FLIGHT SUB-LIEUTENANT HAROLD LESLIE SMITH
ROYAL NAVAL AIR SERVICE
24TH MAY 1917 AGE 19
BURIED: BREBIERES BRITISH CEMETERY, FRANCE
Harold Leslie Smith was educated at Rugby School, which means that his war service is included in one of their wonderful seven volumes of Memorials of Rugbeians Who Fell in the Great War. Each one of Rugby's almost 700 dead is given an individual biography ranging from a couple of short paragraphs to several pages. And for almost everyone of them there is a photograph.
Having qualified as a pilot in May 1916, Smith was commissioned into the Royal Naval Air Service that July. He was 18. In late April 1917 he arrived in France and was killed in action on 24 May. Volume V relates what happened.
"On the early morning of 24 May, he was sent with five others on a fighting patrol. They flew in two formations of three each, and he was flying a single-seater Sopwith Triplane Scout Machine, carrying one gun. He flew behind the leader of the second formation, and, when they were about twelve miles over the German lines, near Douai, the first three machines were observed in action with several Germans over the town. Then nine German Albatross Scouts, known as Baron Richthofen's Travelling Circus, each carrying two guns, approached, trying to cut of the second formation, who immediately flew to the attack. There were several clouds about, so that all were mixed up in the fight, and Lieutenant Smith was not seen again."
Two months later, "official information was received, through the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, that he was killed in this fight, and fell with his machine west of Flers. He was buried by the Germans in the village churchyard of Lauwin-Planque, two miles from Douai". In 1922 his body was reinterred in Brebieres British Cemetery.
Smith's inscription mixes fact - "high in the clouds he fought", "alone he died" - with the poetry of John Oxenham. "Nobly striving, he nobly fell" comes from the first verse of Oxenham's poem Hail! - and Farewell:
They died that we might live, -
Hail! - and Farewell!
- All honour give
To those who nobly striving, nobly fell,
That we might live.
And "For God, for right & liberty" from To You Who Have Lost:
He died as few men get the chance to die, -
Fighting to save a world's morality.
He died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God, and right, and Liberty; -
And such a death is immortality.