SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM ALFRED COTTERILL BROOKE
LONDON REGIMENT (POST OFFICE RIFLES)
14TH JUNE 1915 AGE 24
BURIED: FOSSE 7 MILITARY CEMETERY (QUALITY STREET), MAZINGARBE, FRANCE
Alfred Brooke enlisted on the outbreak of war and took a commission in the Post Office Rifles. He joined the regiment in France on 12 April 1915. Just under two weeks later, 23 April, his brother, the poet Rupert Brooke, died of blood poisoning on the Mediterranean island of Skyros. Less than eight weeks after this Alfred, acting as reserve machine gun officer at Vermelles, was killed 'instantaneously' by a mortor bomb.
It was his widowed mother who chose his inscription - Rest in Peace. The phrase competes with Thy Will be Done as the most common of all headstone inscriptions in the war cemeteries. Other families quoted lines from her son Rupert's poetry, but not Mrs Brooke. She was quite possibly exhausted by grief: her eldest son had died of pneumonia in 1907 at the age of 26, her husband died in January 1910 when he was 59, and her two remaining children died aged 28 and 24 in April and June 1915.