on time

Gentlemen, we meet again

I know the chill of that long wall

Where your names are cut in stone

Beside the Haileybury chapel



Ninety years from your leaving

I repaired the cricket squares

Where you had played

Rolled the pitches where you ran

From wicket to wicket in your whites



Responding to the call of “Yes”

As you had been coached

You set off promptly

With all the others


On Easter Sunday, in Loddon

You appeared to me in sombre form

Brothers arisen from the clay

One hundred miles from the old school

A strange meeting


I apologise

For not recognising you 

You had been just two more names

Of far too many to recall


Look at you!

Grown men, so smart in uniforms

Gentle faces, kind eyes

Brief stories of your brief lives

Etched in marble

Re-iterating the old lie

Dolce et Decorum Est

That still does the rounds

~

n.b. A church (Holy Trinity, Loddon, Norfolk), 100 miles from a private school where I worked on the grounds one summer, carries a marble memorial to the loss of two brothers of the parish named Cadge, who once attended that same boarding school. Both were killed in 1915, in World War I. One during the Gallipoli Landings, the other at Loos.

I understand that Haileybury College lost more former pupils in the First War, than any of the other English private schools. I wonder why that might be the case?

Group think, or not-quite posh enough for its former pupils to become safely ensconced in senior military positions?

Haileybury was the East India Company’s training school. The East India Company was the employer of Clive of India, of whom history has an increasingly dim view.

The East India Company ran India as a private enterprise under license to the English monarchy, until it was nationalised by the government in London. The company had become over-stretched financially.

CLP 31/03/2024