GUNNER LESLIE AMYAS COOK
ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY
14TH SEPTEMBER 1917 AGE 20
BURIED: MENDINGHEM MILITARY CEMETERY, PROVEN, BELGIUM
Tennyson's poetry is turning out to be the most popular source of secular personal inscriptions. This one comes from Geraint and Enid, one of his Idylls of the King. As used by Gunner Cook's father, it makes a lovely epitaph implying that his son combined gentleness, the quality of being kind, agreeable and courteous, with the manly qualities of courage and integrity, which together made him a man.
Leslie Cook served with B Battery, 74th Brigade Royal Field Artillery, attached to the Guards Division. He died at a Casualty Clearing Station in Proven on 14 September. There is no individual information about his fate but on 13 September the 74th Brigade's war diary reported that the enemy put up a box barrage, a defensive barrage round Ney Copse and Ney Wood. It could have been in this incident, or any like it, the Cook was fatally wounded.