SERGEANT WILLIAM JOHN CLEGG
CANADIAN ARMY MEDICAL CORPS
1ST OCTOBER 1918 AGE 24
BURIED: BRAMSHOTT (ST MARY) CHURCHYARD, HAMPSHIRE, UK
William Clegg died from influenza in No. 12 Canadian General Hospital, Bramshott, Hampshire, UK, just when the influenza pandemic was at its most virulent height.
His mother confirmed his inscription. Does it sound as though Mrs Lucy Clegg is being cynical or at the very least, underwhelmed? If so it's due to the fact that we no longer recognise what was at one time a well-known quotation from Napier's 'History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France, from the year 1807 to the year 1814' (1834) describing the death of Colonel Ridge at the Siege of Badajoz. When all seemed lost, Ridge rallied his men, seized a ladder, scaled the walls of the castle and took the town but was killed in the process. Napier's admiring comment was:
"No man died that day with more glory - yet many died and there was much glory."
The description was quoted throughout the nineteenth century to describe other heroic deaths so that John Buchan could write of the death of Hugh Dawnay, in his history of the First Battle of Ypres, that Dawnay "would wish no better epitaph than Napier's words: 'No man died that night with more glory - yet any died, and there was much glory'".