SERJEANT FRANK COAD
SOUTH STAFFORDSHIRE REGIMENT
14TH MARCH 1917 AGE 28
BURIED: ROSSIGNOL WOOD CEMETERY, HEBUTERNE, FRANCE
It may seem incredible to us that after the savaging Wilfred Owen gave this line from Horace anyone would want to use it for their son's headstone inscription. But at this period, Horace was still more powerful than Owen.
Owen's poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, describes the disgusting and degrading reality of death in battle with the 'old lie' that "It is sweet and meet to die for one's country. Sweet! and decorous!" The translation is Owen's own from a letter to his mother. Others translate 'decorum' as right, appropriate or glorious.
...
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from his froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Owen is talking about the process of dying in battle, denying that there is anything sweet, meet, right, decorous or glorious about it. Horace did not mean that there was, he was simply asserting that to die for your country, to be prepared to die for you country, was the mark of a good man and would bring him glory. And what is glory? According to Cicero, "true glory lies in noble deeds". Both in Horace's day and in 1918, dying for your country qualified as a noble deed.
Frank Coad was killed on 14 March 1917 during the South Staffordshire's costly and unsuccessful night attack on the German trenches near Bucquoy.