PRIVATE THOMAS MERCER
MANCHESTER REGIMENT
12TH OCTOBER 1916 AGE 26
BURIED: BERKS CEMETERY EXTENSION, BELGIUM
Thomas Mercer's parents slightly misquote Rupert Brooke's extremely popular war poem, The Soldier, for their son's headstone inscription. The poem begins:
If I should die think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
Brooke wrote the poem at Christmas 1914, the final sonnet in a sequence of five, which he called 1914. Published in the January edition of the magazine New Numbers, a review in the 11 March edition of the Times Literary Supplement spoke of Brooke as "a poet whose rich promise is still in its dawn, but whose life, as they prove, is at its zenith". It quotes The Soldier in full with the comment that,
"It is impossible to shred up this beauty for the purpose of criticism ... The words pause and break, as thought and feeling falter for very fullness, like the song of a bird faced with all summer's loveliness and with but one brief dusk wherein to sing."
Three weeks later the Dean of St Paul's also quoted The Soldier in full in his Easter Sunday sermon, commenting that surely such pure and elevated patriotism had never before found such noble expression.
Posterity has found it only too possible "to shred up this beauty for the purpose of criticism" but for contemporaries the words perfectly captured the mood of these early months of the war: anxious, emotional, proud, patriotic, stoical, afraid. Brooke's sonnets may well be sentimental and grandiloquent but in their grandiose vagueness they brought a steadying comfort. In April 1915 his name was everywhere, praise of him was everywhere, and then on the 23rd he was dead.
The Soldier is quoted in full on Brooke's grave on Skyros, an island in the Aegean where he was buried by his friends following his death from blood poisoning. The grave remains in this same isolated location and although it does not have a War Graves Commission headstone it is maintained by them.