Burns
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.