Kitchener's message
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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.
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
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.