SECOND LIEUTENANT A.E. CRAWFORD HARRIS HARRIS
ROYAL WARWICKSHIRE REGIMENT
11TH SEPTEMBER 1917 AGE 35
BURIED: MENDINGHEM MILITARY CEMETERY, PROVEN, BELGIUM
'Nellie', Mrs Ellen Harris, was Crawford Harris's wife and certainly the inscription sounds as though it was written by a wife declaring that she still loves her husband even though he is dead. I rather suspect that this is exactly what Nellie Harris meant it to sound like. The words rather appropriately come from a hymn for the sick and dying.
Blest be that sacred cov'nant love,
Uniting tho' we part;
Our bodies may far off remove,
We still are one in heart.
....
Nor joy nor grief, nor time nor place,
Nor life nor death can part
Those, who enjoying Jesus' grace,
In him are one in heart.
At the time of the 1911 census, Crawford and his wife had been married for six years. Crawford was a traveller for an iron merchant, they had no children and Nellie's mother lived with them. He died of wounds at one of the several 'Mendinghem' Casualty Clearing Stations.