FRANK CAIN
16TH NOVEMBER 1916 AGE 24
BURIED: ,
Frank Cain's inscription comes from 'Barnabas' by George Willis a poet of almost complete obscurity who wrote one poem for which he is occasionally remembered. That poem, 'Any Soldier to His Son', was also the title of a very slim volume of verses - eighteen in total - published by George Allen and Unwin in 1919.
The poem 'Barnabas' has been exceptionally difficult to find so I am going to write it out in full, although I think this may just be an extract rather than the whole poem.
We march in fours to-day, mate, but tomorrow man by man,
For it's "Up the Line" to-night, mate, and dodge it if you can;
You may work it out in billets, with your synovitis knee,
But all you'll get tomorrow is a whacking great M.D.
It's a damned, infernal pity you should have to do your whack,
But better men than you are have trod the self-same track.
You ain't the only pebble on this beach: there's plenty here
Been out three winters, and you joined up this year.
You're a poor, faint-hearted soldier, but if you only knew,
The whole great British Army was made up from stuff like you.
It's a strange sentiment for an inscription, which Cain's father, Francis Cain a coal miner in Northshields, chose; his wife had died in 1913. What did he mean by it? George Willis, about whom I have discovered nothing, is credited with having been a front-line soldier himself. This is because it was felt he 'knew' how the front-line soldier felt. Whether Willis's experience of war was first-hand or not, he was certainly not someone who glamourised it. In one reviewer's opinion, Willis's poetry "will do more than any measured argument or fiery denunciation to aid in the preservation of peace". The final verse of 'Any Soldier to His Son' shows just exactly how little he glamourised war:
You'd like to be a soldier and go to France some day?
By all the dead in Delville Wood, by all the nights I lay
Between our lines and Fritz's before they brought me in;
By this old wood-and-leather stump, that once was flesh and skin;
By all the lads who crossed with me but never crossed again,
By all the prayers their mothers and their sweethearts prayed in vain,
Before the things that were that day should ever more befall
May God in common pity destroy us one and all!
Frank Cain, came from Chirton, Northshields, Tyne and Wear. Before the war he worked in a coal mine, like all the men in his family. He served with the Drake Battalion, Royal Naval Division and died in a Casualty Clearing Station of wounds received during the Battle of the Ancre, the final stage of the Somme Campaign.