LIEUTENANT COLONEL FRANCIS CHARLES BARTHOLOMEW WEST
ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY
28TH SEPTEMBER 1916 AGE 33
BURIED: AVELUY COMMUNAL CEMETERY EXTENSION, FRANCE
Frank West's inscription was chosen by his wife and comes from Rupert Brooke's 'Safety', perhaps the least well known of his famous five sonnets. Brooke's 'Safety' is to be found in being at one with the immortal universe.
... "Who is so safe as we?'
We have found safety with all things undying,
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.
By her choice of inscription, Mrs West suggests that the couple's love is similarly immortal:
We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain forever.
War knows no power ...
West's life and war-time career are contained in a memoir that his wife, Agatha, published privately in 1921: Francis Charles Bartholomew West, A Record of the Great War. The book can be read online but just a few extracts show the type of man he was.
"You ... must not worry about me, for either I shall come back safely or join those others who have done their best, in which case do not grieve - rather, rejoice, that you and I have been counted worthy to live in such a country and at such a time, for seldom does a country call on the whole nation to prove that they are worthy of their heritage, and we must not grudge the price, if only we can keep our homes safe and our ideals and standards of right and wrong bright and unchanged."
Letter from Frank West to his wife, March 1915
According to Agatha West, her husband's basic war aims were to keep his country safe for his and other people's children, quoting some lines from 'The Admonition: to Betsey', a poem by Helen Parry Eden, to illustrate his thinking :
And guard all small and drowsy people
Whom gentlest dusk doth disattire,
Undressing by the nursery fire
In unperturbed numbers
On this side of the seas -
West commanded a territorial brigade of the Royal Field Artillery, which he had trained since its formation in 1906. Four months after their arrival in France the 4th South Midland Brigade was broken up and West was given another command. However, following his death a fellow officer wrote to Agatha West:
"I am sure you will like to know that every man of the old lot who had known him in peace time went to pay their respects, and there were many misty eyes when the Last Post was sounded."
West was killed on 28 September 1916 by a stray shell "while riding down the relentlessly straight road from Pozieres to the Zollern Redoubt, which was then his headquarters".
The next day was Agatha's birthday; she received a letter from him in the morning and the news of his death that evening. She finishes the book at that point with some lines from Maurice Baring's poem, 'In Memoriam Auberon Herbert':
Here is no waste
No burning Might-have-been
No bitter after-taste.
None to censure, none to screen
Nothing awry, nor anything mis-spent.
As I read about men like this, and what they believed they were fighting for, I feel sorry that one hundred years later we belittle them by claiming the very opposite - that it was all a futile waste. It was all a terrible tragedy, but if we don't try to see the war, and what was at stake, as they saw it, if we just dismiss it all as mindless slaughter, then we will never understand how it could have occurred ... nor how it could happen again. Peace depends on wisdom not on judgemental scorn.