CAPTAIN ROBERT SEFTON ADAMS
ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY
5TH OCTOBER 1917 AGE 29
BURIED: ZANTVOORDE BRITISH CEMETERY, BELGIUM
In May 1922, King George V made a visit to the battlefields of the Western Front. It was his wish that the visit should be accompanied by as little fanfare as possible; he was coming to pay his respects to the dead as their King. A few days after the visit ended, The Times published a poem by Rudyard Kipling called The King's Pilgrimage, which is what the King's visit to the Western Front came to be called. Captain Adam's widow quoted from the first verse of the poem for her husband's inscription:
Our King went forth on pilgrimage
His prayers and vows to pay
To them that saved our Heritage
And cast their own away.
And there was little show of pride,
Or prows of belted steel,
For the clean-swept oceans every side
Lay free to every keel.
Robert Sefton Adams was born in London but brought up and educated in New Zealand where his father was a doctor. He returned to England to study law, first at Trinity College, Cambridge and then in London. In 1913 he married Mary Carpenter and they had two children. When the war broke out he was living in Southsea, Hampshire. He joined the Royal Field Artillery and served with 12th Battery, 35th Brigade. Killed in action on 5 October 1917, his body was located in January 1920 under a temporary wooden grave marker. This grave marker is now in St Mary's Anglican Church in his parent's home town of Silverstream, New Zealand.
Interestingly, had Adams served in a New Zealand Regiment, rather than in the Royal Field Artillery, he would not have had an inscription. The New Zealand Government made the decision not to allow them since in their opinion the War Graves Commission's decision to make family's pay 3 1/4d per character infringed the Commission's principles of equality and uniformity.
Kipling's poem ends with a typical Kiplingesque flourish, which makes me wonder what he, and the dead, would think about our current perceptions of the First World War:
All that they had they gave - they gave -
In sure and single faith.
There can no knowledge reach the grave
To make them grudge their death
Save only if they understood
That, after all was done
We they redeemed denied their blood,
And mocked the gains it won.