Driving home from the pool this morning, a piece I had not heard before came on the radio. "Elegy For Rupert Brooke" by Frederick Septimus Kelly composed on the Western Front in 1916, is a lament for the death of Brooke, Kelly's friend, who had died the previous year on his way to Gallipoli. Brooke is best known for his idealistic war poems and particularly "The Soldier", a sonnet which appeals to sentimental notions of war. I think most people will have heard the opening lines:

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England."

Brooke was clearly a prewar poet - you can see this if you read any verse by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon - though there were many who thought the same way, until they got into the trenches. Then the truth became clear as day. Kelly composed the elegy as bullets flew over his head and he died at the Somme later that year.

The composition itself is as beautiful as anything I have heard, putting me in mind of Ralph Vaughn Williams. Sometimes something lovely emerges from human folly, but at such a price!

Kelly and Brooke