RIFLEMAN HORACE WILLIAM SMITH
KING'S ROYAL RIFLE CORPS
14TH AUGUST 1917 AGE 32
BURIED: ARTILLERY WOOD CEMETERY, BOEZINGE, BELGIUM
This is a beautiful inscription, so beautiful that much of the Internet attributes it to Alfred, Lord Tennyson but he didn't write it. In fact it appears to be an anonymous composition that only began to be used as an epitaph around the time of the First World War.
I'm debating with myself whether this has anything to do with a short story Agatha Christie wrote called, 'While the Light Lasts'. The story, first published in 'The Novel' magazine in 1924, concerns a woman called Daphne whose husband, Tim Nugent, was killed in East Africa during the war. She remarries, a man called George Crozier, and then discovers that her husband is still alive. Fatefully she hesitates before deciding to agree to leave Crozier and as a result Nugent kills himself. Haunted by her betrayal of the man she loved, Daphne remembers the original obituary notice she had chosen for him: "While the light lasts I shall remember, and in the darkness I shall not forget."
'Georgina', Horace Smith's wife, makes the same vow on her husband's headstone. They had been married eight years when Horace was killed and at the time of the 1911 census they had one daughter. At that time Horace was a newsagent who owned his own business having been a goldsmith's apprentice as a sixteen-year-old in 1901. He's buried in Artillery Wood Cemetery, a front line cemetery, his body lying undiscovered in the ground around Boesinghe until August 1919.
It is possible that the Agatha Christie story was the inspiration for this epitaph, even though it was not published until 1924 since it took many years for the permanent cemeteries to be constructed.