PRIVATE FRANCIS JAMES CAREW
CANADIAN INFANTRY
31ST OCTOBER 1917 AGE 22
BURIED: NINE ELMS BRITISH CEMETERY, WEST FLANDERS, BELGIUM
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
This is the first and last verse of Invictus, a four-verse poem by W.E. Henley (1849-1903), which many people felt epitomised the British spirit of fortitude in adversity.
Private Carew's mother chose her son's inscription and I would suggest that it was to her unconquerable soul that she was referring, that it was her head that was "bloody but unbowed" (verse 2). Five weeks after her son, Francis James, died of wounds received in action at Passchendaele Ridge, her husband, Francis Joseph, was killed when the SS Mont-Blanc, loaded with high explosives, collided with the SS Nimo in Halifax harbour, caught fire and exploded causing the largest explosion then know to man. Almost 2,000 people were killed and in the region of 9,000 injured. Francis Joseph Carew, a foreman stevedore, appears as number 844 in the Halifax Book of Remembrance.