SECOND LIEUTENANT OSWALD LUCKING STRONG
SOMERSET LIGHT INFANTRY
5TH AUGUST 1917 AGE 22
BURIED: MIKRA BRITISH CEMETERY, KALAMARIA, GREECE
I don't know what made Oswald Strong's father think that Longfellow wrote these words as they are the most famous lines of a now little-known American writer, Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867). They come from the first verse of his poem, 'On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake', another now little-known poet who died in 1821:
Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise.
Oswald Strong was a chemistry student at Imperial College, London when the war broke out. He joined up immediately. In January 1916 he was posted to Egypt and then in June 1916, attached to the 2nd Battalion King's Shropshire Light Infantry, went to Salonika. The regiment were in the trenches at Neohari on the Struma front until December 1917. Strong, a member of a Trench Mortar Battery, was wounded by shellfire on 4 August 1917 and died the next day.