SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN ROGER WALLACE
ROYAL SCOTS FUSILIERS
22ND APRIL 1915 AGE 20
BURIED: DICKEBUSCH NEW MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
I really thought that this inscription had its origins in Spiritualism, but I was wrong. It's a quotation from stanza 42 of Shelley's 'Adonais', his lament for the death of the poet John Keats. The poem is a popular source of inscriptions but most quote lines from either stanza 39 or 40: "He hath awakened from the dream of life" or "He hath outsoar'd the shadow of our night". These lines attempt to assure us that Adonais is now removed from the pains of life, unlike the living who still have to suffer them. Stanza 42 is different, telling us that although Adonais might be dead he is now everywhere:
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
John Wallace volunteered at the outbreak of the war whilst an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford. A former pupil of Rugby School his obituary in the School's magnificent seven-volume 'Memorials of Rugbeians who fell in the Great War' says that:
"He was struck in an advanced trench near Ypres by a mortar bomb, but refused to be carried off until he had handed over the trench to his Commanding Officer. He was taken to a dressing station about a mile in the rear, but died there shortly afterwards on April 22nd, 1915. Age 20."
A letter from this Commanding Officer was quoted in Wallace's obituary in The Times on 7 May 1915:
"His pluck and unselfishness after he was hit will always be remembered in the Scots Fusiliers. His one idea was that the men wounded at the same moment should be cared for first ... I can only say that his loss to us is irreparable."