Fate
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.
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".
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.