CAPTAIN ARTHUR REGINALD FRENCH, 5TH BARON DE FREYNE
SOUTH WALES BORDERERS
9TH MAY 1915 AGE 35
BURIED: CABARET-ROUGE BRITISH CEMETERY, SOUCHEZ, FRANCE
Lord de Freyne's inscription was chosen by his wife, Lady Amabel. The meaning would seem to be self evident - the pity of all these thousands of young men buried along the battlefields of the Western Front - but this is not what Lady Amabel meant. 'The Pity of It' is the title of a poem written by Thomas Hardy in 1915 in which he asks how it can have happened that "kin folk kin tongued even as are we", in other words the Germans and the British who have ancestral and linguistic ties, can now be fighting and killing each other with such savagery. Hardy concludes that the two countries must have been stirred up by war mongers, "by gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are", and hopes that they and their descendants "perish everlastingly". Patriots strongly disapproved of the poem, but strangely the Germans translated it and approved of it.
Lady Amabel was the controversial wife of the 5th Baron de Freyne. Controversial only because she was the daughter of a Scottish innkeeper who met her husband while she was working a London hotel. Outraged by the social disgrace his son had brought the family, the 4th Lord de Freyne cut off his son's allowance. Consequently, Arthur Reginald disappeared to America where apparently he served as a private in the US army. Following his father's death in 1913, he returned to Britain to take up his inheritance.
On the outbreak of war, Lord de Freyne took a commission in the South Wales Borderers and was killed in the Battle of Aubers Ridge on 9 May 1915. His younger half-brother, George Philip, was also killed in action on the same day serving with the same regiment in the same action. Another half-brother, Ernest Aloysuis, died of wounds on 16 August 1917, and a third, Edward Fulke, died as a German prisoner-of-war two days after the end of the war. Arthur's eldest half-brother, Francis Charles, inherited the title
Arthur's half-brothers all had deeply conventional Roman Catholic inscriptions: George, who was buried beside his brother in Cabaret Rouge British Cemetery, has "On whose soul sweet Jesus have mercy", the same inscription as on Ernest's headstone in Dozinghem Military Cemetery, whilst Edward's has the words from the Requiem Mass, "Pie, Jesu domine dona ei requiem". But the "controversial" Lady Amabel wanted to say something different - that 'brother' had been set against 'brother' by war mongers - "the pity of it".
I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like 'Thus bist,' 'Er war,'
'Ich woll', 'Er sholl', and by-talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird
At England's very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threat and slaughters are.
Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be
At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame
Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,
'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;
May their familiars grow to shun their name,
And their brood perish everlastingly.'
Thomas Hardy 1915