DRIVER MEARNS LAWRENCE DUIRS
EAST AFRICAN MECHANICAL TRANSPORT CORPS
31ST DECEMBER 1915 AGE 19
BURIED: VOI CEMETERY, KENYA
Those "whom the gods love" die young. It is an ancient aphorism attributed to the Greek playwright Menander, 342-292 BC. The meaning being that the world of the dead is so much better than the world of the living that those whom the gods love aren't made to wait so long to get there.
Why is the world of the dead so much better? Many poets from Byron and Shelley to Binyon have explained:
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
from ADONAIS An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Whom the gods love die young" was said of yore,
And many deaths do they escape by this:
The death of friends, and that which slays even more -
The death of friendship, love, youth ...
from DON JUAN by Lord Byron
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grown old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
FOR the FALLEN by Laurence Binyon
Mearns Lawrence Duirs was nineteen when he died in Kenya on 31 December 1915 whilst serving as a driver with the East African Mechanical Transport Corps based in Voi. I have not found a cause of death but the job of a driver, transporting food and provisions to troops guarding the Uganda railway, was both arduous and dangerous as described by Valentine Dolbey in his book Sketches of the East Africa Campaign. The heat, disease, wild animals (man-eating lions), breakdowns, the state of the roads, land mines and German raiding parties all meant that death lurked along every mile. On 31 December 1915 it found Driver Duirs.