LIEUTENANT IVAN LANCELOT STOCKHAUSEN
ROYAL FLYING CORPS
3RD OCTOBER 1917 AGE 27
BURIED: STRUMA MILITARY CEMETERY, DENMARK
Unnamed at times, at times unknown,
Our graves lie thick beyond the seas;
Unnamed, but not of Him unknown; -
He knows! - He sees
And not one soul has fallen in vain.
Here was no useless sacrifice.
From this red sowing of white seed
New life shall rise.
All that for which they fought lives on,
And flourishes triumphantly;
Watered with blood and hopeful tears,
It could not die.
The world was sinking in a slough
Of sloth, and ease, and selfish greed;
God surely sent this scourge to mould
A nobler creed.
Birth comes with travail; all these woes
Are birth-pangs of the days to be.
Life's noblest things are ever born
In agony.
So - comfort to the stricken heart!
Take solace in the thought that he
You mourn was called by God to such
High dignity.
The Nameless Graves
John Oxenham
Just in case you don't read the whole poem, Oxenham is holding out to the bereaved that a new world will be the result of all these these deaths: 'that for which they fought' will live on', replacing the 'slough of sloth, and ease, and selfish greed' into which the old world had fallen. This is why 'not one soul will have died in vain'.
Ivan Lancelot Stockhausen was born and brought up in Jamaica where his family owned sugar plantations. He joined the British West India Regiment, came with it to Britain in 1915 and was gazetted a second lieutenant that December. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in November 1916 where he served with 17 Squadron on reconnaissance and scout duties on the Struma front in Salonika.
Stockhausen and his twenty-year-old fellow airman Lieutenant Charles Victor MacGregor Watson were killed in aerial combat over enemy lines near Seres on 3 October 1917. How do we know? The record of Stockhausen's death contains the note, 'Message dropped by Germans'. This wasn't usually done to gloat but just to inform - evidence of a different age.