PRIVATE AARON PAIN
ROYAL WARWICKSHIRE REGIMENT
4TH OCTOBER 1917 AGE 39
BURIED: DOCHY FARM NEW BRITISH CEMETERY, YPRES, BELGIUM
The words are 'All is well'. If they were 'All's well' then Aaron Pain's parents would have been quoting from a very popular First World War poem by John Oxenham called 'All's Well'. But they're 'All is well' and that would suggest that they come from an equally popular, but much longer lasting, poem by Canon Scott Holland (1847-1918), 'Death is nothing at all', which is still read at funerals today. The poem begins:
Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.
And concludes:
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just round the corner.
All is well.
Aaron Pain worked in his brother-in-law's grocery-dealing business in Birmingham. Although he was 36 when the war broke out he joined the 2nd/8th Battalion the Royal Warwickshire Regiment when it was formed in October 1914. This battalion was initially to be used for home service but it went to France in May 1916.
Pain was killed on 4 October 1917, the opening day of the Battle of Poelcapelle in which the 1st Battalion took part but I can't see any evidence that the 2nd/8th did. Nevertheless, Pain was killed on that day. His body was discovered in an unmarked grave in October 1919.