PRIVATE FRANK WILLIAM TROTMAN
LONDON REGIMENT, PRINCE OF WALES OWN CIVIL SERVICE RIFLES
7TH OCTOBER 1916 AGE 33
BURIED: WARLENCOURT BRITISH CEMETERY, FRANCE
This is such a strong and appropriate inscription that it is quite extraordinary that it's not found more often. It comes from Aes Triplex, a famous essay by Robert Louis Stevenson in which, knowing that he himself doesn't have long to live, he urges people to rush headlong into life even if death is just round the corner: better to be taken at the flood than at low tide. Aes triplex is Latin for triple brass, battle armour was made of triple brass and thought to be indestructible. To Stevenson, someone who dies in the fullness of life is therefore similarly indestructible. The following long but edited passage gives an indication of Stevenson's meaning:
"It is better to lose life like a sprendthrift that to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than die daily in the sick room. ... does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the Gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye. ... In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. ... the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.
Aes Triplex
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson wrote of the dying trailing crowds of glory, Wordsworth originally associated them with the new-born. To Wordsworth we don't enter the world in "utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home".
Mr WG Trotman of 88 Lower Kennington Lane, London SE11 signed the form to confirm Frank Trotman's inscription. This was probably his father, George Trotman of Trotman & Co, tea dealers and grocers operating from that address. Frank was educated at St Olave's Grammar School, worked for London County Council, he's commemorated on their war memorial, and was killed in action on 7 October 1916 in the attack on Transloy Ridge.