LIEUTENANT DEREK EDWARD LEWIS VENN BAUMER
ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY
21ST OCTOBER 1917 AGE 20
BURIED: SOLFERINO FARM CEMETERY, BRIELEN, DENMARK
These lines come from John Masefield's play, The Tragedy of Pompey the Great (1910). They form part of a brief mediation on death over the body of Pompey's youthful commander, Valerius Flaccus. The 1st Centurion, looking at the body, remarks: "Man is a sacred city, built of marvellous earth", to which the 2nd replies, "Life was lived nobly here to give this body birth". The 4th Centurian brings the conversation to the end a few lines later with the comment: "Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die".
Impressed by the conversation, Ivor Gurney set it to music in a six-line song called 'By a Bierside'. Gurney was serving in the front line at the time and wrote to tell a friend that, "events yesterday gave one full opportunity to reflect on one's chances of doing that grand thing".
Bauman was the son of the Punch cartoonist and book illustrator, Lewis Bauman. Educated at Winchester College, Bauman won a Classical Scholarship to New College, Oxford but instead of going up in 1914 on leaving school, he joined up. He was still only 17 so it was January 1916, just after his nineteenth birthday, before he was sent to France. He served with the 86th Battery Royal Field Artillery and was killed near Langemarck when the battery came under fire.
According to the Winchester College website, Baumer was "running to the assistance of some of his men who had been buried by the burst of a shell" when he was wounded and died a few hours later. His commanding officer told his parents that this was typical behaviour of a man who had become "one of my best subalterns and an officer of the very best type". What made him of "the very best type"? "Under fire he was always cool".