CAPTAIN MARK TENNANT
SCOTS GUARDS AND MACHINE GUN CORPS
16TH SEPTEMBER 1916 AGE 24
BURIED: GUARDS CEMETERY LES BOEUFS, FRANCE
And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.
Malachi 3: 16-17
These words from the Old Testament form the basis of a well known children's hymn When he Cometh:
He will gather, He will gather
The gems for His kingdom;
All the pure ones, all the bright ones,
His loved and his own.
It wasn't just children who appreciated the hymn. In his autobiography, Drawn from Memory, Ernest Shepard recalls hearing it "sung by Welsh voices on a dusty shell-torn road in Picardy, as a battalion of Welch Fusiliers marched into battle".
The Scots Guards were involved in the attack at Lesboeufs on 15 September 1916. Mark Tennant was killed the next day. As Cynthia Asquith reported in her diary, "He had got through the battle all right, and had gone across to another trench to congratulate his brother-in-law, Ian Colquhoun, on both their escapes; on his way back, Ian saw him blown to bits by a stray shell".
Cynthia's mother-in-law, Margot Asquith, was Mark's aunt. Margot lost her step-son, Raymond Asquith, on the 15th September, Mark on the 16th, and another nephew, Edward Wyndham Tennant, on the 29th. Mark's sister, Frances, was married to Cynthia's brother Guy, whose brothers Hugo, Lord Elcho, and Yvo had already been killed.
In 1920, Mark's youngest brother, John Tennant, dedicated his wartime memoir, In the Clouds Above Baghdad, to his brother Mark, commenting in the foreword, "life is respectable and comfortable - and safe. The majority of us who have survived this war are no doubt doomed to die in our beds; when that moment arrives how we shall envy that gay company who went before, sword in hand and faces to the enemy, flower of a generation".
John Tennant was killed on 7 August 1941 in a flying training accident whilst on active service. He was 51.