PRIVATE DAVID BEST
NORTHUMBERLAND FUSILIERS (TYNESIDE SCOTTISH)
3RD JULY 1916 AGE 17
BURIED: ALBERT COMMUNAL CEMETERY EXTENSION, FRANCE
I found this inscription in Trefor Jones' On Fame's Eternal Camping Ground: a study of First World War Epitaphs in the British Cemeteries of the Western Front. He notes that despite its appropriateness he has only seen it used this once on a war grave cemetery headstone. I agree with him about its appropriateness and I too have never seen it used anywhere else.
David Best was a seventeen-year-old boy serving with the Tyneside Scottish when he died of wounds received on the Somme.
The words come from the last line of Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities. They are spoken by Sydney Carton who during the French Revolution sacrifices his life for the love of a married woman. The woman's husband has been sentenced to death. Carton has the husband rescued and substitutes himself. On his way to the guillotine Carton tells a companion in the tumbril:
"I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more.
…
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens 1859