her what had happened.

"We took part in a big attack last Monday, the 23rd; we started at 4.45 am, and our Battalion was in support of the 4th Middlesex. At the start the attack went off fairly well, although the Germans had quite a lot of artillery opposite us, and the barrage was accurate. We were held up by machine-guns before reaching the road running between Roeux and Gavrelle, and we were in shell holes all the morning till about 1 pm, by which time the strong point which had held us up was cleared of all the Germans in it. We then advanced about 300 yards and were preparing to push on to what is called Greenland Hill. We then used our glasses standing up in a shell hole, and the Colonel was killed instantaneously by a sniper."
Memorials of Rugbeians Who Fell in the Great War
Volume IV

John Scott's inscription was chosen by his wife. 'Love is sacrifice'. John Scott sacrificed his life for the love of his country. Madeline Scott may have felt that she had sacrificed her husband. It's certainly what many next-of-kin felt, as Harry Lauder wrote after visiting his son's grave.
" And my own grief was altered by the vision of the grief that had come to so many others. Those crosses, stretching away as far as my eye could reach, attested to the fact that it was not I alone who had suffered and lost and laid a sacrifice upon the altar of my country."
A Minstrel in France
Harry Lauder 1918


"SONNY"
EVER LOVING MEMORY
FLOREAT ETONA

SECOND LIEUTENANT PATRICK ARTHUR DUDLEY JACKSON


Patrick Jackson, "Sonny", was the only son of Lt Colonel and Mrs Cecil Jackson. According to the brass plaque fixed to his original wooden grave marker, which hangs in St Michael's Church, Thornton, Buckinghamshire, Jackson was commissioned into the army straight from school in 1914, and first went to the Western Front in 1915. School was Eton, as the final line of his inscription makes clear: Floreat Etona, may Eton flourish. This was a familiar greeting or valediction among Etonians as the obituary of another Etonian, John Byron Noel, makes clear: "'Floreat Etona' were the last words he wrote to one of his greatest friends the day he started for France."


"INASMUCH"

PRIVATE CHARLES BARNES


Private Charles Barnes came from Hook, a small community in Wiltshire where his father was a farm labourer. He served in the 5th Battalion the Wiltshire Regiment, which was formed in Tidworth in August 1914. This is probably when Charles Barnes joined them, quite early in the month too because the volume of recruits was so large that late comers joined the 6th Battalion.
The 5th Battalion sailed for Gallipoli in July 1915, going ashore at Cape Helles on the 17th. They were involved in fierce fighting at Sari Bair at the beginning of August. In a subsequent Turkish counter-attack, sometime between the 9th and the 11th, it is estimated that half the regiment was wiped out.
By October the regiment were in Lala Baba, constructing fire trenches, the War Diary records Barnes' anonymous death:
"... work on new fire trenches was continued. Early this morning one man was killed in the trenches. Our trenches are becoming more exposed owing to the fact that the majority of the trees are deciduous and are rapidly shedding their leaves."
5th Battalion Wiltshire Regiment War Diary 18 October 1915

Barnes' inscription contains the single word, "Inasmuch", note the quotation marks. I am assuming that it is a quotation from the Bible. Cruden's Complete Concordance gives seven occurrences of the word. Initially Matthew 25:40 was the front runner. Jesus tells those who have helped the hungry and the sick, prisoners and the lonely that:
"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
However, it's possible that Private Barnes' mother, who confirmed the inscription, was referring to 1 Peter 4:12/13.
"Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you:
But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy."


QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA
BEHOLD I COME QUICKLY

STAFF NURSE MYRTLE ELIZABETH WILSON


Myrtle Elizabeth Wilson was born in Australia in 1877 where her parents had been living for ten years. A trained nurse, she joined Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service early in 1915 and was sent to Europe in April. That winter she caught pneumonia. Her decline was noted in the official diary of the Matron-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders, Maud McCarthy.
9 December:
Miss Lowndes dangerously ill. Miss Wilson and Miss Donaldson both very ill also.
19 December:
Miss Wilson, Australian, pneumonia, DI [dangerously ill] list - people in Australia, WO informed, and cousin in England.
23 December
Telephone message from 14 General Hospital saying Miss Wilson, Australian on Q Reserve, condition critical. Informed WO. Later (message) to say she had died 7.30 am.

Myrtle Wilson's funeral was held the next day, Christmas Eve. Maud McCarthy made sure that she attended and was furious to discover that no one had done anything about publicising the funeral so that there were very few nurses present. She felt very keenly that people should have had the opportunity "of paying a last respect to one who had come so far and who was among strangers."

Myrtle's inscription was confirmed by her sister May. The family's address was The Roses, Chelmer, Brisbane, Queensland, hence the first line. The second line, 'Behold I come quickly' is a line, repeated several times, from the New Testament Book of Revelation Chapter 22:
Behold I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.
verse 7
And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.
verse 12
He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

Maud McCarthy's Official Diary as the Matron-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, [WO95/3989 The National Archives], has been transcribed by Sue Light @Scarletfinders. She has created the most wonderful resource for which I am very grateful.


KAERE SON VI MODES SNART

PRIVATE KRISTIAN VOGNSEN


Private Vognsen's inscription is in Danish but the database can't cope with the inclusion of the Danish accents on the words 'son' and 'modes'. The inscription was confirmed by his father, who still lived in Denmark, and it means, 'Dear son we will soon meet again'. Kristian Vognes, who descibed himself as a seaman on his attestation papers, emigrated to Australia when he was 18 and a half. He was just 21 and a half when he was killed at Gallipoli on 26 June 1915.
There had always been a small Danish presence in Australia: seamen, gold prospectors and former soldiers following the disbandment of the Danish army in Schleswig-Holstein after the war of 1849-51. Prussia's annexation of these two provinces after the war of 1864 further fuelled Danish emigration, as well as a dislike of Prussian aggression. This meant that in 1914 there was great support among the Danish community for Australian participation in the First World War.


UNTIL THE DAY BREAK
AND THE SHADOWS FLEE AWAY

LIEUTENANT GEORGE NEVILLE PATRICK YOUNG MC


Lieutenant Young's inscription comes from the Old Testament, The Song of Solomon 2:17 and 4:6. It's a popular inscription even though the songs appear to be a series of erotic love songs. George Young's father quotes the biblical phrase exactly, most inscriptions add an 's' to the end of the word break. As used in memorial inscriptions, the phrase refers to the breaking of the day when the speaker will be reunited with the person he mourns, i.e. at his own death.
George Young was wounded on the night of the 10/11 July 1915. His friend Dennis Barnett reported to his mother that Young "got a shrapnel bullet nicely through the shoulder, and insisted on walking round the line to say good-bye to everyone before starting for the dressing station. There was no despondency there. He'll get a good holiday which he's earned if anyone did."
Unfortunately Young didn't get a good holiday, he died from gangrene two weeks later on 25 July.


CAPTAIN OF ST PAUL'S SCHOOL
SCHOLAR-ELECT OF
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

LIEUTENANT DENIS OLIVER BARNETT


Denis Barnett won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford which in the normal course of events he would have taken up in October 1914. Instead of which he enlisted in the Artists Rifles on the outbreak of war and went to France with his regiment in October 1914. In January 1915 he received a commission in the Leinster Regiment and died of wounds received at Hooge that July.
The diary of a fellow officer, Captain Frank Hitchcock, gives the details:
15th August: Barnett got a bullet through the stomach when he was guiding a working party of 1st North Staffords along the Menin Road ...
16th August: Barnett died of his wounds. The Doctor told us that he stuck his wound splendidly and that men who were only hit in the arms and legs were groaning all around him in the dressing station. Barnett had a presentiment that he would get killed, and told us so when we got orders for Hooge ... "
Quoted from Leinster Regiment Journal 10 July 2009
As his inscription makes clear, Barnett was at St Paul's where he was something of a superstar. He played in the 1st XV for three seasons and was Captain of School for two years. An obituary in The Pauline, the school magazine, gives something of his quality:
"Fine brains, powerful physique, complete moral and physical courage, unfailing good humour, charming frankness of manner and absolute straightness ... ".
Denis Oliver Barnett: In Happy Memory: his letters from France and Flanders, October 1914-August 1915 was privately printed in 1915.


BELOVED HUSBAND OF
M.E.VICARY
OF RICCARTON, NEW ZEALAND

PRIVATE HENRY WALTER VICARY


It is rare to see the words New Zealand in a personal inscription, not because few New Zealanders died in the war but because the New Zealand dead were not allowed headstone inscriptions. It was all a question of equality. The War Graves Commission made much of the fact that all the dead were to be treated equally whether they were generals or privates, princes or labourers. However, it then decided, primarily as a concession to the Roman Catholic community, that next-of-kin could be allowed to choose and pay for a brief personal inscription. The Canadian government felt that this was deeply divisive and made the decision that it would pay for all inscriptions. The New Zealand government also felt it was divisive and so made the decision that there would be no personal inscriptions on their graves.
Henry Vicary served in the Australian army. The family originally came from Ilfracombe in Devon but Henry was born "at sea to British parents". By 1914 Henry was a sailor, carpenter, labourer and engine driver living in Narradora, New South Wales. He was killed in action at the battle of Lone Pine sometime between 6th and 9th August 1915.
I don't know when he married, who he married or how the New Zealand connection comes about but by the time Henry Vicary's widow came to confirm his headstone inscription she was living at 9 Bowen St, Riccarton, New Zealand.
Henry's half brother, William Dallin Vicary, was killed in Mesoptamia on 8 March 1916 and is commemorated on the Basra Memorial.


HE DID HIS BEST
GOD GRANT HIM ETERNAL REST
DAD, MAM, EDGAR

GUARDSMAN WILLIAM JOHN WILLIAMS


Initially posted as missing, Guardsman Williams' body was exhumed and reburied in August 1919. His inscription is interesting because of the documentation concerning it that survives in the Imperial War Museum (IWM Misc. 100 item 1556). Carol Acton in her book 'Grief in Wartime', 2007 p 45, relates how ten years after William John Williams' death his family - Dad, Mam and Edgar - visit his grave, an event they describe in a letter to Miss O'Neill who appears to have been William John's girlfriend.
"And it was very easy to find the grave of our Dear William John, as we were going from the entrance ... there stood his name, his rank, regiment and no 13369 quite clear, and every letter correct, as we wish to inscribe on his tombstone ... Now came the burst of tears, but with a hope to meet our dear, brave lad again in a far and better sphear (sic) than this world, where there is no sorrow, nor tears, nor cruel wars, where we shall enjoy everlasting life, when God will wipe every tear. We parted from the Cemetary (sic), very much satisfied and lot better after we seen (sic) his lasting resting place and see the care is taken by our Government of the Cemetary (sic)."
The family leave a wreath on his grave that includes her name:
Father, Mother, Brother, Miss Annie O'Neill
A silent thought, a secret tear
Ten years after their son's death his parents have been able to weep over his grave and this, together with the respectful way in which the cemeteries is maintained, brings them great comfort.



KEEP MY MEMORY GREEN

PRIVATE JAMES OLIVER


'Lord keep my memory green' is the last line of Charles Dickens' book The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, 1848. It was accompanied by an illustration by C.Stansfield RA showing a grand Gothic room with adults sitting round a festive table and young children playing on the floor.
The ghost's bargain is that he can help Professor Redlaw, the haunted man of the title, "to forget the sorrow, wrong and trouble you have known ... to cancel their remembrance ... forever". But, this gift of forgetfulness will be given to everyone he comes into contact with too. Redlaw accepts the bargain but finds that he becomes inexplicably more angry, unkind and bitter. Eventually it is pointed out to him that, "It is important to remember past sorrows and wrongs so that you can then forgive those responsible and, in so doing, unburden your soul ...". In accepting this, Redlaw realises that memory is a vital ingredient for love and understanding to flourish.
There is a terrible poignancy to James Oliver's inscription. It was chosen by his mother, Mrs Sophia Oliver of Trail, British Columbia. Two of her sons, James and William, were killed in the war and her husband, Sidney, was killed on the same day and in the same battle as William - 24 April 1915 at St Julien. William and Sidney have no known grave and are commemorated on the Menin Gate in Ypres, so James is the only one for whom she could choose an inscription.
Sidney Oliver was a forty-nine-year-old miner from Trail, British Colombia. Born in England, in Hartington, Derbyshire, he emigrated to Canada as a young man where he married. He enlisted on 18 September 1914, ticking the box to say that he had had previous military experience and claiming that he had been born in 1870 and was therefore 44. In fact he was nearer 49 as he was 50 when he was killed the following year.
'Keep my memory green'. Not don't forget me, nor even don't let me forget them, but let me remember everything and let me see it clearly.


NO CROSS, NO CROWN
IN MEMORY OF THE BRAVE

LANCE CORPORAL HARRY UBERT EDMANS


"No Cross, No Crown" is the title of a book by the early Quaker, William Penn (1644-1718). The purpose of Penn's book was "to show the nature and discipline of the holy cross of Christ; and that the denial of self ... is alone the way to the ... Kingdom of God." For nineteen-year-old Harry Edmans, and for all 'the brave', death in battle would have been seen as the ultimate in self-denial.
His inscription was confirmed by his sister, Marian Edmans, although his parents, James Ubert, a house painter, and Sabrina Edmans were both still alive.


TYDI GAN HYNNY
GODDEF GYSTUDD
MEGIS MILWR DA
I JESU GRIST

PRIVATE TOMMY THOMAS


Private Tommy Thomas was a carpenter from Mackay, Northern Queensland. He was born in Llanfyrnach, Pembrokeshire, Wales, where his parents lived until after the war. He enlisted in the Australian Infantry on 9 March 1915 and embarked for Europe on the 29 June that year. He died of wounds in hospital in Rouen on 15 September 1916.
His Welsh inscription comes from the English-Welsh Duoglott Bible, from the Second Epistle of Timothy, Chapter 2 verse 3:
Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.


BUINIDH NA
NITHEAN DIOMHAIR
DONTIGHEARNA

PRIVATE NORMAN MCDONALD


Norman McDonald's inscription was chosen by his father, Alexander McDonald, who lived in Portree on the Isle of Skye. It is written in Scottish Gaelic and is a quotation from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy Chapter 29 verse 29:
"The things that are secret belong to the Lord our God."
Gaelic is not really a written language and the version of the quotation I found was spelt:
Buinidh na nithe diomhair do n' Tighearn ar Dia.
And what does it mean? One needs to see the context. Moses tells his people of the covenant with God, and of what will happen to them if they fail to keep it: the anger of the Lord will be kindled against them destroying their land and bringing sickness among them.
"The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law."
I think Mr Alexander McDonald believed that the war was God's punishment for nations not keeping the word of His commandments:
"And that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass growth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zebolm, which the Lord overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath."
Deuteronomy 29:23
The words of Deuteronomy, describing the punishment God will visit on his disobedient people, seem to describe very well to the devastated landscapes of the First World War battlefields, especially the wasteland of the Western Front.


CUI FLOS IUVENTUTIS
INTEGRAE RESECTUS EST
REQUIEM IN PACE

SECOND LIEUTENANT AUBREY WILLIAM FYLDES


Aubrey Fyldes Latin inscription does not appear to be a quote. It translates as:
For what purpose has the flower of this generation been cut back?
Rest in peace

The inscription was chosen by Aubrey's mother. One thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven soldiers from the British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian armies died on Gallipoli the day her eighteen-year-old son died, 9 August 1915 - just a fraction of the total number killed in the war, the flower of the Empire's youth. And this was multiplied many times over when you include the youth of all the combatant nations.
On the Twitter account I have made a mistake in the first line of the inscription, it should be 'flos', flower, not 'flus'.


YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN
JACK DEAR
FOR TRUE LOVE NEVER DIES

PRIVATE JOHN ROBERT WILSON


John Robert Wilson was born and grew up in the mining community of Broken Hill, South Australia where he was a miner. He served with the Australian Light Horse and embarked from Australia for Gallipoli on 20 April 1915. He was killed at Lone Pine just over two months later.
His inscription was chosen by his mother Mrs C Wilson.


EI EWYLLYS EF A WNELER

BOMBARDIER DAVID WILLIAM DAVIES


'Dy ewyllys di a wneler' translates as 'Thy will be done' from The Lord's Prayer, 'Ei ewyllys ef a wneler' as 'His will be done'. Whatever the language this acceptance of God's will, sometimes amended to read 'Thy will not ours be done', seems to be the most common of all headstone inscriptions.
Bombadier David Davies's parents lived in Barry Dock, South Wales, which is where he was born in 1891. At some point he emigrated to Canada as that is where he was living when he enlisted.


HOW CAN MAN DIE BETTER
THAN FACING FEARFUL ODDS

LANCE CORPORAL EDWIN HUTCHINSON TAYLOR


Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temple of his gods.
Horatius at the Bridge
Thomas Babbington, Lord Macaulay

Lance Corporal Hutchinson's inscription quotes Macaulay's famous poem, frequently anthologised in Victorian collections. The poem describes how, in a superb act of gallantry, Horatius prepared to sacrifice himself to save Rome but with great fortitude and endurance manages to save both himself and the city.
There was plenty of gallantry, fortitude and endurance shown by the Australians at Lone Pine between 5.30 pm on the 6 August 1915 and nightfall on the 9th. In their attempt to capture and hold the Turkish trenches, seven Australians won VCs and 2,300 were killed or wounded. In the end the Turks recaptured the trenches and the majority of the Australian dead lay out on the battlefield unburied until the end of the war. No one knows when many of them died so their date of death is given as 6/9 August, as is Lance Corporal Taylor's.
Johnston's Jolly Cemetery was created after the war when the bodies were brought in from the battlefield, but identification was virtually impossible. Of the 181 burials, 144 are unidentified. However, there are 36 named men whose graves carry the words 'Believed to be buried in this cemetery', Lance Corporal Taylor is one of these.


UNDERNEATH
ARE THE EVERLASTING ARMS

CAPTAIN EDWIN GERALD VENNING


The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them.
Deuteronomy 33:27

In August 1914 Edwin Venning was an actor performing in Brighton with a touring company. He joined up on 7 September and was commissioned that December, promoted Second Lieutenant in January 1915 and Captain on 9 June that year, two months before he was killed. We know slightly more about Venning's war than his rapid promotion tells us because two letters to his sister were published in Laurence Housman's 'War Letters of Fallen Englishmen', 1930.
"I've had rather phenomenal luck out here; twice I've found myself the only officer left. I can tell you no news owing to the Censor's vigilance, or rather to the fact that we are on our honour to impart nothing; but I can tell you the happenings of weeks, nearly months, ago at Ypres ... . I had rather a ghastly time then. I remember a certain two days during which we attacked incessantly in the open, and I had to lead two bayonet charges. ... There was an open field between ourselves and the Germans, and I got my men to the edge of it (having lost Lord knows how many from shell fire), and we started a fire fight with rifles and machine guns at about 5 yards. After some time of this I saw the right move, and gave my orders accordingly; it was my first charge, my first real big fight. We tried to spring across that field, but the fire was one block of solid lead. Literally I could see no chance for a fly in it, ... . I had to drop back owing to difficulty in getting my remaining men on. I had a shot at one, and missed him, but it settled the rest, a man by me shouting but he had his head and shoulders taken off; they sagged back from him, you know riddled in a line, and I fell behind the rest of his body just in time. Then my men broke, and I remember standing somewhere in front of the German trenches, with a wounded pal's revolver, that he slipped into my hand, yelling at my men some of the filthiest language ever heard. They were appalled and I rallied a dozen or so; as it happened, they were all killed almost at once, and I was left, so far as I could see, alone. Then I ran of the field faster than I have ever run in my life, dodging taking cover behind dead men, and in shell holes; at the edge of the field I pulled my self together. ... in two or three hours came the orders for another attack in a different place, that was worse. We attacked at dawn; the poor C.O. was killed among many others. At the end of it, I came near to blowing my own head off with my revolver, but a wounded Northumberland officer saved me, and I carried him off the field in a coat. It was a beastly business."

Despite yelling "some of the filthiest language ever heard" at his men they obviously appreciated their officer. The letter ends with Venning recounting his pleasure at the fact that, "my Q.M. Sergeant was asked to go for promotion yesterday and be made a S.M., but he heard it meant leaving me for another Company and refused to take it. My servant also refused because he would not be able to look after me. So evidently my love of men is not wasted here. I think I know the ways and peculiarities of every man of mine; it surprises them, and they like it and work well for it".
After Venning's death Sergeant-Major Utting wrote to his sister, confirming that this was true: "Your brother, Capt. Venning, was my company officer, and he treated myself and the men of my company in such a manner that has gained a respect that will last as long as there is a man of the present B Coy alive".


THE PATHS OF GLORY
LEAD BUT TO THE GRAVE

CORPORAL PERCY EDGAR IND


Whilst some inscriptions quote Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington that "The path of duty was the way to glory", others quote Gray's Elegy in Country Churchyard:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour: -
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Percy Edwin Ind died of wounds received in action on the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war. By this date deaths among British Empire forces amounted to something in the region of 117,293 men.


"IF THE CALL COMES
I AM WILLING TO DIE"
FROM HIS DIARY

LIEUTENANT HUGH JAMES PEARSON HOPKINSON


Hugh Hopkinson was articled to his father who was the engineer for the Hull Joint Dock. A volunteer, he went out to Gallipoli with the Royal Engineers. "On the night of the November 5 1915, he was superintending the laying of wire entanglements in front of the trenches, and was shot while bandaging a wounded man. He died on the way to the dressing station."
Oundle Memorials of the Great War MCMXIV - MCMXIX


ALSO
CAVALRY MACHINE GUNNER
IN FRANCE IN 1915
AGED 15 YEARS

SECOND LIEUTENANT GEORGE BENJAMIN JOHNSTONE STODDART


George Benjamin Johnstone Stoddart was 18 and nine months when he died on 4 March 1918. Born on 21 July 1899 he was therefore just 15 when he enlisted on 1 September 1914, and still 15 when he went to France as a cavalry machine gunner with 6th Dragoon Guards on 23 May 1915, thus qualifying for a 1915 Star. His medal card indicates that he was discharged on 15 January 1915. However, it doesn't look as though he was discharged because he was discovered to be underage but because he received a commission in the Royal Field Artillery.
The 25 January 1918 edition of 'Flight' lists Stoddart's name as among those being confirmed in the rank of Flying Officer, and then three months later among those who have been killed. In the information his mother gave to the War Graves Commission, she says he was killed in action. The announcement of his death in The Times on 16 April says "accidentally killed whilst flying abroad".
Strangely, little has been written about George Stoddart who sounds to have been quite a character. Born George Benjamin Johnstone, the name Stoddart was added after his mother remarried in 1909. Johnstone's father died in 1903 in the London County Asylum. His widow, Rosa, went to work in the Bethlem Royal Hospital Lunatic Asylum. Here she met and married the psychiatrist Dr William Henry Butters Stoddart. In 1911, George, his mother and his two sisters were all living with their step-father at the asylum.


O SO YOUNG & YET SO BRAVE

PRIVATE JAMES RATHBAND


Private James Rathband was 16 when he was killed in action at Ginchy on 9 September 1916.The son of Mr and Mrs J Rathband of Dublin, his inscription was signed for by Miss A Rathband, 12E Abbey Cottages, Upper Abbey Street, Dublin. A street of very modest cottages now pulled down.
Where did the inscription come from? Did Miss A Rathband read it somewhere? Put the words into Google and they come up in at least three nineteenth-century romantic novels to describe young heroes whose deeds belied their years - just as James Rathband's must have done.


AGE 17 YRS. 1 MON. 10 DYS.
IN THY KEEPING
OUR FATHER

GUNNER HAROLD MAITLAND GORING


On Harold Maitland Goring's attestation papers his date of birth is clearly given as 9 September 1898, but he was lying, Harold Goring was born on 9 September 1900. This must be why his mother was so specific on his headstone inscription stating his age as exactly 17 years, one month and 10 days. This made him 16 when he enlisted in January 1917, and still 16 went he went overseas on 23 March 1917.
He served with the 4th Division Ammunition Column of the Canadian Field Artillery and was killed outright by a German bomb dropped on the parade ground just as the men had been dismissed.


FEAR NOT I AM HE THAT LIVETH
IN LUMINE TUO VIDEBIMUS LUMEN

LIEUTENANT GILBERT WALTER LYTTELTON TALBOT


Lieutenant Talbot's inscription was chosen by his father, Edward Talbot, Bishop of Winchester. The first line comes from Revelation 1 verse 18:
I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen.
The second line comes from Psalm 36 verse 9:
In Thy light shall we see light.

Talbot was killed in action leading his platoon across No-man's-land at 2.45 in the afternoon, in other words in broad daylight, in an attempt to recapture Hooge Crater. The crater had been captured earlier that morning by the Germans using liquid-fire, flame throwers, for the first time. There is a vivid description of Talbot's life and death in this blog post.
Toc-H, Talbot House, the world-wide Christian movement designed to maintain the brotherhood of the trenches into the post-war world, was so named in Gilbert's honour at his brother Neville Talbot's request. The symbol of the movement is a bronze lamp of the type used in the Roman catacombs, each Toc-H branch owns one. The inscription round the top reads: In lumine tuo videbimus lumen


HE HATED WAR
BUT VOLUNTARILY GAVE
HIS LIFE FOR FREEDOM

PRIVATE WILLIAM ERNEST HORNER


From the 1911 census it would appear that William Ernest Horner was his parents' only child. His father, Joshua Alfred Horner, Secretary to a Limited Liability Company in Nottingham that dealt in all kinds of goods except eatables, tells us much about his son in his brief inscription - that he was a volunteer and not a conscript, that he saw the cause as freedom rather than God, king, country, honour or even duty, and that he joined up despite the fact that he hated war.
{NB I have only described the father in such detail as whoever transcribed the census form made rather a hash of it!]


ONE MOMENT STOOD HE
AS THE ANGELS STAND
HIGH IN THE IMMANENCE OF AIR ...

SECOND LIEUTENANT EDMUND JASPER SHALLCROSS CAVE


Second Lieutenant Edmund Cave's full inscription reads:

One moment stood he
As the angels stand
High in the immanence of air
The next - he was not
To the fatherland
Departed unaware

The inscription has 120 characters, including spaces, almost double the permitted number, which was 66. This means that Twitter couldn't carry it in full with its blog link, which is why I have written it out in full. The words come from the second verse of Frederic Myers' poem, On a Grave at Grindelwald, although the words of the inscription are not exactly the same as those of the poem - nor is the spelling of the word eminence.
Grindelwald, a village in the Swiss Alps, is the base for climbers wishing to climb the north face of the Eiger. The poem, which describes a climber's death, transfers rather well to that of an airman.

Here let us leave him; for his shroud the snow,
For funeral lamps he has the planets seven,
For a great sign the icy stair shall go
Between the heights to heaven.

One moment stood he as the angels stand,
High in the stainless eminence of air;
The next, he was not, to his fatherland
Translated unaware.

Edmund Cave was shot down whilst on a line patrol near Vignacourt, spotting and attacking tanks. Born in London where his father, also Edmund Cave, was a solicitor in Hatton Garden, Edmund Cave junior had gone to Canada for health reasons and at the time of the outbreak of war was managing a fruit ranch in British Columbia. He enlisted in the Canadian Infantry but on arrival in Britain transferred to the Royal Air Force. His uncle, Sir George Cave, was Conservative Home Secretary 1916-1919 in Lloyd George's cabinet. This might explain why Edmund Cave's parents felt they could disobey the restrictions of length of inscription. However, the evidence seems to show that providing you were prepared to pay the War Graves Commission were prepared to allow their ruling to be broken, whoever you were.


MOTHER IS PROUD
OF HER HERO, THOUGH HE
WAS ONLY A PRIVATE

PRIVATE HAROLD CONSORT SMITH


Harold Smith was 18 and 6 months when he died of wounds in an assault on the Turkish positions at Gaba Tepe in Gallipoli. This means that he can only have been 17 when he enlisted and embarked on board HMAT Geelong from Hobart on 20 October 1914.
I'm pretty sure that Harold assumed the surname Smith and that he was actually Harold Consort Battenburg Street, born in Mathinna, Tasmania to David Charles and Mary Eliza Ellen Street, who are listed as his parents in the War Graves Commission records. Harold 'Smith' was underage when he enlisted and underage when he went overseas. His alias makes me wonder whether his parents knew what he was doing. Their epitaph, confirmed by his mother, certainly grants him posthumous approval.


FOR THE HONOUR OF
SOUTH AFRICA

PRIVATE GERT JOHANNES JACOBUS LUBBE


On 17 October 1918, Gert Lubbe, the only surviving member of his gun team, took his Lewis gun out into open ground to destroy the uncut German barbed wire holding up his company's advance. He died of wounds, "gunshot wounds (knee), which proved fatal" at a Casualty Clearing Station at Roisel the next day.
In 1919, Lubbe was awarded a posthumous Military Medal for the "magnificent gallantry" he showed that day.
The War Graves Commission record Private Lubbe's first Christian name as Gert but other sources record it as Dirk. Dirk/Gert came from near Pretoria in South Africa and had served in German South West Africa before being sent to Europe.


HE HATH BORN OUR GRIEFS
AND CARRIED OUR SORROWS

PRIVATE VICTOR NEIL STEVENS


... to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?
... He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he hath born our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
Isaiah 53:1-5

According to the records, Victor Stevens died of wounds. I can't reconcile this with the fact that the War Graves Commission puts his date of death as between 29 June and 4 July. The definition of died of wounds normally means that the man received medical attention before he died. Why therefore does no one know when he died, what happened to him after his wounds received attention? Open dates like this normally mean that the man's unit was in continuous action over the days and no one could tell exactly when a man was killed. It's curious.


LOVED BROTHER
OF PETER, FERG.
IG, DOT AND MOLLIE

LANCE CORPORAL WILLIAM JOHN SULLIVAN


As Trooper William John Sullivan's parents were dead his sister Margaret was his next of kin. She chose his inscription - naming his five siblings - and signed the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia. Sullivan had been a bank clerk in Coolac, NSW before he volunteered under the alias of William John Monoghan on 24 August 1914. He was killed on 29 June 1915 on what later became known as Pope's Hill.


HE BOWED HIS SHOULDERS
TO BEAR

SECOND LIEUTENANT PHILIP BINNIE


Philip Binnie's inscription, chosen by his mother, comes from Genesis 49 verse 15:
And he saw that rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant; and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant unto tribute.

What can it mean? The context offers little help, the dying Jacob gathers his sons together to tell them of the future. Issachar, understanding the benefits of his position undertakes to shoulder the hard work necessary to maintain it. Does this mean that Philip Binnie understood the necessity for him to shoulder the burden of fighting in order to maintain the country's position, and do the words 'became a servant unto tribute', a form of slave labour, imply that he was a conscript?

Philip Binnie went missing on 26 September 1916. His body was discovered at map reference J.13.c.2.5 in July 1920. There was no cross to mark the grave but the body still had its identity disc. Binnie was born in Leith but is remembered at Strathblane, where their First World War Memorial Project the book A Village Remembers features Binnie. He is also remembered on the memorial in what is now Clincarthill Parish Church in Glasgow.


KILLED IN AERIAL COMBAT
IL Y A DONC QUELQUE CHOSE
DE PLUS PRECIEUX QUE LA VIE
PUISQUE NOUS SOMMES ICI

CAPTAIN FRANCIS LEOPOLD MOND


Captain Mond and his observer, Lieutenant Edgar Meath Martyn, were shot down and killed on 15 May 1918. Although their bodies were recovered they were then misidentified and buried as Captain JV Aspinall and his observer Lieutenant Paul Dornonville de la Cours, see the previous inscription epitaph 352.
Thanks to Mond's mother's persistence (as described in the previous inscription) the mistake was eventually discovered, the bodies exhumed and correctly identified and new headstones erected. For personal inscriptions, Edgar Martyn's widow chose 'Greater love hath no man than this', and Francis Mond's mother a quotation from Georges Duhamel's 'The New Book of Martyrs'. Writing about his wartime experiences, Duhamel, a French surgeon, describes coming across a burial ground:

Mais le cimetiere que voici ne doit rien la vieillesse et a la maladie. C'est un cimetiere d'hommes jeunes et forts.
On peut lire leurs noms sur les cent petites croix pressees qui repetent tout le jour, en un choeur silencieux: "Il y a donc quelque chose de plus precieux que la vie, il y a donc quelque chose de plus necessaire que la vie ... puisque nous sommes ici."

[But this burial ground owes nothing to old age or sickness. It is the burial ground of young, strong men.
We may read their names on the hundreds of little crosses which repeat daily in speechless unison: "There must therefore be something more precious than life, more necessary than life ... since we are here."]

Mrs Mond shortened the quotation to: 'There must therefore be something more precious than life since we are here'. The meaning is that our country is more precious than life since we have given our lives to defend it.

Francis Mond joined the Territorial Artillery in July 1914 and volunteered for foreign service on the outbreak of war. He joined the Royal Flying Corps in February 1915 and was invalided home with shell shock that autumn. He returned to the front in 1916 but in September that year was posted to the Air Board in London. At his own request, he returned to active flying in March 1918 and was shot down on 15 May.

The Western Front Association relates the story of the discovery of the true identity of the bodies. After the war, Francis Mond's parents endowed the Chair of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Cambridge in his memory.

The Monds were originally a German family. Francis's father, Emile Moritz Schweich Mond, was born in Cologne in 1865. Emile's uncle, Ludwig Mond, came to England in 1862 and set up Brunner Mond in Northwich, Cheshire and the Mond Nickel Works in Swansea. Ludwig's son, Alfred Mond who became the first Lord Melchett, was the inspiration behind the establishment of the Imperial War Museum in March 1917, and oversaw the establishment ICI. Francis Leopold Mond was his wife's nephew and his cousin's son.


A FORMER DANISH OFFICER
WHO GAVE HIS LIFE
FOR HUMANITY

LIEUTENANT PAUL VICTOR DORNONVILLE DE LA COUR


How does Lieutenant Paul Dornonville de la Cour manage to have a personal inscription when he's commemorated on the Arras Flying Services Memorial to the Missing, which means just that, that he was missing and doesn't have a body, let alone a grave with an inscription? The answer lies in the fact that Dornonville's body was misidentified and he was buried as another man; the mistake only being uncovered after several years of relentless research by that other man's mother.
On 15 May 1918, Captain FL Mond and Lieutenant EM Martyn were shot down in a dog fight over No Man's Land. Their burnt bodies were recovered and sent to the advanced dressing station at Smith's Farm to await burial; personal effects on Mond's body having first been removed and returned to his mother. On the same day, Captain JV Aspinall and Lieutenant PV Dornonville de la Cour were also shot down. Hearing of the two bodies at Smith's Farm, men from Aspinall and Dornonville de la Cour's squadron came to collect their bodies for burial. There was no one on duty who could correct them in their assumption that these were the bodies of 'their' men. It's worth remembering that the mix of fuel, wood and doped canvas meant that crashed aircraft burnt at a tremendous heat, often rendering bodies unrecognisable. So Mond and Martyn were buried in Doullens Communal Cemetery No. 2 as Aspinall and Dornonville de la Cour, and Mond and Martyn were registered as missing in action.
But Mrs Mond had received items from her son's body; she could not accept that it had never been recovered. She initiated a detailed search and eventually submitted a report to the War Graves Commission suggesting that her son and his co-pilot had been buried as Aspinall and Dornonville. Convinced by her argument, in March 1923 the War Graves Commission exhumed the two bodies - in the presence of Mrs Mond and Captain Aspinall's father. Their real identity was discovered and the headstone's replaced with the correct names - Mond and Martyn. Aspinall and Dornonville de la Cour were then registered as missing and their names added to the Arras Flying Memorial.
However, before all this happened Dornonville de la Cour's family had chosen a personal inscription for his grave and this still shows in the paper record for Doullens Communal Cemetery No. 2:
A former Danish officer
Who gave his life for humanity.




M.A. (HONS) POSTH. GLAS. UNIV.
SON O' MINE
CAPT. J. ERSKINE
GORDON HDRS. & R.A.F.

CAPTAIN THOMAS BARRIE ERSKINE MC


Thomas Barrie Erskine was reading Medicine at Glasgow University when he decided to enlist on the outbreak of war. He served with the 1st Battalion Gordon Highlanders and was killed on 20 July 1915, five days after being awarded a Military Cross for "gallantry during active operations against the enemy".
Erskine's father composed his inscription, recording the award of his son's posthumous degree and his own wartime service. James Erskine lost both his sons, Ralph and Thomas, in the war, his wife had died of consumption in 1901 and a baby daughter in 1896. His only surviving child, Agnes (Nancy) also lost her husband in the war when Captain Jack Lee was killed in action on 31 July 1917. And, in the final act of the tragedy, Ralph's son, who was born within two weeks of his father's death, was killed in action in Tunisia on 23 April 1943.
It's not possible to be sure of the source of the phrase "Son o'mine" but one that fits well is a song from Maurice Baring's four-act play The Death of the Black Prince (1903).

From the bleak sand and the grey sand
(O son o' mine, good-bye),
To the shore of gold and the cornland
To conquer or to die.

The low cloud and the grey cloud
(O son o' mine, good-bye),
It hangs and lowers like a shroud
Across the blood-red sky.

The soft sound and the loved sound
(O son o' mine, good-bye),
"Mother, I have a mortal wound,"
It is my own son's cry.

The horn call and the glad call
(O son o' mine, good-bye),
"Now dig the grave and weave the pall,
For I am soon to die."

The lone bell and the sad bell
(O son o' mine, good-bye),
"Tell them, mother, before I fell,
That I fought gallantly."

The known tread and the strong tread
(O son o' mine, good-bye):
"One told me you were cold and dead.
But I heeded not the lie."

By sunshine or by moonshine
(O son o' mine, good-bye),
"Come back to me, O son o' mine,
I've waited patiently."

The loud song and the strange song
(O son o' mine, good-bye),
I've watched and waited now so long,
Come back before I die"

From the bleak sand and the grey sand
(O son o' mine, good-bye),:
To the shore of gold and the cornland,
To conquer or to die.


OH FOR THE TOUCH
OF A VANISHED HAND
AND THE SOUND OF
A VOICE THAT IS STILL

PRIVATE FRANK TURNER


Private Frank Turner's inscription was chosen by his widowed mother, Fanny Turner. She kept the Tim Bobbin Hotel on Padiham Road, Burnley, where Frank was working as a waiter according to the 1911 census.
After the war, the hotel dedicated its own Roll of Honour to the 100 men associated with the house who had served in the war, with a framed photograph of the five who died. Frank Turner was wounded at Passchendaele Ridge and died in a Base Hospital at Etaples on 24 November 1917.
Frank Turner's inscription comes from Tennyson's Break, Break, Break, which was often quoted in memorial inscriptions both military and civilian for its perfect evocation of longing for a time and a person that can never return

Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue would utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill:
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.


THESE POURED OUT
THE RED SWEET WINE OF YOUTH
GAVE UP THE YEARS TO BE

PRIVATE WALTER NORBURY ROWBOTHAM


Walter Rowbotham's inscription is another one that quotes Rupert Brooke's sonnet III, The Dead.

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

The inscription was chosen by Private Walter Rowbotham's father, John Rowbotham, a leather belt maker turned storekeeper from Stockport in Cheshire. Walter Rowbotham was born in Stockport in 1897. In the 1901 census, aged 14, he was a cotton doffer - someone who removed the full bobbins and replaced them with empty ones. In the 1911 census he was still working in the cotton industry but now as a thread doubler.
Walter was killed on 20 November 1917. In July 1919 his body was exhumed from its isolated grave at map reference J.24.d.O.4 and reinterred in Hooge Crater Cemetery.


ONE WHO NEVER
TURNED HIS BACK
BUT MARCHED BREAST FORWARD

PRIVATE LEONARD EVERARD MAYNE


Private Mayne's inscription comes from the third verse of Robert Browning's Epilogue:

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

Leonard Everard Mayne was born in Plymouth in 1893 where his father, Henry W Mayne was a dental surgeon. He enlisted in Valcartier, Quebec on 23 September 1914, giving his occupation as a bank clerk. His mother was by this time a widow living in Bexhill on Sea.


SLEEP ON DEAR SON
THY WARFARE'S O'ER
THY HANDS SHALL BATTLE
HERE NO MORE

PRIVATE JAMES WHEELDON


James Wheeldon's inscription, chosen by his mother since his father was dead, is loosely based on Canto XXXI from Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake.

Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er,
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking;
Dream of battled fields no more,
Days of danger, nights of waking.
In our isle's enchanted hall,
Hands unseen thy couch are strewing,
Fairy strains of music fall,
Every sense in slumber dewing.
Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er,
Dream of fighting fields no more;
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Morn of toil nor night of waking.

James Wheeldon was born in Burton in Staffordshire in 1899 where his father, Thomas, was a brewers' labourer and his mother a dressmaker on her own account. By the outbreak of war he was living in Coventry and his mother was now Mrs Passam.


ONE SHORT SLEEP PAST
WE WAKE ETERNALLY
AND DEATH SHALL BE NO MORE

SECOND LIEUTENANT ALLEN RHYS GRIFFITHS


Allen Rhys Griffith's inscription is a quotation from Death, Be Not Proud, Holy Sonnet 10 by John Donne (1572-1631).

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swellst thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Educated at Winchester College and commemorated on their website, Allen Rhys Griffiths was working on a tea plantation in Ceylon when the war broke out. He returned to Britain to volunteer in December 1914. Gazetted into the Royal Field Artillery in March 1915, he went out to France early in July and was killed the following month on 9 August 1915.
A Miss C. Griffiths confirmed his inscription. I would hazard a guess that she was a sister. His father had died in February 1919 and although mother was still alive it's Miss C. Griffiths of the Three Arts Club, Marylebone Road, London, who signed the form confirming the inscription. I wonder if his sister is the reason why Allen Rhys Griffith's original wooden cross hangs in the church in Wivelsfield, Sussex where neither Allen nor his parents ever appear to have lived.


THOU THY WORDLY TASK
HAST DONE
HOME ART GONE
AND TA'EN THY WAGES

PRIVATE DONALD HENRY GALE MORISON


Donald Morrison's mother chose his inscription, an extract from the first verse of a beautiful funeral poem, Fear No More the Heat of the Sun, from Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Act IV Sc. 2.

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task has done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Donald Morison was 19 when he was killed in action near Zillebeke on 8 August 1917. After the war his body was discovered at map reference J.19.d.7.2 and identified by his identity disc and pay book. His body was exhumed and re-interred in Hooge Crater Cemetery.


PEACE SHALL FOLLOW BATTLE
NIGHT SHALL END IN DAY

LIEUTENANT HUMFREY RICHARD TALBOT


Lieutenant Talbot's inscription is a quotation from verse 3 of a hymn by John Mason Neale (1818-1866):

Christian! dost thou hear them,
How they speak thee fair?
"Always fast and vigil?
Always watch and prayer?"
Christian! answer boldly,
"While I breathe I pray."
Peace shall follow battle,
Night shall end in day.

Humfrey Richard Talbot was the third son of George Gustavus Chetwynd Talbot, Mayor of Hemel Hempstead. Educated at Wellington College and at Frieburg in Germany, he was gazetted into the King's Liverpool Regiment in 1909, transferred to the 3rd Dragoon Guards in February 1913 and embarked for France on 30 October 1914. He was killed by shellfire two weeks later on 13 November.


CHRIST'S FAITHFUL SOLDIER
AND SERVANT
UNTO HIS LIFE'S END

CAPTAIN CHARLES FREMOULT PRESTON BATTERSBY


Captain Charles Battersby, son of Major General and Mrs Thomas Battersby, was his parents only child. The epitaph they chose for their son quotes the words of a baptismal prayer that was later modified into a soldiers' prayer:

Grant, O Lord, that I may not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under His banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue Christ's faithful soldier and servant unto my life's end. Amen

Born in Ireland, educated at The King's School, Canterbury and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Charles Battersby crossed to France with the British Expeditionary Force on 18 August 1914. He took part in the retreat from Mons, the battles of the Marne and the Aisne and was killed on 4 November 1914 when a shell hit the farm in which he was billeted.
The King's School website contains more biographical details and extracts from his letters.


HE GAVE UP ALL HE LOVED
TO FIGHT FOR
THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD

SAPPER EDWIN ALLEN LE LEU


Edwin Le Leu was a boat builder from Semaphore, a seaside suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. His older brother Sapper Frank Le Leu was a motor mechanic from the same town. Frank Le Leu died on 31 May 1917 and is buried in Strand Military Cemetery, Hainaut, Belgium. He and his brother have identical headstone inscriptions:
He gave up all he loved
To fight for
The freedom of the world.


GAVE UP THE YEARS TO BE

SERJEANT NORMAN HAMILTON REED


Serjeant Reed's inscription comes from the first verse of Rupert Brooke's sonnet The Dead:

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

The 'Particulars required for the Roll of Honour of Australia in the Memorial War Museum' provide researchers with much valuable information on Australia's casualties. Serjeant Reed's father completed his form, combining the poignant detail that his son was 23 years (and 2 days) when he died with the biographical details that he:
"Enlisted Sept 1914. Embarked with No. 1 Stationary Hospital Unit from Melbourne 4th Dec 1914 was on Lemnos Island and at Gallipoli, and in England with the 1st Aust Gen Hospital at Dartford, England for a short time - afterwards went to France & joined the 1st Field Ambulance. Was an athlete, swimmer, cricketer,, Lacrosse & football. Had passed examinations (3) in the St John's Ambulance Assocn. hence being drafted to the AMC when he enlisted."
Although this form records that he died of wounds at Lijssenthoek it gives no details. These come from Lijssenthoek's own hospital records: "shrapnel wounds on abdomen and back at No. 2 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station".


THESE ARE DEEDS
WHICH SHOULD NOT PASS AWAY
NAMES THAT MUST NOT WITHER

PRIVATE STANLEY EDGAR STEPHEN RAVELL


Sidney Ravell was a labourer from Coogee, NSW. He enlisted in Holsworthy, now a suburb of Sydney, embarked for Europe on 20 December 1915 and died of wounds in hospital in Lijssenthoek on 29 October 1917.
His mother confirmed his inscription, which comes from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

But these are deeds which should not pass away,
And names that must not wither, though the earth
Forgets her empires with a just decay,,
The enslavers and the enslaved, their death and birth;
The high, the mountain-majesty of worth
Should be, and shall, survivor of its woe,
And from its immortality look forth
In the sun's face, like yonder Alpine snow,
Imperishably pure beyond all things below.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Canto the Third LXVII
Lord Byron

Sidney Ravell's foster-brother, Michael Noble Smith was killed in action on 19 July 1916. He is buried in Ration Farm Military Cemetery, La Chapelle-D'Armentieres and his headstone carries the same personal inscription as Sidney Ravell's.


MY HEART ALWAYS SAD
MY SORROW GREAT
MY LOSS HARD TO BEAR

PRIVATE ALFRED ERNEST ELDER


Private Elder's next of kin was his sister, Mary, and it was she who chose his inscription since it appears that both their parents were dead. It is not a quotation but a straightforward description of the sister's grief.


ALSO IN MEMORY OF
HIS BROTHER R.M. DON
WHO FELL ON DOIRAN FRONT 1917
IN GOD'S LOVE UNITED.

LIEUTENANT ARCHIBALD WILLIAM ROBERTSON DON


Archibald Don's inscription remembers his brother Robert who went missing in an attack on the Bulgarian line at Jumeaux Ridge and is believed to have died on either the 8th or 9th of May 1917. His body was never recovered and he is commemorated on the Doiran Memorial in Salonika.
Both Robert and Archibald served in Salonika with the 10th Battalion the Black Watch. Archibald died eight months before his brother in September 1916 from a sudden recurrence of malaria. Both brothers had been pupils at Winchester College and both are commemorated on the school's memorial website. http://www.winchestercollegeatwar.com/archive/archibald-william-robertson-don/
Archibald Don was a member of the Union of Democratic Control, a British pressure group formed on 5 September 1914. Although described as a pacifist society it's aim was really to ensure that Parliament controlled foreign policy as opposed to the military. It was deeply unpopular with the right wing press although by 1917 it had 650,000 members.
Archibald, who was just starting to study medicine at St Batholomew's hospital, initially volunteered to work with a Red Cross Motor Ambulance in France but by December 1914 he had applied for a commission. However, he found his position as a British army officer untenable with his membership of the Union of Democratic Control and so resigned his membership.
Archibald Don - a Memoir by Charles Sayle was published by John Murray in 1918 and can be read online - https://archive.org/details/archibalddonmemo00saylialahttps://archive.org/details/archibalddonmemo00sayliala.


PRO PATRIA. LIKE SUNSHINE
BREAKING THROUGH A CLOUD
HE CAME AND WENT

SECOND LIEUTENANT ERIC HENRY SCOTT-SMITH


There is an enamel and brass memorial in Holy Trinity, Stratford-on-Avon in memory of the Revd Frank Smith's grandson, 2nd Lieutenant Eric Henry Scott-Smith. Educated at Clifton College and the Royal Military Academy Woolwich, Eric Scott-Smith was serving on Lemnos with the 14th Fortress Company, Royal Engineers when he died of dysentery. His personal inscription beautifully evokes the brief joy Eric brought into his father's life - "Like sunshine breaking through a cloud he came and went" - the memorial in Stratford church gives the factual details of his life and death:

In loving memory of
Eric Henry Scott-Smith
2nd Lt Royal Engineers only
Son of the Hon Mr Justice
Scott-Smith of Lahore
Born at Sialkot 16 Feb. 1895
Died at Mudros Bay 29 Oct. 1915
Of dysentery contracted in
The Dardanelles Campaign



FOR DUTY
TO KING AND COUNTRY

TROOPER JAMES ANDREW BURROUGH


James Burrough died of para-typhoid fever in hospital in Mudros Bay on the island of Lemnos. Paratyphoid, previously known as enteric fever, was, until the invention of antibiotics, the great military killer caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi.
Burrough was an engine driver from Adelaide. Born and educated in South Africa, he served with the Uitenhage Volunteers on the side of the British during the Boer War. He arrived in Australia in 1908 aged 29. Four months after the outbreak of war, in December 1914, he volunteered although at 35 he was not expected to. He embarked from Australia on 12 February 1915, his eventual destination being Gallipoli.
At the time of his death Burrough was married with two small sons. His wife Laura chose his inscription, emphasising his continuing loyalty to King and Country. She gave her address as: Lemnos, Randolph Avenue, Fullarton, South Australia, Laura Burrough had named her house after the island where her husband was buried.


WAITING

PRIVATE CLARENCE GEORGE TOPPER


When I first read this inscription I assumed it was a bereaved wife assuring her husband that she would always be waiting for him and their reunion. But it isn't, it's from a bereaved mother and father for their only child.
Clarence George Topper was 17 when he died of tetanus in hospital in Mudros Bay on the island of Lemnos. At 17 he was technically too young to be serving at the front and maybe he wasn't. When the Army realised you were underage, if they ever did, they either sent you home or used you behind the lines. Mudros Bay was a huge allied camp off the coast of Gallipoli and Topper could have been working there when a simple scratch gave him tetanus. He could equally as easily have been injured in the fighting on Gallipoli and got tetanus that way.


FOR ENGLAND

LIEUTENANT RICHARD ROY LEWER


Richard Lewer was wounded on 16 July 1916 in the King's Royal Rifle Corps' attack on High Wood. He lay out in the open for four days before being found. A brother officer and a fellow old boy of Denstone College, wounded on the 15th, takes up the story:

" On the 20th he [Lewer] was brought into No. 36 Casualty Clearing Station and put into the bed opposite mine (later we were moved and I was next to him). He was very weak of course, and asked for food but was quite cheery. We then exchanged experiences.
When he was hit his orderly got him into a shell-hole, bandaged him up and put a rough splint on his leg. Then they withdrew and he couldn't be got away. His orderly had to go and left his water-bottle with him. He was in the shell-hole five days (16th to 20th) until we took the wood again.
When the Germans came in they didn't take any notice of him but he told them to give him some water, which they did, but no food. After the first day they wouldn't give him anything, and then left him alone, except to call him names so that he then had about two bottles of water (his orderly's and his) left, which he spun out.
His wound didn't trouble him very much, and he had morphia with him which he took periodically. This of course was a great relief and enabled him to sleep a certain amount. The worst thing of all, was, of course, when our guns shelled the wood, which was pretty often, and it is wonderful that he was not hit again. Then on the 20th he was found by our own people, much to everyone's surprise, and got back immediately. This is all he told me; he was asleep when I was moved so I couldn't say good-bye." Later of course, he died of his wounds.
The Denstonian
April 1917

Lewer was a geological surveyor who had worked for British Burmah Oil Co. before going to the Caucasian Oil Fields and then to Western Canada. He returned to Britain immediately on the outbreak of war and was commissioned into the King's Royal Rifle Corps.


HIS LAST WORDS TO FRIENDS
I WILL DO MY BEST
WHEN I GET THERE

GUNNER GEORGE FREDERICK PATTEN


Charles and Mary Patten had three sons. They all served in the war, only one returned. George, a railway fireman, was killed in Flanders on 28 August 1918. His brother Trooper Charles Douglas Patten, Australian Light Horse, died as a prisoner of war in Turkey on 9 February 1917.
Their sister, Mrs W.E.Webb, instituted a Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau search for Charles. This revealed that he had been captured at Katia on 9 August 1916 and initially interned in Afion Kara Hissar. When he died six months later he was in Angora Paludean Cachexia. One of the witnesses informed the Red Cross "he was in & out of hospital every week at Angora, suffering from malaria - he was game to the last".
In answer to another query Trooper G.A. Roberts wrote: "We are not allowed to attend the burial of a fellow prisoner. When they die in hospital they are taken to a room in the hospital and washed and then conveyed on a stretcher to the hospital grave ward and buried by Turks (shrouds are unnecessary luxuries according to these people) there is no mark to show who is buried in certain places. We know they are English that is all."
After the war the bodies of all allied prisoners of war buried in Anatolia were exhumed and reinterred in Baghdad North Gate Cemetery. The graves are unidentified but the names of the dead are recorded at the cemetery. However, access to the cemetery is difficult at the present time and in acknowledgement of this the War Graves Commission have compiled a two-volume Roll of Honour of the casualties either buried or simply commemorated in Iraq, which can be inspected in the Commission's head office in Maidenhead.


AFTER LIFE'S FITFUL FEVER
HE SLEEPS WELL

PRIVATE JAMES WALTER COOPER


After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
Treason has done his worst; nor steel nor poison
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further.
Macbeth Act 3 Sc. 2
William Shakespeare

James Cooper was a fireman from Southern Cross, Yilgarn, Western Australia who emigrated from England in 1912 when he was 32. He enlisted in 1916 and embarked for Europe on 23 November 1916. Born in Reigate, Surrey he served for 12 years in the Royal Field Artillery before moving to Australia.
His wife, Edith, chose his inscription. Macbeth is speaking to his wife telling her that Duncan the king is dead, he has killed him. However, one gets the sense that even in his, the murderer's mind, there is an element of envy for the freedom from fear and danger in which Duncan now rests.
At the time Mrs Cooper confirmed the inscription she was living in St George's Hostel in Katanning, Western Australia. This imposing building was built in 1913 to house itinerant workers drawn to the town by the booming agricultural prosperity of the area.


"A SORROW'S CROWN
OF SORROW IS
REMEMBERING HAPPY THINGS"
TENNYSON

PRIVATE JAMES ALEXANDER LAMERTON


Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
Locksley Hall,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Private James Lamerton is buried in Brandhoek Military Cemetery. Constructed beside the Field Ambulance Dressing Stations, just behind the lines, this would imply that Private Lamerton died not long after being wounded at the front.


HE LEAVES A WHITE
UNBROKEN GLORY
A GATHERED RADIANCE
A SHINING PEACE.

LIEUTENANT EDWARD WYNNE CHAPMAN


Mrs Elivra Chapman, Edward Chapman's widow, chose his inscription. It is adapted from The Dead, Sonnet IV in Rupert Brooke's sonnet sequence 1914:
... He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.

Edward Chapman was born in New Zealand and educated there at Christ's College. He came to England in 1909 where he joined the army, the 3rd Dragoon Guards. In 1912 he went to Egypt and was serving there when the war broke out. He arrived back in Britain on 20 October 1914 and went straight out to France where he died of wounds on 17 November.


DEAR HAPPY BOY

SECOND LIEUTENANT JAMES DOUGLAS HODDING


This "dear happy boy", a second lieutenant in the Royal Fusilers, was born in March 1899, gazetted on 28 May 1915 and therefore was only 17 when he died of wounds at the Casualty Clearing Station in Heilly on 10 July 1916. He was too young to be on active service and too young to be at the front. It appears that he was wounded when, behind the lines, a shell set off a grenade dump. He died at the Casualty Clearing Station in Heilly the next day.
Hodding was born in Portsea, Hampshire. His father and grandfather served in the Indian Army. A pupil at Wimbledon College at the time of the 1911 census, the family subsequently emigrated to Duncan, Vancouver Island, British Colombia.


"... THE JOY THAT WAS SET
BEFORE HIM" HEBREW XII V2

CAPTAIN CLIFFORD WHITTINGTON GREEN


The full text of Clifford Whittington-Green's inscription, chosen by his mother, reads:
Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin that doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12:1 & 2
Clifford Whittington Green was commissioned into the 1st Battalion the Royal Berkshire Regiment on 14 August 1914, joining them in France on 27 November. He took part in the fighting that winter, most particularly at Givenchy on 22 December and at Richebourg on 20 May 1915. On 26 June 1915, whilst trying to get this men under cover from German shelling, Whittington-Green he was hit, dying of his wounds the next day. A First World War Memorial site for St Leonard's Church, Sunningwell gives an extensive overview of his family and war service.



A VERY GALLANT OFFICER
AND GENTLEMAN
TRULY DEPICTED
IN PSALM XV

SECOND LIEUTENANT TERENCE DONOUGH O'BRIEN


Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill?
He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart.
He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil against his neighbour, not taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.
In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.
He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved.
Psalm XV

Psalm 15 was known as the gentleman's psalm as it appeared to summarise the qualities of a Christian gentleman, into whatever station of life he had been born.
Terence O'Brien was the only son of Brigadier-General Edmund Donough John O'Brien and his wife Harriet. He was killed on 3 March 1916 during an aborted landing at Abeele aerodrome in which the pilot, Lieutenant RA Pierpont, is variously said to have been either injured or unhurt.
Terence O'Brien was educated at Winchester where their memorial site gives more details.


DEARLY LOVED YOUNGEST SON OF
WILLIAM JOHN & MARY AINSLEY
OF 1, ST JOHN'S GROVE, LEEDS
YORKS

PRIVATE DONALD AINSLEY


Donald Ainsley, was a clothiers assistant in Leeds, as was his father, although at the time of the 1911 census the father is recorded as 'not working'. Donald was killed on 25 September 1916 in the Battle of Morval, the attempt to secure the ruined villages of Morval and Lesboeufs.


OUR BELOVED
SCORTON. LANCS

GUARDSMAN WILLIAM B APPLEGARTH


William Applegarth served in the Machine Gun section of the Coldstream Guards and was killed in action at Combles on 17 January 1917. Born in Casterton, Westmoreland, a fact recorded by his mother in the War Grave Commission's records, where their father was a farmer, the family had moved to Scorton in Lancashire by the time the war broke out.

His younger brother, John Oliver Drouet Applegarth, was killed in action on 9 October 1918 and is buried in Forenville Military Cemetery. His inscription reads:

Our beloved
Scorton, Lancs


SON OF W. AND M. HALL
PLEASELY, NOTTS

PRIVATE GEORGE RICHARD BAKER HALL


George Hall worked at Pleasley Colliery before he enlisted in September 1914. The family wrshipped at St Barnabas Church where George sang in the choir. The Mansfield Chronicle Advertiser reported that a few days before going into battle he sent his mother a beautiful card with the words 'God be with you 'til we meet again'. He was killed on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916, in the Sherwood Foresters attack on the Leipig Salient.
His elder brother James Northage Hall died on the Greek Island of Lemnos of dysentry on 9 December 1915. His wife assures him in the inscription she chose that he was "Gone but not forgotten", even though she was now married to someone else.


DICKON
3RD SON OF RICHARD ROSS
RUTHERFORD, ROXBURGH, SCOTLAND

SECOND LIEUTENANT RICHARD (DICKON) ROSS


Dickon Ross was the third of Richard and Emily Ross's five sons. James, the eldest, a Scottish rugby international who played for the London Scottish and the Barbarians, was killed on 1 November 1914. Dickon was killed on 25 September 1916 and Thomas, fatally wounded on 4 November 1918, died on the 13th, two days after the Armistice.
Their father, Richard Ross, farmed over 1,000 acres around Maxton in Roxburghshire. However, father had died in 1908 and Emily Ross moved from Rutherford Farmhouse, Maxton to Sherborne in Dorset. Nevertheless, she thought of Maxton as her sons' home and although James had no grave and is commemorated on the Menin Gate, both Dickon and his brother Thomas's inscriptions reference Rutherford, the place where they were born.


GWENDRAETH
FFINNON GROEW
FLINTSHIRE, N. WALES

PRIVATE ALBERT TREVOR JONES


Ffinnon Groew, now more usually spelt Ffynnongroyw, is a small village on the Flintshire side of the Dee Estuary. Albert Trevor Jones was born here in 1897, as were his brother and sister after him. His mother was born in the nearby village of Mostyn. Their father, head teacher at the local elementary school, came from Camarthenshire, the village of Ponteyberem in the Gwendraeth Valley. Father confirmed the inscription, the family's address, where the name of their house in Ffinnon Groew is the name of the valley in Camarthenshire where he was born.


GILL TOP
COWLING
NEAR KEIGHLEY
YORKSHIRE

PRIVATE GEORGE WILLIAM GOTT


Private Gott's surname is so very place specific that it was hardly necessary to record his address on his headstone. To this day the greatest number of Gotts are still to be found in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in the Bradford (BD) postal code area. Gill Top is no more than a hamlet, a small cluster of cottages just ouside Cowling.
Gott's father, who confirmed the inscription, must have considered Gill Top as his son's true home even though the Craven Herald, in a report on his death, says that George William Gott had "resided for some time with his aunt, Mrs Wormwell, at Aireview, Cononley". Before joining the army Gott had worked as a traveller for Messrs Lowcock and Sons, clothiers in Skipton.
William Gott joined up in January 1916 under the Derby Scheme. In the summer of 1917 he was invalided home with dysentery and spent six months in hospital in Bournemouth and then several months convalescing in North Shields. He returned to France in March 1918 and was killed on 13 April when he was hit in the stomach by a piece of shrapnel.


OF MANILA
PHILLIPINE ISLANDS
SON OF F.G. DAVIDSON
OF SUEZ, EGYPT

LIEUTENANT GERALD LOUIS DAVIDSON, MC


"For conspicuous gallantry in action. He led an attack across the open in daylight to take a strongly fortified 'stop'. His attack was successful and enabled the whole trench to be seized and consolidated. He was twice wounded."
Award of Military Cross to Lieutenant GL Davidson
London Gazette 25 August 1916

The above action took place on 9 July 1916 during an attack on the Quadrangle Support between Mametz Wood and Contalmaison. The British held the trenches but Lieutenant Davidson's wounds were serious and he died two days later at the Casualty Clearing Station in Heilly, Mericourt-L'Abbe.
Gerald's sister, Helen, signed the form confirming his inscription. It's not clear whether their parents were still alive or were still living out of the country. FG Davison, the father, was an agent for P & O and before working in Suez he had been in Singaore where it appears that all the children were born. Before the war Gerald and another brother, Francis, worked in Manila for Messrs Smith, Bell & Co, shipping agents. Their eldest brother, Robert, worked for Messrs Boustead & Co in Singapore. Robert served with the Devonshire Regiment and was killed in action on the first day of the battle of the Somme, just ten days before Gerald succumbed to his wounds. Sister Helen chose Robert's inscription too:
Late of the Malay States
Elder son
Of Gerald Davidson
Suez, Egypt.

NB The spelling of Phillipine in the inscription is as it was signed for on the form.


SON OF
MICHAEL & MARIA O'DONNELL
BANIXTOWN, CLONMEL. BORN 1884
R.I.P.

SECOND LIEUTENANT PERCY O'DONNELL


The O'Donnells were a prosperous Roman Catholic farming family from Fethard, County Tipperary, Ireland. Their eldest son, Percy, who gave his profession as 'bank official', enlisted on 17 August 1915. He was comissioned into the Royal Field Artillery on 1 September 1915 and left for France on 18 November, arriving in the fighting lines on the 24th. He was wounded six months later at 'Clapham Junction' in the Stirling Castle Sector of the Ypres Salient, and died of his wounds, "compact skull injury" in No. 10 Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek at 9.45 pm on 6 May 1916.

The O'Donnells lived at Bannixtown House, mispelt in the inscription as Banixtown, where in addition to farming they bred horses.

Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, where O'Donnell is buried, is one of the great witnesses to the tragedy of the Great War. The town, a few miles behind the front line and close to the Poperinghe-Hazebrouck railway, was the site of four big Field Hospitals and four Casualty Clearing Stations with a total of almost 4,000 beds bewtween them. Nearly 10,000 patients, soldiers wounded in the fighting, are buried in the cemetery. The town has developed a Visitor Centre and website for which they have collected, and are collecting, personal information about those who died. Much of my information on Percy O'Donnell comes from this site. Particularly poignant is a a list of personal effects returned to his family, amongst which is a protractor - he was an artillery officer - a chapelet, identified further as a rosary, and some flowers "1 of wax, smashed."


ONLY BELOVED SON OF
OF GEORGE AND LOUISE ALMAS
HAMILTON, ONT. CANADA

LIEUTENANT ERNEST NORVAL ALMAS


Ernest Almas enlisted in Toronto on 17 December 1915, served in Flanders with the 38th Battalion Eastern Ontario (Ottowa) Regiment and "Died of wounds (shrapnel wounds, face, right arm, shattered shoulder) at No. 11 CCS" on 31 October 1917.


HUSBAND OF HELEN N. BARCLAY
COBDEN ST., LOCHEE
DUNDEE, SCOTLAND

DRIVER JOHN EASTON


John Easton's next-of-kin was his wife Helen N Easton of 55 Cobden St, Lochee, Dundee. I am assuming that the Helen N Barclay mentioned in this inscription is the former Mrs Easton now remarried, or perhaps Barclay was her maiden name and she reverted to it. Either way, is it slightly odd that Driver Easton's widow should draw attention to this fact on her husband's gravestone?


THE DEAR HUSBAND OF
ETHEL DAVISON
RYHOPE COLLIERY
PEACE PERFECT PEACE

PRIVATE ALFRED DAVISON


Alfred Davison was a 'mine putter' who worked in Ryhope Colliery, Sunderland, the mining town where he was born and where his mother and father had been born before him. A mine putter was the person who pushed the wagons from the coal face to a horse or mechanical haulage road. In the 1911 Census Davison gave his occupation as 'water leader', someone who clears water from the mines. On 29 January 1916 he married Ethel Trusty and their son Robert Trusty Davison, was born on 9 January 1917. Alfred Davison died on gunshot wounds to his face and hands in No. 8 Stationary Hospital, Wimereux, France on 10 October 1918, just one month before the end of the war. I am grateful to Trevor Davison's Family History File on Ancestry for much of this information.
"Peace, perfect peace", a very popular inscription, is a quote from a hymn, which I have written about here


OUR DEAR SON
OF ST. JOSEPH'S RECTORY
BARBADOS B.W.I.
FELL NEAR BAPAUME
LOVE NEVER FAILETH

PRIVATE WILLIAM LAWRENCE HUTCHINSON


Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away.
1 Corinthians 13:8
American Standard Version 1901

William Lawrence Hutchinson was born on Barbados in 1899 where his father, the Reverend William Gordon Hutchinson, was the Anglican priest-in-charge at St Philip-the-Less. In 1910 father moved to St Joseph's on the east of the island. Both parents remained on Barbados until they died, father in 1942 and mother, Priscilla, in 1947. The surviving children inscribed their parents' memorial in St Michael's Cathedral, Barbados with the same quotation that the parents had chosen for their son, William Lawrence: "Love never faileth".


REST IN PEACE

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM ALFRED COTTERILL BROOKE


Alfred Brooke enlisted on the outbreak of war and took a commission in the Post Office Rifles. He joined the regiment in France on 12 April 1915. Just under two weeks later, 23 April, his brother, the poet Rupert Brooke, died of blood poisoning on the Mediterranean island of Skyros. Less than eight weeks after this Alfred, acting as reserve machine gun officer at Vermelles, was killed 'instantaneously' by a mortor bomb.
It was his widowed mother who chose his inscription - Rest in Peace. The phrase competes with Thy Will be Done as the most common of all headstone inscriptions in the war cemeteries. Other families quoted lines from her son Rupert's poetry, but not Mrs Brooke. She was quite possibly exhausted by grief: her eldest son had died of pneumonia in 1907 at the age of 26, her husband died in January 1910 when he was 59, and her two remaining children died aged 28 and 24 in April and June 1915.


IN MEMORY OF THE DEAR SON
OF MR. AND MRS. HILLS
OF ALBANY, AUSTRALIA

PRIVATE CHARLES HILLS


Charles Hills was born in England, in Norwood, Surrey where his father was a carrier on a farm. The family emigrated to Australia in 1911 and settled in Albany. Charles enlisted on 4 March 1916 and sailed for England on 11 August that year. He took part in the battles of Pozieres and Bullecourt, where he was wounded on 11 April 1917 and spent three months in hospital in England. Returning he fought in the battle of Bapaume and was killed in action on 29 March 1918.


SON OF
SIR HENRY & LADY HEPBURN
OF BRADNINCH, DEVON

SECOND LIEUTENANT ROGER PAUL HEPBURN, MC


Educated at Rugby School and Magdalen College, Cambridge, Roger Hepburn had just graduated with a 1st Class degree in Natural Sciences when war was declared. He and three friends, who were all still up in Cambridge during the Long Vacation, immediately left with their motorbikes to join the BEF as despatch riders. Two of them survived the war but Hepburn, who was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in May 1915, survived the Somme but was hit by a shell on 1 August 1917 and died of wounds in Casualty Clearing Station at Poperinghe two days later.
Paul Hepburn was the youngest son of the late Sir Henry Hepburn, formerly Chairman of Devon County Council. The family, who owned Hele Paper Mill, which produced high quality paper used for bank notes throughout Britain and the Empire, lived at Dunmore House, Bradninch, Devon.


IN MEMORY OF DEAR BOB
SON OF MR. AND MRS. W.H. GOODWIN
COOMA, N.S.W.

SERJEANT ROBERT BOYD GOODWIN


Bob Goodwin was a draper from Cooma, the main town in the Monaro region of New South Wales. He was killed in action on 11 March 1917 and originally buried at map reference 57c.R.3.c.5.8 before being reinterred in Lesboeufs in July 1919.


27 YEARS
BELOVED SON OF
C. AND E. GREEN
BURRA, SOUTH AUSTRALIA

LANCE CORPORAL HAROLD TEMPERLEY GREEN


"Green was badly wounded - shot through the head and fell beside me. After being bandaged he was carried to the Dressing Station and on their return the bearers told me he was dead."
Private J. Davy to the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau 14.10.1918
"I saw above named on a stretcher just after he had been wounded (about 9 pm) at Merris. I spoke to him, S/B Wright (No 452) of same Battalion) bandaged him up. The face (mouth portion) had been blown in."
L/Cpl J McFarlane to the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau 21.10.1918
"I saw Pte. (sic) J Green fatally wounded by shell while holding the lines in front of Merris on the 30th July 1918 ... The ground was held."
L/Cpl W Bartch 14.10.1918
"3333 Pte. (sic) Green H.T. 10th Bn. died of wounds at our Dressing Station Borre at 5.45.a.m. on 30/7/18. Wound received was S.W.skull compound fracture. He was unconcious on admission and died soon after. Burial took place at Military Cemetery Borre same day."/ Signed by Major, Acting CO 1st Australian Field Ambulance, [signature unreadable]

Harold Green's elder brother Edward Owen Green "died of accidental injuries" near Tripoli in Syria, according to his father when he filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia. Edward Green is buried in Bierut War Cemetery in the Lebanese Republic. His inscription, which was signed for by his father rather than by his mother as Harold's was, reads:
Beloved son of
C. and E. Green
Of World's End
South Australia.


DEARLY BELOVED SON OF
MR AND MRS ROBERT ANDERSON
COOMINYA, QUEENSLAND

GUNNER JAMES ANDERSON


James Anderson was a farmer from the small community of Coominya in Queensland, which even today has scarcely more than 1,000 residents. He enlisted on 9 September 1915 and embarked for Europe on 11 May 1916. He died of shrapnel wounds to his left leg in No 10 Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek, Belgium.


BELOVED SON OF
H.C. AND I. RAWLINS
13 GROVE PARK, LIVERPOOL

LANCE CORPORAL BERTRAM LLOYD RAWLINS


"In the early morning of 15 March Lance-Corporal B.L. Rawlins, this very capable N.C.O. in charge of the Battalion Engineering Section, was out in front of the trenches on the right of the sector putting out barbed wire. At this point the enemy's trenches were only about 80 yards away and he was seen and mortally wounded by a sniper. Captain Ronald Dickinson, O.C."X" Company, in front of whose trench Rawlins was lying, wished to go out himself to bring him in but was forcibly held back by his men, who would not allow him to take the risk. Four men, Lance-Corporal A.G. Davidson, Privates W.W. Howarth and J.L. Wallace of "X" Company and Private S.G. Gibson of the Engineering Section, at once went out and under heavy fire brought Rawlins in."
The Liverpool Scottish
A.M. McGilchrist


"LOVE IS ALL
AND DEATH IS NOUGHT"
BROWNING

CAPTAIN CHRISTOPHER WILLIAM BRODRICK BIRDWOOD


This epitaph comes from the final line of Robert Browning's 'Fifine at the Fair':
'I end with "Love is all and death is naught" quoth She'.
It was chosen by Captain Birdwood's wife Helen, the mother of his two children. Christopher Birdwood was fatally wounded on 4 June 1915 in an attack on Achi Baba. He died in a Casualty Clearing Station three days later.
Birdwood was one of the five children of William Spiller Birdwood, formerly of the Indian Army, all three of whose sons died before him: George was 22 when he died in 1910 following an operation; Gordon was 19 when he was killed in action on 19 September 1914 and Christopher, 33, when he died of wounds in Gallipoli in 1915. Their sister Gladys died in 1918, which left one surviving child, Elinor.
William Spiller Birdwood's brother was Herbert Birdwood whose son, Field Marshal Sir William Birdwood, was the commander of the ANZAC forces on Gallipoli when his cousin Christopher was killed.


ALL OF HIMSELF
AND HIS PARENTS WAS GIVEN
WITH LOVE MOTHER AND DAD

PRIVATE CLIFFORD EATON KING


In both the 1901 and the 1911 census, Clifford Eaton is the only child listed in the household belonging to Charles Reeds King, Bank Manager, and his wife Laura Isobel, so it looks as though he was their only child. It would explain the epitaph they chose for him.
Clifford King volunteered in the first month of the war and went to France in December 1914. He was killed whilst the HAC were in the trenches between 24 March and 31 May 1915 when they lost two officers wounded and 125 other ranks killed and wounded. Like Private Frederick Bateman, see epitaph 300, he was originally buried in the gardens of Elzenhall Chateau. In September 1919 the War Graves Commission exhumed the sixteen bodies buried in the chateau's gardens and reburied them in Voormezeele Enclosure No. 3.


FROM THEE I DESIRE
TO RECEIVE ALL THAT
THY ETERNAL LIFE CAN GIVE

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR CHARLES BROOK


Although this sounds like a quotation, it doesn't appear to be. Captain Brook's wife, Sydney, who by the time she chose this inscription had remarried and was now Mrs Simpson, appears to have composed it herself. In so far as it can be said to have a source is it this?

"My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:
And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand."
St John 10:27-8

So, "all that Thy eternal life can give" appears to be safety, the guarantee of being in God's keeping for ever, this is what Mrs Simpson hoped she was securing for her dead husband.
Second Lieutenant Arthur Brook was a Director of Jonas Brook & Brothers, cotton thread manufacturers from Meltham in Yorkshire. A former pupil of Rugby School, he was killed in Gallipoli on the opening day of the Third Battle of Krithia, 4 June 1915, along with seven other Old Rugbeians: Captain Thomas Cunliffe, Sub-Lieutenant William Denis-Browne, Captain Robert Edgar, Captain Joseph Holt, Captain Edgar Kessler, Second Lieutenant Thomas Walker and Sub-Lieutenant John Weightman - eight of the 1,725 British and Empire troops killed on that day.
The Rugby war register describes Brook's fate:
"During the attack by the Manchester Brigade on the Turkish trenches below Achi Baba, he was directing his men who were taking ammunition, under heavy fire, to the captured trenches, when he was shot and killed instantly, on June 4th, 1915."
The register also quotes from the letter Brook's colonel wrote to Mrs Brook: "He was absolutely cool and utterly fearless always and used to go out into the open, if necessary to get his guns about. He was not killed though carelessness; he was exposing himself necessarily, as a brave man should do, and he was a brave man."


"AND THE LEAVES OF THE TREE
WERE FOR THE HEALING
OF THE NATIONS"
REV.XXII.2

CAPTAIN RICHARD LENNARD HOARE


"C" Company, the centre left element of the attack, had also been hung up on uncut wire. Led by Captain Richard Hoare, who was killed by shrapnel in front of the German lines, the men desperately sought a passage through the German wire and into the relative safety of the German trenches but a hail of rifle fire and bombs was thinning their ranks by the minute."

"There went into action with the Rangers, 23 officers and 780 other ranks. Answered their names at roll call: 6 officers and 280 other ranks. Another 53 other ranks lost in the confusion or trapped in No Man's Land by heavy fire found their way back and returned to the ranks over the following days. In all, 58% of the Rangers became casualties on 1st July. Three-quarters of the officers were either killed or wounded."
1:30 am 2nd July 1916
The Rangers War Diary

Richard Hoare's inscription, which comes as it says from the Book of Revelations, was confirmed by his mother, Laura (Cator) Hoare.

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.
In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
Revelation 22: 1-2


STILL LIVING
STILL LOVING
STILL MINE

PRIVATE CHARLES HENRY KENWARD


I love this inscription - Private Kenward's wife doesn't say "still loved, still missed, still mine", which is how people usually phrase this sentiment in newspaper 'In Memoriam' columns, but "still living, still loving, still mine", a fiercely positive assertion that death has not changed anything.
I haven't been able to find the cause of Kenward's death but the 3rd Battalion's War Diary (NB Kenward served in the 2nd Battalion in roughly the same area) gives an indication of conditions:

11 December 1916
Condition of the trenches indescribable. Men had to be dug out on the way up and in the trench by far the majority had to stand in mud above the knee, some with it above the waist. ...
12 - 14 December 1916
The weather conditions got still worse. It was intensely cold and the rain was punctuated with scuds of snow and sleet. ...
15 December
The men were in the most exhausted condition, being encased in mud up to their armpits and wet through. ...
16 December
... Some men who had been pulled out of the mud had lost their boots and in one case a man was dug and pulled out and then found deficient of his boots, socks and trousers.


SACRED HEART OF JESUS
HAVE MERCY ON HIS SOUL

SECOND LIEUTENANT CHARLES SIDNEY STUART MORGAN


Officer Killed in the Fog
A verdict of "Accidental Death" was returned at a Kensington inquest yesterday on the body of Lieutenant Chas. Sydney Morgan, aged 29, of the R.F.C. (sic), whose home was at Walton, Liverpool.
In the dense fog last Thursday night Mr Morgan stepped off the platform at West Brompton (District) Station, and was crushed between the wheels of a Wimbledon train and the live rail. In order to extricate him the officials had to raise the coach with jacks, and this took an hour. It was found that his toes had been crushed, his thigh broken, and that he was badly burned by the current. He died two days later.
The Times February 6 1918


AND LIFE
IS ALL THE SWEETER
THAT HE LIVED

CAPTAIN KEITH JOY BARRETT


Of such as he was, there be few on earth;
Of such as he is, there are few in Heaven:
And life is all the sweeter that he lived,
And all he loved more sacred for his sake:
And Death is all the brighter that he died,
And Heaven is all the happier that he's there.
Extract from In Memoriam
In affectionate remembrance of
John William Spencer, Earl Brownlow, died 1867
By Gerald Massey 1828-1905

Captain Barrett was an Australian who served in the British army. On 13 April 1917 during the Second Battle of Arras he was injured in the leg whilst leading his men at Guemappe. He carried on until he was hit in the face by a bullet, which shattered his jaw and pierced his tongue. Even this did not stop him to begin with, as a brother officer wrote in a letter to his parents:

"Unable to speak, he sat down and delivered his orders in writing; it was only after seeing that everything was in order that he left the scene of carnage."

Sent back to a base hospital in Etaples, he died there three days later. In 1921 his diaries were published as 'The Diary of an Australian Soldier'. A memoir written by Henry Gyles Turner, a friend of Keith's parents, can be read here


DUTY BRAVELY DONE
IN THE GLORY OF HIS YOUTH

PRIVATE FREDERICK MILLER BATEMAN


Do your duty bravely
Fear God
Honour the King

These are the final lines of Field Marshal Lord Kitchener's message to the troops embarking for France in 1914, which they were instructed to keep in their active service pay books.
The idea of doing 'your duty bravely' was acknowledged in both civilian and military circles in the nineteenth century. Henry Richardson's poem on the sinking of the Tigris, a naval survey ship that sank in the Euphrates during a sudden storm in May 1836, includes the verse:

The chief upon the flood or plain,
May mourn his followers sunk or slain,
The battle lost or won:
But, gathered to the honoured dead,
They sweetly sleep in glory's bed - their duty bravely done.
Stanza XXIV The Loss of the Tigris
Henry Richardson 1840

Thomas Hood the Younger's poem, Ford the Fireman, celebrated a Metropolitan Fire Brigade officer, Joseph A Ford, who in 1871 saved six people from a burning building in Grey's Inn Road, London but lost his own life in the process. The poem contains these lines:

Not always, true, are purest laurels won
Amid red carnage in fierce battle's strife,
But earned by humble duty, bravely done,
In saving human life!

Even children could do their duty bravely as twelve-year-old Martin Craghan is said to have done in a poem by Zadel Barnes Gustafason, Little Martin Craghan. Craghan lost his own life saving a group of miners in a pit fire in Pennsylvania sometime in the 1870s:

He sees the men; he warns; and now,
His duty bravely done,
Sweet hope may paint the fairest scene
That spreads beneath the sun.

Frederick Miller Bateman enlisted in the Honourable Artillery Company on 24 August 1914, went overseas on 26 December the same year, and was killed on 30 May 1915 - the 300th day of the war.

"From March 24th to May 31st, we lost in casualties 2 officers wounded and 125 other ranks killed and wounded. ... Nearly all our men who were killed during this period (and there were many splendid fellows among them) were buried in the garden behind Elzenwalle Chateau."
The Honourable Artillery Company in the Great War 1914-1919
edited by Major G. Goold Walker

In September 1919, when the War Graves Commission was consolidating bodies buried in isolated graves and small cemeteries, Bateman's body was exhumed from Elzenwalle Chateau, along with the bodies of four other members of the HAC who had been killed in April and May 1915. All five were reburied in Voormezelle Chateau Cemetery.

The glory of young men is their strength; the beauty of old men is the grey head.
Proverbs 20:29


ENOUGH
HE LIKE A SOLDIER FELL

LANCE CORPORAL BERT TRACEY


On December 4th "General Seely came into the lines and asked for volunteers to raid the barrier [across the Wulverghem-Messines road]. The raiding party was to get prisoners for identification purposes, if possible; find out the reasons for such a barrier; make reconnaissance and return within an hour. ... The raid was to take place behind a screen of an artillery bombardment but unfortunately this drew the enemy's fire in a counter-bombardment and put the opposing troops on the alert. ... Due to the bombardment there were several casualties. Captain Mackay, Privates B. Tracey and R. Sears were killed and four men wounded."
4th Canadian Mounted Rifles 1914-1919
Captain S.G.Benett MC, late Royal Engineers
Published 1926

Bert Tracey's parents lived in Stockport, Cheshire. He enlisted in Toronto on 27 November 1914. These are the only two firm facts I have been able to find out about his background. His mother chose his inscription. It comes from a broadside ballad, which, if it was written by William Vincent Wallace and Edward Fitzball, would have to have been written by 1873 when Fitzball died. The inscription is based on the final three lines. You can listen to the song here on a site called Music From the Works of James Joyce. The words vary on different sites but these are the ones printed on the broadsheet.

Oh let me like a soldier fall
Upon some open plain?
This breast expanding for a ball
To blot out every stain.
Brave manly hearts confer my doom,
That gentler ones may tell;
Howe'er unknown forgot my tomb
He, like a soldier fell.
He, like a soldier fell.

I only ask of that proud race,
That end its blaze in me -
To die the first and not disgrace
Its ancient chivalry.
Though o'er my grave no banner waves,
Nor trumpets swell;
Enough, they murmur at my tomb,
He, like a soldier fell,
He, like a soldier fell.


"LOCHABER NO MORE"

PRIVATE JOHN NEWLANDS


"Lochaber no more" is the title of a Gaelic air known as early as 1701. The poet Allan Ramsay composed words for it in 1724: a soldier's lament as he leaves his homeland and his girlfriend, perhaps for ever. The first verse reads:

Farewell to Lochaber! and farewell, my Jean,
Where heartsome with thee I hae mony days been;
For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more,
We'll maybe return to Lochaber no more!
These tears that I shed they a' for my dear,
And no for the dangers attending on wear,
Though borne on rough seas to a far bloody shore,
Maybe to return to Lochaber no more.

Lochaber is a region of the Western Highlands. The main town, Fort William, is where John Newlands was born. The family later moved to Glasgow where Newlands enlisted. He died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek in Belgium.

Postscript 9 September 2018
The poet Neil Munro (1863-1930) wrote another version of Lochaber No More, which would appear to be more relevant to the First World War dead.
Each of the three verses ends with a different heartrending lament:

The trout will come back from the deeps of the sea,
The bird from the wilderness back to the tree,
Flowers to the mountain, and tides to the shore,
Bur he will return to Lochaber no more!

Brave songs will be singing in lands of the West,
But he will be silent who sang them the best;
The dance will be waiting, the pipes will implore,
but he will return to Lochaber no more!

The night falls disconsolate, bringing no peace,
No hopes for our dreams, for our sighs no release;
In vain when the Spring comes we look from the door,
For he will return to Lochaber no more!


OUR LOSS IS GREAT
WE'LL NOT COMPLAIN
BUT HOPE IN HEAVEN
TO MEET AGAIN

PRIVATE FRANK ERNEST LUCY


"After moving out of the Salient on August 20th, the Battalion (1st) spent five days in camp at Caestre and then moved south by bus to "Regina Camp" near Ploegsteert. The Battalion spent the ensuing three months either in the front line facing Warneton ... or in billets and camps further back. ... No operation of any note was undertaken by the Battalion during that period, nor were the casualties heavy."
History of the Worcestershire Regiment 1694-1970

Private Frank Lucy served with the 1st Battalion the Worcestershire Regiment and died during the period mentioned. The Battalion were in the front line from 29 October to 2 November. Lucy died on 31 October yet the report only mentions that three soldiers were wounded during this spell in the trenches not that one of them was killed.
Berks Cemetery Extension is not a cemetery attached to a Field Ambulance dressing station or a Casualty Clearing Station so Lucy didn't die of wounds received in an earlier engagement. I'm not suggesting there's a mystery, just showing how indiviual deaths can be overlooked, which somehow makes Frank Lucy's headstone inscription rather more pathetic:
"Our loss is great
We'll not complain ... "


ENGLAND CALLED - HE ANSWERED

PRIVATE WALTER MAURICE LAKE


In 1911 Walter Maurice Lake was a laundry vanman working at a steam laundry in Barrow-in-Furness, married with one daughter. From his headstone inscription I would suggest that he was a volunteer who responded to the recruiting posters' call to arms.
He was killed in the Battle of Bellewaarde Ridge. There is no individual account of his death but at 2.45am on 24 May 1915, the Germans launched a massive artillery bombardment and chlorine gas attack on the British lines, which broke to the north and south of Bellewaarde Lake. The British launched a counter-attack at 11 o'clock that night but it was a disaster and resulted in very heavy casualties.


USQUE DUM VIVAM ET ULTRA

CAPTAIN THE HON. JULIAN HENRY GRENFELL DSO


Julian Grenfell, author of the poem 'Into Battle', was the eldest son of Lord and Lady Desborough of Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he joined the army in 1910. On 13 May 1915, he was hit in the head by a shrapnel fragment and died in hospital in Boulogne thirteen days later.
His inscription is part of a longer Latin quotation the origins of which I have been unable to discover: Hieme et aestate, et prope et procul, usque dum vivam et ultra - In winter and summer, near and far, during life and beyond. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff recorded the inscription in the notes to his diary (1896-1901), saying that it was said to have been found in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Berchtold Brecht quotes it in his play 'Life of Galileo' written in 1948. The words imply constancy, unchangeableness, - usque dum vivam et ultra.


M.A., B.C.L
OF BALLIOL COLLEGE OXFORD
THE DEARLY LOVED SON
OF GUSTAF AND ANNIE ROOS

CAPTAIN GUSTAF OSCAR ROOS


Gustaf Roos was a well developed man with auburn hair and about 5 foot 9 or 10 inches in height. How do we know? Because this was the description of the body exhumed on 26 June 1924 from Fremicourt Communal Cemetery where it had been buried by the Germans in July 1916 under a cross inscribed with his name.
Captain Roos's fate can be traced through the war diary of the 14th Battalion the York and Lancaster Regiment, the Barnsley Pals', for July 1 1916 . 'A' Company, under Captain Roos was:
"To proceed in file across "No Man's Land" immediately following assaulting waves. To consolidate and hold German Trench K30a4085 to K23a7510 and to construct and hold strong points A and B along that line."
Reporting on the attack the diary later states:
"No report of any sort was received back from A or B Companies once they had left Nairne. From reports by wounded men who had got back from "No Man's Land", very great casualties were sustained by A and B Coys, while crossing towards the German wire, on the left flank of the attack."
At the end of the day the Battalion war diary reports 26 men killed, 153 missing and 96 wounded. Of 'A' Company's officers, Captain Roos and Lieutenant RDB Anderson were missing, 2nd Lieutenant W Hirst had been killed and 2nd Lieutenant W Kell wounded.
Later reports suggested that Captain Roos had been seen to enter the German trench at the head of his men but had been wounded, captured by the Germans and died of wounds in a German hospital. All this is confirmed by his burial on 4 July 1916 in Fremicourt Communal Cemetery, where the Germans were burying those who died in the hospital they had set up in the local church. And what were his wounds? I'll let the exhumation report tell you: "Both legs broken, body badly smashed".
Gustaf Roos must have been some man. He had been a Queen's Scholar at Westminster, taken a 1st Class degree in Jurisprudence from Balliol College, Oxford, which he followed with a B.C.L., a Bachelor of Civil Law. He worked as a solicitor in London, often acting as 'Poor Man's Solicitor' at Toynbee Hall. He volunteered to fight in the South African War where he was badly wounded. So badly wounded that he found it difficult to persuade anyone to take him seriously when he volunteered to fight in 1914. Eventually, in October 1915, he got a commission in the York and Lancaster Regiment, which is how at the age of 47 he found himself leading 'A' Company across No Man's Land at 7.10 on the morning of 1 July 1916.


O MEMORIES
THAT BLESS AND BURN
O BARREN GAIN
AND BITTER LOSS

SECOND LIEUTENANT R.F. BATH


This is another inscription, like Epitaph 253, that comes from The Rosary, a hugely popular romantic song about loss and the acceptance of loss, written in America in 1898 by Ethelbert Nevin and Robert Cameron Rogers. It became one of the most popular songs of the early twentieth century, and was made even more popular by Florence L Barclay's deeply romantic novel of the same name in which the song plays a central part. Barclay's book was published in 1909 and immediately became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic; by 1924 it had sold a million copies.

The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
Are as a string of pearls to me.
I count them over every one apart,
My rosary.
Each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer,
To still a heart in absence wrung.
I tell each bead unto the end - and there
A cross is hung.
Oh memories that bless - and burn!
Oh, barren gain - and bitter loss!
I kiss each bead, and strive at last to learn
To kiss the cross,
Sweetheart,
To kiss the cross.

The inscription for Second Lieutenant RF Bath, whose Christian names I have been unable to discover, was chosen by his wife, Ethel.


THIS GRAVE HOLDS ALL
THAT LIFE HELD DEAR

SERJEANT GEORGE EDWARD BRAIN MM


This eloquent inscription to Serjeant Brain was chosen by his wife, Margaret Jane. Her husband died of wounds at a field dressing station on the Ypres Salient and the impact of his death is summed up in these few words.


IN SHORT MEASURES
LIFE MAY PERFECT BE

LIEUTENANT DOUGLAS OLIPHANT CONSTABLE


Douglas Oliphant was a publisher who joined the Inns of Court OTC on 1 February 1915 as a private. He was later promoted sergeant and in November 1915 was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards. He was killed leading his men in an attack on the Somme. Douglas Oliphant's inscription comes from a twelve-verse ode by Ben Jonson, 'To the immortal memory and friendship of that noble pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H Morison'. The relevant verse reads:

It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make a man better be;
Or, standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log, at last, dry, bald, and sear:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far, in May,
Although it fall, and die that night;
It was the plant, and flower of light.
In small proportions, we just beauties see:
And in short measures, life may perfect be.


WHEN THE EBB TIDE FLOWS

PRIVATE JAMES EMERSON PROCTER


" ... at 3pm [on 20 May 1915] the Germans blew the mine, killing 11 men and wounding 22 others of the 1/5th Lincolnshires, four men also being missing believed killed."
Records of the 1/5th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment

Private James Emerson Proctor was killed in this explosion, as was his only brother Private Ernest Arthur Proctor. The 1911 census records a sister in the family but it doesn't appear that there were any other children.
James Emerson's headstone inscription comes from a popular song, 'When the Ebb-Tide Flows', written in 1906 by Clifton Bingham with music by Stanley Gordon. His brother's inscription is of a completely different hue - 'Died for home, country and honour'. It makes me wonder whether their mother, Lillie Proctor, chose James' inscription and their father, John Walton Proctor, Ernest's.
The song is featured in a set of Bamforth's song cards. Originally they depicted the sailor as a fisherman but a wartime set shows him in uniform. There were three cards, each with a separate verse.

Out with the tide at the dawn of the day, under the morning star,
Gaily the fisher lad sailed away, over the deep afar
"Mother dear" cried the sailor lad,
Don't be lonely at home or sad
Though wild the storm and wide the foam,
There's One above will guide me home!"

I shall come home, when the ebb-tide flows,
Go where I may, there is One who knows.
Fierce though the gale, still His care will prevail,
I shall come home when the ebb-tide flows.
Over the foam, I shall come home, when the ebb-tide flows.
Father Eternal, though I may roam, guide Thou me home.

Grey haired and silent upon the quay there is a mother lone,
Never again to her heart came he, though the long years have flown.
Sound he sleeps in the trackless main,
Tides have ebbed and re-flowed again,
But still she smiles, because she knows
She'll meet him when Life's ebb-tide flows.


LOVED WE OUR COUNTRY MUCH
HE LOVED IT MORE

CORPORAL WALTER NORMAN


Their "country" was Newfoundland, a self-governing British Dominion with a population of 240,000. Despite its size, Newfoundland managed to recuit a complete battalion, and even more amazingly to maintain its numbers despite the almost 90% casualties the regiment suffered on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Walter Norman was killed on 27 February 1917 in an attack on the German trenches at Sailly-Saillisel.


PER ARDUA AD ASTRA

CORPORAL HERBERT GEORGE MUSTOE


This has been the motto of the Royal Air Force since it first came into being as the Royal Flying Corps in 1912: 'Per ardua ad astra', 'Through rough ways to the stars'. It is not an ancient, classical quotation and no one knows exactly where it came from. The story goes that it was suggested by someone who had read it in Rider Haggard's 'People of the Mist'. There it was the motto of the Outrams of Outram Hall and the inspiration for the two Outram brothers' quest to seek their fortune so as to be able to regain the family's inheritance, lost by their disgraced father:

"Per ardua ad astra," said Tom, absently reading the family motto which alternated pretty regularly with a second device that some members of it had adopted - "For heart, home, and honour."
"'Per ardua ad astra' - 'Through struggle to the stars' - and 'For heart, home and honour'," repeated Tom; "well, I think that our family never needed such consolations more, if indeed there are any to be found in mottoes. Our heart is broken, our hearth is desolate, and our honour is a byword, but there remains the 'struggle' and the 'stars'.

There is a suggestion that the RAF motto was inspired by lines from Virgil's Aeneid, Book IX Line 641 'Sic itur ad astra', 'Thus you shall go to the stars'. Virgil's lines certainly contain the words 'ad astra' but the sentiment bears much more resemblance to Seneca the Younger's 'Confragosa in fastigium dignitatis via est', 'It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness'.
Herbert Mustoe's wife, Daisy, chose his inscription. Mustoe, a house painter from Norwood, London, enlisted in the Royal Artillery during the summer of 1915 as part of the 39th (Deptford) Brigade. The brigade went to France in March 1916 where they continued their training before going into action in December. Mustoe served in D Battery, 186th Deptford (Howitzer) Brigade. We don't know exactly what happened to him but the 'Short History of the 39th (Deptford) Divisional Artillery' reports:

"During the first week in June (1917) the Divisional Artillery co-operated in two demonstrations against the enemy's trench system and batteries, especially during an attack made by troops on the right against Wytschaete-Messines and Hill 60. C/186th were very heavily shelled and compelled to leave their position after having two gun pits set on fire and ammunition blown up." This is followed by another comment: "Early in July (1917) the 186th Brigade was withdrawn having had a most unpleasant time in the past month". It was during this "most unpleasant time" that Corporal Mustoe died of wounds at a Field ambulance dressing station in Brandhoek.


GU BRISEADH NA FAIRE

SERJEANT MALCOLM FISHER


Malcolm Fisher was a clerk in the Clydesdale Bank, Dundee. A married man, he enlisted in the 14th Battalion the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders on 27 May 1915. After training, the battalion crossed to France in June 1916. Fisher died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Chocques five months later.
Serjeant Fisher's wife, Catherine, chose his Gaelic inscription; it translates as 'until day break'. It's not part of a quotation from the Song of Solomon 2:17: Until the day break and the shadows flee away. The Gaelic for this is: Gus am bris an la, agus an teich na sgailean.


ABIDE WITH ME
HE FELL A CONQUEROR
LEADING THE ASSAULT
SUNDAY 16TH MAY 1915

LIEUTENANT COLONEL HARRY RODERICK BOTTOMLEY


Lieutenant Colonel Harry Bottomley, commanding the 2nd Battalion The Queen's West Surrey Regiment, died on 18 May of wounds he'd received two days earlier leading an assault on the German salient at Festubert. His inscription begins with the opening words of Henry Lyte's hymn, a prayer asking for God's supporting presence through all life's trails and especially when facing death. The first and last verses read:

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.


"STEEL TRUE AND BLADE STRAIGHT
THE GREAT ARTIFICER
MADE MY MATE"

LANCE CORPORAL GUY MELVILLE FARNDEN


This is a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson's beautful poem 'My Wife':

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel-true and blade-straight,
The great artificer
Made my mate.

Honour, anger, valour, fire;
A love that life could never tire,
Death quench or evil stir,
The mighty master
Gave to her.

Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life,
Heart-whole and soul free
The august father
Gave to me.

Guy Farnden's wife, Edith, chose his incription, transferring the qualities Stevenson had bestowed on his beloved and greatly valued wife onto her own husband to whom she had been married for ten years.


LOVED AND LOST AWHILE

LIEUTENANT MONTAGUE DOUGLAS SPANKIE


Lieutenant Spankie's mother has adapted a line from Cardinal Henry Newman's extremely popular hymn 'Lead Kindly Light' for her son's headstone inscription. The hymn is not an unusual source for inscriptions but it's usually the first line of the first verse that's chosen:

Lead, kindly light, amidst th'encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

Mrs Spankie, a widow whose husband, Montague's father, had been an officer in the Indian army, has adapted a line from verse 3:

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on.
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone.
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

It is not clear how Lieutenant Spankie died but the previous two days, 12th and 13th May, the 29th Indian Brigade, which had only arrived in Gallipoli on 1 May, had taken part in an action that became known as Gurkha Bluff. Did Lieutenant Spankie die from injuries sustained in that action or was he killed by a sniper as the Brigade withdrew the next day?


SERVED THROUGHOUT THE BOER WAR
3RD I.Y.
MENTIONED IN DESPATCHES

LIEUTENANT ALAN FLETCHER TURNER


AlanTurner was a 40-year-old farmer from Witham Common, Grantham in Lincolnshire who had served with the 3rd Imperial Yeomanry throughout the Boer War, in which he was twice mentioned in despatches. During that war he was with the 3rd Yorkshire Hussars, in 1914 he was with another territorial force, the Leicestershire Yeomanry. He volunteered again for foreign service, took part in the Second Battle of Ypres and was killed at Frezenberg Ridge when the Leicestershire Yeomanry held the line for 24 hours against a fierce German attack. They lost many men: of the 291 memembers of the regiment who went into action, 93 were killed, including Lieutenant Turner, and 91 wounded. A letter from Trooper WH Walker, published in the Midland Mail on 4 June 1915, gives his account of the battle.


O VALIANT HEARTS

MAJOR WILLIAM JAMES ROWAN-ROBINSON


I thought it was strange that two adjacent graves should quote from the same hymn - it's not the same inscription but the source is the same, Sir John Arkwright's O Valiant Hearts. Then I noticed that both men had been killed on the same day, 12 May 1915, both were 44-year-old majors and both had been serving with the King's Shropshire Light Infantry. On investigating the War Grave Commission's records further, I discovered that both men had originally been buried under a single grave marker at map reference 28.1.11.b.5.3, both as unknown British majors. There was also another officer buried at the map reference, an unknown British lieutenant.
When the graves were exhumed on 13 March 1926 the bodies were identified by their badges of rank and their clothing as Major WJ Rowan-Robinson, Major CA Wilkinson and Lieutenant H de L Hulton-Harrop.
The website at King's School, Canterbury explains what happened: the King's Shropshire Light Infantry were in the Ypres Salient holding the trenches from Bellewaarde Farm to the railway line when on the 11th and 12th of May they came under very heavy bombardment, forcing the evacuation of Battalion HQ. When the shelling slackened Rowan-Robinson and Wilkinson went back to collect vital equipment and documents. Whilst they were inside the dugout it received a direct hit. Both men were killed together with four soldiers from the regiment and four men from other units.
What the King's School site doesn't tell you however is that one of the men from the other units was Lieutenant Hulton-Harrop, Major Rowan-Robinson's brother-in-law. Mrs Alyne Rowan-Robinson therefore lost her husband and her brother on the same day.
All three men have adjacent graves but it's Major Rowan-Robinson and Major Wilkinson who have inscriptons from the same hymn. The former's reads, 'O valiant hearts', and the latter's, 'Christ our redeemer passed the self same way'. Who knows if the relations conferred. Rowan-Robinson's was confirmed by Mr LC Rowan-Robinson, who was not his father, Wilkinson's by his widow.

O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame;
Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.

Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war
As who had heard God's message from afar;
All you had hoped for, all you had you gave,
To save mankind - yourself you scorned to save.

Splendid you passed, the great surrender made;
Into the light that nevermore shall fade;
Deep your contentment in that blest abode,
Who wait the last clear trumpet call of God.

Long years ago, as earth lay dark and still,
Rose a loud cry upon a lonely hill,
While in the frailty of our human clay,
Christ, our redeemer, passed the self same way.

Still stands His cross from that dread hour to this,
Like some bright star above the dark abyss;
Still, through the veil, the Victor's pitying eyes
Look down to bless our lesser calvaries.

These were His servants, in His steps they trod,
Following through death the martyred Son of God:
Victor, He rose; victorious too shall rise
They who have drunk His cup of sacrifice.

O risen Lord, O Shepherd of our dead,
Whose cross has bought them and whose staff has led,
In glorious hope their proud and sorrowing land
Commits her children to Thy Gracious hand.


IF I FALL
I SHALL HAVE DONE
SOMETHING WITH MY LIFE
WORTH DOING

PRIVATE GEORGE LAWRENCE HOLMDEN


George Holmden's father used his son's own words for his epitaph. Twenty-year-old George, a piano stringer from Grenfell, Quebec, volunteered on 16 September 1914. Both his parents had been born in Britain, emigrating to Canada in September 1877. Many of the earliest Canadian volunteers were young men who had been born in Britain; George Holmden, who was also an early volunteer, was born in Montreal.


A BURSTING BUD
ON A SLENDER STEM
BROKEN AND WASTED
OUR BOY

PRIVATE THOMAS LEONARD MICHAEL QUINLAN


There's no disguising the bitterness of this inscription, nineteen-year-old Thomas Quinlan, 'a bursting bud on a slender stem broken and wasted'. This is an interesting inscription, it sounds like a quotation but I don't think it is. The end of the inscription refers to 'our boy' but I have a feeling that Thomas Quinlan's parents were dead, either that or they were no longer in the country as they both disappear from the census record after 1901.
Thomas Quinlan, however, appears in the 1911 census as a boarder at St Nicholas Industrial School for Roman Catholic Boys, Manor Park East Ham. Many industrial schools were for juveniles who had never been convicted of an actual offence, but whose habits indicated that they might lapse into crime if not "taken in hand in time". It sounds ominous and indeed the regime was usually quite strict and there was often little to distinguish these industrial schools from reformatories. One of the other boys at the school in 1911 was only 5 so there's a possibility that St Nicholas was an orphanage too.
We have no idea why Thomas Quinlan was at the school, nor where he went afterwards but we can assume that he joined the army since he was serving in the 1st Battalion the Royal Warwickshire Regiment when he was killed near Ypres on 9 April 1915, which would indicate that he was a regular soldier. And if he wasn't a regular soldier he was certainly a volunteer.
Who chose his inscription? The War Graves Commission's register states that he was the 'son of Michael John Quinlan' but gives no address. The person who confirmed his inscription was Mr H Quinlan, 16 de Walden Buildings, Henry Street, St John's Wood - a brother? 'A bursting bud on a slender stem broken and wasted'; Thomas Quinlan doesn't sound like a former reformatory boy - it would be good to know more.


ALSO CAPT. A. WEATHERHEAD
ROYAL LANCASTER REGIMENT
KILLED 1ST JULY 1916

CAPTAIN GEORGE ERNEST WEATHERHEAD


"Much sympathy will be felt throughout the district for Mrs. Weatherhead, of Mount Road, New Brighton, widow of the late Canon Weatherhead, of Seacombe, in the loss of her eldest son, Captain and Adjutant George Ernest Weatherhead, of the 2nd Battalion the King's Own (Royal Lancaster) Regiment. Mrs. Weatherhead has just received the sad news that her son was killed in action near Ypres on Sunday last. It will be remembered that she had three sons serving with His Majesty's Forces."
Wallasey News Saturday 22 May 1915

From this son's inscription we can see that another of Mrs Weatherhead's sons, Andrew, was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Neither George nor Andrew were married but there is evidence that at least one of the sons married and had children.

"Captain George Ernest Weatherhead, Adjutant, 2nd Battalion the Kings Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) Died 8th May 1915 defending Ypres. 100 Years and still remembered.
Nephew Peter Weatherhead and family."
In Memorium Column, Daily Telegraph 8 May 2015

There seems to be some confusion over the date of George's death. The War Graves Commission records it as the 9 May but the family say the 8th and I think they are correct. According to the 2nd Battalion's War Diary for 8 May 1915: the Germans began to heavily shell their trenches at 7am, simultaneously launching an attack which forced them to abandon the front line. The battalion regrouped but at 10am the Germans renewed their attack and at 11.35 am they received the message to retire. Among those listed as having been killed in the attack was Captain Weatherhead.


BEHIND ALL SHADOWS
STANDETH GOD

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ROBERT GARTSIDE


Fifty-two-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Gartside was mortally wounded as he rose to lead an attack on the Turkish trenches during the Second Battle of Krithia. He is quoted as having just said, "Come on boys, I know it's deadly, but we must get on," when he was hit in the abdomen by machine gun bullets.
His inscription sounds as though it must be a quotation. It could be a reference to the hymn 'Once to Every Man and Nation'. The hymn's sentiment would have been seen to be appropriate:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight;
And the choice goes by for ever
'Twixt that darkness and that light.

With the last verse concluding:

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above his own.

This looked to me as though it was the closest we were going to get to the source of the epitaph. However, I put the phrase into Google in inverted commas and came up with a photograph taken by E.R.Pretyman, 1870-1930, held in the Archives Office of Tasmania, which shows a large mausoleum with the words 'Light evermore, behind all shadows standeth God' written in huge letters across the pediment. Could this be the source of the inscription and if so is there any connection between Robert Gartside and this mausoleum, which unfortunately isn't identified?


SMALL TIME BUT IN THAT SMALL
MOST GREATLY LIVED
THIS STAR OF ENGLAND

LIEUTENANT RAYMOND ASQUITH


"We greatly regret to record the death in action on September 15th of Lieutenant Raymond Asquith, Grenadier Guards, by which the Prime Minister loses his eldest son and the country a man of brilliant promise."
The Times, September 19th 1916

Raymond's epitaph is spoken by the Chorus in the Epilogue to Shakespeare's Henry V and was chosen by his wife, Katherine. It is often said that Raymond was one of the most brilliant men killed in the war. He was brilliant but never ambitious for his brilliance. As his friend John Buchan put it, Raymond had about him 'The suggestion of some urbane and debonair scholar-gipsy, who belonged to a different world from the rest of us'. In addition, 'he scorned the worldly wisdom which makes smooth the steps of a career'.
On 15 September 1916, the Guards attacked at Lesboeufs. John Buchan later wrote that, 'Their front was too narrow, their objectives too far distant, and from the start their flanks were enfiladed'. Raymond was shot in the chest as he led his men into a hail of bullets. He was taken to a dressing station, putting on a magnificent show of nonchalance and smoking a cigarette to disguise the extent of his injuries.
Margot Asquith, Raymond's stepmother, broke the news of his death to her husband the Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith who, 'put his head on his arms on the table and sobbed passionately'. Later Asquith wrote that, 'Counsellors tell me that I ought not to be sorrowful. But I am: like a man out of whose sky the twin stars of Pride and Hope have both vanished into lasting darkness'. 'Twin stars', 'this star of England', the same stellar image occurred to both father and wife.
Before he died, Raymond had asked the medical orderly to send his water bottle to his father, and his father, who had apparently never written to his son once whilst he was at the front, is said to have kept his son's flask by his bed for the rest of his life.
Raymond was educated at Winchester College whose website Winchester College at War gives more details about his life.


A VOLUNTEER FROM THE U.S.A.
TO AVENGE
THE LUSITANIA MURDER

DRIVER LELAND WINGATE FERNALD


Leland Wingate Fernald was an American citizen, a painter from Bakersfield in California whose parents lived in Dover, New Hampshire. He enlisted in the Canadian Army on 11 November 1915 in Esquimalt, British Columbia and died of wounds - "shrapnel wounds on head" - in No. 10 Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek just under six months later. His headstone inscription, chosen by his parents, makes clear his motives for enlisting - to avenge the deaths of the 1,191 civilians, 139 of them US citizens, who died when the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat on 7 May 1915. Many people called for America to enter the war on the side of the Allies as a result of the sinking but it was two years before she did so on 6 April 1917. However, this did not stop several US citizens like Leland Wingate from crossing the border into Canada and joining the British Army.


LO I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS

LANCE CORPORAL PERCY EUSTACE PENFOLD


And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
Matthew 28:18-20

Lance Corporal Percy Eustace Penfold was killed in action on 7 October 1916, his brother Lance Corporal Herbert Penfold having been killed on 13 October 1915. In the intervening year it appears that their father also died. Herbert's body was never recovered so he has no headstone and therefore no memorial inscription.


"HIS WAS THE JOY
THAT MADE PEOPLE SMILE
WHEN THEY MET HIM"
LT. S.L. REISS

LIEUTENANT RONALD WILLIAM POULTON PALMER


"By the death of Lieutenant Poulton Palmer Rugby football has lost one of its most brilliant exponents. As a three-quarter back - he could play either in the centre or on the wing - his name will go down to posterity as probably the greatest player of all time."
The Times 8 May 1915

Poulton captained the English side during the 1913-14 season leading England to a 10-9 victory against the Welsh, 17-12 against the Irish, 16-15 against Scotland and 39-11 against the French. In all the close run games it was generally agreed that Poulton's contribution, both as player and Captain, had tipped the balance.

After his death it distressed his father that the newspapers concentrated on his sporting career. In the memoir Edward Poulton wrote of his son he was keen to point out that to Ronald rugby had only been a game. His main interest was Boys Clubs to which he had devoted much of his free time since his school days. Wherever he went, Rugby, Balliol, Manchester or Reading, he helped out at these clubs on a weekly basis. He believed firmly that by talking, teaching, playing and praying with these boys, who came from poor and disadvantaged families, he could help them break the cycle of poverty and deprivation which so reduced their chances in life. As a good sportsman he was greatly admired by the boys but he never overestimated the impact he was having on them. Describing one club evening he reported to his sister: "I think it was rather successful, and they were fairly quiet - that is to say they only whistled and talked and threw chairs about".

After Oxford Poulton went to work for his mother's uncle, G.W.Palmer, in the family biscuit business of Huntley and Palmer in Reading, as his heir. It was 1912, and when his uncle died in 1913 Ronald adopted the name Palmer as he promised his uncle he would. This is how he comes to be known as Ronald Poulton Palmer.

In 1912 he also joined the Territorials, the 4th Battalion the Royal Berkshire Regiment, believing that "in no other position could I so place myself that my training at Oxford [in the OTC] might be of use in a future war". And when the war broke out he volunteered for foreign service, even though his family felt strongly that his first duty was to the company. In response to his family he told them that although he considered war to be a ridiculous way for two countries to resolve their differences, he was a trained soldier, his country required his services and everyone should obey their own conscience. In a letter to his parents, who were in Australia when the war broke out, he put it rather less pompously: "You cannot realise in Australia what is happening here. Germany has to be smashed, i.e. I mean the military party, and everybody is volunteering. And those who are best trained are most wanted and so I should be a skunk to hold back".

After all the drama and excitement of mobilsation the battalion spent seven months in training and home defence in Chelmsford before embarking for France on 30 March 1915. Edward Poulton later expressed his regret at his inability to speak of anything personal on Ronald's last leave; he said had not wanted to cast a shadow over the occasion but was sure that his son "knew he was loved; he knew the fears we felt, speech was not needed to tell him this".

If Poulton's family hadn't felt able to speak to him his friends not only felt they could but did. William Dimbleby from the Reading Boys' Club wrote later, "His heart was not in it at all. He went solely from a sense of duty and as an example to others". And his landlady in Chelmsford claimed, "He didn't want to die, he had everything on earth ... he couldn't imagine anything better in heaven". One of his very best friends, William Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, recorded his last evening with Poulton in his diary. Poulton had said:

"I don't want to be killed yet; there is such a lot I wanted to do, or try anyhow." I asked if he felt sure he would be killed; "Oh yes" he said, "sure of it". I said nothing and again there was a long silence. Then he suddenly said, "Of course it's all right; but it's not what one would have chosen."

The 4th Battalion went into the trenches on 4 April. Poulton wrote home regularly, constantly referring to the danger from snipers. "The snipers are very good shots. We had three periscopes smashed, and yet they only show 3" by 3" over the parapet and the German trenches are quite 500 yards away". Not surprisingly his family were obsessed by the need for him to take care. On 29 April he wrote to reassure them, "Don't worry about me in this respect ... I am always thinking of it and keeping my head down". However, it was only six days later that they received the following telelgram: "Regret your son killed last night. Death instantaneous. Colonel Serocold."

In the early hours of 5 May Poulton had been superintending a working party when he was shot through the heart. A brother officer assured Poulton's parents, "I reached him the moment after he fell but he never spoke or moved again". His father was one of many who felt sure that the Germans had made a point of killing him, knowing what a huge blow this would be to British morale. However, reports suggest that Poulton was caught by an unfortunate ricocheting bullet.

Whatever the cause, his men were devastated. As Lieutenant Crutwell told Poulton's parents, "When I went round his old company as they stood to at dawn, almost every man was crying". He was buried in Ploegsteert Wood on the evening of 6 May in the presence of his whole company. Captain Sharpe reported the event to his wife, "I wept like a child ... as did many of us". The next night the Albert Road Lads' Club in Reading, of which Poulton had been president, recorded in its Log Book, "The saddest day the Club has known. We could not hold a club, no one felt like it".

Poulton's inscription comes from a letter written by a Balliol friend, Lieutenant Stephen Reiss, to Ronald's father. Reiss was killed on 13 October 1915.


MY DARLING

PRIVATE DAVID HEATHCOTE MELROSE ROBERTSON


"My darling" not our darling, although David Robertson's father was still alive. It was David's mother, Mrs Emma Jane Roberston, who filled in the form confirming the inscription and she wrote "My darling". Father, Mr James Robertson, didn't die until 1950 and he's buried under a headstone which describes him as the beloved father of David, but nevertheless his son's headstone inscription only reads "My darling".
David Robertson was a motor mechanic from Ballarat, Victoria. He enlisted at the age of 18 in July 1915, and was sent to Gallipoli in August where he was wounded and spent some time in hospital on Malta. After the evacuation from Gallipoli in January 1916, the Battalion regrouped in Egypt and then were sent to France in March where they took part in the Somme campaign. In 1917 were sent to the Ypres front. David was killed in action at Zonnebeke during the Battle of Passchendale on 22/23 September. According to his mother, on the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia, he was "twenty and one week" when he died, so not 21 as it says on the War Graves' records. Initially buried without being identified, his body was later exhumed from map reference 28.J.@.d.7.2, identified by the clothing and correspondence on it, and reburied in Sanctuary Wood Cemetery.


THANK YOU HARRY

RIFLEMAN HENRY ASHFIELD CARLISLE


'Thank you Harry', a simple message of gratitude from Harry's nineteen year old sister, Maud Sibyl Carlisle - his next-of-kin. Harry had been her only close family member; their parents were both dead and there were no other surviving siblings. They had lived with their mother's brother, the Revd Gilbert King, vicar of Easterton, Wiltshire, whose only child Noel Gilbert Bryan King was killed in 1917.
Harry was educated at Denstone College and then went to Ceylon. He enlisted in the Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps on the outbreak of war. According to Charles Bean's 'The Story of the Anzac', the Corps landed in Gallipoli with 150 men and one officer and were used by General Birdwood as a personal escort and camp guard. This was necessary because, as Birdwood himself recounted, "when we first landed at ANZAC, with the whole countryside covered with thick, high bushes in which many Turkish snipers were concealed, my little escort proved itself invaluable at scouting through the scrub." Harry Carlisle was killed soon after the Gallipoli landings; it was said that he was shot going to the help of a wounded comrade.


NO REVEILLE
AND NO MORNING GUN
SHALL EVERMORE WAKEN HIM

CAPTAIN ANDREW GEORGE CHRISTIAN


This inscription, chosen by Captain Christian's wife, comes from a poem written at the time of the Boer War by William Alexander, the Protestant Primate of All Ireland. It's a long poem from which these are the relevant verses:

They who marched up the bluffs last stormy week,
Some of them, ere they reached the mountain's creek,
The wind of battle breathing on their cheek,
Suddenly laid them down.

Like sleepers - not like those whose race is run -
Fast, fast asleep amid the cannon's roar,
Them no reveille and no morning gun
Shall ever waken more.

The morning gun was fired at the same time as the first bugle note of reveille and summoned the soldier from sleep.


GOOD-BYE FRED, YOU HAVE
NOBLY DONE YOUR DUTY
THOUGH YOUR MOTHER'S HEART WAS BROKEN

PRIVATE FRED LAND


There's no sign of Fred's mother on the War Grave Commission's records. It was Fred's stepfather, Henry Morgan, who chose his inscription. I have a feeling that Henry Morgan meant it when he said "your mother's heart was broken"; I think his mother must have been dead.


MY COUNTRY BEFORE EVEN YOU
MOTHER DEAR
(HIS PARTING WORDS
ON LEAVING HOME)

LIEUTENANT JOHN CLARENCE HANSON


John Clarence Hanson was a school teacher born in 1893 in St John, New Brunswick, Canada. He enlisted in the Canadian Infantry on 20 March 1916. He later transfered to the Royal Flying Corps, serving with the 55th Squadron, a daytime bombing squadron. He was "accidentally killed" on 14 July 1917.
It appears to me that he was an only child, which gives his inscription an added poignancy - how vividly his father has managed to convey the tensions of his last good-bye.


HE DID HIS BEST

PRIVATE THOMAS PETER ELLIOTT


Am I alone in thinking this a half-hearted inscription? Who was the Mr Herbert Elliott who confirmed it? He lived at 8 Cheshunt Road, Green Street, Forest Gate, E7 but he wasn't Private Elliott's father as Thomas Hyde Elliot was dead, and so it seems was his mother, Mary Jane.
Thomas Elliott was 17 and one month when he joined the Territorial Forces on 21 May 1909. In answer to the question, 'In whose employ are you?' he answered, 'My own', giving that employment as 'porter'. At the time he was living at 51 Fernlea Road, Balham and gives no family members.
In April 1915 the 2nd Battalion East Surrey Regiment were in the trenches at Zonnebeke taking part in what has become known as the Second Battle of Ypres. The Battalion War Diary for the 27th/28th April records: "Brigade asked to send up some force to drive enemy from captured portion. Casualties to noon. Thirteen killed one died of wounds and nineteen wounded." One of these would have been Private Thomas Elliott who "did his best".


A POPULAR OFFICER
DEEPLY MOURNED

LIEUTENANT CLARENCE WILLIAM WOLFENDEN


Clarence Wolfenden was a consistent high achiever at every stage of his short career. An artillery officer, he was killed when the Turkish guns found the range of his guns on Plateau 400. His mother, a widow, chose his inscription.


CARRY ON

MAJOR WILLIAM JAMES ANDERSON


"I feel frightfully upset today. Our new commanding officer, Major W.J. Anderson was on a tour of inspection along the firing line, when a bomb hit him above the heart. I expect another commanding officer will be appointed shortly. He will be our tenth commanding officer, which speaks for itself of the work our battalion has done."
So wrote Major Connery a fellow officer in the regiment. William Anderson was born in India, joined the army in 1882 and retired in 1909 to Rock Creek, British Columbia. He re-enlisted on the outbreak of war and served with the Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment but had just been made C.O. of the 1st/9th Manchesters and was serving on the Headquarters Staff when he was killed.
Where did the phrase 'Carry on', chosen by Major Anderson's wife for his headstone inscription, come from? It's so firmly asociated with the Second World War poster 'Keep calm and carry on' that's it's difficult to find any First World War associations, and yet there are some. There's a Christmas card that circulated among the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, which carries a verse headed, 'Carry On':
Be sure to keep hope in your line of sight,
And face the music with all your might,
Smile and be always brave and bright,
You'll find 't will make all burdens light.
It's possible that Mrs Anderson, still living in British Columbia, was familiar with this verse but perhaps more likely that she knew the poster urging Canadians to buy Victory Bonds. Under the words 'Carry On!' there's a nurse supporting a wounded officer and the injunction: - Lest we forget! Belgium, Louvain, Lusitania, Edith Cavell, Llnadovery Castle.


IN PROUD AND
MOST LOVING REMEMBRANCE

LIEUTENANT COLONEL RICHARD ALEXANDER ROOTH


V Beach 25 April 1915, 6.30 am
"Up to the last moment it seemed that the Turkish defences had been abandoned; but just as the River Clyde grounded, and when the boats were only a few yards from the shore, Hell was suddenly let loose. A tornado of fire swept over the incoming boats, lashing the calm waters of the bay as with a thousand whips. Devastating casualties were suffered in the first few seconds. Some of the boats drifted helplessly away with every man in them killed. Many more of the Dublins were killed as they waded ashore. Others, badly wounded, stumbling in the water, were drowned. ... Few of the boats were able to get off again. Most of them, with their devoted crews, were destroyed on the beach. The ripples placidly lapping the shore were tinged with blood."
With this vivid piece of writing, Military Operations Gallipoli, Volume 1, compiled by Brigadier-General C.F. Aspinall, described the first few minutes of the attempted landing on V Beach in which Lt Colonel Rooth, Officer Commanding the 1st Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers "was killed instantly as he was stepping on the beach".
Rooth is buried at V Beach Cemetery. Initially he was buried in a joint grave with The Revd William Joseph Finn the Roman Catholic padre also killed on the beach. Ernest Raymond, author of the famous Gallipoli novel, Tell England, described Finn in a much later novel, The Quiet Shore (1958).

"D'you know who that padre fellah is? He's the Dublins' and Munsters' chaplain: Father Finn, or some such name. I was with him in the bows of the Clyde, watching, and when he saw hundreds of his boys lying on the beach, he said "I can't stand this, Colonel. Dammit, my bloody place is out there" - or whatever it is padres say. And Irish padres at that. And he rushed out, though several tried to stop him. A pretty stout fellah you know. But all these Irishmen are. All of 'em."

This might have been a novel but it captures the spirit of the man, which is echoed in this factual account:

"He (Finn) certainly spent a considerable part of the day beside dying soldiers as there was an abundance of them at V Beach. He attempted to save a number of drowning and wounded men before being hit himself, in the right arm. He managed to get ashore and crawled around the beach offering help or consolation to the wounded and dying Dublins and Munsters. In order to give absolution he had to hold up an injured right arm with his left. While he was blessing one of the men in this fashion, there was a shrapnel burst above him which blew part of his skull away. He was buried on the beach and his grave marked with a cross made out of an ammunition box 'To the memory of the Revd Capt Finn'."


MATE O' MINE

MAJOR JOHN EDWIN SERGEANT


Major Sergeant was killed by a shell high above Anzac Cove on the first day of the Gallipoli landings. The men of the 8th Battalion Australian Infantry, led by Colonel William Bolton, captured what became known as Bolton's Ridge on this first day. A photograph of Sergeant's grave at the top of a steep precipice with the sea far below illustrates the Australians' amazing achievement. The photograph was taken by Lieutenant Jack Duffy and can be seen on Trevor Henshaw's blog Original graves at Gallipoli. However, they never managed to make much further progress and during the entire nine months the Allies were on the peninsular this position always remained close to the Turkish front line.
Major Sergeant's wife chose his epitaph. It comes from the song Mate o' Mine: music written by the British composer, conductor and violinist, Percy Elliott, words by Leslie Cooke.

We set out together, mate o' mine,
When youth was in its prime,
Life - the path that lay before us,
Life - the hill we had to climb.

We neither of us knew the road,
How long the journey, great the load;
Nor I how deep the debt I owed
To God for mate o' mine!

We set out together, mate o'mine;
We've wended road and hill;
Now it's homeward through the valley
We must wander at God's will.

We neither of us fear the gloam,
Love still shall light the path we roam;
Should you be the last returning Home,
I'll greet thee, mate o' mine!

John Sergeant was 45, a grazier and vigneron who had served in the South African War. He re-enlisted as a Captain on 28 August 1914 and embarked for Egypt on 19 October. It was his wife, Annie, who in the words of the song became "the last returning Home". Her choice of inscription, and the song it came from, sadly encapsulating the unknown journey you set out on at the beginning of married life.


THERE'S SOME CORNER
OF A FOREIGN FIELD
WHICH IS FOREVER ENGLAND

PRIVATE THOMAS MERCER


Thomas Mercer's parents slightly misquote Rupert Brooke's extremely popular war poem, The Soldier, for their son's headstone inscription. The poem begins:
If I should die think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
Brooke wrote the poem at Christmas 1914, the final sonnet in a sequence of five, which he called 1914. Published in the January edition of the magazine New Numbers, a review in the 11 March edition of the Times Literary Supplement spoke of Brooke as "a poet whose rich promise is still in its dawn, but whose life, as they prove, is at its zenith". It quotes The Soldier in full with the comment that,
"It is impossible to shred up this beauty for the purpose of criticism ... The words pause and break, as thought and feeling falter for very fullness, like the song of a bird faced with all summer's loveliness and with but one brief dusk wherein to sing."
Three weeks later the Dean of St Paul's also quoted The Soldier in full in his Easter Sunday sermon, commenting that surely such pure and elevated patriotism had never before found such noble expression.
Posterity has found it only too possible "to shred up this beauty for the purpose of criticism" but for contemporaries the words perfectly captured the mood of these early months of the war: anxious, emotional, proud, patriotic, stoical, afraid. Brooke's sonnets may well be sentimental and grandiloquent but in their grandiose vagueness they brought a steadying comfort. In April 1915 his name was everywhere, praise of him was everywhere, and then on the 23rd he was dead.
The Soldier is quoted in full on Brooke's grave on Skyros, an island in the Aegean where he was buried by his friends following his death from blood poisoning. The grave remains in this same isolated location and although it does not have a War Graves Commission headstone it is maintained by them.


HERE LIES
THE SERVANT OF GOD
SUB-LIEUTENANT IN THE
ENGLISH NAVY
WHO DIED FOR THE
DELIVERANCE OF CONSTANTINOPLE FROM
THE TURKS

SUB-LIEUTENANT RUPERT CHAWNER BROOKE


This is a translation of the Greek epitaph inscribed on the back of the wooden cross that at one time marked Brooke's grave on the Aegean island of Skyros. Brooke died from blood poisoning on 23 April 1915, at 4.46 pm whilst on board the French hospital ship the Duguay-Trouin. Those who died on board ship were customarily buried at sea but Brooke's friends were sure he wouldn't have wanted this - and they didn't want it for him either. They decided to bury him on Skyros but had to do so quickly as their ship was to sail for Gallipoli at dawn.
Despite the need for speed the event was planned and carried out with great dignity, ceremony and affection. Brooke's school friend, William Denis Browne, later described the event in a letter to Edward Marsh:

"We buried him the same evening in an olive-grove where he had sat with us on Tuesday - one of the loveliest places on this earth, with grey-green olives round him, one weeping above his head; the ground covered with flowering sage, bluish-grey, and smelling more delicious than any flower I know. The path up to it from the sea is very difficult and very stony; it runs by the bed of a dried up torrent. We had to post men with lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. ... The journey of a mile took two hours. It was not till 11 that I saw them coming ... First came one of his men carrying a great white wooden cross with his name painted on it in black; then the firing party, commanded by Patrick; and then the coffin, followed by our officers and General Paris and one or two others of the Brigade. Think of it all under a clouded moon, with the three mountains around and behind us, and those divine scents everywhere. We lined the grave with all the flowers we could find, and Quilter set a wreath of olive on the coffin. The funeral was very simply said by the Chaplain, and after the Last Post the little lamp-lit procession went once again down the narrow path to the sea.
Freybourg, Oc and I, Charles and Cleg stayed behind and covered the grave with great pieces of white marble which were lying everywhere about. Of the cross at the head ... on the back of it our Greek interpreter wrote in pencil ... "

Until recently this cross used to stand in the Brooke family burial plot in Clifton Road Cemetery, Rugby along with a smaller one from his brother's grave. Like many other original grave markers they were returned to his family after the war, in this case to his widowed mother, Mary Brooke. However, unlike the bodies of other soldiers who had been buried in isolated graves, Brooke's was not exhumed and reburied in a War Graves Commission cemetery, nor was the wooden cross ever replaced by one of the Commission's headstones. Brooke's death and burial had become part of his legend and the Commission agreed to leave the grave in situ. However, the cairn of marble boulders that had been heaped over his grave to keep the wild animals away, was replaced in the 1920s by a marble tombstone surmounted by a horizontal cross, the whole surrounded by iron railings.
The wooden cross has now been moved to the Chapel at Rugby School, where Brooke was a pupil. It's not what Mrs Brooke had wanted but after 100 years it would not have survived in the open air for much longer and it's a very special relic, a direct link with one of the most famous casualties of the war who wrote what was certainly at one time the most famous poem of the war:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. That there shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
The Soldier - Rupert Brooke


YES
MY LOVE THE SAME
YOUR WIFE, ETHEL

PRIVATE JOHN SMITH


This is such a tender inscription, an assurance by a wife to her husband that her feelings for him are just the same as they always were. Ethel Smith lived in Newnham Road, Everdon, Daventry, Northamptonshire but even this hasn't enabled me to identify the couple any further.


ONE CLEAR CALL

LIEUTENANT SIDNEY MAURICE SCOTT


Sidney Scott was killed in action at Ginchy on 15 September 1916. The younger son of Isabella Scott, a widow, his elder brother, Basil, had been killed on 23 October 1914. Educated at Eton, on leaving school in October 1915 he took a commission in the Coldstream Guards and went with them to France in May 1916. His inscription is a quotation from Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, which reflects Tennyson's own quiet acceptance of his approaching death. Acceptance must have been very much more difficult for Isabella Scott whose sons were only nineteen and twenty when they were killed.

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning at the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.


HE LOVED THE FIELDS
HIS PEOPLE AND HIS FLOCKS
A GENTLE SHEPHERD HE

PRIVATE ROBERT SCOTT


Robert Scott's father has composed a beautiful inscription for his son, a "gentle shepherd" who looked after his flocks in the fields of Arnmannoch, Dalbeattie, Dumfries and Galloway, and died of wounds in a base hospital in Etaples.


KILLED AT LOOS AETAT 22
ST PAUL'S SCHOOL R.M. ACADEMY
FRANCE AUGUST 1914
PRO PATRIA

LIEUTENANT JOHN BATHO


These few words encompass twenty-two-year old John Batho's brief life. However, he has an extensive obituary in Volume 2 of the Marquis du Ruvigny's Roll of Honour. Whilst people tend only speak well of the dead, one of the letters quoted was written on 1 January 1915, whilst he was still alive. Lt Colonel Arthur Daly, in a letter to another senior officer wrote: "I have two wonderful sapper subalterns called ... and Batho. They have only got about 18 months' service each and are perfect heroes, both of them, and work night and day without sparing themselves, and no know fear: always cheery and always full of resource. I should like their people to know what splendid boys they have got, and how proud they ought to be of them."
Nine months later, on the night of the 26/27 September, he was shot by a sniper whilst supervising work just 100 yards from the German front line. He died in a Casualty Clearing Station three days later. In a letter to his parents on behalf of the section Sergeant McQuiston wrote, "We all loved him and would follow him anywhere, full of confidence when he was leading us. We shall never find one better, but we are living in hopes of getting one half as good."


CHARTERED ACCOUNTANT
SON OF A.B. AND MARY PAIRMAN
OF THE OLD MANSE, BUSBY

PRIVATE JAMES PAIRMAN


This is another biographical inscription. James Pairman's mother was a widow. Was she simply stating the facts when she recorded that he was a Chartered Accountant or was this a matter of some pride for her? James Pairman is commemorated on the Glasgow University Roll of Honour as well as that of the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He was killed on the third day of the Battle of the Somme during fighting round the Leipzig Salient.


ARTIST, OLDHAM, LANCASHIRE

PRIVATE JOSEPH FRANKLIN KERSHAW


Joseph Franklin Kershaw studied at the Royal College of Art and is commemorated on their war memorial. He was born in Oldham, where his father was a prosperous ironmonger, and educated at Oldham Hulme Grammar School. Oldham Library and Art Gallery have three of his paintings, and there is one in the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport's Collections. These paintings can be seen on the BBC's Your Paintings site.
Kershaw married in 1908 and it was his widow, Effie, who confirmed his inscription, even though the War Graves Commission doesn't mention her in its register, simply saying that Joseph Franklin was the son of Joseph and Hannah Kershaw of Oldham. I wondered whether there was some antipathy between Joseph Franklin and his parents over his marriage because the 1911 census gives Effie's age as 42, which would have made her 16 years older than her husband. However, the cemetery register for Backup, where Effie was buried on 31 March 1966, gives her age as 85. This means that although she was a couple of years older than her husband she certainly wasn't 16 years older than him. In 1911 the couple were living in Fulham but when Effie Kershaw filled in the War Grave Commission's form she was living in St John's Cross, Storth, a remote house on the shores of Morecombe Bay. Private Joseph Kershaw is commemorated on the Storth war memorial too.


BYATT OF SUMMERFIELDS
CHARTERHOUSE
CLARE COL. CAM.
LONDON HOSPITAL
"AD SUM!"

CAPTAIN HARRY VIVIAN BYATT BYATT


Captain Byatt's epitaph summarises his life history, only omitting his years in the Royal Army Medical Corps, which he joined in 1909. He was killed, shot through the chest by a rifle bullet, whilst dressing a wounded man's head injury. Although he was taken to the Field Ambulance at Estaires he died soon afterwards.
'Ad sum', is the Latin for I am present, or I am here. Is it a significant motto, or perhaps the quotation marks imply that the words come from the dead man, 'I am here ', death is not the end.


WHEN DUTY WHISPERS LOW
"THOU MUST"
THE YOUTH REPLIES
"I CAN"

LANCE CORPORAL ALAN LOUIS SHAW


This inscription comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Voluntaries, written in 1863. The relevant verse reads :

In an age of fops and toys,
Wanting wisdom, void of right.
Who shall nerve heroic boys
To hazard all in Freedom's fight, -
Break sharply off their jolly games,
Forsake their comrades gay,
And quit proud homes and youthful dames,
For famine, toil, and fray?
Yet on the nimble air benign
Speed nimbler messages,
That waft the breath of grace divine
To hearts in sloth and ease.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.

The poem is Emerson's tribute to the young men who volunteered to fight for the Union in the American Civil War. The last four lines of the verse are among Emerson's best-known lines and regularly appear on memorials to veterans of all subsequent wars.
Alan Shaw volunteered on the outbreak of war in 1914. He was killed the following May by an unlucky ricochet from a stray bullet which pierced his spine.


THE HOURS I'VE SPENT
WITH THEE DEAR HEART
ARE AS A STRING OF PEARLS
TO ME

PRIVATE FRED HAMPTON


This inscription comes from The Rosary, a hugely popular romantic song about loss and the acceptance of loss, written in America in 1898 by Ethelbert Nevin and Robert Cameron Rogers. It became one of the most popular songs of the early twentieth century, and was made even more popular by Florence L Barclay's deeply romantic novel of the same name in which the song plays a central part.
Barclay's book was published in 1909 and immediately became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic; by 1924 it had sold a million copies.

The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
Are as a string of pearls to me.
I count them over every one apart,
My rosary.
Each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer,
To still a heart in absence wrung.
I tell each bead unto the end - and there
A cross is hung.
Oh memories that bless - and burn!
Oh, barren gain - and bitter loss!
I kiss each bead, and strive at last to learn
To kiss the cross,
Sweetheart,
To kiss the cross.

Fred Hampton's widow, Eleanor, chose his inscription. Her husband had been killed during the night of 3 July whilst part of a working party repairing the wire out in no-man's-land. Initially no one knew what had happened to him and Eleanor initiated a search by the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Bureau. One wonders how much of what the Red Cross found out was relayed to her. Witnesses describe how Fred Hampton was "struck by a shell which carried away the lower part of his face". The witnesses then disagree about whether "he lived only a few minutes" or was "taken to a dressing station where he died after about 30 minutes". The fact that he is buried in a battlefield cemetery not one associated with an aid post, Field Ambulance or Casualty Clearing Station, inclines me to think he only lived a few minutes.


NATURE MIGHT STAND UP
AND SAY TO ALL THE WORLD
'THIS WAS A MAN'

PRIVATE ARTHUR WILLIAM CALLANDER


Arthur Callander's inscription was chosen by his older brother, Henry. Their father had died when Arthur was 4 and Henry 17, and their mother when Arthur was 7 and Henry 20. Henry was quite possibly Arthur's next-of-kin. As an orphan, Arthur had attended the Commerical Travellers School for Orphan and Necessitous Children. His father had been a commercial traveller in the tea trade but Arthur went to work in a shop. By the time he joined up in 1914 he was the manager of the Costume Department at Messrs Green & Co. Oxford Circus. He went to France in March 1915 and was killed two months later.
His inscription comes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and refers to Brutus. Brutus has killed himself, by running on his sword, having taken part in the murder of Caesar. Antony, a fellow murderer, says:

This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators save only he
Did that he did in envy of great Caesar.
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world 'This was a man!'


HE NOTHING COMMON DID
OR MEAN
UPON THAT MEMORABLE SCENE

SECOND LIEUTENANT RALPH ERNEST WHITE


These are the words Andrew Marvell used to describe the actions of King Charles I on the scaffold:

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try.
Nor call'd the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless plight,
But bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed.

I can't work out who the Mrs E Walton of 13 Gerard Road, Harrow, Middlesex, who chose this inscription, can have been. Ralph White never married so this isn't the name of his remarried widow under her new name. Whoever she was, however, she evidently intended to imply that forty-year-old Second Lieutenant White, who in the 1911 census had been an insurance agent in Gosforth, accepted his destiny with great dignity and without complaint. Forty is quite old to be a Second Lieutenant, had he been promoted from the ranks or perhaps he had only recently been conscripted.


OLD PAL
WHY DON'T YOU ANSWER ME

PRIVATE JAMES CONGREVE FERN


At first I thought this had to be a reference to spiritualism and imagined that James Fern's father was complaining that he had not been able to make contact with his son in the spirit world. And in a way it is: Old Pal, Why Don't You Answer Me? is the title of a mournfully romantic popular song, written by Jerome K Jerome in 1920, in which a man expresses his loneliness to his dead wife, wishing she would answer his prayers and presumably send him some sort of sign.
James Fern Snr was a widower, his wife had died in 1916, and James Jnr was their eldest child. Although the song wasn't written until after the war, work didn't start on Abeele Aerodrome Cemetery until 1923, which explains how a quote from a post-war song can provide the inscription for a 1918 casualty.

Old pal, old gal,
You left me all alone;
Old pal, old gal, I'm just a rolling stone.
Shadows that come stealing,
Thru' the weary night;
Always find me kneeling,
In the candlelight.

Old pal, old gal,
The nights are long and drear;
Old pal, old gal,
Each day seems like a year.
No one left to meet me,
After all I've toiled;
No one here to greet me,
It's an empty world.

The long night through I pray to you,
Old pal why don't you answer me?
My arms embrace an empty space,
The arms that held you tenderly.
If you can hear my pray'r away up there;
Old pal why don't you answer me?

Words Sam M Lewis & Joe Young
Music Jerome K Jerome


OH SOLDIER SAINT
WHO PUT HIS BREAST
BETWEEN THE SPEARS AND ME

PRIVATE MAXWELL GREEN


Maxwell Green's parents have adapted a passage from Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book. During his lifetime this was Browning's best selling publication, a verse poem running to 21,000 lines. The subject of the poem is a seventeenth-century Roman murder case in which a husband is accused of killing his wife and her parents because he suspects she's been having an affair. The lines from which the inscription is taken read:

The heart and its immeasurable love
Of my one friend, my only, all my own,
Who put his breast between the spears and me.
Ever with Caponsacchi! ...
The day-star stopped its task that makes night morn!
O lover of my life, O soldier saint,
No work begun shall ever pause for death!

The murdered wife is Pompilia and the man who is accused of being her lover, Caponsacchi, did indeed love and worship her but as one might love and worship the Virgin Mary. Caponsacchi is Browning's idea of heroic manhood - passionate, earnest and good hearted.
Maxwell Green was scarecely more than a school boy. He was educated at Haberdashers' Aske. The records say that he enlisted in August 1914 and further information relates that had attended the University of London and worked in insurance. As he was only 19 when he was killed I think it's more likely that he had a place at university but joined up instead and that the reference to insurance was to his father whose business if definitely was.


HE COULD NOT HAVE HAD
A BETTER END
BUT AS WE SEE IT
IT CAME TOO SOON

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN HEWITT SUTTON MOXLY


Second Lieutenant Moxly's mother chose his inscription; it's not an uncommon one. However, John Hewitt Sutton Moxley has another epitaph, one that was written by his friend the poet Robert William Sterling:
To J.H.S.M., Killed in Action March 13, 1915.

O Brother, I have sung no dirge for thee:
Nor for all time to come
Can song reveal my grief's infinity:
The menace of thy silence made me dumb.

John Moxley was shot through the heart by a sniper as he lifted the wire on the parapet in preparation for going out to repair a forward section of the trench. The War Graves Commission gives his date of death as March 12 not 13 as in the title. Moxley and Sterling had met at Pembroke College, Oxford. They had enlisted together and had hoped to serve in the same regiment but this didn't happen. Sterling was killed six weeks after his friend.


"I WOULD NOT WISH HIM
TO A FAIRER DEATH"

CAPTAIN PERCY REED DODD


Captain Percy Dodd was killed in the first hour of the first day of the battle of Neuve Chapelle "gallantly leading his men" in an attack on the German trenches. His inscription quotes Siward, leader of the victorious English army in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Siward's son, Young Siward, is killed in the fighting. The context of the quotation gives it extra meaning.

Ross: Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier's debt: He only lived till he was but a man; the which no sooner had his prowess confirm'd in the unshrinking station where he fought, but like a man he died.
Siward: Then he is dead?
Ross: Ay, and brought off the field: your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end.
Siward: Had he his hurts before?
Ross: Ay, on the front.
Siward: Why then, God's soldier be he! Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death: And so, his knell is knoll'd.

"Had he his hurts before?" "Ay, on the front". Were his wounds on the front of his body? Yes. Young Siward, like Percy Dodd, was facing the enemy when he was killed. John Dodd, Percy's father, had been a soldier in the 78th Highlanders. Like Siward, knowing the manner of his son's death would have brought him some comfort.


IN MEMORY OF
MY DEARLY LOVED ONLY CHILD
MARYBOROUGH, VIC. A.

LANCE CORPORAL HARLEY BESWICK CROSS


"My dearly loved only child." Note that Lance Corporal Cross's father uses the word 'my' not 'our'. This is because Frederick Harley Cross was a widower and now his only child was dead.


I AM THE RESURRECTION
AND THE LIFE

LIEUTENANT HOLT MONTGOMERY HEWITT


Montgomery Hewitt was one of three brothers killed in the war. Two of them, Montogmery and his younger brother William, were killed on the same day, 1 July 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme. Only one of them, Montgomery, has a grave and was therefore able to have an inscription. The other two are commemorated on memorials to the missing, Ernest at Le Touret and William at Thiepval. The fourth brother survived the war.
The boys' parents took comfort from the words they chose for Montgomery's inscription:
"Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me , though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whoso believeth in me shall never die."
St John 11:25-6


RESURGAM

PRIVATE KENNETH POWELL


Resurgam - I will rise again - expresses the fundamental tenet of Christian belief as summarised in the Apostles Creed, "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting". Resurgam is the word Christopher Wren had carved over the south door of St Paul's Cathedral underneath a carving of a phoenix. A stone with this word on it had been found amongst the rubble after the Great Fire and Wren had placed it at the heart of the new foundations. Is this what inspired Private Powell's father, a leather merchant in the City of London, the thought of something mighty rising from ruins. Or was he thinking of the bible, Micah 7:8:
"Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise, when I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me."
Kenneth Powell, educated at Rugby and King's College, Cambridge, was an Olympic athlete - representing Britain in the hurdles in both the 1908 and 1912 Olympic Games - and a Wimbledon tennis player, competing there between 1908 and 1911 and again in 1913.
He was hit by a chance bullet on the night of 17 February whilst returning from fatigue work in the trenches. He was taken to the Field Ambulance at Loker and operated on the next morning but he died almost immediately afterwards.


"IT IS FINISHED"

PRIVATE ALFRED BURDEN


This inscription quotes Christ's last words on the cross:

"After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. ... When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost."
St John 19: 28 & 30

I wonder who the Mr Watson was who confirmed this inscription. He is neither Alfred Burden's father nor his step-father. It is difficult to decide what he meant by it. In the case of Christ it meant that his task on earth was done.


HE HUMBLED HIMSELF
BECOMING OBEDIENT UNTO DEATH

PRIVATE THOMAS PERCEVAL BLAKEMAN


This inscription quotes Philippians 2:8.

And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

The concept might have been doctrinally completely unsound but this did not stop families equating the sacrifice their menfolk had made with that of Jesus Christ. Christ had died to save mankind on the cross, these men had died to save mankind on the battlefield. Sir John Arkwright's poem, O Valiant Hearts, encouraged the view:

All you had hoped for, all you had you gave,
To save mankind - yourselves you scorned to save.
... Christ our redeemer passed the self same way.


BORN
IN BRIGHT SOUTH AUSTRALIA
DIED DOING HIS DUTY

PRIVATE WILLIAM CARL MEYER


I completely misread this inscription thinking that bright was an adjective describing South Australia. I rather liked the idea that William Meyer's parents wanted to contrast the sunny land of his birth with the rain and muddy fields of Flanders where he died. But I was completely wrong because Bright is a proper noun, the name of the town where he was born.
William Meyer's great-great niece has uploaded photographs and information about him to the RSL Virtual War Memorial, which tells us more about this farmer from the township of Hilltown, near Clare, who died in Belgium "doing his duty". However, it doesn't mention the fact that whilst he gave his religion on his enlistment papers as Methodist, his father, Johann Heinrich Friedrich Meyer, had him buried under one of the War Graves Commissions' Jewish headstones, which are clearly marked with the star of David. One has to assume from his names that Johann Meyer was of German or Austrian extraction. Is this why he emphasised his son's Australian birth and commitment to duty on his headstone?


WHAT CRUEL FOLLY IS WAR
IT ROBS US OF OUR DEAREST

PRIVATE LAURANCE HERBERT HEBDITCH


Although the War Graves Commission had given itself the right to censor inscriptions, and there is evidence in one of my previous blog posts that it did, it appears to have been happy to allow inscriptions that criticised war in general, this war in particular, and even those that questioned the cause for which men had died. Private Hebditch's father rails against war, echoing the sentiments of General William Tecumseh Sherman the Union general famous for the devastation he caused on his march through Georgia during the American Civil War, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it". And there are other inscriptions here that one might have thought the Commission considered very carefully before permitting - which to its credit it did. This list will no doubt grow as the Epitaphs of the Great War project continues.


POST TENEBRAS LUX

PRIVATE HARRY LEONARD


The Latin phrase translates as, after darkness light. It's a comforting phrase in itself, referencing the old proverb that the darkest hour is just before dawn. More particularly however, Post tenebras lux was the watchword of the sixteenth-century Reformation. It referred to the light Luther and Calvin brought to the world with their religious reforms. Private Leonard, who was born in Edinburgh, is described by his mother as a native of Auchterarder, a small town in the Scottish Highlands. Does his inscripton say something about either his or his mother's religious allegience since the Church of Scotland, the Kirk, draws its principles from Calvin's reforms?


BELOVED ONLY CHILD
WELL DONE THOU GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN BENNETT LINDLEY


John Lindley was educated at Repton, joined the Inns of Court OTC in August 1915 when he was 18, was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery and went to France on 22 May 1916, the day after his 19th birthday. He died of wounds almost a year to the day later - 19 May 1917 - having been struck on the head by a shell splinter. This information comes from the Trafford War Dead website.
His inscription comes from the parable of the talents, St Matthew 25:21:

And he also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.
His Lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.


HE LOVED DUTY
AND HE FEARED NOT DEATH

CAPTAIN BRYAN DOLPHIN PAULL


Bryan Paull left school, Charterhouse, in 1914 and enlisted immediately. He was gazetted Lieutenant in February 1915 and promoted Captain two months later. He was just 18 and one month, surely one of the youngest Captains of the war. He was 19 and 9 months when he was killed leading an attack on the German trenches in September 1916. His promotion indicates that he was a natural leader; his inscription, confirmed by his mother, that he was a brave and serious minded boy.


SANS PEUR ET SANS REPROCHE

SERJEANT JOHN STONE HEPWORTH MM


The phrase may translate simply as fearless and faultless but it resonates with associations to the Age of Chivalry. 'Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche' was the tribute attached to Pierre Terrail (1473-1524), the Chevalier Bayard, who, according to the chroniclers, was the epitome of chivalry: a brave and skillful commander and a fair and honourable foe. Association with Bayard implied piety, generosity, honour, independence, truthfulness, loyalty, courtesy, modesty, humanity and respect for women, as enumerated by Kenelm Digby in his 'Broad-Stone of Honour or Rules for the Gentlemen of England', published in 1822. The story of Bayard was given a further boost with the publication in 1911 of Christopher Hare's 'The Good Knight Without Fear Without Reproach', the title incorporating the description Bayard himself preferred. The association was a great compliment whether one was the English general Sir James Outram, hero of the Indian Mutiny, buried in Westminster Abbey under a slab inscribed with the words 'The Bayard of India', or John Hepworth, a serjeant in the Duke of Westminster's West Riding Regiment killed in the First World War.


FOND SON OF
REVD. ALFRED G AND MRS ROGERS
OF GATTON RECTORY, SURREY

MAJOR WILFRID FRANK ROGERS DSO


Educated at Charterhouse and Merton College, Oxford, Wilfrid Rogers was already serving in the Royal Field Artillery at the outbreak of war. He went to France with the Expeditionary Force in August 1914 and was severely wounded in May 1915. Two years later he was killed in action whilst in command of the 45th Battery, 42nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. After hearing the news of his death, the padre, the Revd Oswin Creighton, wrote, "The Major was one of our very best, Rogers - a young fellow of twenty-seven. I had unbounded admiration for him, and his death is a bitter blow".


SON OF MANDELL
BISHOP OF LONDON
HE THAT LOSES HIS LIFE
FOR MY SAKE, SHALL FIND IT

REVEREND OSWIN CREIGHTON


Oswin Creighton was the son of the author, academic and cleric Mandell Creighton, and his wife Louise Creighton, author and suffragist. Educated at Marlborough and Keble College, Oxford, Oswin was ordained in 1907 and went to work in Canada, which is where he was when the war broke out. It was his mother who chose his inscription since his father, Mandell Creighton, died in 1901. Two years after her son's death, Louise Creighton edited and published a collected edition of Oswin's letters, The Letters of Oswin Creighton. Oswin returned from Canada on the outbreak of war, joined the Army Chaplains' Department and sailed to Gallipoli in March 1915. After the evacuation he spent some time in England before going to France in November 1916. Extracts from his letters chart his changing attitude to the war over three and a half years.

5 August 1914
I expect it may sound foolish my wishing to get back so much. There is nothing I could do, I suppose; but England is my home and I just feel I want to be there.

10 August 1914
There is no doubt England has made herself exeedingly popular. They [Canadians and Americans] feel she is democracy's and liberty's great champion in Europe.

25 September 1914
The more one thinks, the more utterly futile the whole war seems. What has anyone to gain? Why cannot it all be stopped? To what purpose is this waste?

21 October 1914
On the whole there is a calm sense of determination and readiness for any sacrifice, which is very beautiful. It seems impossible to be selfish, and one feels the greatness of England and all that she stands for ...

13 April 1915
I am afraid that when I next write, it will in all probability be a letter giving rather different experiences. There is a tremendously tough time ahead, of that there can be no doubt. Most of the officers seem to take it for granted that they are going to be killed. However, they are quite cheerful about it.

28 April 1915
The fighting started on Sunday morning and has been raging ever since. We have been watching it three miles out to sea for four days now, and have practically no news, beyond the apparently only too certain fact that my two particular regiments [Royal Fusiliers and Lancashire Fusiliers] have been absolutely cut to pieces.

5 May 1915
The strange thing I find is that I am really extremely happy. There is more goodness and true unselfishness and seriousness about on this Peninsular than there is at a race meeting for instance.

14 June 1915
Many of his remaining friends having been killed in a recent battle, Oswin became critical of the way the British effort was being managed. At this time he was working with a field ambulance 500 yards from the front in a narrow gully, Aberdeen Gully, helping the wounded and taking funerals.

19 July 1915
Oswin was in hospital with diptheria.

31 October 1915 back in Gallipoli
What makes Englishmen so stupid? As I sit at my coffee bar and chat with some of the men in the endless line that passes, I always find the Colonial so far quicker and more intelligent, much more of a man. I cannot say I am impressed with the intelligence of Englishmen. Brains are the want out here from top to bottom, ordinary average brains and common sense; and the Colonials have them, but they're not used.

5 December 1915
Oswin is very disillusioned that so little has been done to prepare for the terrible cold of the Peninsular winter, the freezing temperatures, biting winds, snow and ice. Soon after this he was evacuated with jaundice, just before the entire Peninsular was evacuated. He spent most of 1916 in England and then in November was sent to France with an artillery division.

29 May 1917 Arras
When I went to Gallipoli war was new and its experiences had a certain amount of excitement. Now it has become an occupation, and it has a deadening, coarsening effect and one seems to lose interest in most things. More and more the world seems to have lost its charm and to offer little worth living for. Often I have thought that the simplest solution to its many insoluble problems would be to be blown to pieces. ... When you see a lot of people being killed you seem to lose interest in the real world.

28 August 1917
I think the main thing you at home have to realise is that the effects of this war are almost entirely negative. We are strangely disillusioned. I get quite alarmed at the extent of my disillusionment.

10 December 1917
Why can't we hurry peace up. The whole war is really too impossible. We cannot hope to destroy Germany without destroying ourselves, and why go on destroying each other.

20 March 1918
Personally I am enjoying life. We have had no casualties this year. The men are all very comfortable. The weather has been simply wonderful until yesterday when the rain started, and has been going on ever since ...

21 March 1918
The day after this letter, the Germans launched their Spring Offensive along the Western Front, pushing all before them with huge casualties. The German assault was so strong and so successful that many thought the war would soon be over and Germany would have won. Oswin was tremendously proud of the splendid response of all the men in his Division but was still not reconciled to war.

31 March 1918
I can only feel all the more the utter stupidity and imbecility of it all, the way so many men have to put all their energies and strength into such terribly futile things. After all, what can war decide? How hateful it all is.

3 April 1918
The old truth comes back that at whatever cost one must, regardless of all else, cling to the truth, and if possible, friendship.

9 April 1918
The war is to decide for all time whether the superman idea or the democratic is stronger.

Oswin was killed, 'blown to pieces', on 13 April in a massive German bombardment.

Oswin's headstone inscription, like the dedication his mother chose for the book, quotes St Matthew 10:39, which in context reads:

And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.
He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.


OH BERTIE DARLING
HOW WE MISS YOU

PRIVATE DONALD ROBERT ROSS THOMSON


Nineteen-year-old Donald Robert Ross Thomson, 'Bertie', was the seventh of ten children of Donald and Margaret Thomson, of Govanhill, Glasgow. There were twenty years between the children. Bertie died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Bethune. It was his mother who confirmed his inscription on the War Grave Commission's form - a touching lament for her lost child.


AT EVENING TIME
IT SHALL BE LIGHT

LIEUTENANT COLONEL HERBERT CECIL BULLER DSO


This inscription quotes Zechariah 14:7. When the day of the Lord comes, the last day, the day of judgement, "it shall be one day which shall be known to the Lord, not day nor night: but it shall come to pass, that at evening time it shall be light.
This may be the origin of the inscription but the source is probably the hymn called 'At Evening time it shall be light'. Five of the six verses end with this refrain and verse 2 offers the comforting promise that:

Thy morning may be overcast -
Clouds may obscure the brightest sky;
The gath'ring storm may burst at last -
But, O, take courage, God is nigh -
His promise puts all fears to flight
"At evening time it shall be light".

Henry Buller was one of the five sons of Admiral Sir Alexander Buller. A serving soldier before the outbreak of war, he was promoted to command Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry on the death of his comanding officer in March 1915. In May that year he was badly wounded, losing an eye, but returned to his command and was killed on 2 June 1916 in the German attack on Canadian positions at Mount Sorrel. Three Canadian lieutenant-colonels and one major general were among the huge casualties suffered by the Canadians that day.


SAY NOT GOODNIGHT
BUT IN SOME FAIRER CLIME
BID ME GOOD-MORN

LANCE CORPORAL EDWARD BODEL


Edward Bodel's inscription quotes 'Life', a poem written by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), or rather it nearly quotes it. I imagine there was no poetry book to hand and this is how the family remembered the lines. Barbauld was a very popular poet in the early years of the 19th century. In 'Life' she lightly questions what exactly life is:

Life! I know not what thou art,
But know that thou and I must part;
And when, or how we met,
I own to me's a secret yet.

Bodel's inscription comes from the final verse:

Life! we've been long together
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear;
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not Good night, but in some brighter clime
Bid me Good morning.

Edward Bodel was born in Shankill, Co. Antrim and lived in Belfast. He joined the army in 1905 when he was 19 and in 1911 was serving with the 6th Dragoons in India.


LET THOSE WHO COME AFTER
SEE TO IT THAT HIS NAME
BE NOT FORGOTTEN

SERJEANT DANIEL SMITH


Not only did the relatives of the dead receive a memorial plaque and a letter from the King but also a memorial scroll. The wording on the scroll had been very difficult to compose: Rudyard Kipling, Montague Rhodes James and King George V all made their suggestions. Charles Keary finally modified the last lines, changing them from, "The remembrance of them shall long be honoured in the land which they loved and died to save," to, "Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten". Judging by their popularity as an inscription, the words obviously struck the right cord. The whole scroll reads:

He whom this scroll commemorates was numbered among those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom
Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.

There is an excellent article on the plaque, letter and scroll at www.greatwar.co.uk


OUR DADDY, HIS YOUNG LIFE
GAVE FOR OTHERS
MAGGIE, TILLIE, SAM NELSON

SAPPER WILLIAM ROBERT NELSON


A letter from the King accompanied every memorial plaque sent out to the next-of-kin of the dead. Under the royal coat of arms and the address, Buckingham Palace, the letter read:
I join with my grateful people in sending you this memorial of a brave life given for others in the Great War.
The letter was then signed with a facsimile signature of George R.I.
Sapper Nelson's family would have received one of these plaques, perhaps it inspired the inscription composed by his wife, Maggie, and the children Tillie and Sam.


HE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR

CORPORAL ARTHUR MCINTYRE


Many families chose this inscription since it had the sanction of officialdom. These were the words the Government chose for the memorial plaque they wanted given to every man or woman whose death was attributable to their war service. The general design of the plaque was put out to competition but the wording was not open to negotiation - he or she were to have died for freedom and honour.
More than 800 people submitted designs and the winner was Edward Carter Preston, a painter, sculptor and medallist from Liverpool. I hadn't realised before that the competition and therefore the winning design predates the end of the war, Britain hadn't won, in fact the day after the results of the competition were announced the Germans launched their Spring Offensive and many feared that Britain might be on the brink of defeat. Britannia with her laurel wreath honours the dead not victory, the dolphins represent the navy and the lion Britain itself. No wonder the small lion savaging the eagle at the base of the plaque is so small, there could be no triumphalism because there wasn't yet any victory.


HE WENT
KNOWING HE WOULD NOT RETURN

PRIVATE ARCHIBALD GRAY HOSKING


Archibald Hosking was a sheep grazier and wheelwright in Queensland. Despite believing that he would not return, Archibald Hosking was a volunteer, there was no conscription in Australia. He enlisted on 26 April 1916, embarked for France on 7 September 1916 and died of wounds in a base hospital in Rouen on 20 May 1917.


M.A. BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD
VICAR OF RANDFONTEIN
TRANSVAAL

PRIVATE THOMAS GRAY HOPKYNS


The Reverend Thomas Gray Hopkyns was the Vicar of Randfontein, a gold-mining community in the Transvaal. In 1917 he enlisted in the South African Infantry and served as a stretcher bearer with the South African Medical Corps. He was killed in action whilst on stretcher-bearing duties.
His father was the vicar of Long Wittenham in Oxfordshire. There is a stained glass window in the church commemorating both father and son, which shows soldiers receiving communion at the front. This would indicate that Thomas Hopkyns acted as a priest as well as a stretcher bearer. His headstone inscription shows the importance his parents placed on the fact that their son should be known as more than simply a private in the South African Infantry.


LATE CABINET MAKER
& NEWSAGENT, BOLTON RD.
DARWEN, LANCASHIRE

PRIVATE AMOS TAYLOR


It was important to Amos Taylor's mother, a widow, that she recorded her son's occupations and his place of work on his headstone. They had been his father's occupations too but her husband, Richard, had been dead since before the 1891 census was taken.


A PURE KNIGHT OF GOD

SECOND LIEUTENANT GEORGE GORDON WATTS


It was Sir Galahad who was the perfect knight, who in Tennyson's poem could boast:
My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.
It was because he was the perfect knight that he was permitted to achieve the grail quest. And it was as a pure knight that he died having achieved it.
Lieutenant Watts' father specifically uses the term 'knight' to describe his son, but the inscription definitely has resonances of Christ's teaching at the Sermon on the Mount:
Blest are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Matthew 5:8
George Watts is commemorated on his parents' headstone in Payneham Cemetery, Adelaide with the inscription: 'A true knight of God'.


ATTIRED IN SUDDEN BRIGHTNESS
LIKE A MAN INSPIRED

SECOND LIEUTENANT TRICE MARTIN


In his poem, 'The Character of the Happy Warrior', published in 1807, William Wordsworth enumerated the qualities of the soldiers on whom the security of Great Britain depended during the Napoleonic Wars. One hundred and ten years later he could have been describing the young men on whom Britain's security again depended.
Second Lieutenant Martin's inscription quotes Wordsworth's poem and can perhaps be best understood by reading the rest of the section in which it appeared. In answer to the the question, 'Who is the Happy Warrior? Who is he whom every man in arms should wish to be?' Wordsworth enumerated his numerous qualities, which included:
... who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which heaven has join'd
Great issues, good or bad for human-kind,
Is happy as a Lover; and attired
With sudden brightness like a Man inspired;
And through the heat of conflict keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw;
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need:

The lines had a great resonance with the soldiers of the First World War, as can be seen by the following letter, which Second Lieutenant Alexander Gillespie wrote to his father on the eve of an attack.

Trenches: September 24 1915
My Dear Daddy,
... Before long I think we shall be in the thick of it, for if we do attack, my company will be one of those in front, and I am likely to lead it; not because I have been specially chosen for that, but because someone must lead, and I have been in the company the longest. I have no forebodings, for I feel that so many of my friends will charge by my side, and if a man's spirit may wander back at all, especially to the places where he is needed most, then Tom himself will be here to help me ...
It will be a great fight, and even when I think of you, I would not wish to be out of this. You remember Wordsworth's 'Happy Warrior':
Who if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad, for human kind,
Is happy as a lover, and is attired
With sudden brightness like a man inspired.
Well, I never could be all a happy warrior should be, but it will please you to know that I am very happy, and whatever happens, you will remember that. Well, anything one writes at a time like this seems futile, because the tongue of man can't say all that he feels - but I thought I would send this scribble with my love to you and Mother.
Always your loving
Bey

'Bey', Alexander Gillespie, was killed the next day. His body was never found and he is commemorated on the Loos Memorial, hence he has no grave and no inscription. The Tom he refers to was his brother, Lieutenant Thomas Gillespie, who was killed in action on 18 October 1914 and also has no grave.


DIED OF WOUNDS
RECEIVED IN THE BATTLE
OF NEUVE-CHAPELLE
R.I.P.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL LAURENCE FLETCHER-ROWE


Laurence Fisher-Rowe was the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards when he was wounded by a bullet on 12 March 1915 during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. He died in a Casualty Clearing Station in Estaires the next day. The Imperial War Museum has a collection of his private papers containing letters and diaries, which record, among other things, the Christmas Truce of 1914. There is also a collection of letters from his wife describing the difficult journey she made across France in March 1919 to visit her husband's grave. Laurence Fisher-Rowe was always known as 'The Old Friend', which is how he is described on his memorial in Sherborne Abbey.


SEVENTH BARONET
OF BREAMORE HOUSE, HANTS
KILLED AT NEUVE CHAPELLE
12TH MARCH 1915. AGE 25

CAPTAIN SIR EDWARD HAMILTON WESTROW HULSE


Sir Edward Hulse, his parents' only son, inherited the baronetcy in 1903 at the age of 13, after his father killed himself. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards in 1912 and went with them to France in August 1914, transferring to the Scots Guards in November. He was killed during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle.
In a letter of condolence to Sir Edward's mother, Lieutenant Archibald Jarvis, as the senior surviving officer in the company, described what happened.
'We were attacking a position held by the enemy and had to cross some open plough to get into some support trenches, and while doing so the Commanding Officer, Major Paynter, who was directing the operations, was badly wounded and lay in the open. Slightly before he was struck, your son had gained cover behind a shallow trench, and upon learning that the Commanding Officer was hit, without hesitation went to see if he could render him any assistance, and in so doing was killed. He died instantly and suffered no pain whatever.'
In 1916, Sir Edward's mother privately printed a collection of her son's letters, 'Letters written from the English front in France between September 1914 and March 1915' . These include one written on 28 December (28/11/14) describing in detail Sir Edward's experience of the Christmas truce.


YOUNGEST SON OF THE
DUKE AND DUCHESS DE STACPOOLE
CO. GALWAY
R.I.P.

SECOND LIEUTENANT RODERICK ALGERNON ANTHONY DE STACPOOLE


... the whole brigade felt the loss of that dear spirited boy, de Stacpoole, a charming youngster, almost a child, with the face of a girl and the heart of a hero. He was killed carrying wire across an open and fire-swept field, leaving his men under cover, and doing the most dangerous work himself.' So wrote one of Roderick (Roddy) de Stacpoole's senior officers in a letter to his wife. Major Head, another officer, reported how he had had de Stacpoole's body brought back to the Battery for burial, recording that his grave "is on the south side of the Rue du Bacquerat, 300 yards NE of Rouge Croix crossroads on the main Estaires - La Bassee road". The Grave Registration Unit later marked the grave with a wooden cross and recorded the map reference - SH 36/M.21.d.9.1. On 12 July 1920 Roddy's body was disinterred and reburied in Pont-du-Hem Military Cemetery.
Roddy de Stacpoole was the youngest of the five sons of the Duke de Stacpoole, an Irish Catholic title awarded by the Pope in 1830. All five served in the war and Roddy's elder brother, Robert, was killed on the Aisne on 20 September 1914.


GLAD DID HE LIVE
AND GLADLY DIED
AND HE LAID HIM DOWN
WITH A WILL

CAPTAIN RICHARD JOHN CLARKE


On 10 March 1915 the British army launched its first major planned offensive against the German lines. Soldiers from the Indian Army made up half the attacking force and suffered heavy casualties, the 39th Garhwal Rifles losing four officers and 120 men that day.
Captain Richard John Clarke, the son of Major Charles James Clarke, Royal Engineers, was born in Sydney, Australia in 1879. In 1911 he was serving with the 8th Rajputs in Hong Kong, and in 1914 he was in Peshawar. He was killed leading a frontal attack on the German trenches.
His inscription is adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson's poem, Requiem, which is inscribed on Stevenson's own grave in Samoa.

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and glady die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.


WE STILL LOVE HIM DEARLY

SAPPER WG ARMSTRONG


Sapper Armstrong came from Oakenshaw, a small colliery village in Co. Durham. His mother was a widow. I think I've found him in the census: his Christian names were William George, the same as his father. His father was a miner and William George, the son, was quite possibly one too. I hope the Joseph Robert Armstrong killed in a mining accident at the colliery - crushed by a pit wagon - was no relation, but in a small community it's likely that he was.
William Armstrong was killed in April 1915. In 1919 his body was disinterred from its orginal grave and reburied in Ypres Town Cemetery Extension. It wouldn't have been until at least then that Mrs Armstrong was asked to finalise her choice of inscription, probably later. Her son had been dead more than four years, but as she was happy to declare for all to read, 'We still love him dearly'.


ONE OF NATURE'S GENTLEMEN

PRIVATE FREDERICK HENRY EDWARDS


What or who is a gentleman? It was a question that much preoccupied earlier generations. To the American president Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), a gentleman's qualities were best summarised by Psalm 15:

He that walketh uprightly and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart.
He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour,
In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.
He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved.

The Victorian author Samuel Smiles (1812-1904), in his immensely popular book 'Self-Help: with illustrations of character and conduct' (1859), devoted a whole chapter to the definition of the true gentleman. To Smiles his qualities did not depend on fashion or manners but on moral worth, not on personal possessions but on personal qualities. Smiles agreed with Jefferson that a gentleman was one "that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart."

Gentlemen were always assumed to have acquired their 'superior' manners and general demeanour from generations of 'good' breeding, something those born to a more lowly station in life could therefore never emulate. But Smiles was adamant:

Riches and rank have no necessary connection with genuine gentlemanly qualities. The poor man may be a true gentleman, - in spirit and in daily life. He may be honest, truthful, upright, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting, and self-helping, - that is, be a true gentleman'.
Self-Help Chapter XIII.28

Such a man would be 'one of nature's gentlemen', someone who although he'd had none of the gentleman's advantages of birth had all his qualities: honesty, integrity, good manners etc. Mrs Dinah Mulock Craik's 'John Halifax, Gentleman', published in 1856, was one such person. Halifax, an orphan, made his way in life through honesty, initiative and hard work. The Scotsman's review described him as 'one of nature's own nobility'. Halifax says of himself, 'If there was one point I was anxious over in my youth, it was to keep up through life a name like the Chevalier Bayard - how folk would smile to hear of a tradesman emulating Bayard - 'Sans peur et sans reproche!' (Without fear and without blame).

Frederick Henry Edwards is difficult to find in the census record, only appearing in 1891 as a six-year-old scholar living with his grandparents in Garston, Liverpool, where his grandfather was a dock labourer.


"AN IRISH VOLUNTEER"
HE DIED FOR THE FREEDOM
OF SMALL NATIONS

CORPORAL JOHN GEORGE DUNLEA


This is an interesting inscription that declares John Dunlea's political allegiance for all who can read it. The first clue comes from the inverted commas round the words 'An Irish volunteer'. They indicate that whilst Dunlea may well have volunteered for the British army on the outbreak of war he was already a member of the Irish Volunteers, a paramilitary organization formed in 1913 in response to the formation of the Ulster Volunteers: the former, largely Roman Catholic and from the south, were supporters of Irish Home Rule and the latter, Protestants from the north, fiercely opposed it.
When the war broke out, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond, recommended that the best way to ensure the enactment of the Home Rule Bill was for those in favour of it to support Britain in her struggle against Germany and join the British army. British gratitude would secure Irish Home Rule. Redmond also argued that these soldiers would be fighting for the freedom of all small nations like themselves; nations like Belgium and Serbia whose independence had been violated by the German and Austro-Hungarian armies.


LALA-GAHLE, UMTA-GWETU
PRO ARIS ET FOCIS

SECOND LIEUTENANT AYLMER TEMPLAR WALES


The word typed onto the form is definitely 'gahle' but I wonder if it was a mistake and the word should have been 'kahle'. I believe that the first line of this inscription is written in Zulu in which language lala-kahle means something like Goodnight or perhaps even rest in peace. However, I've no idea what 'umta-gwetu' means, if indeed this is what it's meant to say.
The second line of the inscription is the Latin motto of Maritzburg College, Aylmer Wales's school in Pietermartzburg, Natal. It comes from Cicero's De Natura Deorum 111.94 and translates as, for our altars and fires. This of course means much more than just altars and fires, it is what the Romans held most sacred, most worth defending, the equivalent of hearth and home, King and country.
Second Lieutenant Wales was 'commissioned in the field' just before his death. This meant that he was identified as officer material and promoted without returning to Britain for officer training. His father, Lieutenant Colonel ATG Wales, makes a point of mentioning this in the War Cemtery Register. Aylmer Wales was killed in Deville Wood where the South African Brigade suffered huge casualties during the Battle of the Somme.
Thanks to Stuart Sinclair I now know that the Zulu translates as 'Goodnight, sleep well'. The difference between ghale and kahle being explained by the transliteration of the Zulu words into Roman characters. Thank you!


'IF WE ARE MARKED TO DIE
WE ARE ENOUGH
TO DO OUR COUNTRY LOSS'
HENRY V

PRIVATE JOHN HENRY RAYNER


John Henry Rayner, a warehouseman from Islington, was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme. His parents' inscription quotes Shakespeare's Henry V on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. The King, overhearing the Earl of Westmoreland lament the fact that the English army is so small, tells him that he would not wish for one man more: if they are all about to die then there are quite enough of them to "do our country loss", but if they are about to live then there will be fewer people to have share the honour with. This is the beginning of Henry's famous St Crispin's Day speech in which he assures his listeners that "From this day to the ending of the world", we will all be remembered: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers".


FAR DISTANT, FAR DISTANT
LIES SCOTIA THE BRAVE
HERE LIES A TRUE HIGHLANDER

DRIVER HECTOR MACMILLAN


Hector Macmillan's inscription comes from the first line of a traditional Scottish song, 'Jamie Foyers'.

Far distant, far distant, lies Scotia the brave,
No tombstone memorial shall hallow his grave,
His bones they are scattered on the rude soil of Spain,
For young Jamie Foyers in the battle was slain.

Jamie Foyers was a real soldier from Campsie in Stirlingshire who died fighting in the Duke of Wellington's army at the seige of Burgos in 1812. Hector Macmillan was, as his parents said, a true highlander, a native of Campbeltown despite the fact that at the time of his death the family were living in Cambuslang, a suburb of Glasgow. He enlisted in August 1914 at the outbreak of war and died at Delville Wood during the Battle of the Somme.


BELOVED ONLY CHILD OF
RN AND MRS WEEKES
OF MODBURY DEVON

SECOND LIEUTENANT REGINALD PENKIVIL OLIVE WEEKES


Nineteen-year-old Reginald Weekes, 10th Squadron RFC, was 'killed in aerial action returning from a bombing expedition'. His father, Captain Reginald Newton Weekes RAMC, was also serving in the war, as a surgeon at the 1st Southern General Hospital in Birmingham. I find it interesting when families feel the need to record who the casualty was in terms of their relationship with him, and to say where he lived. All this is recorded in the cemetery register; but not, I suppose, the fact that he was 'beloved' and not that he was his parents' 'only' child. For Captain and Mrs Weekes these were important details.


DEARLY BELOVED SON OF
MR AND MRS SMITH
POST OFFICE, KEOSE, STORNOWAY

PRIVATE RODERICK SMITH


Keose is a crofting township on the Isle of Lewis where Angus and Alexanderina Smith opened a Post Office in 1901. They had twelve children of whom Roderick was one. Before joining up, he had moved away from Stornoway and was working in the drapery trade in South Wales. Soon after he arrived at the front he was wounded in the right hand, which necessitiated the amputation of a finger. He worked for a time as a clerk behind the lines before returning to active service where he was injured and died of wounds whilst being transported to hospital.


ALAS THAT SPRING
SHOULD VANISH WITH THE ROSE
THAT YOUTH'S SWEET SCENTED
MANUSCRIPT SHOULD CLOSE

SECOND LIEUTENANT WARREN KEMP FENN-SMITH


This beautiful, melancholy inscription comes from Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which dwells at length on the transient nature of all things. Warren Fenn-Smith was 18 when his plane was shot down. Lieutenant Seton Montgomerie's diary records the details:
'Fenn-Smith and Cornforth shot down at 10.25 near Hulluck but in our lines. Both killed, probably a shot from the ground or may have been two Huns – fire broke out, and bombs went off. Smith had one of our machines and nearly took mine as his own flight was short of machines'. The next day Montgomerie records matter-of-factly that he 'went to Smith and Cornforth's funerals at Chocques in the afternoon'.


ALWAYS UPRIGHT AND TRUTHFUL

PRIVATE ALEXANDER YOUNG FARQUHAR


One can still sense the pride with which Private Farquhar's father chose the words for his son's grave: 'Always upright and truthful', the words having a resonance beyond their dictionary definition. Psalm 15, known as the Gentleman's psalm, asks, 'Lord who shall abide in Thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in Thy holy hill?' And the answer is, 'He that walketh in righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart'. This was a theme taken up by Samuel Smiles in his immensely popular and influential book, 'Self Help', first published in 1859.
Chapter XIII.28 'Riches and rank have no necessary connection with genuine gentlemanly qualities. The poor man may be a true gentleman, - in spirit and in daily life. He may be honest, truthful, upright, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting, and self-helping, - that is, be a true gentleman'.


E'EN AS HE TROD
THAT DAY TO GOD
SO WALKED HE FROM HIS BIRTH
IN GENTLENESS AND SIMPLENESS
AND HONOUR AND CLEAN MIRTH

SECOND LIEUTENANT ALGERNON PERCY CLARKE


Algernon Percy Clarke was killed by a German shell that burst in the room where he and two other officers were resting. His brother Harold Percival Clarke had been killed ten weeks earlier on the 9 May. Harold has no grave and is commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial.
Algernon's inscription comes from Dedication, one of Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads. In the realm of the dead -

'Beyond the path of the outmost sun through utter darkness hurled -
Further than ever comet flared or vagrant star-dust swirled -
Live such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world.'

These dead have been 'cleansed of base Desire, Sorrow and Lust and Shame', but the latest to join their number came just as he had been on earth -

'He scarce had need to doff his pride or slough the dross of Earth -
E'en as he trod that day to God so walked he from his birth,
In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth.'


LIFE IS ETERNAL
AND LOVE IS IMMORTAL
AND DEATH IS ONLY A HORIZON

LIEUTENANT GUY JOHN HAMILTON ASHWIN


Lieutenant Ashwin was killed in the Durham Light Infantry's attempt to capture the Butte de Warlencourt, which they succeeded temporarily in doing only to be driven off again with huge casualties. The Butte is thought to have been a prehistoric burial mound, several hundred feet high, which gave the possessors a strategic advantage over the flat land around. It was not captured until February 1917.
Guy Ashwin's inscription is a line from a prayer written by William Penn (1644-1718), the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania. The prayer was later modified by an American writer, Rossiter W Raymond (1840-1918), and it is to him that the Internet usually attributes the authorship.

We seem to give them back to Thee, O God, who gavest them to us. Yet, as thou didst not lose them in giving, so do we not lose them by their return. Not as the world giveth, givest Thou, O Lover of Souls. What Thou givest, Thou takest not away. For what is Thine is ours also if we are Thine. And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. Lift us up, strong Son of God, that we may see further; cleanse our eyes that we may know ourselves to be nearer to our loved ones who art with Thee. And while Thou dost prepare a place for us, prepare us also for that happy place, that where Thou art we may be also for evermore.


'TWERE DISHONOUR TO YIELD
OR THE BATTLE TO SHUN

SERJEANT JAMES HENRY WELLS


Serjeant Wells' inscription comes from the penultimate verse of the martial-sounding hymn, 'We Are Soldiers of Christ': soldiers in the battle against "satan, the flesh and the world".

Now let each cheer his comrade, let hearts beat as one
While we follow where Christ leads the way;
'Twere dishonour to yield, or the battle to shun,
We will fight, we will watch, we will pray.


RELIGION CHURCH OF IRELAND
AN IRISHMAN LOYAL TO DEATH
TO KING AND COUNTRY

PRIVATE WALTER MCCLEAN MURRAY


From his inscription it can be no surprise that Walter Murray, who came from Rockcorry, Co. Monaghan, belonged to a battalion made up largely of men from the Ulster Volunteers, which had been formed in 1912 to resist Home Rule for Ireland. His inscription could stand for that of all Ulster Unionists who were fiercely loyal to the Protestant Church and to the British Crown and deeply opposed to an independent Ireland.


A SON OF THE PERTHSHIRE MOUNTAINS
LIES HERE

PRIVATE GEORGE LYALL MCLAUCHLAN MM


George McLauchlan emigrated to Canada in April 1910 at the age of 32. He enlisted in British Columbia in April 1915 and died of "shrapnel wounds, neck" in a base hospital in Boulogne on 16 April 1917. McLauchlan came from Struan, a small community in Perthshire. It was his brother, Alex, seven years older than him and an inspector on the Government railways in Ceylon, who chose his inscription. There's something rather moving about Alex in Ceylon remembering their Perthshire home on his brothers' headstone inscription in France.


WE HONOR YOUR NAME
UNCLE, AUNTIE, HARRY, DOROTHY

PRIVATE LESLIE HUDSON


Leslie Hudson, born in 1895, was the adopted son of William George Hardham and his first wife Lizzie Sarah Barrett. In 1905 the three of them emigrated to Canada, where Lizzie died in 1908. The following year William Hardham married Edith Amy Barrass and they had two children: Harry born in 1910 and Dorothy in 1912. It was William Hardham who chose Leslie Hudson's inscription and who would therefore presumably have been 'Uncle', 'Auntie' would have been Edith, and Harry and Dorothy their two children - none of them any blood relation to Leslie.
Leslie Hudson's origins are a bit of a mystery. He was born in Erpingham, Norfolk in 1895. In the 1901 census he's living as a five-year-old boarder with William and Lizzie Hardman, in 1905 he's listed with them on the passenger list of the SS Tunisian on its way to Quebec. I thought at one time that he could have been Lizzie Sarah's illigitimate son but as he was born after she and William were married that doesn't appear to be likely. His epitaph, however, anchor's him firmly within a family circle - his name honored.


FELL IN A RIGHTEOUS CAUSE
AN ENGLISHMAN AND A JEW

PRIVATE ALBERT LAPPIN


There were many Jews in Britain, especially in London, who had no desire to fight in an army that was allied to Russia. Their families were the victims of Russian Jewish pogroms and Russia was the enemy. The consequent low recruitment figures in Jewish areas fanned the endemic anti-semitism present in some sectors of British society. This was fueled by the suspicion that Jews, who spoke Yiddish, an Eastern European dialiect of German, and who had German sounding surnames, were all potential spies.
There were however many Jews who felt grateful to Britain for giving them shelter, and others who had been in Britain since the seventeenth century and felt totally assimilated. Once conscription was introduced it is calculated that 41,000 Jewish soldiers served out of a population of only 280,000.
Albert Lappin lived in Stamford Hill, which is now home to the largest Hasidic community in Europe. By the beginning of the twentieth century prosperous Jews were beginning to move there from the East End of London and Albert's father lived in a substantial three-story house in Osbaldeston Road. I know nothing of their family history, whether they were refugees from Russia or had been in Britain a long time, but in the inscription Albert's father chose for his son he allies himself with Britain's cause, identifies his son as an Englishman but doesn't deny his Jewish faith - a simple inscription that speaks volumes.


SON OF GEORGE SOMES LAYARD
"ENAMOURED OF LIFE
HE WENT LAUGHING
INTO THE ARMS OF DEATH"

LIEUTENANT PETER CLEMENT LAYARD


George Somes Layard was a well-known writer and this inscription is a quotation from the book he wrote about his son, 'Peter Clement Layard,Extracts from his Letters with a Character Sketch by his Father'. Father, having given himself prominence on his son's headstone, dedicates the book to, "Peter's mother, for of all people in the world he loved her best". George Somes Layard gives numerous instances of Peter's exhuberant approach to life, and of his demonstrative temperament, but as for actually going "laughing into the arms of death" ... Peter was returning over the ground he and his men had covered during an attack to see if he could find any of his wounded men when he was shot dead by a sniper.


SADLY DISFIGURED
'TWAS FOR THE BEST
DAD

LANCE SERJEANT PERCY WILLIAM STAUNTON


The acceptance of fate comes in many forms. Previous epitaphs have been 'Kismet', 'Thy will be done' and 'Whatever is is best', but this is different. The inscription is signed Dad, Staunton's mother was dead, and Dad is tantamount to welcoming his son's death: 'Twas for the best'.
There's no indication what Percy Staunton's injuries were but the word his father used is 'disfigured' not wounded and that implies facial injuries. We don't need to imagine what this might mean, the work of Henry Tonks shows us only too clearly what some men suffered. Tonks, a surgeon and an artist, worked with the plastic surgeon Harold Gillies drawing soldiers' facial injuries that were both deeply humane and unsparing in their detail.
Staunton is buried in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, where the London hospitals buried their dead. He may well have been one of Gillies' patients.

[With thanks to Dr Andrew Bamji, Gillies Archivist, Royal College of Surgeons - site currently being rebuilt]


ALL THAT HE HAD HE GAVE
TO SAVE MANKIND
HIMSELF HE SCORNED TO SAVE

CAPTAIN JOHN FRANCIS


Captain John Francis's inscription comes from the second verse of Sir John Arkwright's 1919 poem O Valiant Hearts which, set to music, became a very popular remembrance hymn until it fell out of fashion.

Proudly you gathered rank on rank for war,
As who had heard God's message from far;
All you had hoped for, all you had you gave
To save mankind, yourselves you scorned to save.

John Francis, educated at Uppingham and Gottingen in Germany, was a director in the family jewellery firm of Deakin and Francis in Birmingham. He joined a territorial battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1907 and volunteered for foreign service on the outbreak of the war. He crossed to France on 5 March and was killed by a sniper just over three months later.
Originally buried in Rosenberg Chateau Military Cemetery, Captain Francis and the rest of the 475 soldiers buried there were exhumed in 1930 when the owner of the chateau decided, despite pleas from the highest level for the bodies not to be disturbed, that he wanted to rebuild his house and that the military cemetery "would detract from the amenities of his home". It was something of a cause celebre, and very distressing for the relatives, but The Times reported that "each body, as it was reverently taken from the earth, was placed in a coffin draped with a Union Jack and removed by motor ambulance to Berks Cemetery Extension".


O GOD OUR HELP IN AGES PAST

PRIVATE GEORGE HERBERT HAYWARD


Private George Herbert Hayward, a pawnbroker's warehouseman in civilian life, died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Bailleul on 12 July 1917. In October 1915 he had married Anne Catherine Varley and it was she who chose his inscription. It is the the first line of a very popular hymn:
O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.


HERE LIES GRIT

PRIVATE ALFRED HARDING


Alfred Harding was a general labourer from Sussex. His brother Edgar, three years younger than him, chose his inscription. Grit, it's an unsophisticated word but we know what it means: courage, resolve, strength of character.


A MOTHER'S DARLING

CORPORAL WILLIAM JOHN SAVAGE


William Savage was a 25 year old labourer from Port Adelaide, South Australia who enlisted when the 27th Battalion was formed there in March 1915. The Battalion went to Gallipoli in September 1915 and then to France early in 1916. Savage was killed in their final action of the war, the attempt to break the Beaurevoir Line, Germany's last line of defence, the last strand of the Hindenburg Line. The fighting was ferocious despite the fact, or maybe because of the fact, that the end for Germany was so near. Savage was killed on the 3rd and the line was finally broken late on the evening of the 5th. With the Hindenburg Line breached, the high ground behind it captured, the ground before the Allies now lay open before them.
The war was virtually over but Mrs Savage's 'darling' was dead. I love these simple, unsophisticated inscriptions, they are so eloquent. The War Grave Commission's records indicate that both William Savage's parents were still alive but it is as his mother's darling that he is commemorated.


AN AMERICAN CITIZEN

SECOND LIEUTENANT HARRY A BUTTERS


American born, of English, Scottish, Irish and French ancestry, Harry Butters decided the moment war broke out that the Allied cause was just and that he was going to fight for it, regardless of America's strict policy of neutrality. He arrived in Britain early in 1915 and enlisted in the British army. By September 1915 he was in France taking part in the battle of Loos, after which he wrote home:

"I find myself a soldier among millions of others in the great Allied Armies, fighting for all I believe to be right and civilized and humane against a power which is evil and which threatens the existence of all the rights we prize and the freedom we enjoy, although some of you in California as yet fail to realise it. ...but I tell you that not only am I willing to give my life to this enterprise ... but I firmly believe ... that never will I have an opportunity to gain so much honorable advancement for my own soul, or to do so much for the world's progress ...".

After nine months at the front, at the end of May 1916, his observation post received a direct hit and there were many casualties among his men. Suffering from shell shock he was posted to the ammunition column operating behind the lines. Ten days before his death he wrote to the Army Chaplain asking him "if I should happen to get wiped out" to write to his sister as she was "mother, sister and everything else that is dear in the world to me", his parents both being dead. He also asked to be buried by the Roman Catholic padre if possible as that "will give her greater consolation than anything - and please put after my name on the wooden cross - the bare fact that I was an American. I want this particularly, and I want her to know that it has been done so."
Two days later he was recalled to one of the batteries to replace a casualty and eight days after this he was dead. Whatever it said on his wooden cross, his headstone inscription reads, "An American citizen"; he would be pleased. However, there could be a question as to whether he was still an American citizen. The United States had not yet come into the war and so to protect their neutrality soldiers who fought in foreign armies were technically no longer citizens. Despite the fact that he was a member of the British army, Butters always maintained that he had not taken an oath of allegiance to the King, and, although he's buried under a British headstone, his inscription insures that his allegiance to America remains unquestioned.


"OUR NEVER TO BE FORGOTTEN
CAPTAIN AND LEADER"
COMPANY MESSAGE

CAPTAIN JOHN LLEWELYN THOMAS JONES


At 4.45 am on Thursday 16 August 1917 Captain J. Llewelyn T. Jones led his men over the top in an attack on the German held village of Langemarck. A brother officer later told Jones' father that, "We went over the top together ... were under terrific fire, he was absolutely cool and collected and, in fact, joked with me as we parted". But by the end of the day he was "missing, believed killed in action". This is when the company message referring to him as "Our never to be forgotten Captain and leader" would have gone round to the remainder of his 250 men.
It was only just under a year since Llewelyn Jones had left for the front with the good wishes of the firm of printers for whom he worked. They had presented him with a sword as a mark of their esteem and his father, a partner in the firm, had assured them all that it "would be treasured as an heirloom".
It was a measure of Llewelyn Jones' ability that a year later he was a Captain - it was a measure of the casualty rate for junior officers too of course. Llewelyn Jones knew the score and four months before his death he had written to his father "in the event of anything happening to me."
"You know what an undemonstrative nature mine is, but my love for you all is, nevertheless, strong, and deep, and though I said nothing about these things before I left England, it was just because - I couldn't - my heart was too full ... War is cruel and I detest it, but since it was not possible to keep out of this without loss of prestige and perhaps worse, it behoves us to carry it on to a successful conclusion ... the thought that I may not see you dear ones again in this world brings a lump to my throat and the tears to my eyes. I trust that I shall return, but ... ".
Llewelyn Jones has been incredibly difficult to identify, which is why I called him J. Llewelyn T. Jones at the beginning of the blog because that's how I first found him once I'd searched the CWGC site. I believe he's commemorated on the Llangollen war memorial because the family came from Dee Mount, Llangollen. The Clwyd Family History Society have researched the names on the memorial but they haven't given any details beside Llewelyn Jones. Perhaps one day some one will see this blog and identify him.


HE WAS THE FIRST ICELANDER
TO GIVE HIS LIFE
FOR CANADA

PRIVATE MAGDAL HERMANSON


Magdal Hermanson was born in Iceland, from where his parents emigrated to Canada in 1904 when he was 13. In 1914 he was working as a printer, probably in Valcartier, Quebec where he enlisted. By February 1915 he was in France and then on 23 April he was reported to be dangerously ill with a gunshot wound in the head. He died in hospital on 3 May.
Private Hermanson's inscription is interesting on two counts, that his parents referenced the fact that he was Icelandic and that he died for Canada not England, Britain or the Empire.


GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN
HE CAME FROM MEXICO
TO SERVE IN 1915

CAPTAIN MATTHEW HENRY GIBSON MC AND BAR


Having returned from Mexico in 1915, Matthew Henry Gibson enlisted and took a commission in the 12th Irish Rifles. He joined his regiment in France on 6 June 1916.
Promoted Temporary Lieutenant the following year, by the time of his death a year later he was a Temporary Captain. One of his two MCs was gazetted on 18 October 1917, the citation published in the London Gazette on 2 December 1918.

"For great determination and gallantry. He was ordered to attack and clear up a village which was a nest of machine guns. After one and a half hours' severe house to house fighting, he succeeded in establishing his company on the far side of the village. Being short of officers, on six separate occasions he personally led his platoons forward, and captured four machine guns at the point of the bayonet.
M.C. gazetted 18th October 1917"
London Gazette 2 December 1918

The citation for his other MC was published on 7 March 1918:

"For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in rallying men of other units who were falling back owing to loss of their officers, leading them forward again and again and holding on to his position under heavy fire."

Gibson died of wounds near Ypres on 29 October 1918. The 12th Irish Rifles had been withdrawn from the line with the rest of the 36th Ulster Division on the 27th, but had been in action on the 25th. The History of the 36th Ulster Division recorded that the work of 12th Irish Rifles, "was probably the best performed by that battalion, amid much good work accomplished since the beginning of offensive operations. Repeatedly the men had charged in upon houses defended by machine-guns, and bayoneted the detachments". Perhaps this was when Matthew Gibson's luck ran out.
Matthew Henry Gibson was the second of three sons of David Gibson, a Bookseller's Manager, and his wife, Annie. The family lived in Belfast. In the 1911 census, Matthew Gibson gave his occupation as House Agent. I haven't been able to discover what he was doing in Mexico.




VOLUNTEER FROM
COLONIA COSME, PARAGUAY

PRIVATE DAVID JOHN MACLEOD


David Macleod's father, Allan Mann Macleod, was a rancher in Colonia Cosme, Paraguay. Born in Australia did he go with the socialist settlers who were determined to build a Utopian settlement there in 1893, or did he go later when the scheme had collapsed? David was born in Australia but educated in Colonia Cosme so it's possible that his parents were among the original settlers. If so, they had a very difficult time of it.
David Macleod was also a rancher in both Paraguay and Chile. He volunteered immediately on the outbreak of war and returned to Europe to fight, serving throughout the war until he was killed in August 1917.


THOU CALLED ME TO RESIGN
WHAT MOST I PRIZED
HE NE'ER WAS MINE

SECOND LIEUTENANT TERENCE WILLIAM HONYCHURCH


If Thou should'st call me to resign
What most I prize, - it ne'er was mine;
I only yield Thee what was Thine; -
"Thy will be done."

Can you see the difference between the verse from the hymn and the inscription? There's no 'if' about this epitaph and there's no 'it' about what was most prized. God did call Second Lieutenant Honychurch's widowed mother to relinquish what she most prized and 'he' was her son.
The final verse of the hymn, 'My God my Father, while I stray', reads:

Renew my will from day to day,
Blend it with Thine, and take away
All that now makes it hard to say,
"Thy will be done."


MAKE HIM TO BE NUMBERED
WITH THY SAINTS O LORD
IN GLORY EVERLASTING

BRIGADIER GENERAL STUART CAMPBELL TAYLOR


Stuart Campbell Taylor, a career soldier, was one of seventy-eight generals to die as a result of enemy action in the First World War. Commissioned into the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in 1892, he served in Tirah on the North West Frontier, Mauritius, South Africa, Crete and Northern Nigeria before retiring from the Army in 1911 at the age of 39. He rejoined the regiment on the outbreak of war taking command of the 11th Battalion. In May 1915 he was promoted to command the 15th West Yorkshire Regiment, the Leeds Pals, where his men described him as "a martinet but very fair".
Wounded in May 1916 he was therefore not with his men when they attacked towards the village of Serre at 7.30 on the morning of 1 July 1916, losing 15 officers and 233 men killed in the opening minutes of the campaign. In May 1917, whilst still in command of the regiment, he was awarded the DSO for conspicuous gallantry and then in March 1918 he was promoted Brigadier-General in command of 93rd Brigade, 31st Division. On the morning of 1 October he was on a tour of inspection of his brigades when he was fatally injured by a bursting shell. He died ten days later.
Stuart Campbell Taylor was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and at Bedford Grammar School. A staunch old boy of the Dragon, there is an extensive obituary to him in their memorial volume, 'Dragon School, Old Boys and Masters Who Gave Their Lives in the Great War'. The book has two illustrations painted by his younger brother the artist Leonard Campbell Taylor, who was also an old boy of the school.
Brigadier-General Taylor's inscription was chosen by his widowed mother and comes from the Te Deum:
We therefore pray thee, help Thy servants: whom thou hast redeemed with Thy precious blood
Make them to be numbered with Thy saints: in glory everlasting.


IF THIS IS VICTORY, THEN
LET GOD STOP ALL WARS
HIS LOVING MOTHER

PRIVATE FRANK HITCHIN


This epitaph comes very close to suggesting that the dead might have died in vain. However, even though the War Graves Commission had given itself the right to censor inscriptions, it let this one through. To see what inscriptions they did censor read His Loving Parents Curse the Hun, His Loving Parents Curse the Hun.


HE SAW BEYOND THE FILTH
OF BATTLE, AND THOUGHT DEATH
A FAIR PRICE TO PAY
TO BELONG TO THE COMPANY
OF THESE FELLOWS

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM ALEXANDER STANHOPE FORBES


This beautiful inscription with its Shakespearian resonances was composed by Stanhope Forbes RA for his son. Although inscriptions were meant to be restricted to 66 characters this one has 91, and the small pencilled figures on the bottom of the War Graves' form calculate the total cost as £1 6s 6d.
William Alexander Stanhope Forbes, known as Alec, was the only son of Stanhope and his first wife Elizabeth, who were both artists and together founded the Newlyn School of Art. Alec was educated at Bedales and then went on to the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He was 21 when the war broke out but was initially declared unfit for military service. As a result, he joined the Railway Operating Division as a Railway Transport Officer, eventually securing a transfer to the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. He joined his regiment in France on 16 August 1916 and was killed eighteen days later leading his platoon in an attack on Guillemont.
After his death his father painted a portrait of his son of which there are two copies: one is still in the family and one is in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry Museum at Bodmin Castle.
The portrait forms the basis of Alec's memorial plaque in St Creden Church, Sancreed, Cornwall. The plaque was designed by his father and features a tower and bridge behind the portrait, which were taken from two of Alec's own prize-winning drawings.


GREAT GRAND NEPHEW
TO MICHAEL DWYER
THE FAMOUS WICKLOW CHIEFTAIN

PRIVATE GERALD PATRICK HEAVEY


One hundred and twelve years after Michael Dwyer arrived in Australia having been deported from Ireland by the British as a nationalist rebel, his seventeen-year-old, Australian, great-grand nephew, Gerald Heavey, was killed in France fighting for the British. A hundred and twelve years is time enough to forget old scores but his parents made a point of recording the connection on their son's headstone. Yet all the evidence points to their son being keen to fight. Australia did not have conscription so he was a volunteer. However, at the age of 17 he was too young to have joined up, too young to be serving in France let alone too young to die.


HE CAME FROM FIJI ISLANDS
TO HELP HIS NATIVE LAND

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM FYVIE


William Fyvie was born in Fraserburgh, Scotland in 1885. In 1901, at the age of 15, he was still in Fraserburgh working as an apprentice draper. When the war broke out he was in Fiji, part of a small European community of fewer than 4,000 men, women and children. He returned to England in November 1915. By this time his parents had emigrated to South Africa. It was they who chose his inscription, ensuring that his connection to Fiji was recorded on his headstone and that of his birth in Fraserburgh in the cemetery register.


OMNIA VINCIT AMOR

CAPTAIN CHARLES CADWALADR TREVOR-ROPER


The words for this inscription come from Virgil's Eclogue X, line 69, Love conquers all things. They were chosen by Charles Trevor-Roper's wife.
Charles Trevor-Roper was an actor. After taking his degree at Clare College, Cambridge he went on to study at the Academy of Dramatic Art. He toured Australia with Harry Irving's company during 1911, and at the outbreak of war was playing Captain Felix in 'The Grande Seigneur' at the Savoy Theatre.
On the death of his uncle in 1901, Charles had inherited the family estate of Plas Teg in Flintshire together with a large fortune. He was one of twelve children, ten of whom were older than him, but they were all girls. The twelfth child was another boy. Both boys, Charles and Geoffrey, were killed in the war.
Charles' only son, Richard, who had been the rear gunner in Guy Gibson's Lancaster bomber on the Dambuster Raid, 16/17 May 1943, was killed in action in another raid over Germany on 31 March 1944.


HE BEING MADE PERFECT
IN A SHORT TIME
FULFILLED A LONG TIME

CAPTAIN WILLIAM VICTOR TREVOR ROOPER


William Rooper was a twenty-year-old flying ace. He joined No. 1 Squadron in the summer of 1917 and was credited with eight victories between his first on 28 July 1917 and his death on 9 October. He was shot down in aerial combat over Polygon Wood, becoming the seventh victim of Xavier Dannhuber.
Rooper's inscription comes from the Book of the Apocrypha, the Wisdom of Solomon 4:13-14:
He, being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time:
For his soul pleased the Lord: therefore hastened He to take him away from among the wicked.


WHILE ENGLAND STANDS
THEIR HIGH RENOWN SHALL LAST
FOR THEY HAVE JOINED
THE HEROES OF THE PAST

CAPTAIN THOMAS HERBERT RICHMOND


Battalion War Diary 28/29 October 1914: "Still in trenches. Heavy shell firing and heavy casualties. Capt. Richmond killed". The Diary goes on to record that some of the shells were the result of the French artillery firing short. Despite the diary entry, Captain Richmond hadn't been killed but he had been mortally wounded. He died three days later, on 1 November, in a base hospital in Boulogne
Thomas Herbert's father employs high diction for his son's inscription. It's not possible to tell whether the 'heroes of the past' that he refers to were chivalric knights or Greek heroes - but does it matter, we get the gist?


TELL ENGLAND
THAT WE WHO DIED
SERVING HER
REST HERE CONTENT

CAPTAIN MARCUS HERBERT GOODALL


Marcus Goodall's inscription is a modification of the one on the obelisk "erected by their comrades in memory of the NCOs and Troopers of the Imperial Light Horse" who were killed in the Battle of Waggon Hill, South Africa on 6 January 1900.
Tell England, ye who pass this monument
We, who died serving her, rest here content.

The epitaph is based on one said to have been written by Simonides, which according to Heroditus marked the graves of the Spartans who fell with Leonidas at Thermopylae in 480 BC:
O passer by, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here obeying their orders.
[Mackail The Greek Anthology 1906].

William Lisle Bowles had translated the same epitaph in 1833 as,
Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

In 1856 Ruskin likened the English dead of the Crimean War to the Spartan dead of Thermopylae and suggested that the message they would have wanted sent home was, "Oh stranger, go and tell the English that we are lying here, having obeyed their words".

The Imperial Light Horse epitaph was said to have been written by the English born South African politician Edmund Garrett. A version of the epitaph certainly appears as one of his memorial verses in his memoir, but the words aren't the same,
Tell England, you that pass our monument,
Men who died serving Her rest here, content.

Ernest Raymond published his best-selling novel, Tell England, based on the Gallipoli campaign, in 1922. Many war cemeteries had yet to be contructed so there was time enough for the book to have an influence on the choice of headstone inscriptions. Simonides' epitaph, in Raymond's own translation, is used on a grave marker. Edgar Doe and Rupert Ray have gone searching for the grave of their friend and come across it unexpectedly.
"His name stood on a cross with those of six other officers, and beneath was written in pencil the famous epitaph:
Tell England, ye who pass this monument,
We died for her, and here we rest content.
The perfect words went straight to Doe's heart.
"Roop," he said, "if I'm killed you can put those lines over me."
I fear I could not think of anything very helpful to reply.
"They are rather swish," I murmured."

Marcus Goodall made friends with Siegfried Sassoon in the spring of 1916 whilst on an Army training course at Flixecourt and, after Goodall's death, Sassoon wrote an unpublished elegy to him, Elegy to M.G., which can be found in his notebook for 26 June to 8 Aug. 1916. Goodall makes an appearance as Lieutenant Allgood in Sassoon's 'Memoirs of an Infantry Officer'. Although the book is a fictional memoir there is no reason to think that the portrait of Allgood/Goodall is not an acurate one.
"Allgood was quiet, thoughtful, and fond of watching birds. We had been to the same public school, though there were nearly ten years between us. He told me that he wanted to be a historian, and I listened respectfully while he talked about the Romans in Early Britain, which was his favourite subject. ... Allgood never grumbled about the war, for he was a gentle soul, willing to take his share in it, though obviously unsuited to homicide. But there was an air of veiled melancholy on his face, as if he were inwardly warned that he would never see his home in Wiltshire again. A couple of months afterwards I saw his name on one of the long lists of killed, and it seemed to me that he had expected it."


CAMBRAI LE CATEAU
BELOVED SON OF THE LATE
COL. A.D.RICKMAN R.B.
& MRS EDWARD DUNN

MAJOR STUART HAMILTON RICKMAN


Major Rickman was a professional soldier who had seen extensive action in South Africa, the North West Frontier and West Africa. Home on leave from India when the war broke out, he was appointed Second-in-Command of the 1st Battalion the Rifle Brigade and went with them to France on 21 August. Four days later he was mortally wounded at Le Cateau. He died the following day.
According to a comtemporary, "None saw Major Rickman dead. He was dangerously wounded gallantly commanding the rearguard of our retirement on the afternoon of 26 Aug. and he was left, of course, where he fell." He died later in German hands and they buried him in the cemetery at Fontaine-au-Pire, marking his grave with a wooden cross that correctly gives his name but incorrectly describes him as 'engl. Kapitaine'. Major Rickman's grave marker now hangs on the wall in St Mary's Church, Childrey, where his mother lived.


DEO DANTE DEDI

CAPTAIN GUY FRANCIS HADLAM KEENLYSIDE


Guy Keenlyside was an old boy of Charterhouse School and this is the school motto - Deo dante dedi: God having given I give. Charterhouse built a Chapel as its war memorial and inscribed on the Foundation Stone are the words, Deo dante dedurunt: God having given they gave.
Keenlyside, a professional soldier, was wounded on 26 October 1914 during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. He died in a base hospital in Boulogne three days later.


"HE KNOWS ABOUT IT ALL
HE KNOWS, HE KNOWS!"
PRO PATRIA

LIEUTENANT JOHN HENRY HANCOCK


This may not sound like a hymn but I think that it is, a misremembered quotation from the chorus of a revivalist hymn by Mrs Ophelia Adams:

He knows it all, He knows it all
My Father knows He knows it all
Thy bitter tears how fast they fall! -
He knows, My father knows it all.

John Hancock was killed by a high explosive shell on his way back to the rest camp at Reninghelst. Brought up in Ireland and educated at the protestant High School in Dublin, according to his parents he died for his country - pro patria.


AB UNO DISCE OMNES

RIFLEMAN RICHARD MCDOWELL


Ab uno disce omnes: from one example learn all. Virgil Aeneid II:65. A rather more expansive translation would be, from one example the character of a nation may be judged, and this, I am sure, is what Rifleman McDowell's parents meant to imply about their son.


ALL IS OVER AND DONE
RENDER THANKS TO THE GIVER

CAPTAIN RICHARD LANG ROSCOE


"He is my very best officer. I don't know what I shall do without him," wrote Colonel Barker of the 22nd (Kensington) Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, on hearing that Captain Richard Roscoe had been dangerously wounded by shell fire, losing a leg whilst asleep in A Company's HQ post after 48 hours in the front line. "He was splendidly brave and as clever as a man of 40, although just 20". According to the War Graves Commission records Captain Roscoe was in fact still only 19. He had been gazetted Lieutenant on 19 October 1914 when he can only have been 17. "He is now my Senior Captain and one in whom I had the most implicit confidence," Colonel Barker continued. However, despite the stretcher bearers taking immense personal risks themselves to get Roscoe medical treatment, he died the following day.
Captain Roscoe was vouched for from another source too. He was Hector Hugh Monro, Saki's, Company Commander and Munro's friend, Corporal Spikesman, described Roscoe as "one of the finest fellows". Monro was chatting to Roscoe moments before he was shot, just after he'd uttered his immortal last words, "Put that bloody cigarette out".
Richard Roscoe's inscription, confirmed by his father Philip Roscoe, is a quotation from Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington:

All is over and done:
Render thanks to the giver,
England, for thy son.
Let the bell be toll'd.

Much of the information on Roscoe comes from G.I.S. Inglis's book The Kensington Battalion: Never Lost a Yard of Trench. Although not published until 2010, the book benefits from the fact that Inglis did much of his research whilst many of the survivors were still alive.


SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
MY DEAR BROTHER FRED
FROM ALF

PRIVATE FREDERICK ROBERT WILLIAM OSBORNE


A beautifully solemn and unsophisticated inscription from Alf to his brother Fred. The brothers' parents were both still alive and named as next-of-kin but they don't feature in the inscription, which was signed for by Alf.


AGED 25
ONLY CHILD OF MAJOR GENERAL
SIR W.G. MACPHERSON
AND ELIZABETH ANNE MACPHERSON

LIEUTENANT DUNCAN STUART ROSS MACPHERSON


Major General William Grant Macpherson was the Colonel Commandant of the Royal Army Medical Corps and the author of its official history. His only child, Duncan Macpherson, was killed in action at Festubert on 23 November 1914. Although he was apparently never prepared to talk about the death of his son, as an old boy he was prepared to unveil the Fettes School war memorial. This was dedicated to the 246 old boys who lost their lives in the war, among them Duncan, his only child.


HE WAS A MAN

PRIVATE FRANK HANKS


This simple but beautiful inscription is a quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Horatio says of Hamlet's father: "I saw him once; he was a goodly king." And Hamlet replies:
"He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again."
The implication of Hamlet's words being that he considers his father to have been the ideal example of a man, 'the sum and pattern of excellence'. And this, however modestly put, would have been the implication behind the inscription Mrs Hannah Hanks chose for her son.


HE WOULD INSIST
ON SERVING HIS COUNTRY

DRIVER WILFRED THOMAS WELLING


The point of this inscription, composed by Wilfred Welling's parents, was that Welling was only 16 when he died, far too young to have even joined up let alone to have been serving oversea. You were meant to be 18 before you could enlist and 19 before you could go abroad - unless you had your parents' signed permission. But you can see what his parents said, "He would insist on serving his country".
How could this be allowed? Richard Emden's Boy Soldiers of the Great War shows that there are no simple answers. If you were big enough and strong enough to look 18 the Army took your word for it. That is until the National Registration Act was passed in July 1915. This made it compulsary for all men between the ages of 15 and 65 to complete a form on National Registration Day, 15 August 1915, giving their name, age, nationality, marital status and employment details. After this date you had to produce your registration card when you went to enlist making it more difficult - but not impossible - for under-age boys to get through. For all the disgust we might feel today at the army accepting under-age boys, for all the stories of recruiting sergeants encouraging boys to lie about their age, it was the case that some boys really wanted to be part of the action and their parents couldn't or wouldn't stop them.
Wilfred Wellings served with the 40th Division Ammunition Column Royal Field Artillery. According to the information given by his parents to the War Graves Commission, he died of concussion. He was buried in one of the cemeteries in St Omer, a large hospital centre behind the lines.


"SAIL FORTH!
STEER FOR
THE DEEP WATERS ONLY!
RECKLESS, O SOUL EXPLORING!"

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ATHELSTAN MOORE DSO


Sail forth - steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Passage to India

Athelstan Moore, a professional soldier, served in the South African War where he was awarded the DSO. After this he served in West Africa and then in 1911 went to New Zealand as instructor to the Ortago Military District, serving with the Ortago Infantry. He went with them to Gallipoli in 1915 and then to France. In August 1916 he transferred to the Munster Fusiliers and then in April 1917 took command of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He died of wounds on 14 October 1918, the opening day of the Battle of Courtrai.
Married with one child, the form confirming his inscription was signed by his mother.


LEST WE FORGET

PRIVATE WILFRED EDMUND BELL


Commonly used today as a plea not to forget those who lost their lives in the First World War, this was not the original meaning of the words. They come from Rudyard Kipling's poem Recessional, written in 1897 the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. However, the poem was not a celebration of the Jubilee and of the Empire it was more a warning against pride, complaceny and jingoism. What Kipling intended his readers not to forget was what they owed to Christ, both by way of his teaching and his sacrifice. For, when 'the Captains and the Kings depart' and 'our navies melt away', the British Empire, like all other Empires, will pass away and may God forgive us for our boastfulness and arrogance if we have forgotten him. Interestingly, Kipling is seen as the poet of Empire, the proponent of the values he warned against - his detractors obviously haven't studied his poems very closely.


THERE IS NO DEATH

SECOND LIEUTENANT PHILIP MAURICE RAMSEY ANDERSON


"In the way of righteousness is life; and in the pathway thereof of there is no death."
Proverbs 12:28
Philip Anderson was a Roman Catholic educated at Beaumont College, the Jesuit school in Berkshire. At the outbreak of war he was working in Argentina but returned immediately to volunteer. He joined King Edward's Horse before receiving a commission into the Royal Irish Regiment. He died on 24 February 1915 of wounds received ten days earlier near Hill 60.
His younger brother, Alan James Ramsey, also serving with the Royal Irish Regiment, had been killed on 20 October 1914.


DEATH IS THE GATE OF LIFE
GOD IS LOVE

CAPTAIN PHILIP ERNEST VINEY


The first line of Captain Viney's epitaph comes from 'In Transitu S. Malachi' by St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153): Mors januae vitae: Death the gate of life, an affirmation of the resurrection of the dead. The second line comes from 1 John 4:7. - He that loveth not knoweth not God for God is love.
Philip Viney was a regular soldier; he had gone to Sandhurst after Aldenham School and was commissioned into the Leicestershire Regiment in 1906. He went with his regiment to France in September 1914 and was mortally wounded by a shell on 14 December. He died three days later.


GOD IS LOVE

CAPTAIN DUDLEY EYRE PERSSE


Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
1 John 4 v 7 & 8
Captain Persse was a regular soldier who had been with the Expediitonary Force since the beginning of the war. He died of wounds at No. 2 Casualty Clearing Station in Bailleul. After his death a small volume of poetry, 'Seven Poems by Dudley Eyre Persse 4th Royal Dublin Fusiliers Died of Wounds Received in Action 1 February 1915', was printed for private circulation.


"HE WAS A VERY FINE FELLOW
AND BRAVE, FOR HE KEPT ON
WITH HIS LEWIS GUN
ALL THE WAY DOWN"
THE PILOT

SECOND LIEUTENANT FREDERICK HORACE REED


This is one of the very rare instances when the War Graves Commission doesn't give an exact date of death. Frederick Reed, an observer with 6 Squadron RAF, was shot down on 23 October 1918. His plane crashed behind the German lines and he was taken prisoner. He died of his injuries sometime between the crash on the 23rd and the 27 October. That is why the Commission's records and his headstone give his date of death as 23/27 October.
Reed was buried by the Germans as an 'Unknown British Aviator'. On 16 September 1920 his body was exhumed and reburied in Englefontaine Churchyard - still as an unknown British aviator. The exhumation record shows that there was nothing in the grave to identify him, not even a uniform; he had been buried only in a ground sheet.
At the bottom of the form are the words, 'Dame Adelaide Livingstone Informed'. In September 1920, this remarkable American woman was head of the War Office mission to trace British soldiers reported as missing in France and Flanders. At some point Reed's body was identified and the details in the Graves Registration documents amended. This means that when in February 1975 the body was exhumed again and reburied in Terlincthen Military Cemetery (for what reason I don't know) he was known to be Second Lieutenant Frederick Horace Reed.


COELUM QUID QUERIMUS ULTRA

LIEUTENANT COLONEL LAURENCE GODMAN


Laurence Godman's epitaph is his family motto taken from Lucretius' De Rerum Natura III.18, 'What seek we more than heaven'. Educated at Rugby School and the Royal Military Academy Woolwich, Godman had seen service in South Africa and India before going to France with the Expeditionary Force in August 1914. He was killed by a shell whilst looking for observation posts in front of the trenches at Messines.


HE WAS ONLY AN ATOM
IN THE MATERIAL
OH! HOW MIGHTY HE IS
IN THE SPIRIT

PRIVATE JOHN JOSEPH HUBBARD


I have very little evidence for this but I have a feeling that the background to this epitaph lies in spiritualism or even theosophy, both believed in the evolution of the spirit after the death of the material body.
Eighteen-year-old John Hubbard was the son of John Chamberlain Hubbard a blacksmith from Glen Parva in Leicestershire who had served with the Leicestershire Regiment in the Boer War. John Hubbard died from the effects of gas in a base hospital at Etaples.


LATE CLASSICAL SCHOLAR B.A.
OWST PRIZEMAN AND WINNER
OF DR GREEN'S CUP
CLARE COLL: CAMBRIDGE

LIEUTENANT JOSEPH SENIOR


Pilot W McArthur, with his observer navigator Lieutenant Joseph Senior, had just shot down a German plane when they came under attack from three more. Whilst twisting and turning to get away, Lieutenant Senior was shot through the stomach and had a finger smashed. Despite this he managed to keep on firing and they were able to get away and land safely. However, Senior's wound was mortal and he died in hospital that night.
Joseph Senior was one of the top scholars not only of Wakefield Grammar School but in the country. He was placed first in the entire country in the Oxford Senior Local exams, won an open scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge and graduated among the top six candidates in his year, winning not only the Owst Prize but Dr Green's Cup for General Learning. When the war broke out he was studying for his Civil Service exams.


YE SHALL DIE LIKE MEN
AND FALL LIKE
ONE OF THE PRINCES

PRIVATE CHARLES FREDERICK COX MITCHELL


The inscription comes from Psalm 82:
... all the foundations of the earth are out of course.
I have said, Ye are all gods; and all of you are children of the most High.
But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.
Private Mitchell came from Vancouver and served with the 7th Battalion Canadian Infantry, the British Columbia Regiment. He was killed in action at Ploegsteert "While taking part in operations south of Messines, he was hit in the head and instantly killed by an enemy rifle bullet". Canadian Expeditionary Force Burial Registers.


1ST BATTALION

LIEUTENANT PATRICIUS GEORGE CHAWORTH-MUSTERS


A regular soldier, Lieutenant Chaworth-Musters had crossed to France with his regiment on 12 August 1914. He was wounded in September but was able to return to the Front in January 1915. However, soon after this he was severely injured resulting in the amputation of his right arm. He died of blood poisoning in a Casualty Clearing Station a few days later. Pat Chaworth-Musters was one of seven brothers. All but one of them served in the war in which three of them died. Lieutenant Chaworth-Muster's inscription, '1st Battalion' indicated his military record to those who knew about such things.


A SOLDIER AND A MAN

PRIVATE W BROWN


This inscription, which sounds like a plain statement, is in fact the title of both a 1916 film - about a general's son framed by a spy for cardsharping who enlists as a private and saves his father and girlfriend from capture - and of a music hall song.

A soldier stood on the battlefield
His weary watch to keep,
While the pale moon covered her mantle
O'er the souls that 'neath her sleep.
"Ah me!" he sighed with tearful eye,
And called on him above,
"I'm far away from my children dear
And all on earth I love."
At the bugle sound he turned once more
The battlefield to scan,
"I am, whate'er my fate,
A soldier and a man."

The bugle called, he hastened forth,
The bravest in the battle's van.
Remember him who yields his life,
He is a soldier and a man.

The night-watch o'er the morn dawned,
Her light on earth to show,
And the soldier true to his country's call,
Advanced to meet the foe.
Amid the din of shot and shell
He fought with heart so brave,
'Till reeling from his faithful steed,
He found a soldier's grave.
Oh, Father! who in heaven above
Hath all things at Thy span,
Remember him who yields his life
Is a soldier and a man.

We know very little about Private W Brown other than that he was a regular soldier serving with the 1st Battalion the Gordon Highlanders. The regiment crossed to France on 14 August 1914 and was involved in very heavy fighting, suffering many losses, during the first few months of the war. By the time he died, eighteen-year-old Private Brown would have earned his epitaph, 'A soldier and a man'.


WITHOUT THIS
FOLLY, AGE AND COLD DECAY

CAPTAIN E WRIGHT


At first reading this inscription looks as though it's saying the same as Binyon's poem: age will not wither him because he will never grow old. However, this is not the meaning of the words in the sonnet Shakespeare wrote, Sonnet XI. Shakespeare, who is addressing this sonnet sequence to a young man, tells him that:
She [nature] carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.
If the young man doesn't have children then all that nature has endowed him with will age and decay and be lost.
Captain Wright was 49 when he was killed, beyond the age of compulsary military service. He had been born and brought up in Brazil, was a former broker and bank manager and had married a Brazilian woman. Who knows whether he had childen, who knows how his inscription was meant, although I find it interesting that the layout of the lines of the inscription, specified by the Mr CPD Wright who confirmed it, aren't the same as those of the sonnet:
Herein lies wisdom, beauty and increase;
Without this folly, age and cold decay:


HE DID HIS DUTY
WE LOVED HIM SO

PRIVATE RICHARD WARING


Ever since Nelson's famous signal to the fleet on the morning of 21 October 1805 before the Battle of Trafalgar, every Englishman has known what is expected of him: "England expects that every man will do his duty". And your duty was to fight, and if necessary to die, for your country.
Private Waring was killed so early in the war, scarcely five weeks after the outbreak, that he must have been a regular soldier. Because he was killed so early in the war the exact location of his grave became lost. This explains why the words 'Known to to be buried in this cemetery' appear across the top of his headstone. His mother's simple and direct words at the base of the stone make for a very touching inscription.


HE NOBLY ANSWERED THE CALL

PRIVATE ERNEST FREDERICK JORDON


By saying that Private Jordan had "answered the call" his parents are telling us that their son was a volunteer, that he had answered the recruiting posters' call to arms. The use of the word 'nobly' is an echo of the words King George V used in his message to the expeditionary force - "I have implicit confidence in you my soldiers. Duty is your watchword, and I know your duty will be nobly done".


I LAY IN DUST
LIFE'S GLORY DEAD

PRIVATE JOHN TELFER HIDDLESTON


John Hiddleston's inscription comes from the fourth line of the last verse of George Matheson's hymn, O Love That Will Not Let Me Go. This statement of total despair is followed by the final two lines of the hymn which speak of resurrection and eternal life. Neverthless, these were not the lines Hiddleston's father chose:
O Love that will not let me go:
O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life's glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.


HERE LIES
THE NOBLEST WORK OF GOD

PRIVATE HARLEY RANDOLPH SLOGGETT


"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.


AT THE RIVER'S CRYSTAL BRINK
CHRIST SHALL JOIN
EACH BROKEN LINK

CORPORAL WILLIAM STARRETT


This is a very popular memorial inscription, particularly in Northern Ireland, which is where Corporal Starrett came from - Ballinahonemore, Armagh. The inscription is a modification of a hymn by the American hymnwriter Fanny Crosby. The hymn speaks of the 'sweet day' when 'we shall meet our lov'd ones gone':
At the river's crystal brink
Some sweet day, by and by;
We shall find each broken link
Some sweet day, by and by;


AU REVOIR DARLING TOOTS
OUR LOVING
BRAVE TRUE HEARTED BOY
AN ANZAC

LIEUTENANT STEPHEN PHILIP BOULTON


"Died of wounds 3.10.18. 4 large splinters from gas shell (4.2) one splinter through right arm and 1 in groin. He never regained consciousness - buried by Chaplain Webb at Roisel near Peronne." This is the report given by Lieutenant Boulton's senior officer, Major Dodd, to the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau. Others witnesses might have put it more delicately but they could not alter the facts.
Stephen Boulton was born in Australia in 1890. He enlisted in the ranks in January 1915 from his position as a clerk in the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. He served in Egypt and Gallipoli and in January 1918 received a commission. He was killed during a heavy bombardment of his artillery position.
In 1928 his mother donated his letters and postcards - all signed Toots - together with her official letters of condolence, and correspondence from the Imperial War Graves Commission, to the Australian War Memorial. This digitised correspondence can be read on-line providing a vivid record of one man's war. In the last line of his personal inscription, his mother describes him as an ANZAC, a member of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The term remains today, what it was then, a proud term for a superb body of soldiers.


NOT ONCE OR TWICE
IN OUR ROUGH ISLAND STORY
WAS THE PATH OF DUTY
THE WAY TO GLORY

SERJEANT THOMAS MOTTERSHEAD VC


Serjeant Mottershead was awarded the Victoria Cross for safely bringing his burning aircraft back to land behind Allied lines, thus saving the life of his observer. Mottershead however was caught beneath his burning plane and died of his injuries five days later. He was the only non-commissioned RFC officer to win a VC in the First World War.
His inscription is a quotation from Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, which emphasises that greatness lies in quietly doing your duty. The following is the extract from which the quotation is taken.

Yea, let all good things await
Him who cares not to be great,
But as he saves or serves the state.
Not once or twice in our rough island-story,
The path of duty was the way to glory:
He that walks it, only thirsting
For the right, and learns to deaden
Love of self, before his journey closes,
He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting
Into glossy purples, which outredden
All voluptuous garden-roses.


THE SPIRIT RETURNED
TO THE GOD WHO GAVE IT

CAPTAIN REGINALD GEORGE STRACEY


Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern,
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
The Book of Ecclesiastes, 12:6 & 7


At the very moment of death, when the silver cord is loosed, the body returns to the dust from which it came and the spirit returns to God who made it.
Captain Stracey was a regular army officer educated at Eton and Sandhurst. He served with the 1st Battalion the Scots Guards, embarking with them for France with the Expeditionary Force on 13 August 1914. He was killed in an attack at Cuinchy La Bassee when the Scots Guards were ordered to attack the German positions to the south of the La Bassee Canal.
Reginald Stracey's family came from Norfolk. He is commemorated on the war memorial in Rackheath, where Sir Edward Paulet lived at Rackheath Park, and in both St Mary with St Margaret and St Cuthbert's in Sprowston where his father, the Lord of the Manor, had lived at Sprowston Lodge.


LAST WORDS
"LOVE TO ALL AT HOME"

PRIVATE W PHILPOTT


Private Philpott died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Bailleul on the last day of 1914 with someone at his bedside who was able to record his last words and communicate them to his mother, who chose them for his headstone inscription.
It is possible that it was his mother who was at his bedside as it was not unheard of for the next-of-kin to be sent for. However, I have a feeling that this was only done when the patient was in one of the base hospitals and Bailleul was a Casualty Clearing Station, not far from the front line. Nevertheless, such was the care taken to communicate with the next-of-kin that it's quite possible that Mrs Philpott was informed of his words in a letter written by one of the nurses or by an army padre.


A CROWDED HOUR
OF GLORIOUS LIFE
IS WORTH AN AGE
WITHOUT A NAME. MOTHER

PRIVATE HARRY STEANE


Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife,
To all the sensual world proclaim
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.

This poem, The Call, written by Thomas Osbert Mordaunt (1730-1809) was at one time thought to have been written by Sir Walter Scott who used it as the motto to Chapter XIII in Volume II of An Old Mortality. W.E.Henley (1849-1903) certainly attributed it to Scott when he used it on the title page of Lyra Heroica, his collection of poetry for boys.
The phrase, which Harry Steane's mother has slightly misquoted, was frequently used as a shorthand to describe a certain type of person. Vera Britain used it to describe Roland Leighton:
"I know you're the kind of person who would risk your life recklessly; I was talking to someone a short time ago and I said I thought you were the kind who believes in the 'one glorious hour of crowded life' (sic) theory; is it true?" (Vera Brittain, Chronicle of Youth, 1981, page 139).

Harry Steane, who was born in Warrington, England, enlisted on 5 October 1914 in Australia. After his death his mother wrote, "But the best of all in my idea is he volunteered for his country at once and was in the first landing on Gallipoli and I think that is a very great honour".


TO LIVE IN HEARTS
WE LEAVE BEHIND
IS NOT TO DIE

PRIVATE RAYMOND EVERITT BAYLISS


Raymond Bayliss was a twenty-three-year-old farmer from Wangaratta, Victoria, Australia whose brother, Ernest Foord, was also killed. Raymond's inscription is a quote from Hallowed Ground by Thomas Campbell (1777-1844).
But strew his ashes to the wind
Whose sword or voice has served mankind,
And is he dead, whose glorious mind
Lifts thine on high?
To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.




WHATEVER IS - IS BEST

SERJEANT HENRY HARGREAVES


Serjeant Hargreaves died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek. His inscription is both the title and the last line of each of the three verses of a poem by the hugely popular American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919). This is the final verse of the poem:
I know there are no errors
In the great Eternal plan,
And all things work together
For the final good of man.
And I know when my soul speeds onward
In its grand Eternal quest,
I shall say as I look back earthward
Whatever is - is best.

Wilcox's philosophy echoes that of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) whose 'An Essay on Man' states:
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.


HIS LAST WORDS
"GOODBYE COBBER
GOD BLESS YOU"

TROOPER HAROLD RUSH


This is probably the most famous of all Australian inscriptions. They weren't Trooper Rush's dying words but they were spoken as he turned to a friend just before they charged the Turkish lines when he knew that death was virtually certain.
At dawn on 7 August 1915 the Australian Light Horse, dismounted and serving as infantry, were given instructions to charge The Nek, a promontory in Turkish hands. The plan was that there would be four waves, each of 150 men, who would 'hop the sacks', leave the trenches, at two-minute intervals. Waves one and two had been mown down almost to a man, Rush was in the third wave. The attack was called off before the fouth wave but not before well over 300 Australians, including Rush, had been killed or mortally wounded in less than eight minutes.
Harold Rush was an Englishman who had emigrated to Australia five years earlier when he was 18. Somehow his words must have been communicated to his parents back home in Bury St Edmunds, England, as it was his father who confirmed his inscription.


LAETUS SORTE MEA

LIEUTENANT RANULPH STEINTHAL DE SAUMAREZ-BROCK


The Latin phrase translates as 'Happy with my lot'. It is not the family motto. Ranulph's sister, Joan, living at the family home in Cambridge Gardens, London, signed the form confirming her brother's inscription. The de Saumarez-Brocks were a Guernsey family and Ranuph had been educated at Elizabeth College.


PEACE PERFECT PEACE

SERJEANT FRANK COLLINS


Whilst Christmas Day 1914 undoubtedly saw many truces at various points along the Western Front, in many other places it was business as usual. A total of 149 men died on 25 December 1914, seventy-eight of them in France and Belgium. Some men died in base hospitals and casualty clearing stations from previously acquired wounds but a fair few of them were killed in action on Christmas Day. And the fighting was savage enough for the bodies of thirty-two men to be unrecoverable - eighteen are commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial, eight on the Ploegsteert Memorial and six on the Menin Gate. Snipers remained active too, in fact Serjeant Frank Collins was killed by a sniper. He was returning from No Man's Land after exchanging cigarettes with the Germans when he was shot in the back. An unofficial truce was meant to have been in operation at the time but the man who went out to help him was shot and killed too.
Frank Collins' inscription, 'Peace perfect peace', is among the most popular of all headstone inscriptions. The words begin six out of the seven verses of a hymn written by Bishop E.H. Bickersteth, questioning how there can be peace, perfect peace in a world of sin, with our thronging duties, surging sorrows, loved ones far away, future unknown and the shadow of death hanging over us and those we love. The answer is to put our trust in Jesus,
It is enough: earth's struggles soon shall cease,
And Jesus calls us to heaven's perfect peace


A MAN GREATLY BELOVED

SECOND LIEUTENANT HERBERT RONALD FARRAR


Herbert Farrar was killed in the trenches at Wulverghem on Christmas Eve 1914, the event recorded in Major Swindell's pocket diary - Major was not his rank but his Christian name.
"Dec 24th 1914 D. Station. We hoped there would be no casualties during the holidays. But our hopes were soon dashed to the ground. 1 lieut (Mr Yarrow) killed, 1 sergt & 1 pte wounded, both died afterwards. It made one think the Germans had singled out 1 officer, 1 sergt & 1 pte."
The officer killed was Mr Farrar not Mr Yarrow. The next day, Christmas Day, Major Swindell recorded how "Our chaps went and met the Germans half way between the trenches & exchanged cigarettes, cigars etc ..."
Herbert Farrar was the son of the Revd HW Farrar of Barcombe Rectory, Lewes, Sussex. Educated at Dulwich College and Queens' College, Cambridge, he had been a prep school master before he joined up. His inscription sounds as though it could be quotation from a letter of condolence, which it might be, but it is also a quotation from the Book of Daniel, 10:11 "O Daniel, a man greatly beloved".


"I'VE ALWAYS TRIED
AND DONE MY BEST
AT EVERYTHING"
ARCHIE

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARCHIBALD DAVID REID


Archie Reid died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station in Bailleul. I wonder at what point and to who he made this statement. It was his mother, Mrs J Reid, who confirmed his inscription despite the fact that Lieutenant Reid was married. His wife, Mrs Beatrice Daisy Reid, died in 1985 aged 92.


MY HUSBAND AND PAL
SO DEARLY LOVED

PRIVATE AG HANNON


I hate it when I can't find out anything about a casualty, not even his Christian names, but I love Mrs Hannon's inscription, so simple and so direct. My grandmother used to call her close friends pals, she would have been of the same generation.


TELL MY MOTHER
I WILL MEET HER AT THE FOUNTAIN

PRIVATE WILLIAM GARFIELD RANKIN


An enigmatic inscription that was confirmed by eighteen-year-old Private Rankin's mother. At his enlistment, William Rankin gave his religion as Baptist and I believe his inscription is a reference to a very popular Baptist hymn by Anne Ross Cousin, 'The sands of time are sinking', number 454 in the Baptist Church Hymnal (1900). The hymn anticipates the long-awaited joys of dying and meeting Christ face to face.

The sands of time are sinking,
The dawn of heaven breaks,
The summer morn I've sighed for,
The fair sweet morn awakes:
Dark, dark hath been the midnight,
But day-spring is at hand,
And glory, glory dwelleth
In Emmanuel's land.

William Garfield's inscription references verse 3, which in itself references John 4:13, "whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life."

O Christ, He is the Fountain
The deep sweet Well of love!
The streams on earth I've tasted,
More deep I'll drink above:
There to an ocean fulness
His mercy doth expand,
And glory, glory dwelleth
In Emmanuel's land.

The regimental war diary for 24 April 1916 records: "At about 4.00 a.m. a Hostile aircraft drops 3 Bombs on Camp "E" occupied by R.C.R. One Bomb making a direct hit on one of the huts inflicting casualties to the extent of Killed 3 O.R. Wounded 31 O.R." William Garfield Rankin was one of the 3 soldiers killed. They were buried the same day.


I COULD NOT LOVE YOU
DEAR SO WELL
LOVED I NOT HONOR MORE

SERJEANT HAROLD FULLER PARSONS


"I was with Parsons in a trench near Zonnebeke ... I had just moved away from him for a moment when some shrapnel burst over us, and I saw Parsons hit in the throat and killed immediately ... We lifted Parsons from the trench on to the parapet and covered him up with his groundsheet. He was buried at dusk just behind our trench. I don't know if a cross is put up to him." This eye-witness account was given to the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau on 15 March 1918 by Private G Todd, in response to enquiries instigated by Sergeant Parson's wife.
It was Mrs Parsons who chose the inscription, the last two lines of 'To Lucasta, Going to the Wars' by Richard Lovelace 1618-1658.

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of that chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this incontancy is such
As thou too shalt adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.


"THUG THU BARRACHD
ANN AM BEUS"

PRIVATE HUGH MACINNES


Hugh MacInnes's inscription is a quotation from a Gaelic song, a lament, 'Cumha na-h-Oighe', 'Lament for a Maiden'. Despite my best endeavours I had been unable to find a translation for it until Stuart Sinclair saw my Twitter plea. He took it to a Gaelic speaker, Stewart Macleod, who sent a complete translation of the song. The phrase 'Thug thu barrachd ann am beus', from the second verse, means, 'you displayed superiority in manners'. Although the song is written about the death of a young woman, the grief it describes is just as applicable to those mourning the death of a young man. The inscription appears to have been chosen by Mrs Flora MacInnes, Hugh's mother.

Maid of my heart, maid of my love!
Cold today is your resting place,
Your leaves have withered, your bloom has faded,
And they have laid you in the earth.
I am so grief-stricken and wretched,
Missing you night and day.
They locked my joy in the grave,
And neither lamenting nor sorrow will release her.

You were gentle, you were kind;
Every element was in love with you.
It was your soft smooth brow,
That first enticed my love for you.
You displayed superiority in manners,
You were fairer than hundreds.
Your form was without fault or blemish;
Sad is my state, missing you.

You have vanished, star of virtues,
You left the sky too swiftly;
It was the cloud of death that tore you from me,
And ill starred and melancholy is my course.
You were as a guiding light to me,
Radiant star, jewel of my eyes,
I am now like a rudderless ship,
With no harbour in mind without you.

But there is a sky up in heaven
Over which passes neither mist nor cloud;
A bright sky of the greatest beauty
And you will be radiant there anew.
Shine down into my heart
And guide me to the land
Where it is my desire to be with you,
Forever, without want, without care.
Calum MacPharlain 1853-1931

Private MacInnes enlisted in Canada where he had joined the Canadian Bank of Commerce in January 1911. Born and educated in Oban, Argyll, where his father was a crofter and the ferryman for the Kerrara-Gallanach ferry, Hugh MacInnes enlisted in Manitoba in January 1916. He was killed in action on 30 October 1917 during the Battle of Passchendaele. He had already been wounded twice on that day but had voluntarily remained on duty.


LOVE AND KISSES FROM MOTHER

PRIVATE JAMES DONNELLY


James Donnelly was nineteen when he died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Roisel on 19 October 1918. His medal index card shows that he was entitled to the 1915 Star having served in a theatre of war, identified as '2b' - Gallipoli and the Aegean Islands - since 28 August 1915. At this point he can have been no more than 16 since he was eleven on the day the Irish census was taken on 2 April 1911.
Donnelly, born in Curragh, Co. Kildare, was the son of James and Ann Donnelly. His father died before he was two and in 1911 his mother had been married for nine years to William Patterson, a bar owner in Newbridge Co. Kildare. There were no living children from this marriage and it would appear that James was her only child.
On the 16 October the 2nd Battalion Dublin Fusiliers took over the front line at Saint Benin just south of Le Cateau. On the morning of the 17th they crossed the River Selle in the face of heavy machine gun fire and two attempted German counter-attacks. They were relieved in the early hours of the 19th having suffered 206 casualties of whom thirty-seven were dead. Donnelly died of wounds later that same day.


A GENTLEMAN - UNAFRAID

DRIVER LAWRENCE HAROLD KING LIGHT


This inscription is a quotation from 'Dedication', one of Rudyard Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads. The full line reads, "And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid". 'They' are those who have died, and 'He' is God, visiting the dead. And the sort of men the poet is talking about are those who:

"Borne on the breath that men call Death, my brother's spirit came.
He scarce had need to doff his pride or slough the dross of Earth
E'en as he trod that day to God so walked he from his birth,
In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth."

An excellent website dedicated to the history of the Royal Engineers lists Driver Light as having died, not died of wounds, on 29 October. It is my guess that he will have died from influenza.


DEAR STEPHEN

CAPTAIN STEPHEN USSHER


A gentle inscription that uncovers a family tragedy. Captain Stephen Ussher was one of the five sons of the Revd Richard and Mrs Ussher. His youngest brother, Arthur Basil, died when he was seven. After Stephen's death, his older brother, Beverly, was killed in Gallipoli in June 1915. Then after the war his oldest brother, Robert Arland, died following an operation and the next year, 1922, his younger brother, Richard, died from a war-related illness.


DJENAN

BRIGADIER GENERAL FREDERICK JAMES HEYWORTH


"Brigadier-General FJ Heyworth, Commanding 3rd Guards Brigade, killed by a sniper at long range. Otherwise a quiet day."
Guards Division War Diary 9 May 1916

At 7 am on 9 May, General Heyworth went up to the front line to inspect a new mine crater blown by the Germans during the night. He was killed outright.
His inscription is a complete puzzle. Djenan seems to be an Arabic name for both a person and a place. It was chosen by his wife, Violet, the widow of James Hatfield-Harter, who he had married in 1913. Frederick Heyworth served in the Sudan in the 1880s, at the start of his military career, perhaps the name became associated with him then.
Written in December 1914

1 June 2018
I am very grateful to John Snowdon, @snowspain, for pointing out to me that Djenan was a character in French author Pierre Loti's popular 1906 novel, 'Les Desenchantees', the disenchanted or disillusioned. The word means 'well-beloved'.


UW WIL GESCHIEDE!
MATT. 26:42

PRIVATE ALTON DANIEL BENEKE


The inscription is Africaans for 'Thy will be done'. However, because Private Beneke's parents have specified the biblical reference we know that it's not the 'Thy wlll be done' of the Lord's Prayer but of Christ's agony in the Garden of Gethsemene. Christ, knowing that his betrayal, arrest and crucifiction are imminent, prays, "O My Father, if this cup may not pass away from Me, unless I drink it, Thy will be done". "Unless I drink it" ... for both soldier and next-of-kin there was no other option.


IF OUR TIME BE COME
LET US DIE MANFULLY
FOR OUR BRETHREN
MACC.IX.10

LIEUTENANT RONALD LUCAS QUIXANO HENRIQUES


Lieutenant Henriques was killed during the Battle of the Aisne. Having led his men to within thirty yards of the German positions, he was shot straight through the centre of his forehead just after he had uttered the word 'Advance'. A regular soldier, Ronald Henriques transferred from the 2nd Battalion to the 1st in order to be able get to the front immediately.
Ronald Henriques is thought to have been the first Jewish officer to be killed in the war. His inscription comes from 1 Maccabees. To Protestants, Maccabees is part of the Apocrypha, meaning that it is a non-canonical text considered to have no doctrinal worth but to be of interest perhaps for lessons in life and manners. It is valued in much the same way in Judaism where it is not a religious text either. The particular line that Ronald's parents chose concludes, "and let us not stain our honour".


BOYS, YE FOUGHT
AS HEROES FIGHT
AND DIED AS MEN

PRIVATE ARTHUR JEFFERSON LANE


Arthur Jefferson Lane was killed on 25 April 1918; his twenty-year-old brother, William Gladstone Lane, was killed two days later on the 27th. William's body was never found so he has no grave. His name is commemorated on the memorial to the missing at Villers-Bretonneux. It was their father who confirmed Arthur's inscription. Initially I thought that the reference to 'boys' was a reference to all the Australian soldiers in that battle. Now I feel sure that the father was directly addressing his two sons. But it's true, all the Australians fought "like heroes fight" at Villers-Bretonneux between the 24th and the 27th of April 1918.


HE HAS OUTSOARED
THE SHADOW OF OUR NIGHT

SECOND LIEUTENANT HAROLD JAMESON


Harold Jameson was 20 when he died and, according to his parents' entry in the Cemetery Register, he had been serving in France since 10 August 1914 when he was only 17. During that time he had been awarded the MC, DCM and the French Medaille Militaire. He was shot down over the German lines whilst directing artillery and crash landed in flames. His observor was killed outright and Harold died the next day in a Casualty Clearing Station in Lijssenthoek.
Harold was the brother of the novelist Storm Jameson. She dedicated 'A Richer Dust' (1931), the third novel in her trilogy 'The Triumph of Time', to his memory.
Harold's inscription comes from Shelley's 'Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats', with its comforting words to those who mourn a youthful death:
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.


FAR FROM HIS HILLS
SWEET REMEMBRANCE
ENFOLDS HIM

LIEUTENANT ROBERT WILSON HISLOP


The Mr JN Hislop who confirmed Lieutenant Hislop's inscription was not his father since his father was the Revd Robert Hislop. Mr JN Hislop lived in Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire, in the Central Scottish Lowlands, but there is no indication where either Robert Wilson Hislop was living when he joined up or where his parents lived. Are the hills, "his hills" as referred to in the inscripton, the hills of Refrewshire with their sweeping views and open grassland and moors?


EI ABERTH NID A HEIBIO
- A' I WYNEB
ANNWYL NID A'N ANGO
MAM

GUNNER EVAN EVANS


The lines come from 'Not Forgotten', a brief poem written by the Welsh bard Hedd Wynn, Private Ellis Humphrey Evans, to commemorate a friend killed in action in the early months of the war. The friend cannot have been Evan Evans because he was killed on the same day as Hedd Wyn himself.
Written in Welsh, the lines translate as, 'Neither his sacrifice nor his dear face will be forgotten. Mother'. The poem is inscribed on a plaque fixed to a statue of Hedd Wyn in his home town of Trawsfynydd. In translation it reads:

Neither his sacrifice nor his dear face will be forgotten
Though the Germans have stained their fist of steel in his blood


HE GAVE HIS LIFE
FOR FRANCE AND ENGLAND

LIEUTENANT ROBERT WILLIAM RYALL


Lieutenant Ryall came from a military family, his father had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the 4th Gurkha Rifles and his grandfather, Major General William Ryall, had commanded the 8th Bengal Cavalry. Robert Ryall was educated at Tonbridge School and Sandhurst. He was dangerously wounded on 25 September 1915 when a shell landed at his feet whilst he was leading his men in an attack at Mauquissart during the Battle of Loos. He died in the base hospital at Etaples sixteen days later.


OH ARTY, DEAR DEPARTED SHADE
WHERE IS THY PLACE
OF BLISSFUL REST
FROM HIS LOVING MOTHER

PRIVATE ARTHUR BULLOCK


Mrs Bullock has modified a poem by Robert Burns, 'To Mary in Heaven', substituting her pet name for her son for that of Mary. In the poem, it is the anniversary of Mary's death and Burns is remembering his last meeting with her, little realising at the time that it would be his last.

Thou ling'ring star, with lessening ray,
That lov'st to greet the early morn,
Again thou usher'st in the day
My Mary from my soul was torn.
O Mary! dear departed shade!
Where is thy place of blissful rest?
See'st thou thy lover lowly laid?
Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?

Arthur Bullock died at the base hospital at Etaples from the effects of gas. Although Mrs Bullock has quoted from verse one, I have a feeling that the final verse would have echoed her own sentiments too:

Still o'er these scenes my mem'ry wakes,
And fondly broods with miser-care;
Time but th' impression stronger makes,
As streams their channels deeper wear.


OUR RON
AGED 18½ YEARS
HE FOUGHT THE GOOD FIGHT

PRIVATE RONALD CARPENTER BAND


"Our Ron", one can still sense his parent's heartbreak, their son, just eighteen and a half years old, dead. Official government policy was that you had to be 18 to sign up and 19 to serve abroad, unless you had your parent's written permission - or the written permission of one parent, although you could of course have simply lied about your age. The fact that Mr and Mrs Band give their son's exact age, and that they complete the inscripton with a reference to the hymn 'Fight the Good Fight', all incline me to think that they had given their permission.


AS STRAIGHT AS A DIE
AS TRUE AS STEEL

LIEUTENANT, ACTING CAPTAIN RALPH WILLIAM HOMAN


After his death Ralph Homan's Major wrote to his parents to say, "I have lost not only one of my best Officers, but one of my best friends. He was straight as a die and as true as steel." One of Captain Homan's privates writing to a friend was rather more prosaic though no less heartfelt: "He was a very brave chap, what the boys call a 'Trump'." Captain Homan was injured on 10 August in the recapture of the trenches at Hooge. He died the next day of a "shrapnel wound in the head".


HE PREFERRED A NOBLE LIFE
BEFORE A LONG

PRIVATE JAMES FINGLAND HYSLOP


Private Hyslop was born in 1887 in Muswell Hill, London. He enlisted in Calgary, Alberta on 11 June 1915. His inscription was chosen by his sister, Mrs JA Forbes. Whilst not a quote it owes its sentiment to Seneca the Younger, the Roman philosopher, who wrote: "Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.


IT IS SAD BUT TRUE
I WONDER WHY
THE GOOD ARE ALWAYS
FIRST TO DIE

PRIVATE JOSEPH HILL


Joseph Hill was a 35 year old labourer from Aramac, Queensland, Australia, who enlisted in December 1915 and embarked for Europe in May 1916. It was his sister Jeannie who confirmed his inscription. It's a popular piece of verse that often appeared in the 'In Memorium' columns of local newspapers.


LET NOT AMBITION
MOCK THEIR USEFUL TOIL

PRIVATE JOHN GRAY


This is a line from 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' by Thomas Gray (1716-1771). It was chosen by Private Gray's wife and implies that those who have achieved the trappings of greatness should not underestimate the value of those whose lives appear to have been more humble - John Gray may only have been a private but he played his part in life and in the war. It's the following stanza that is much better known and to which perhaps Mrs Gray wanted to draw attention:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour: -
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.


HE LOVED HONOUR
MORE THAN HE LOVED LIFE

LANCE CORPORAL THOMAS EUSTACE


Thomas Eustace, born in Newfoundland in 1888, was a graduate of Bishop's University, Quebec, where he was studying for the ministry of the Church of England when he enlisted. According to the war diary, his squadron had just gone into the trenches at Hill 63 when he became the regiment's first casualty. The diary doesn't record how he died but mentions that German snipers had been very active. He was buried the next afternoon, "Simple burial service carried out. Corporal Hodge of the 4th CMR officiated." Corporal Hodge, a serving clergyman, was injured by a shell the following day and died of his wounds the day after that.
Thomas Eustace's inscription is not a direct quote but has echoes of Brutus's speech to Cassius when he declared, "For let the gods so speed me as I love the name of honour more than I fear death," [Julius Caeser, Act 1 Sc. 2] and also of the seventeenth-century poet, Richard Lovelace, whose 'To Lucasta, going to the Wars' ends: "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I nor honour more".


THOU ROCK OF AGES
I'M HIDING IN THEE

PRIVATE RUNDLE COUMBE


Private Coumbe's inscription references the Reverend Toplady's hymn, Rock of Ages, which begins and ends with the couplet:
"Rock of Age cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee".
In the hymn, the writer refers to God as the rock of ages, asking Him to shelter him from the guilt and power of sin:
"Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power".
Mrs Coumbe, Private Coumbe's mother, who chose the inscription, appears to be telling God that she is hiding from the world in Him.
Rundle Coumbe was born at Underhill Farm in Cornwall in 1892. He enlisted in Canada on 8 February 1915. His parents still lived in Cornwall so I am assuming that he had emigrated.


ONLY SON
R.I.P.

PRIVATE MICHAEL THOMAS MAHER


According to a file in the Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, Private Maher was a stretcher bearer killed during the German attack on Villers Bretonneux. Four witnesses recalled that, whilst engaged in carrying wounded from the fighting to the Regimental Aid Post, he was hit in the temple and chest by a shell and killed outright. One witness mentioned that 'Mick' was "a very obliging chap, well thought of by his mates". In civilian life Michael Thomas Maher was a farmer, grazier, from Bethundra in New South Wales who had enlisted on 1 February 1916.


NON NOBIS SOLUM

SECOND LIEUTENANT HENRY FREDERICK EDGCUMBE EDWARDES


Not for ourselves alone. The quotation comes from Cicero's De Officiis 1:22. Non nobis solum nati sumus ortusque nostri partem patria vindicat, partem amici. Not for ourselves alone are we born; our country, our friends, have a share in us. Henry Edwardes, a graduate of St John's College, Cambridge, had been a Classics master at Abingdon School before he joined up in the autumn of 1914. Their website commemorates his service.


AU REVOIR
DAD

PRIVATE HERBERT ERIC ADAMS


A widowed father's farewell to his nineteen-year old son. The French for good-bye, in so far as it translates into English at all, means, until I see you again, or good-bye for the present. In this way Private Adams' father could be neatly indicating a belief in eternal life without being overtly religious ... or he could just be speaking French!


MAN'S INHUMANITY TO MAN
MAKES COUNTLESS THOUSANDS
MOURN

CORPORAL GEORGE MORRIS


George Morris died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Estaires. His widowed mother chose his inscription. It would not have been the sort of inscription that the War Graves Commission originally had in mind. They were thinking in terms of simple dedications and religious texts. Nevetheless, although they had the power to censor inscriptions, they were happy with this one. And Mrs Morris wasn't the only person to choose it. It doesn't insult the Germans, the British Government, or the Army etc, it just laments man's inhumanity to man. The quotation comes from verse seven of 'Man Was Made to Mourn' by Robert Burns (1759-1796).

Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves,
Regret, remorse and shame!
And man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, -
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!


IN LOVING MEMORY
THESE ARE THEY -

LIEUTENANT GEORGE GORDON STEVEN


An enigmatic inscription which is explained when you realise that the quotation, "These are they", comes from the hymn, 'How Bright These Glorious Visions Shine'. The hymn is based on Revelation 7:14 "These are they which came out of great tribulation and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb". The full text of the hymn reveals how it could have brought comfort to the bereaved. Verse five reads:
Hunger and thirst are felt no more
Nor suns with scorching ray;
God is their Sun, whose cheering beams
Diffuse eternal day.
And verse seven:
Midst pastures green He'll lead His flock
Where living streams appear;
And God the Lord from every eye
Shall wipe off every tear.


... FRIEND JUST SAY
"HE TRIED"

CAPTAIN HENRY EVELYN ARTHUR PLATT


This seems rather a half-hearted inscription until you realise that it's a quote from a poem written by Henry Platt himself. By chance, the poem was published in the Eton Chronicle just after he had been killed but before the announcement of his death. The poem makes clear that the writer wouldn't want any elevated language to surround his own death.
"Say not of him 'he left this vale of tears,'
Who loved the good plain English phrase
'He died,'
Nor state he nobly lived (or otherwise),
Failed or succeeded' - friend, just say
"He tried"
Captain Platt was a very popular officer both with his men and his fellow officers. He had been out at the front since August 1914, originally with the 19th Hussars. However, following a series of clashes with a senior officer, he asked for a transfer to the Coldstream Guards. He was killed whilst out wiring on a bright moonlit night.


TROS RYDDID A'I WLAD

PRIVATE WILLIAM ROBERTS


William Robert's Welsh inscription translates as 'For freedom and country'. Blighty Valley was a sheltered location, just behind the Somme front line, where the dead could be buried and the wounded await transportation by light railway back to the Casualty Clearing Stations, Base Hospitals, or 'Blighty'. William Roberts was serving with the RAMC, and had seen service in the South African War too. There is no record of whether he was a medical orderly or a stretcher bearer.


HE SLEEPETH WITH THE BRAVE

LANCE CORPORAL ALAN HILL


Alan Hill was one of the 19,240 men killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. His inscription references 'How Sleep the Brave', a poem by William Collins (1721-1759).
How sleep the brave, who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes blest!
When Spring with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow'd mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.

By fairy hands their knell is rung;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honour comes, a pilgim grey,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair
To dwell, a weeping hermit, there!


DEATH TO ME
SHORT WARNING GAVE
THEREFORE BE CAREFUL
HOW YOU LIVE

PRIVATE IVOR GRAFTON JONES


This is a classic gravestone inscription, which is usually followed by some sort of instruction to:
Prepare in time, do not delay
For no one knows their dying day.
Private Jones came from Ton Pentre, a small mining community in the Rhondda Valley, where non-conformism was very strong. He died from the effects of gas at a Casualty Clearing Station in Bailleul.


DIED AT BETHUNE
FROM WOUNDS RECEIVED
IN ACTION NEAR VERMELLES
RIP

REVEREND JOHN GWYNN


Father Gwynn volunteered on the outbreak of war to serve as a chaplain at the front. He was attached to the Irish Guards and went with them wherever they went: living with them in the trenches, helping at the Field Dressing Station when they were in action, comforting them, administering the last rites and burying them. On 11 October a shell landed at the entrance to his dugout and a fragment pierced his lung. He died the next day at a Casualty Clearing Station. His inscription is based on words taken from his temporary grave marker, which continued:
This monument has been erected by all ranks of
The 1st Bat. Irish Guards in grateful
Remembrance of their Beloved Chaplain
Father Gwynn
Who was with them on active service for nearly 12 months
From Nov. 1914 until his death
And shared with unfailing devotion all their trials and hardships.


OUR ONLY CHILD
LOVE NEVER FAILETH

PRIVATE GEORGE HENRY JENNINGS BROWN


George Brown was the only child of the Reverend Thomas and Mrs Brown of St Stephen's Church, Walthamstow. They chose an extract from the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8, in the American Standard Version, for their son's headstone inscription: Love ... beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth;


A WHITE ROSE

CORPORAL WILLIAM JOHN KNIGHT MM


Can Corporal Knight really only have been 18 when he died; 18 seems far too young to have been a corporal. As for his inscription, that could imply that he was older too. It was chosen by Mrs Knight. A white rose is a symbol of innocence and purity, so it could be an appropriate inscription for a mother to have chosen for her eighteen-year-old son. But 'A White Rose' is also the title of a popular poem, written by John Boyle O'Reilly, and it's extremely unlikely that the Mrs Knight who chose this as an inscription was William Knight's mother.
The red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
O the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.
But I send you a cream-white rosebud
With a flush on its petal tips;
For the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on the lips.
I think that Mrs Knight was William Knight's wife since, however old he was, he was old enough to have fathered a son, and it was this son's grandson who owned Corporal Knight's Military Medal in 2012.


LEAD THOU ME ON

PRIVATE R CAMPBELL


Private Campbell's wife had remarried by the time she confirmed this inscription for his headstone. It's a quote from the hymn, 'Lead Kindly Light', written by John Henry Newman in 1833:
Lead kindly light, amid the encicling gloom,
Lead Thou me on.
The night is dark and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on;
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.


MY BELOVED SON

CORPORAL JR BISHOP


Both Corporal Bishop's parents were alive so, from the use of the personal pronoun 'my' as opposed to 'our', I assume that the inscription they chose is a quotation from the New Testament, Mark 1:11, when, following Christ's baptism, a voice came from heaven saying, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased".
In the section that asks for further biographical details on the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia, Mr Bishop quotes from the letter of condolence he received from his son's Company Commander, Captain Adams: "I valued Corporal Bishop highly as one of the best men in the company as well as in the battalion - his men and his commander miss him - cheerful under the worst conditions - and a great help to the men who all deplore his death. I looked upon him as a personal friend and he was the most popular NCO in the platoon, probably in the whole company".


I HAVE LOST YOU
I WHO LOVED YOU
BUT LIKE OTHERS
MUST BE BRAVE

PRIVATE WH MASON


Private Mason's wife's sentiments must have been echoed by hundreds of thousands of wives everywhere. There was no real alternative.


LOYAL AU MORT

MAJOR ERIC GREY DRUMMOND


Loyal au mort, faithful unto death, is the motto of the Drummond family of Invermay. Eric Drummond was a professional soldier who had served with the Indian Army since 1895. He retired in November 1913 but rejoined the army on the outbreak of war. He crossed to France on the 8 November and was ordered to join the 2/3rd Gurkha Rifles near Bethune. He went into the trenches on the 13th and was killed that night leading an attack.


THE LORD GAVE AND
THE LORD HAS TAKEN AWAY
OUR DEAR NORMAN

PRIVATE NORMAN DONALD MCPHEE


Private McPhee's parents quote the Old Testament, Job 1 21-2. On receiving the news of the death of all his children and the loss of all his possessions, Job falls to his knees saying:
Naked I came out of my mother's womb, and naked shall return thither: the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
Three weeks after Norman's death, his brother William James McPhee was killed, the same day that another brother was wounded, the 19 July 1916. A fourth of the McPhee brothers was wounded on 7 June 1917.


O GOD GIVE ME
THE HERO'S MOTHER
STRENGTH TO SAY
THY WILL BE DONE

PRIVATE THOMAS ELWELL


'Thy will be done' was one of the most popular of all headstone inscriptions. Mrs Elwell's variation shows how hard it was for her to accept her son's death, even if it was God's will.


HIS LAST WORDS WERE
"I AM NOT AFRAID
I HAVE DONE MY DUTY"

SERJEANT FREDERICK PARMENAS BECKLEY


Many men believed it was their duty to serve their country, and the fact that they had done so brought comfort to their relations - and to the men themselves. Serjeant Elwell was the Scoutmaster of the 1st Chesham Bois Troop which he is thought to have founded.


AND FROM THE GROUND
THERE BLOSSOMS RED
LIFE THAT SHALL ENDLESS BE

LIEUTENANT JOHN NOBLE


John Noble, a graduate of Glasgow University, was a school teacher at Henderson Street School, Glasgow. His inscription comes from the last verse of the hymn, O Love that will not let me go:
O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life's glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.


"HIS GALLANTRY UNDER FIRE
WAS ALWAYS AN EXAMPLE
TO HIS MEN
AND OTHER OFFICERS"

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARCHER BENJAMIN LAXTON


Both the tone of the words and the quotation marks make me think that this is an extract from a letter of condolence to his mother from Lieutenant Laxton's senior officer. The fact that she quoted from it for her son's headstone inscription indicates that she derived the intended comfort from it. Her son, after all, was only 19. He died in a Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek "of gunshot wounds head, right shoulder and right thigh".


SIC ITUR AD ASTRA

CAPTAIN EDWARD RALPH LAMBERT HOLLINS


The epitaph translates as 'Thus you shall go to the stars' and comes from Virgil's Aeneid Book IX Line 641. Edward Hollins was a schoolmaster, educated at Malvern and Emmanuel College Cambridge. He died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Lijssenthoek the day after being involved in the retaking of The Bluff. This was a strategically significant mound, a spoil heap. It was only about 30 feet high but that was enough to provide a valuable observation point over the flat lands around Ypres. The Germans had captured it on 14 February. The British recaptured it on the 2 March with the loss of 1,620 lives.


A MOTHER'S HEART IS BURIED
WITH HER DEAR SOLDIER SON

PRIVATE THOMAS JOSEPH DAWES


Thomas Dawes mother both chose his inscription and filled in the circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia. On the latter, in the section which asks whether there's any other biographical information likely to be of interest to historians of the AIF, Mrs Dawes tells how her son was very ill on the journey out from Australia and, believing himself to be dying, wrote a letter to his mother, put it in a bottle and threw it overboard. Four months later the bottle came ashore on the west coast of Australia and the letter was posted on to his mother in Victoria.
Eleven days after her son's death, Mrs Dawes inserted a death anouncement in her local paper, the Bendigo Advertiser; it concludes with a long memorial verse which reveals her pain.
When the flags are o'er the roadways
And the troops come marching home,
And the sweethearts lean to bless them
And the mothers to caress them.
O God, have pity for the waiting ones
Whose boys can never come.


O SACRED HEART OF JESUS
HAVE MERCY ON HIS SOUL
RIP

CORPORAL JAMES SADDINGTON MM


James Saddington was a Roman Catholic and it was his mother who chose a classic Roman Catholic text for his inscription. The manner of his death, killed in action, would have deprived him of the last rites so the text was therefore a plea to Jesus to secure his path through purgatory.


FOR EVER ENGLAND

CORPORAL JAMES ANTHONY LINCEY


James Lincey had been in Tasmania for three years when he returned to Europe as a soldier in 1916. Born in Menstone-in-Wharfdale, England, he emigrated with his parents in 1913. His father died two years later. His mother therefore chose his inscription, "For ever England". The quotation is taken from the third line of Rupert Brooke's famous poem, The Soldier:
If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.


WHO DIES IF ENGLAND LIVE

SECOND LIEUTENANT PHILIP BRYDGES GUTTEREZ HENRIQUES


Sir Philip and Lady Henriques chose the last line of Rudyard Kipling's patriotic, 1914 poem, For All We Have and Are, for their son's headstone inscription:

No easy hope or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
But iron sacrifice
Of body, will, and soul.
There is but one task for all -
One life for each to give.
What stands if freedom fall?
Who dies if England live.

They used the same quotation in a memorial window to their son in St Mark's Church, Normandy, Surrey. Lieutenant Philip Henriques died in a casualty clearing station at Lijssenthoek of wounds received in the Second Battle of Ypres.


HIS LAST MESSAGE
"I AM ALL RIGHT
KEEP CHEERY AND BRIGHT"

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM HAY


Lieutenant Hay was wounded on 27 March when the First Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers were heavily involved in an action around the St Eloi craters. He was well enough to send his parents this encouraging message but four days later he was dead.


SACRIFICED

PRIVATE SIDNEY JOHN CANNELL


This is a difficult inscription to gauge. At first sight it looks like a bitter criticism of Private Cannell's pointless death, but perhaps that is to be reading it with our twenty-first-century preconceptions. Sidney Cannell was wounded on 1 November in the desperate fighting around Ypres as the Germans pushed again and again to break the British lines. His wife chose his inscription. I wonder if she was simply acknowledging that something she held very dear had had to be given up for the greater good, which is the meaning of sacrifice, rather than that her husband was the victim of a callous military command.


MY SON DIED BY
THE HAND OF FOES
A STRANGER'S HAND
HIS LIMBS REPOSED

PRIVATE JOHNSTONE MACPHERSON


In earlier days the laying out of a body carried great significance, not only for the dead but for their family too. Traditionally these offices were carried out by the women, with the body remaining in the family home, being watched over, until the funeral. All these customs brought a comfort that was denied to those bereaved by the war.


SPLENDID YOU PASSED
THE GREAT SURRENDER MADE

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ARTHUR JEX BLAKE PERCIVAL


At mid-day on the 31 October 1914 the Germans broke throught the lines at Gheluvelt and, had they taken advantage of the situation, could have broken the British Army in Flanders. The situation was made even worse when a German shell hit Hooge Chateau killing six senior staff officers and seriously wounding several others just as they were meeting to confront the emergency. Lt Colonel Percival was one of the staff officers killed. The situation was saved by the Worcestershire Regiment who, in an incredible action, drove the Germans back and managed to close the gap.
Arthur Percival's inscription is taken from the first line of the third verse of Sir John Arkwright's poem 'The Supreme Sacrifice'.
Splendid you passed, the great surrender made,
Into the light that never more shall fade;
Deep your contentment in that blest abode,
Who wait the last clear trumpet call of God.


HE DIED FOR KING AND COUNTRY

LIEUTENANT WALTER GEORGE FREDERIC WELCH


This was not Lieutenant Welch's original inscription. He was killed in Herenthage Wood, between Gheluvelt and Hollebeke, and was buried where he fell. After the war, his father bought a small plot of land - 138' x 70' - surrounding his grave and put up a private memorial - something the War Graves Commission always tried very hard to stop. A seven-foot-high Celtic cross, the inscription read:
This cross is set up
In ever loving memory
To mark the place where
On the evening of October 30th 1914
During the First Battle of Ypres
Lieutenant Walter George Frederic Welch
17th Battery Royal Field Artillery
Fell in action aged 24
He was buried by his brother officers & men
Near this spot
"Alongside the guns he had fought.
A keen and good soldier" O.C.
On 9 November 1956 Walter Welch's body was exhumed and reburied in Ypres Ramparts Cemetery, Lille Gate. His father had died in 1939 and I am assuming that the family decided it would be better if the Commission now looked after his grave.


"A GRIM GRAY TRIBUTE
OF MEMORY
IS ALL WE HAVE LEFT TO GIVE" CMH

CAPTAIN CYRIL MORTON HORNE


Cyril Morton Horne was an Irish writer and music hall performer. His inscription is a quotation from one of his own poems, Aftermath, taken from his book, Songs of the Shrapnel Shell:

A grim, gray tribute of memory
Is all we have left to give
To those who have fought and fallen
From those who sorrow and live.
Memory lives and we wonder
If the law of the gods was kind,
For the hardest battle was fought by
The somebody-left-behind.

Cyril Horne made his debut on the London stage in 1910 and then later that year he went to Broadway where he spent three years. He was killed trying to rescue a soldier lying out in the front of the trenches. He was close to succeeding when a shrapnel shell exploded overhead and killed them both.


HE DIED THAT WE MIGHT LIVE
TO THINK OF IT
FILLS OUR HEARTS WITH TEARS

PRIVATE SAMUEL HORROCKS


A beautifully tender and unsophisticated inscription. It appears that Samuel Horrock's wife and their two sons lived with his parents. She chose the inscription but from the use of the word 'our' acknowledges the rest of the family's grief with her own.


DARLING JACK
HOW I MISS YOU
NOBODY KNOWS BUT ME
MOTHER

PRIVATE JOHN FAGAN


A deeply personal inscription from a mother whose son is buried 10,000 miles away from his home in Geelong, Australia. She uses her son's headstone to send him a private message of grief and longing. 'Nobody knows but me Mother', even though the form confirming the inscription was signed by her husband, John's father.


THY WILL BE DONE
ONE WHO LOVED HIS MOTHER
AND HIS MOTHER LOVED HIM

PRIVATE ALFRED BRITTEN


An article in The Observer about soldiers' wills on 26 October 2014 confirms what a study of headstone inscriptions already reveals, that many soldiers had a special relationship with their mother, one that they were very happy to acknowledge.


NOTHING IS HERE FOR TEARS
NOTHING BUT WELL AND FAIR

LIEUTENANT SIR ROBERT (ROBIN) GEORGE VIVIAN DUFF


Lieutenant Sir Robin Duff's widow, Lady Juliet, quotes from John Milton's Samson Agonistes for her husband's inscription:

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast; no weakness no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame; nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

Sir Robin was killed by a sniper whilst reconnoitering a heavily defended farm outside the Belgian village of Oostnieukerke. Originally buried in the churchyard at Oostnieukerke, his body was exhumed and reinterred in 1952.
Sir Robin was the only son of Sir Charles Garden Assheton-Smith who died on 24 September 1914. He attended his father's funeral in uniform and was dead himself twenty-two days later. His seven-year-old son inherited the baronetcy.


WE THANK GOD FOR
19 YEARS OF HAPPINESS
WITH OUR ONLY CHILD

SECOND LIEUTENANT THOMAS FREDERICK HENRY WAKE


The dignity and restraint of this inscription are heartbreaking. Thomas Wake was wounded on 9 April when the Germans launched their Spring Offensive in Flanders - Operation Georgette. He died the next day in a Casualty Clearing Station in Lijssenthoek.


"MY SON, MY SON"
"NO REWARD CAN BE TOO GREAT"

CAPTAIN THOMAS RIVERSDALE COLYER-FERGUSSON VC


Thomas Colyer-Fergusson quotes from two sources in his son's inscription. The first is the Old Testament, 2 Samuel: 33:

And the King was much moved and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept. And as he went, thus he said, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son".

The second quotation comes from the citation for his son's Victoria Cross. Captain Thomas Riversdale Colyer-Fergusson won the VC for his capture of two enemy machine guns in an attack where his conduct throughout "forms an amazing record of dash, gallantry and skill, for which no reward can be too great, having regard to the importance of the position won".


IN MEMORIAM
IN SPEM

CAPTAIN HENRY COLT ARTHUR HOARE


The Latin translates as 'In memory and in hope'; a poignant inscription for a death that led to the end of the Hoare family's ownership of Stourhead after more than 200 years. Captain Henry Hoare was the only son of Sir Henry and Lady Hoare. He was wounded on 17 November 1917 in the attack on the Mughar Ridge in Palestine. After lying out on the battlefield all night he was eventually evacuated to the hospital in Raseltin, a journey of more than three days, where he died on 20 December from haemorrhage and heart failure. His father later wrote, "Our only & the best of sons. He never grieved us by thought or word or deed. He loved Stourhead, worked for it, and with us all his life. He was deeply respected by all here who mourn his loss".
Following the death of his heir, Sir Henry decided to leave Stourhead to the National Trust as the best way of keeping the estate together.


ALSO IN MEMORY OF
4399 DRUMMER ROBERT GREGG
KILLED IN THE BOER WAR
AT SPION KOP

PRIVATE LEONARD GREGG


Leonard's inscription remembers his brother who was killed in the Boer War. Robert was 20 when he died in South Africa. The Greggs were a military family: in the 1881 census their address is given as Military Barracks, Bolton Road, Elton, Bury, Lancashire. This is the address of the Lancashire Fusiliers' Wellington Barracks. Father, William Gregg, is described in the census as Colour Sergeant, 7 Rgt. Lancs. Militia, Pensioner. He was 39. Leonard too must have been a professional soldier. The 1911 census records him as serving with the Lancashire Fusiliers in Multan, Punjab, India. The 2nd Battalion crossed to France on 20 August 1914 and were involved in all the early battles of the first months of the war. Leonard died in a Casualty Clearing Station on 23 October 1914.


WITH LOVE AND PRIDE
WE REMEMBER
THE CIRCUMSTANCES
OF HIS DEATH

SAPPER GEORGE STEPHENSON


Unfortunately it has not been possible to discover the circumstances of George's death, which the family say they remember with love and pride. The 15 June 1915 saw the Canadian Brigade suffer heavy casualties in an attack at Givenchy.
George was one of the three Stephenson brothers killed in the war (see previous epitaph). He had emigrated to Canada and enlisted in Quebec on 23 September 1914.


ONE OF SEVEN BROTHERS
WHO SERVED
THREE OF WHOM
REST IN FRANCE

SECOND LIEUTENANT ERIC LIONEL STEPHENSON


The Stephensons were a properous family living in Althorpe, Lincolnshire. The boys' father, Mr James Stephenson, was a local benefactor and JP. Eric's inscription tells the family story. Strangely, his is the only inscription that mentions the other brothers. The oldest, George, had emigrated to Canada and served with the Canadian Engineers. He was killed on 15 June 1915. The youngest, Lieutenant Urban Arnold Stephenson, Lincolnshire Regiment, was killed on 23 March 1918.
The War Graves Commission do not hold any family details for Urban, and he has no inscription, but he is definitely related to George and Eric because they are all three commemorated on the war memorial in Althorpe. The lack of family details could be because, as the the records show, Urban's body was originally only identified as that of an unknown British officer of the Lincolnshire Regiment. His body was exhumed, identified and reburied in Peronne Communal Cemetery Extension where, after the war, eleven cemeteries were concentrated into one. Perhaps the lack of information about Urban has something to do with the death of Mr James Stephenson in a car crash in 1925 .


ALSO IN MEMORY OF HIS
SON JAMES, KILLED SOMEWHERE
IN FRANCE SEPT 2ND 1918
AGE 19, UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN

CORPORAL HENRY ARMITAGE


Corporal Armitage was killed by a shell and thirteen months later his wife was informed that their son had also been killed, "somewhere in France". Strict censorship meant that soldiers were never allowed to say exactly where they were beyond the phrase somewhere in France. In fact James Armitage had been killed in the attack on the German Drocourt-Queant lines and as his body was never found he is commemorated on the Vis-en-Artois memorial.


FRANCIS GIDEON HIS ONLY SON
K.R.R.C.
KILLED IN ACTION 10.1.15
AGED 18

PRIVATE HARRY ALFRED TAYLOR


Rifleman Francis Gideon Taylor, son of Harry Alfred Taylor, enlisted in Islington on 13 August 1914. He was killed ten months later on 10 January 1915, as recorded on his father's headstone. Francis Gideon has no headstone of his own and is comemorated on the memorial at Le Touret. His father, Harry Taylor, died of wounds in a base hospital in Calais. Aged 49 at the time of his death he was above the age for military service. His inscription was chosen by his own father, Frank Taylor of Barrow-in-Furness. This means that Harry's wife/Francis's mother does not appear in the records.


UNIS DANS LA MORT
COMME ILS L'ETAIENT
DANS LA VIE

PRIVATE PAUL JEAN AND PRIVATE CHARLES GUY DESTRUBE


Brothers Paul Jean and Charles Guy Destrube were not only killed on the same day (see previous inscription) but they were buried in the same grave. French Canadians from Edmonton their inscription tranlates as 'United in death as they were in life'.


ALSO IN MEMORY OF
HIS BROTHER JACK, AGE 23
KILLED IN ACTION SAME DAY
THY WILL BE DONE

PRIVATE W STOKES


Brothers W and JH Stokes both served with the Duke of Wellington's Regiment and both were killed on 3 September 1916 in the attack on Thiepval Ridge. JH Stokes (Jack) is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.


GUS AM BRIS AN LA

PRIVATE HUGH MCGILP


Hugh McGilp was one of three brothers killed in the war, only two of whom have graves. His father appears to have chosen his brother Archie's inscription, a factual account of the family's tragedy (see previous inscription). Hugh's mother chose his, a quote in Gaelic from the Old Testament, Song of Solomon 2:17, Until the day breaks (and the shadows flee away).
If I'm reading the cemetery records correctly, Hugh's body appears to have been exhumed on 23 January 1929. He had originally been buried with eight others as unknown British soldiers. By 1929 the War Graves Commission knew who eight of them were and according to the exhumation records could identify Hugh individually by his kilt and his size ten boots.


HUGH, ELDER BROTHER
AT HOOGE, MAY 1915
JOHN, TWIN BROTHER
AT ARRAS, APRIL 1917

PRIVATE ARCHIE ALLISON MCGILP


Archie McGilp was one of three brothers who were all killed in the war. Hugh was buried in Sanctuary Wood Cemetery but John, whose body was never found, is commemorated on the Arras Memorial. The family lived at 33 Montpelier Park, Edinbugh and the boys all attended Boroughmuir High School. It's a long way from Appin in Argyllshire where a headstone in Appin Old Churchyard commemorates the family: father, Archibald, 1861 to 1938; mother, Elizabeth Allison, 1867 to 1948; the three boys, and their sister, Mary Margaret McGilp, who died in 1950 aged 54.


I KNOW
WHERE YOU ARE DEAR LAD
BUT HARD TO SAY
YOUR BROTHER IS MISSING

SHOEING SMITH GEORGE HALTON


In 1920, when the details of Coxyde Cemetery were finalised, George Halton's brother was still 'missing in action'. Their mother, seemingly caring nothing for the normal conventions of headstone inscriptions, used George's epitaph to send him a direct message. It is obvious that while she could derive some comfort from knowing where George was buried the unknown fate of her other son was an added grief.
Twenty-eight men with the surname Halton were killed in the war, nine of them are commorated on memorials because their bodies were never found and so they have no known grave: none of them can be identified as George Halton's brother. He could be Gunner R Halton who was killed in action on 12 July 1917 and is commemorated on the Nieuport Memorial, finalised in 1928. Gunner R Halton and George Halton both served with C Battery, 168th Brigade Royal Field Artillery.
A Shoeing Smith, someone with the responsibilty for shoeing horses, was a both a trade qualification and an army rank.


ALSO IN MEMORY
OF WILLIE AND BOB
BROTHERS
KILLED IN ACTION

PRIVATE HENRY GRAHAM


'Bob', Corporal Robert John Graham, Cheshire Regiment, was killed on 17 April 1918. He is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial. I have been unable to identify 'Willie'. It was their sister, Mrs Elizabeth Thornton, who signed the paperwork for her brother Henry's inscription.


A BELOVED SON
WORTHY OF A BETTER FATE

PRIVATE OSBORNE DYE


Osborne Dye was one of three brothers killed in the war. The surviving brother, William, appears to have decided his other brothers' inscriptions (see previous two inscriptions) but their mother signed the form for this one. Her disillusion and bitterness are unmistakeable. All three brothers are described as 'beloved', which is the only similarity between the three inscriptions.


A DEARLY BELOVED SON
WHO BRAVELY DID HIS DUTY

RIFLEMAN FREDERICK DYE


Frederick Dye was one of three brothers killed in the war (see previous and next inscription). Frederick's surviving brother, William, signed the form confirming both this and Harry's inscriptions. Despite the numerous references on headstones to King and country, or to abstract ideals such as honour and liberty, many men simply saw themselves as having done their duty.


UNITED WITH
HIS BELOVED BROTHERS
OSBORNE & FRED
WHO FELL IN 1915

PRIVATE HARRY DYE


Harry Dye was one of four brothers who fought in the war of whom three were killed. Osborne and Fred died within twenty-four days of each other in May and June 1915. The records show that it was the surviving brother, William, who signed the form confirming this inscription. I wonder if he chose it?


ALSO HIS BROTHER "BILLY"
FELL AT ROEUX, 16TH MAY 1917
OUR HOPES OUR LIFE

PRIVATE JAMES HENDERSON RANKIN


Mr and Mrs Rankin lost their two sons within three months of each other. Private James Rankin died of wounds at a base hospital in Wimereux. His brother 'Billy', Private William H Rankin, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, was killed during the Battle of Arras. His body was never found, consequently he has no grave, no headstone and no inscription. The four, final words of his brother's inscription say everything about his parent's grief


RIGHT DEAR
IN THE SIGHT OF THE LORD
IS THE DEATH OF HIS SAINTS

THE REVEREND CHARLES IVO SINCLAIR HOOD


The Reverend Charles Hood died of wounds in the Casualty Clearing Station at Lijjsenthoek exactly one month before his elder brother died at Ebblinghem (see previous epitaph). A third brother, Lieutenant Commander Martin Arthur Frankland Hood RN, died on 14 May 1919 aged 31. The fourth brother, Alban John Frankland Hood, a major in the King's Own Scottish Borderers, who had been gassed on the Somme, died in 1927. All four brothers are commemorated on the war memorial in Nettleham Church despite the fact that Alban, who died after 31 August 1921, died too late to qualify for commemoration by the War Graves Commission.
Charles Hood's inscription is taken from Psalm 116 v. 15 and implies that God takes a particular interest in receiving his saints into heaven.


"IN MEMORY
OF A GREAT COLONEL"
TRIBUTE OF BRIGADE
ON HIS CROSS

LIEUTENANT COLONEL EDWARD THESIGER FRANKLAND HOOD


Today Colonel Hood's grave marker, a wooden cross, hangs on a pillar in All Saints, Nettleham, Lincolnshire. Colonel Hood, officer commanding 38th Brigade, died of wounds in the Casualty Clearing Station at Ebblinghem. The dedication on the wooden cross says, 'In memory of a great Colonel'. His mother had the words repeated on his permanent headstone with the explanation that this was the tribute of his brigade.


HE DIED AS HE LIVED
BRAVE AND FEARLESS

LIEUTENANT ALAN SCRIVENER LLOYD


Lieutenant Lloyd was killed reconnecting the wire from his forward observation post, broken by a German bombardment. Some weeks after his death, Gunner John Manning, who had been with him when he died, placed a small hand-made, wooden sign on Lloyd's grave. On it he had written, "He died as he lived, brave and fearless, a true British hero". Lloyd' wife chose the first eight words for her husband's headstone inscription. The wooden sign is now part of the Imperial War Museum Collection, as are many of Lloyd's papers
Lloyd was a Quaker, educated at Leighton Park School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He fell out with his parents over his decision to enlist, but as he wrote in a letter to his father, "I'm the last person to be a jingo and hate flag wagging and Union Jack hurrahing etc but do feel that I might be useful, with my motor or without it, in case of attack by Germany and so I've offered my services.


HIS MEN WROTE ON ROUGH CROSS
"IN MEMORY OF
A VERY BRAVE BRITISH OFFICER"

SECOND LIEUTENANT LAMONT LIVINGSTONE PATERSON


The 'rough cross' was Lieutenant Paterson's original grave marker, a wooden cross. His mother, touched by his men's inscription, had it repeated on her son's permanent headstone. Lamont Paterson was a Canadian born and bred. He served with an English regiment and to his men was "a very brave British officer".


SHOT AT DAWN
ONE OF THE FIRST TO ENLIST
A WORTHY SON OF HIS FATHER

PRIVATE ALBERT INGHAM


There is no prevarication about this inscription. In order to spare his feelings, Private Ingham's father would have been informed that his son had 'died of wounds', and this is what it says in the cemetery register. However, when Mr Ingham discovered the truth he chose not to hide it but to state it defiantly on his son's headstone. He also pointed out that his son had been an early volunteer and that he, the father, was still proud of him.
Albert Ingham and a friend absconded from the front and were caught in civilan clothes trying to get back to England. They were tried and executed for desertion. Without Mr Ingham's choice of inscription there would be nothing to differentiate his son's grave from that of any other casualty of the war.
Interestingly, Mr Ingham's view of his son's actions was reflected in Parliament. On 30 July 1919, The Times reported Colonel Lambert Ward, Conservative MP for Kingston-upon-Hull, asking for an assurance from the Secretary of State that "no difference should be made between the graves of those men who in France and Flanders were killed in action or died of wounds or disease and the graves of those unfortunate men who were tried by Courts-martial and shot for cowardice or desertion in the face of the enemy. These men were not cowards. Many of them volunteered in the early days of the war. They tried - and they failed. Surely it is better to have tried and failed that never to have tried at all. (Hear, hear.)"


SHOT DOWN AT DAWN
OVER THE GERMAN LINES
FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH

LIEUTENANT RICHARD STONE


This inscription had me worried for a moment but no it says 'shot down at dawn' not shot at dawn.
Richard Stone was a pilot with 203 Squadron who at midnight on 8 August 1918 was attached to 201 Squadron in a ground attack role. The next morning he took off in Sopwith Camel D6250 in support of the British troops attacking near Rosieres. Driven off once by German fighters he returned to the area where he was attacked again. This time his plane was hit and crashed. Stone was killed.
As was the custom with pilots, the cut down propeller of his plane formed the cross over his original grave. It now hangs in the church of St Nicholas, Piddington, Oxfordshire. There is another survival from this crash. In May 1919, Stone’s body was exhumed by the Australian Graves Detachment and reburied in Heath Cemetery. One of the Australians removed Stone’s and when he was passing through London he returned it to Stone’s father, John Morris Stone, a Lincolns Inn barrister. The ring is still worn by a member of the Stone family.
The last line of Stone’s inscription comes from the Book of Revelation 2:10. This quotes Jesus as having promised, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life”, a special reward for those who have met death in their efforts to fulfil God’s will. To the British, of course, God’s will was that they should defeat the Germans.
More details on Richard Stone can be found here on the Piddington Village website.


DIED AT THE GUNS
HEARTENING HIS MEN
AT ZILLEBEKE LAKE

CAPTAIN JOHN LINDSAY KELSALL


There's something about this inscription that I find very moving. I'm not sure why, other than the fact that it epitomises the role of a junior officer during the war. One of his main duties was to look after his men, to maintain their morale. This was done both by winning their respect and by discipline. The little book, A General's Letters to His Son on Obtaining His Commission, published in 1917, offers the following advice:

"Your men will obey you because you are their officer, but you will succeed in getting infinitely more out of them if you can win their love and respect. Let your Platoon always be your first care. Put yourself in the position of your men, and never ask them to do what you would not be ready to do yourself in like circumstances.
In a disciplined company when the Captain has given the word to advance, the individual obeys, certain that whether he advances or not his comrades on either side will do so, and whatever his own feelings may be, he cannot but obey. Having done so, and believing himself a hero among a band of heroes, he acquires the courage which comes from discipline, and becomes a brave man though he was not born one."

Zillebeke was already an appalling and dangerous place to be in August 1917 before 34.9 mm of rain fell over the 26th and 27th of the month. Keeping the guns firing became a herculean task, not made any easier by the fact that the Germans had the range of the British guns and kept up a constant bombardment.
The Rochdale Observor announced Kelsall's death in their 5 September edition; his family were partners in the Rochdale firm of Kelsall and Kemp, big employers in the town, which did good business during the war making khaki cloth for the army. After recounting the details of his education and army service if finished its report with the words: "He was popular, loved and respected alike by officers and men". Kelsall had succeeded in fulfilling his duty to his men.


DIED OF WOUNDS
RECEIVED IN ACTION

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILFRED HUDSON


Lieutenant Hudson's parents had already received a telegram telling them that their son had been dangerously wounded on 25 January. This was followed by another one on 8 February informing them that he had 'died of wounds'. Records at No 10 Casualty Clearing Station, Lijssenthoek describe the nature of his wounds - "bullet in the abdomen".


GRENADE THROWER
DIED AS A SOLDIER
AT HIS POST

PRIVATE JOHN DUNCAN MACPHERSON


To a soldier this is the ultimate accolade implying the faithful discharge of duty regardless of the cost. As a grenade thrower, Private Macpherson would have been one of two in a nine-man team often used for clearing captured trenches.


FATALLY WOUNDED
WHEN VISITING HIS MEN
MENIN ROAD
FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH

THE REVEREND ARMAR EDWARD ACTON


The Graves Register states that the Reverend Armar Acton 'died of wounds (gas)' but this doesn't really tie in with the inscription on his headstone, which says he was 'fatally wounded'. Another account therefore seems to be more accurate. According to this, Acton was visiting the front line on 26 October when he was injured by shrapnel, which broke his knee. Initially this didn't seem a very serious wound but then infection set in, his leg had to be amputated and he died on 4 November.


KILLED BY SHELLFIRE
WHEN ERECTING CROSSES
ON THE YPRES-MENIN ROAD

CAPTAIN JOHN DORAN MACDONALD


Captain Macdonald was marking graves with wooden crosses, part of the work the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries carried out to try to ensure that soldiers' graves were not lost but identifed and their position recorded.


IN LOVING MEMORY OF
MY DEAR HUSBAND CHARLIE
DROWNED ON ACTIVE SERVICE

LANCE CORPORAL CHARLES BELLENDEN POWELL


Lance Corporal Powell served with the Inland Water Transport section of the Royal Engineers. This operated barges transporting ammunition and provisions from the Base Supply Depots to the front. It also helped operate the ambulance barges carrying the wounded from the front to the base hospitals.


DIED FROM INJURIES RECEIVED
WHILST RESCUING A CHINAMAN
DURING AN AIR RAID
"GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN"

REVEREND WILLIAM SPINKS


On the night of 19/20 May 1918 the Germans bombed the base camp at Etaples causing many casualties among soldiers, nurses and members of the Chinese Labour Corps. The Reverend William Spinks was severely injured and died of his wounds ten days later. It is estimated that there were nearly 100,000 Chinese Labourers working for the British Army in France by the time of the Armistice of whom about 2,000 died.


WHAT GREATER SACRIFICE
THAN HIS OWN LIFE
GIVEN TO SAVE A HORSE

SERJEANT CHARLES COX


Horses were valued and valuable members of gun crews. Each 18 pounder gun was pulled by a team of six horses with the Bombardier and Serjeant riding their own. It is said that 484,000 British Army horses died during the war.


OUR NOBLE HAROLD
DIED SAVING AN OFFICER
GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

PRIVATE HAROLD EDWIN TREMBATH


"Killed Mont St Quentin, France whilst voluntarily carrying a wounded officer back to dressing station." This is what Private Trembath's father wrote in the the section 'Place where killed or wounded' on the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia. Further down the form he explains how, influenced by the Principal of Ballarat College, Major Garbutt, his son was very keen to get to the Front, writing in one of his last letters, "Father, I intend to Play the Game". From the form it's difficult to tell whether Mr Trembath blames Major Garbutt for his son's military enthusiasm, but seeing how he describes his son in the inscription, "Our noble Harold", I feel father saw it that way too.


KILLED WHEN ATTENDING
THE WOUNDED ON THE FIELD

LIEUTENANT FRANCIS SIDNEY MITCHELL


From his inscription, Lieutenant Mitchell must have been the Medical Officer at the Regimental Aid Post, which was usually situated in or very close to the front line. During their four days here in the trenches at Hooge, the Royal Sussex Regiment lost 7 officers and 134 men, including almost all the men of D Company who were buried alive on the 14th when the Germans exploded a mine under the trenches. Dr Francis Mitchell was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and the Royal City of Dublin Hospital.


IN PROUD MEMORY
KILLED WHILE LEADING A CHARGE
OF THE 2ND LEINSTERS
GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

LIEUTENANT COLONEL CHARLES CONYERS


Mrs Conyers was a novelist, the author of 54, Irish based, romantic novels featuring horses and hunting. She describes her husband as having been killed leading a charge, as though the Leinsters were a cavalry regiment. In fact, Colonel Conyers was killed in the frantic melee of attacks and counter attacks that caused heavy casualties amongst the Leinsters that day.


KILLED LEADING HIS BRIGADE
BUT 5 DAYS LANDED
SOLDIER AND GREAT GENTLEMAN

BRIGADIER GENERAL JAMES FOSTER RIDDELL


Four days after the Germans launched their first gas attack on the Western Front the situation outside Ypres was desperate. Newly landed in France, 149 Brigade was rushed up to the front and ordered to make a frontal attack in broad daylight on the village of St Julien. About mid-afternoon General Riddell insisted on going forward to the firing line to see the situation for himself. He was seen conferring with his battalion commanders when he was shot through the head by a sniper. Obituaries spoke admiringly of his military career in India and South Africa and of his skill as a horseman both on the polo pitch and in the hunting field.


FORGET THEM NOT
O LAND FOR WHICH THEY FELL
MAY IT GO WELL WITH ENGLAND
STILL GO WELL

LANCE CORPORAL WILLIAM JAMES MACFARLANE


William MacFarlane was born in Dingwall, Ross-shire, lived in London when his parents moved there, and served and died in a Scottish regiment. Not forgotten by the united land for which he fell, the inscription his parents chose continues:
Keep her proud banners without blot or stain
Lest we may dream that we have died in vain.


FOR ENGLAND

MAJOR DAVID MITCHELL TOMLINSON


David Tomlinson was the grandson of a Scottish engine driver from Leith. He was born in New Zealand, served with a Scottish Regiment, and died "For England" at a time when the word 'England' was used to refer to the whole of Great Britain and the Empire, and when it was acepted that it was 'better together'. The inscription was chosen by his Scottish-born mother.


AN ONLY SON
KILLED IN ACTION
ON HIS WAY TO
LEAVE AND WEDDING

LANCE CORPORAL HAROLD GILKES


The Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau would make extensive enquiries when it needed to find out exactly what had happened to a casualty. Their records, now digitised, reveal that Private Gilkes "was about 19, fair, medium height, and fresh complexion. A fine little soldier. His name was Harry" (Lieutenant Hindmarsh). Information pieced together from other witnesses describe what happened: they were holding an advanced position and had been bothered by a sniper, at about mid-day Gilkes crawled out into the long grass to try and get him. When he didn't return his mates went out to look for him and found him shot through the head, "the bullet entered the top of his head, coming out at the back above his neck", "I helped carry him from the front line to the support line where they placed him on a stretcher", "he was working for leave to go to England to meet his father. He expected to get married".


KILLED IN ACTION
AT GIVENCHY
WHILST IN COMMAND OF
THE 141ST INFANTRY BRIGADE

BRIGADIER GENERAL GEORGE COLBORNE NUGENT


The entry in the 141st Brigade War Diary reads: "7.40 am Brigadier General Nugent killed by a stray bullet". To those at the Brigade Headquarters this seemed impossible but as Private AR Read reported: "Our Brigadier General while inspecting the forward positions was killed by a sniper at Sidbury Mound. Strange to say but I myself had passed that spot a good many times, and it must have been the general's red hat band that caused his death". Read goes on to say that the General's body was brought back to Headquarters and "each of us in turn was allowed to have a last look at him. We went out and picked some wild flowers and the Pioneers made a wooden cross".
General Nugent's two sons, aged 24 and 20 at the time of their father's death, both survived the war.


KILLED IN ACTION

LIEUTENANT FREDERICK BRISCOE


The words on the telegram received by the next of kin were blunt and unambiguous: "Deeply regret to inform you that ... was killed in action on ...". It seems rather a strange inscription for Mrs Briscoe to have chosen for her only son, but in fact it says more than you think. To have been killed in action means that you must have been on active service, somewhere on the front line. And to have been on active service means that you must have been judged Grade A at your medical. Mrs Briscoe, a widow, was proud of her son, a brave man and a fine physical specimen; the blunt inscription 'killed in action' tells us all we need to know about her hopes and dreams.


HE WAS NOT TO KNOW
THE REASON WHY
BUT TO GO AND DIE

PRIVATE WALTER STEPHEN SPRINGETT


The inscription is Private Springett's parents own version of the lines from Tennyson's poem, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade':
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do and die.
If you think there is a whiff of bitterness about the inscription, I think you could be right, even though Tennyson wrote the poem in praise of military loyalty and obedience. Mr and Mrs Springett lost their eldest son, Walter, in 1916 and his nineteen-year-old brother, FW Springett, in 1918. The brother, for who we only know his initials, died whilst a prisoner of war. He was buried by the Germans but his grave cannot now be identified.


MY COUNTRY RIGHT OR WRONG

LANCE CORPORAL ARCHIE FERGUSON


This unquestioning allegiance to country has completely gone out of fashion. However, it wasn't common at this period either, and when you read what the Senator for Wisconsin, Carl Schurz, actually said in 1872 then you can see that it wasn't what he meant anyway: "My country right or wrong; if right to be kept right; and if wrong to be put right".


"I MUST GO!
I AM ASHAMED TO BE SEEN
WITHOUT A SOLDIER'S UNIFORM"

PRIVATE ALFRED KINGSNORTH MALLYON


This is a difficult inscription. It was chosen by Private Mallyon's father and as the words are in quotation marks they presumably belong to Private Mallyon himself. I used to think that he must have been admitting to having been constrained by public opinion into enlisting. However, I now don't think this can be the case. If it was, why did his father say on the form for the Roll of Honour of Australia that his son had been deeply impressed by the tombs of "England's noble sons" in St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. Alfred had gone on to tell his father that, when you remember what they stood for, coupled with the high traditions of our country "one needs no further inspiration to fight for them, and if need be lay down one's life for them". Maybe the two sentiments - headstone inscription and Roll of Honour quote - are not incompatible, but if so the former is easily misunderstood without the latter.


FOR KING AND COUNTRY
THUS HE FELL
A TYRANT'S ARROGANCE TO QUELL

PRIVATE HARRISON RAYMOND ALLEN


The arrogant tyrant would have been the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who was demonised by the British public, probably unjustifiably because he was nowhere near as powerful or influential as they thought he was.
I find this an interesting inscription. The War Graves Commission was quite strict about how insulting it allowed you to be about the former enemy and it censored inscriptions it thought might be offensive. Obviously it was OK to be insulting about the Kaiser, now in exile at Doorn in Holland, but you had to be careful, for example, how you described the German people.


SHE DID HER DUTY
FOR KING AND COUNTRY

NURSING SISTER MARGARET LOWE


Margaret Lowe was injured in a German air raid that hit the 1st Canadian General Hospital on 19 May 1918. She sustained a fractured skull and chest penetrating wounds and died nine days later. Born in Scotland, Morayshire, she trained as a nurse in Winnipeg Civic Hospital and enlisted in May 1917. She served initially in Canadian hospitals in the UK and then was sent to France in January 1918. It was her father who chose her inscription, her mother having died some time before.


SON OF COL. ARTHUR SYKES CBE
FOR ENGLAND, DEAR ENGLAND
AND HOME

PRIVATE ARTHUR LEWIS SYKES


For some reason I find this rather a haunting inscription - why? Perhaps it's the use of the adjective 'dear'. Private Arthur Sykes was 21 when he died. He had enlisted in December 1915 in Victoria, British Columbia. His father lived in Kingston Hill, Surrey. Arthur junior was born in India - ergo father served in the Indian Army. Why had father thought it necessary to elevate his son's humble status as a private by adding his own name and honours to the inscription? Had Arthur emigrated to Canada? Was his heart still in England, had he longed for home? I have been unable to find out any more about either Arthur so will never know.


MY COUNTRY,
'TIS FOR THEE

PRIVATE WILLIAM HEBER LEWIS


Private Lewis died of meningitis in one of the big base hospitals in St Omer. Whether his parents meant it or not, his inscription is a slight misquote of the first line of an early American patriotic song written by Samuel Francis Smith in 1831. The first words of the song are "My country 'tis of thee" not "for thee". I assume that the country that's being referred to is Canada, which is where William Lewis was born. However, his parents' address at the end of the war was 1323 Amapola Avenue, Torrence, California, USA. Perhaps William Lewis was an American citizen. The song is sung to the tune of the British national anthem. The words of the first verse are:

My country 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my father's died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!


HE DIED FOR CANADA AND THE EMPIRE

PRIVATE ROBERT BLAKE ALLAN


Private Allan was wounded on his 22nd birthday, 29 May. A record survives of the letter written the next day to his parents by an army chaplain, "at the request your son". Far away in Stavely, Alberta, they cannot have been reassured: "I am sorry to say that the wound is rather serious. One injury being in the stomach and the others in the legs. The legs are only flesh wounds and should heal quickly ... we are hoping that his more serious wound will heal without further complications, as many of that kind have been known to do." Robert Allan died the next day.
In August 1914 the Dominion of Canada was constitutionally a subordinate member of the British Empire. When Britain was at war, Canada was at war. There was no other legal option. However, it was the Canadian government in Ottowa that determined the actual nature of Canada's contribution to the war effort, not London. From a population of 8 million, 400,500 Canadian soldiers served overseas, of whom 60,661 died. Many believed what the recruiting posters told them, that if England fell Canada would fall too.


QUI ANTE DIEM PERIIT
SED MILES, SED PRO PATRIA

LIEUTENANT JOHN RIGGALL BLAIR


These are the last lines of Henry Newbolt's poem 'Clifton Chapel'. They are not quoted from an ancient Latin author, Newbolt wrote them himself. The words translate as, 'Who died before his time - but a soldier, but for his country.' In the poem, published in 1898, a new boy at his father's old school is shown, by his father, the school chapel and encouraged to embrace the Christian and chivalric codes that constitute the public school ethos. Pointing out a brass memorial plaque on the Chapel wall, the father implies that there can be no purer following in life than to be a soldier who is prepared to die for his country. The last verse reads:
God send you fortune: yet be sure,
Among the lights that gleam and pass,
You'll live to follow none more pure
Than that which glows on yonder brass.
'Qui procul hinc', the legend's writ, -
The frontier grave is far away -
'Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.


HE FOUGHT AND DIED
FOR HIS WIFE AND LITTLE SON
AND TO SAVE HIS COUNTRY

PRIVATE GEORGE HENRY DUNSTAN


In civilian life George Dunstan was a Methodist Home Missionary. As such he was exempt from military service but, according to his family, he preferred to help his country. When he signed his Attestation Paper on 24 September 1916 he was unmarried, giving his parents as his next of kin. By the time of his death his wife was next of kin. Her name was Ivy Doris but I have been unable to find any information about his little son who by my calculations could only have been months old when his father was killed.


HIS BRAVE YOUNG LIFE HE GAVE
THAT BRITONS STILL
MIGHT LIVE

DRIVER ERIC ROBERT LANGE


Driver Lange was "dangerously wounded" on 8 June and died five days later "of gunshot wounds". Australian born, his mother, who chose the inscription, stated that he died that Britons still might live, a huge, all-embracing cause. At that date, the word Britons referred to the people of the British Empire. It was a slightly archaic word; the term 'the British' or even 'the English' being more usual. The word does however have echoes of 'Rule Britannia' with its proud refrain - "Britons never shall be slaves".


HE GAVE HIS LIFE
FOR FRANCE AND LIBERTY

DRIVER CARLYLE EUGENE BLACKBURNE


In his last letter home Carl Blackburne wrote, "I have been in some terrible stunts but I trust in God, lead a clean life, and do my duty." Backburne was a thirty-seven-year old forest worker from Maryborough, Victoria, who saw it as his duty to fight and die for France and Liberty.


HE DIED FOR AUSTRALIA

PRIVATE WILLIAM GAR


For Private Gar's parents the cause was unequivocal, their son died for Australia not God, King or Empire as many other Australians did. William Gar was a Filipino, born Guillemo Gah on Thursday Island, Queensland, Northern Territory, which allowed him to answer 'Yes' to the question 'Are you a natural born British subject' on his Attestation Paper. Gar was apparently one of only eight Filipinos from the Northern Territory to enlist. For some reason I find Carlos and Mary (Gah) Gar's overt loyalty to Australia both significant and rather moving.


HE LAID DOWN HIS LIFE
FOR HIS FRIENDS

PRIVATE ROBERT WILLIAM MELVILLE


Private Melville's parents adapted this verse from St John 15:13, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'. This was one of the most popular of all war memorial inscriptions. Although the quote comes from the bible it sounds secular, which could explain its universal acceptability. On the whole when people abbreviated it they chose the beginning of the quote, 'Greater Love hath no man'. This acknowledged that the deceased had died for a cause but left the actual cause unspecified, it could have been his country, his king, his God or any of the other myriad causes. Mr and Mrs Melville were happy to specify that their son had died for his friends.


HE DIED FOR AN IDEAL

SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR PELHAM WEBB


The ideal is unspecified but by chance I happen to know something about Lieutenant Webb. After working in the City he decided to become a writer and published two volumes of verse before enlisting in 1915. In a letter to his parents a few days before his death he said, "We live on a high plane out here, and are always cheerful. I do not wish to die, but have no fear of death. Death is but a quest, and I love quests'.
His will revealed a request that Mrs WW Wallace should receive "a diamond ring of great beauty and value" consisting of "one fine diamond in a claw and I wish Lydia to wear it always out of the great love I bear her and I shall hope (for I believe) that I may meet her dear spirit in the space which men call heaven ... I wish it had been God's will that she could have been my wife, nevertheless I love her husband also".
[I am grateful to the Archivist at Sedbergh School for this information.]


HE DIED THE NOBLEST DEATH
A MAN MAY DIE
FIGHTING FOR GOD & RIGHT
& LIBERTY

LIEUTENANT ARTHUR STANLEY CAREY


The lines come from 'To You Who Have Lost' by John Oxenham from his popular book of poems, 'All's Well', published in 1915. The lines were regularly used both as a headstone inscription and, in a longer quotation, as a dedication on war memorials:
He died as few men get the chance to die
Fighting to save a world's morality.
He died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God, and Right, and Liberty; -
And such a death is Immortality.


BELGIUM'S AGONY
CONSTRAINED HIM TO THIS

GUARDSMAN GEORGE ALBERT LEWIS


Belgian resistance to the German invaders came not only from the army but from civilians too. This encouraged the Germans to introduce a policy of 'schrecklichkeit', frightfulness. The newspapers made the most of these atrocity stories, as did recruiting posters - not that all the reported atrocities were propaganda.

Private Lewis was one of those motivated to enlist by what became known as the 'Rape of Belgium'. Interestingly, Private Lewis's parents made a point of mentioning in the Cemetery Register that he had been, "Rejected as 'unfit'. Underwent operation in Llanelly Hospital to render himself 'fit'."


FOR GOD, HIS KING
AN' AULD SCOTLAND
HE GAED - HE GAED HIS A'

SERJEANT WILLIAM THOMAS GILMOUR


Gaed' , a Scots word, is the past tense of 'go' i.e. 'went'. It therefore means gave. A' means al so the phrase means, 'he gave his all'. the


HE FOUGHT AND DIED
FOR BRITAIN
AND THE HONOUR OF HIS RACE

PRIVATE A ARMSTRONG


Private Armstrong's mother quoted from a popular piece of memorial verse:

He marched away so bravely
His head so proudly held
His footsteps never faltered
His courage never failed.
Then on the field of battle,
He calmly took his place.
He fought and died for Britain
And the honour of his race.


HE DIED FOR ULSTER
WE GAVE OUR BEST

PRIVATE RICHARD FOWLER


This is a proud and a political inscription. Nineteen-year-old Richard Fowler served with the 9th Battalion the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, raised in Omagh, Co. Tyrone in September 1914 from the Tyrone Volunteers. This was a branch of the Ulster Volunteer Force formed in 1913 and prepared to offer armed resistance to the British Government should it attempt to force through Home Rule for Ireland. Deeply loyal to the British Crown, the Ulster Volunteers raised three battalions for the three Irish regiments drawn from the Six Counties of Ulster: the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles and the Royal Irish Fusiliers.
The combination of Richard Fowler's inscription, his regiment and his home town, Omagh, indicate that he, or at least his parents, were Ulster Unionists if not actually members of the Ulster Volunteers.
The 9th Battalion formed part of the 36th Ulster Division, which performed with great dash, success - and huge casualties - on 1 July. The Battalion War Diary gives the details of the day recalling that:

Every Officer and Man was eager for the fray & determined to do their utmost that day. All ranks realised that the great test had arrived & that the Honour of Ulster & the reputation of their Regiment was at stake.

The honour of Ulster was upheld that day, the day the 9th Battalion lost 475 officers and soldiers killed, wounded and missing and that Ulster gave "our best".


FOR THE GLORY OF ENGLAND AND
THE HONOUR OF BRISTOL

SECOND LIEUTENANT REGINALD WILLIAM COOK


By the time Vaulx Hill Cemetery was constructed Lieutenant Cook's wife had married again. His parents chose this inscription. They lived at 390 Stapleton Road, Bristol.


FOR GOD
RIGHT AND LIBERTY

RIFLEMAN ALFRED HERBERT BURTT


Rifleman Burtt's inscription was inserted by his wife


HE LOVED ME
AND GAVE HIMSELF FOR ME

CORPORAL THOMAS LIVERMORE


Corporal Livermore's parents chose this inscription, a quotation from Galatians 2.20: "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me".


FOR MOTHER
KING AND COUNTRY

PRIVATE J SNOOKS


The usual epitaph is 'For God, King and country'. Both Private Snooks' parents were still alive when this inscription was chosen.


FOR GOD
FOR KING AND COUNTRY

PRIVATE CHARLES NUNN


Private Nunn's inscription exactly matches the phrase on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. A veteran of the South African War, Private Nunn was born in England but served with the Canadian forces. His parents were dead and his next of kin is listed as Miss E Nunn, 17a Seagrave St, Clapton E4


JOINED HIS MAJESTY'S FORCES
AUGUST 31ST 1914
PROCEEDED TO FRANCE
JANUARY 1915

CORPORAL DONALD HUME NODING


On Sunday 30 August a special edition of The Times published the Amiens Dispatch. Seven days after the Battle of Mons and four after Le Cateau the dispatch told the truth about the dire situation at the Front. Recruiting increased immediately.


AMAVIMUS, AMAMUS, AMABIMUS

COLONEL FRANK RIDLEY FARRER BOILEAU


This is the same epitaph as the one on Charles Kingsley's grave. The author of 'The Water Babies', who died in 1875, is buried with his wife Fanny in the churchyard of St Mary's, Eversley, Hampshire. The Latin words translate as 'We loved, we love and we shall love', the implication being that their love is eternal. The words are also the title of a poem written in 1890 by Arthur Shearly Cripps. One of the verses ends with the lament: "Ah! the golden years have fled; Thee have reft, and me have left here alone, thy loss to mourn".


IF LOVE COULD HAVE SAVED HIM
HE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN KILLED

LIEUTENANT CHALONER FRANCIS TREVOR CHUTE


Lieutenant Chute's headstone was erected seven years after his death by which time his wife had remarried. Nevertheless she chose this inscription. It's a popular piece of memorial verse, which in its more usual form reads, 'If love could have saved him he would not have died'.


DIED ON HIS 20TH BIRTHDAY
FAULTLESS BEFORE THEE
WITH EXCEEDING JOY

SECOND LIEUTENANT PHILIP HAMILTON SULIVAN


The quotation comes from Jude 1.24, "Now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy"


OMNE SOLUM FORTI PATRIA

CAPTAIN THE HON. ROBERT BRUCE


The Latin translates as 'Every land is a homeland for the courageous man'. Ovid Fasti Bk 1. line 493. Captain the Hon. Robert Bruce, Master of Burleigh, was the eldest son of the 6th Lord Balfour of Burleigh. The inscription is an adaptation of the family motto, 'Cuis solum forti patrium'


MENS CONSCIA RECTI

CAPTAIN CHARLES CORBOULD WALKER


The words translate as 'a mind conscious of rectitude'. The full quote from Vergil's Aeniad 1.604, 'mens sibi conscia recti', translates as 'the mind in itself and for itself conscious of its own rightness', the implication being that in your own mind you know that you have done right.


WE WILL GO FORWARD
AT WHATEVER COST,
QUIETLY, UNTIRINGLY
UNALARMED

CAPTAIN CHARLES HUNTER BROWNING


Captain Browning, a professional soldier, was educated at Eton where he had been not only a King's Scholar and Captain of School but also a fine cricketer whom Wisden described as "a stubborn batsman and an excellent wicketkeeper with a quiet style".
His inscription displays the same quiet style and sounds as though it comes from something that Browning wrote or said himself - a letter, a diary entry or perhaps, and most likely, his instructions to his men on 26 August as the British II Corps were ordered to take a stand at Le Cateau in order to delay the oncoming German 1st Army.
The British were heavily outnumbered and exhausted after their defeat at Mons on the 23rd, since when they had been retreating with scarcely any rest. Browning, was a professional soldier. He joined the army in 1898 and served throughout the South African War. His words sound as though they come from someone who knows the odds: "We will go forward at whatever cost, quietly, untiringly, unalarmed".
Browning was killed when his battery came under direct fire from German artillery. Although British casualties were very heavy, and they were forced to withdraw by mid-afternoon, the delay at Le Cateau is considered to have made a significant difference to the ultimate outcome of the war.


ENLISTED AUG. 12 1914
MOOSOMIN. SASK. CAN.

LANCE CORPORAL HENRY CHILTON


Lance Corporal Chilton, a Canadian-born homestead farmer from Moosomin, Saskatchewan, Canada was a very early volunteer.


HE RESPONDED TO
LORD KITCHENER'S APPEAL
AUGUST 1914
AND DIED FOR HIS COUNTRY

SECOND LIEUTENANT CHARLES EDWARDS


Lord Kitchener's appeal, his 'call to arms' on 11 August stated, "Your King and Country need you"


SERVED FR. AUG. 1914
KILLED LEADING
SUCCESSFUL ATTACK SOMME
7 OCT. 1916, AGE 21

LIEUTENANT ARTHUR GEOFFREY GROSE


Lieutenant Grose survived the Battle of Mons to be killed two years later on the Somme


ONE OF THE FIRST 100,000
"THE CONTEMPTIBLES"
WHILE ENGLAND HAS SUCH SONS
SHE NEED FEAR NAUGHT

PRIVATE GEORGE KILPIN


The British Expeditionary Force that sailed for France in August 1914 was scarcely more than 100,000 strong. The Kaiser is said to have referred to it as a "contemptible little army". The survivors of this original force took a pride in referring to themselves as "The Old Contemptibles".


REQUIESCAT IN PACEM

LIEUTENANT MAURICE JAMES DEASE


Lieutenant Dease was awarded one of the first two Victoria Crosses of the war for his actions on the 23rd August. The citation reads:- "Though two or three times badly wounded he continued to control the fire of his machine guns at Mons on 23rd August, until all his men were shot. He died of his wounds." The London Gazette, 16 November 1914. The Latin words of the inscription translate as 'may he rest in peace' and come from the Roman Catholic service for the burial of the dead.


KISMET

LANCE CORPORAL CHARLES HENRY LENARD TAYLOR


Kismet - fate. Lance Corporal Taylor served in both the South African War and on the North-West Frontier of India but it was his fate to be killed on the first day of the first British battle of the war.


SON OF THE 7TH EARL OF GRANARD
KILLED AT MONS R.I.P.
OF YOUR CHARITY
PRAY FOR HIS SOUL

CAPTAIN FERGUS GEORGE ARTHUR FORBES


Captain Forbes was killed on the first day of the Battle of Mons, Britain's first engagement of the war. The Earldom of Granard is an Irish peerage but relatively unusually the family were Roman Catholic as Captain Forbe's inscription indicates.


DUTY NOBLY DONE

LANCE CORPORAL WALTER MAGARRY


Taken from King George V's message to the Expeditionary Force, 12 August 1914: Duty is your watchword, and I know your duty will be nobly done.


FEAR GOD
HONOUR THE KING

LIEUTENANT JAMES HENRY MORIARTY


From the New Testament, St Peter 2:17, used by Lord Kitchener on 9 August 1914 in his letter to British troops about to embark for France: Do your duty bravely. Fear God. Honour the King.