SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN WALTER REES MORGAN
ROYAL DUBLIN FUSILERS
1ST JULY 1916 AGE 23
BURIED: SUCRERIE MILITARY CEMETERY, SOMME, FRANCE
"If it can be any consolation to you in your grief, I think you ought to know the high regard in which he stood. As for this last ordeal, I know he faced it without misgiving, and with that quiet courage and sense of duty which he always possessed."
Letter to Morgan's family from a brother officer
And what was "this last ordeal?" It was to lead his men in an assault on the German trenches near Mailly-Maillet on the morning of 1 July 1916. In his letter of condolence, Morgan's captain wrote: "The last time I saw him he was leading his men in the open under very heavy fire, in a manner in which I knew he would". It was whilst doing this that Morgan was "hit on the head by some shell splinters and killed instantaneously".
Morgan's older brother chose his inscription, both parents were dead. It's very definitely a quotation since there's no mistaking the quotation marks and this being the case it must come from 'The King's Byways' (1902) by the best-selling novelist Stanley J. Weyman who wrote swashbuckling stories set mainly in sixteenth and seventeenth-century France. In this novel it is Antoine, a young page in the court of Henry of Navarre, who "had it not in him to fear", and it is this fearlessness that saves the day for the King at the siege of Cahors where Antoine is killed. Might not brothers have read and admired the story together, which would explain its choice?