Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Read the article: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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.
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.
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.