Brooke
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."
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.]
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
HE LEAVES A WHITE
UNBROKEN GLORY
A GATHERED RADIANCE
A SHINING PEACE.
Unidentified
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.
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.
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.
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.