LIEUTENANT MARTIN HUNTER
9TH (QUEEN'S ROYAL) LANCERS
11TH APRIL 1918 AGE 20
BURIED: WIMEREUX COMMUNAL CEMETERY, FRANCE
I didn't recognise this inscription and yet I would have thought I might have done. It comes from the first of Rupert Brooke's sonnets: Peace, the one that begins,
Now God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
And caught our youth and wakened us from sleeping,
The poem expresses pleasure that the war has given today's youth the opportunity to do something noble and fine in the face of the moral corruption of contemporary society. And even if they are killed, the worst that will happen is that they will have found peace. The poem ends:
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, Hunter was commissioned into the 9th Lancers in January 1915, joining them in France in February 1916. As trained cavalrymen the Lancers were thought too valuable to be used as assault infantry so spent much of the war dismounted, digging trenches, building railway lines, clearing the battlefields, as 'vulture parties', and waiting for the great breakthrough when remounted they would sweep through the German lines to victory. Unfortunately it was the Germans who broke through. Hunter was wounded on 25 March 1918 during the German Spring Offensive, fighting a desperate mounted rearguard action near Bapaume. He died seventeen days later in hospital in Wimereux, his parents at his bedside.
Martin Hunter was his parents only son. Today there is a rather overgrown, private family burial plot close to Anton's Hill, their house in Leitholm, Coldstream. James and Jessie Hunter placed their son's original wooden grave marker here, in a little wooden shrine, which was recently surveyed for The Returned. James Hunter, who had also served in the 9th Lancers, chose his son's inscription.