LIEUTENANT HORACE MICHAEL HYNMAN ALLENBY MC
ROYAL HORSE ARTILLERY
29TH JULY 1917 AGE 19
BURIED: COXYDE MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
Horace Allenby was Field Marshall Lord Allenby's only child. His inscription comes from 'When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloomed' by the American poet Walt Whitman. The poem is an elegy on the death of President Abraham Lincoln, which becomes a meditation on death and on the grief of the living, leading the author to the conclusion that it's the living who suffer not the dead.
In the writer's dreams he sees the dead from the American Civil War:
"I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men - I saw them;
...
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest - they suffer'd not;
The living remain'd and suffer'd - the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd."
The lines Lady Allenby chose for her son's inscription indicate the impossibility of finding words to describe his "large, sweet soul", and question how can she make his death bearable, "what shall my perfume be for the grave of him that I love".
Horace Allenby was nineteen when he was killed. He had left school, Wellington, in 1915 and after attending the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich was gazetted into the Royal Horse Artillery in February 1916. At this point he was still only 18. He served with "T" Battery and in February 1917 was awarded a Military Cross "for conspicuous gallantry in action", which included rescuing a wounded man under heavy fire.
On 29 July, just before the opening of the Third Battle of Ypres, Horace Allenby was hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel and died in a Canadian Casualty Clearing Station five hours later. This was just a month after his father had arrived in Cairo as commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. It was another month before his parents received the devastating news at which, according to General John O'Shea, Allenby wept inconsolably.
NB: This inscription has 120 characters, including spaces, and is almost twice the length suggested by the War Graves Commission. With its link to the blog post, it was even too long for Twitter. This has meant that for Twitter I have had to shorten it by writing 'How'll' rather than 'How shall' and putting '&' instead of 'and'. The full, correct inscription is as above.