Shelley

O WIND
IF WINTER COMES
CAN SPRING BE FAR BEHIND?

CAPTAIN HARRY DUNLOP MC

War Diary
102nd Battalion Canadian Infantry
Aulnoy
Saturday November 2 1918
The Hun started bombing and shelling at 04:00 hours. Our barrage opened at 05:30 hours ...
The Hun continued desultory shelling of the town and at about 09:00 hours, the Battalion Medical Officer, Captain Harry Dunlop MC (CAMC) was hit in the head whilst standing in the doorway of HQ and died shortly afterwards, to the intense sorrow of all.

Dunlop was working in Peru when the war broke out. He returned to Canada to enlist in March 1916 and went abroad that October. In March 1918 he married an American, Rachel Thayer, in London. In August he was awarded a Military Cross for his action near Beaucourt-en-Santerre when, "this officer followed close behind the attack, and attended to the wounded under heavy machine gun fire. He was untiring in his efforts to care for and evacuate the wounded, and undoubtedly saved many lives".
After the war, Mrs Dunlop returned to the United States. At the time she chose her husband's inscription her address was Eaton's Ranch, Wolf Creek, Wyoming, a 7,000 acre cattle ranch on the slopes of the Bighorn Mountain.
The inscription she chose comes from the last line of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. The poem is thought to express support for the people of Europe in their struggle against authoritarian regimes. Winter in this context being the re-establishment of reactionary governments after the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 and these governments' suppression of liberal protest; just as spring always follows winter so conservative repression will be followed by liberal reforms. However, in the context of Harry Dunlop's inscription it would appear to be a reference to death and resurrection: just as spring always follows winter so death is always followed by resurrection.

HIS FATE AND FAME
SHALL BE AN ECHO
AND A LIGHT UNTO ETERNITY

SERGEANT JAMES GORE

Shelley's Adonais, his Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821), is not an unusual source for personal inscriptions but people tend to choose line 344: 'He hath awakened from the dream of life', or line 352, 'He has outsoared the shadow of our night'. James Gore's inscription comes from the last four lines of the first verse:

Say: 'With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!'

The inscription was chosen, or at least signed for, by Gore's younger brother John. The family lived in Liverpool where Gore had been born and where in 1911 James was working as a building lift attendant. However, at some point he must have gone to Canada because when he attested on 6 November 1916 he was working as a steward in Bellevue, Ontario, Canada.
Gore served with the 19th Battalion Canadian Infantry and arrived in France on 30 November 1917. He was killed in action on 9 October 1918 but that is not a day that the battalion were in action. In fact, all the war diary says for the 9th is that the companies were notified to move into new positions and that the move was achieved by 11.20 am. At 5.30 pm the battalion moved again to an area NE of Escaudouvees in preparation for an attack at 6 am the following morning, 10 October.
By the end of the 11th the battalion casualties amounted to one officer missing, four wounded and 139 other ranks either killed or wounded. Gore is the only person in the 19th Battalion to have died on the 9th - and it's not that he died of wounds in a hospital behind the lines because Sains-les-Marquion was a front line burial ground. His death was just part of the normal, unremarkable, wastage of war.

HE IS A PORTION
OF THE LOVELINESS
WHICH ONCE HE MADE
MORE LOVELY

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM MCCONNELL RUTHERFORD

William Rutherford's brother chose these lines from 'Adonais: an Elegy on the Death of John Keats'. The poem became the source of many First World War epitaphs as hundreds mourned the death of young men who, like the poet John Keats, died before their time: "He hath awakened from the dream of life", "He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night", "He lives he wakes - 'tis Death is dead, not he;", "He is made one with Nature: there is heard his voice in all her music", "He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely".
Rutherford was a teacher at Kingston Grammar School and they have compiled a wonderfully detailed biography of his life and war service. In brief, he was born in Belfast, educated at Belfast Methodist College, Queen's University, New College in Edinburgh and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1912 he took a job teaching a junior class at Kingston Grammar School but when war broke out two years later, despite the fact that he disliked war, he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He worked as a hospital orderly in Alexandria, where the wounded from the Gallipoli and Palestine campaigns were brought, and in October 1916 applied for a commission. Gazetted into the East Yorkshire Regiment in May 1917, he was severely wounded in the thigh during the heavy fighting around Hazebrouck 11-13 April, and died in hospital in Wimereux on the 19th.