The details when they came were scanty but enough. That early morning, the Brigade on their left being engaged in a small local attack, the Essex standing to arms had been bombarded by the enemy’s light artillery. Oscar was threading his way behind his men, all anxiety on their account, and had just asked Sergeant Clarke: ‘Is everybody all right?’ At that moment a small high-explosive just cleared the parapet, but not the opposite edge of the narrow trench, bursting close behind Oscar’s head: he died where he fell unconscious, and was buried that night by a party of the men he loved.
It is not for us to add one word of our own; but with a very few of the wonderful tributes from others, we shall leave our dear son to rest in the hearts of many loving friends.
Said the Eton Chronicle, in an obituary notice already quoted on the opening page:
Oscar Hornung came from Mr. Churchill’s at Stone House in September 1908 to Mr. H. de Havilland, and after six years left last July to go to Cambridge. His inherited love of literature made him an eager reader of books at all times. A Division Master recognised this one year when he gave him a special prize for English work. A good cross-country runner he was second in Junior and third in Senior Steeplechases. At football he played a hard game, and his energy as Captain of Games was notorious. A few days after leaving Eton, thinking that the best chance to get to the front was in a reserve regiment, he joined the 3rd Essex. At Harwich he lived until April in a farm-house on the marsh next the sea, and in April he went with his enthusiasm to France. Among other exploits he one night leading three others crept 200 yards to the barbed wire until they could hear the diggers, and then after a successful bomb throwing came back with his ear badly injured. On July 6th when behind the parapet he was struck by a shell and died in the trench without recovering consciousness.
A letter from a General Officer says: ‘His platoon were wild with grief, as they worshipped him. The men said he was absolutely fearless and was employed on all sorts of jobs, machine guns, bombs, patrols, etc,’ Any one who knew him will recognise the boy at Eton. He revelled in every hour of his life at the Front just as he had in life in general. ‘He lies buried in a cemetery made by the Essex Regiment behind a farm which goes by the name of Turco Farm on the east side of the Yser Canal.’
A simple-minded and religious boy he lived the straightest of lives, always at the top of some enthusiasm whether playing games or fighting Germans. His affection for the School at all times was intense and he wrote that Eton meant more than ever to him out there; every letter to the last showed the same spirit. Full of thought for others he was loved by all who knew him.
Comment, again, is hardly for us, who like to feel that this generous writer and friend did think of Oscar as a member of his house up to the outbreak of war; in spirit he was a most loyal member to the last; but he had actually left Eton at Easter, in order to read for King’s, the college of his own unhesitating choice, where the following October was to have found him installed. He had done his Little-go, finished for ever with uncongenial subjects; had only History, Literature, and Life before him!
From Eton came other tributes, which should speak for themselves if space permitted, and two that must. One was the beautiful letter from Peter Blacker, Captain of the House most of the two years Oscar was Captain of Games. All of it I cannot bring myself to give, but this much will show the noble comfort given, while conveying some idea of Oscar’s Eton life:
... As you know, Oscar went to Eton two halves before me. During my first two or three weeks there, I suffered from a hideous form of homesickness that must have made me appear a very unattractive person to everyone. The first time I saw Oscar was my second evening, when he came into my room and talked to me as one schoolboy talks to another, telling me what to do, and explaining the somewhat complicated conventions of Eton, and in his jolly way giving me a few words of encouragement which meant the world to me then, and for which I have ever since been grateful. But it was only some 2 years later that I got to know him intimately, and began to appreciate those fine qualities that have subsequently meant such a lot to the House.
I saw that irrepressible and effervescing flow of energy, which appeared in everything he did, governed throughout by the highest principles, and directed by an indomitable moral and physical courage.
While a lower boy, and during his first year as an Upper, his uncompromising devotion to what he considered Right sometimes brought him into conflict with environing—and at that time contrary—influences, and caused him to lead a somewhat isolated life, so that it was only when he reached a real position of eminence in the house, some 3 years ago, that his influence was given full play. And immediately others began to fall in behind him, and follow his lead.
I tell you this with the strictest truth, that during the last 2 years of his Eton career, when I was thrown into close contact with him, and came to know him well, I never heard him say an unjustifiably harsh or unkind word to anyone.
Always ready to see another’s good points in preference to his bad ones; always scrupulously careful never to express an uncharitable thought about anyone; always the first to own himself in the wrong should he feel that he had acted mistakenly; always straightforward and loyal; always sympathetic, unselfish and kind, he was always loved and admired by everyone who knew him.
I can tell you with perfect frankness that during the whole time that I have known Oscar I do not once remember him failing in any of these qualities in the smallest degree without having recognized the failure immediately and without making immediate reparation, all personal considerations laid aside.
What he has been able to do for the House in this way neither Mr. de Havilland nor I can ever make you understand.
I feel that in Oscar I have lost that most valuable and treasured of possessions;—a friend upon whom one might count and depend, and whom one could trust. I can pay no higher tribute to him than this.
Our hearts go out to this dear fellow, now fighting gallantly in his turn, and already a far heavier loser by the war than when he wrote this noble letter. We can only thank him with our prayers.
A younger friend of Oscar’s, the friend of many happy holidays, wrote to show us what he was away from home and from school:
I am just sending you a line, to tell you how we all loved Oscar, and how deeply we feel for you. All who got to know him well, discovered what a beautiful character he had, and all loved him. I have never met, nor do I expect I ever shall meet, a person with such a noble heart, and so unselfish. He never said or did anything unkind to or about anyone.
From the front his friend and company commander, Guy de la Mare, wrote of him as ‘a terrible loss to the company,’ and as one who ‘knew no fear at all,’ The last letter shall be Sergeant-Major Clarke’s—for Oscar’s affectionate belief in his platoon sergeant was very soon to be justified by ‘old man Clarke’s’ further promotion. How glad the boy would have been! How touched and how embarrassed by this:
I must say, Sir, your dear son died like a Gentleman and a Soldier. He was always to the front and a braver man there never was, his thoughts were always for the men under him and to their comfort he was always seeing. And there was no one more sorry to lose him than his platoon and myself. He was a promising officer and if he had continued in the service he would have had a fine career before him. On several occasions he himself organised bomb throwing parties and proceeded within a few yards of the German trenches, and I know on a couple of occasions he must have done considerable damage and confused them as they were rather quiet afterwards for some time.
I might mention, Sir, that your brave son lies in a quiet spot beside more of his comrades on the famous battlefield of Ypres. I served all through the South African War, but was never in such a place as that, and I am not sorry to say, Sir, that I have left that place for another along the line.
The whole battalion left that place the day after Oscar’s death; he told us they were going to, but it was God’s Will that he should stay behind. But if against our enemies there is one hand still lifted that we long to grasp, one elbow to which we wish more power, they are those of the gallant Sergeant-Major, who was our dear boy’s guide and friend in the day of battle, and in the hour of death.
‘Trusty and well beloved’ were the words that reached us almost in that hour; and almost in the next came a gracious human message from the King and Queen themselves, even as it were in tender confirmation of the stately phrase. And yet, could words apply more closely to all our glorious boys—above all to Oscar’s ‘one class who are enjoying themselves in this war’? In any other country, by one means or the other, the men were to be had: it is only our Public Schools which could have furnished at once an army of natural officers, trained to lead, old in responsibility, and afraid of nothing in the world but fear itself. Their teaching will not be forgotten by those of us whose strange fate it is to inherit our sons’ great names, to follow humbly in the steps we thought to guide. We shall remember that each was also the son of some great school which shares our sorrow and our pride, and which perhaps did more than we ourselves to make him what he was.
Besides Oscar, I am thinking of two who were here to mourn him last July. Robin Blacker was his old friend’s brilliant young brother—so young that he had once been Oscar’s fag. He had left Eton long before his time, yet full of Eton honours. He might have been First Keeper of the Field this very half: he preferred to play for England, and, in the Guards’ great hour at Loos, fell most gloriously, thirty yards ahead of his platoon, with none between him and his last goal.
In the same hour and the same attack John Kipling was last seen alive. He was even younger than Robin Blacker, but the gap between him and Oscar, two equally independent characters, had long been filled by the love of brothers. It is said that after Oscar fell John’s scheme of war included the personal vendetta, just as one younger than any of them is already preparing ‘to avenge John as he avenged Oscar.’ John’s lot was not to spend many weeks under shell-fire, like Oscar and his merry men; but he lived to lead a platoon of the Irish Guards in such fighting as Oscar never saw. God send that he is living still, and restore him even yet to the world our dear boys loved so well, and surrendered without a sigh!
It may be remembered that in one of those last two letters Oscar promised us more verses of his own. They came at length, among his other papers, in scribbled, experimental fragments which I have no right to put together here, deeply moving as they are to us who can read between the sincere and simple lines. They were not directly about the war: they were about Stone House, his first school and in a sense my own, but to us both a second home. Yet they touch quite openly and naturally on Death, and on all that might come instead to hearts deepened and strengthened by the war. To Oscar it was Death that came before the lines were nearly finished; yet it is from them we know, what his happy letters never hinted, that all the time he was as ready even for that as for everything else. He thinks of old schoolfellows who have gone before him, and only asks, if die he must, to ‘die as they did, by their schoolboy honour aided.’ He pictures the Chapel at Stone House, where reproductions of the regimental colours of Old Boys killed in the Boer War hang like true knights’ banners:
‘And there he stops,’ said Mr. Churchill in his beautiful sermon about our boy. ‘It may be the last words he ever wrote. Some day soon we shall have his flag to “commemorate our love.” Our love, for one of the most fearless, one of the kindest, one of the simplest, one of the purest boys we ever had in this school.’
And not at Stone House only is his dear name to endure, but also at Eton, for all the hundreds she has lost. Of their own generous accord, the boys of his Eton house are placing a tablet on the wall of his old room; and for the tablet his revered ‘R. K.’ has written out one of his own stanzas, adding, ‘I like them for Oscar because of the last line’:—
FOOTNOTES
[1] Eton College Chronicle, July 22, 1915.
[2] To his godfather, Arthur Conan Doyle.
[3] Lieutenant C. D. W. Rooke, 1st Cameronians, was killed in action on June 19.
[4] Presently he went to see—with a result described in his letter to Mr. de Havilland, p. 46.
[5] = ‘Grandmamma.’
[6] Hooge, apparently.
[7] Not his last escape. A few days later: ‘A bit of a “Little Willie” came in and struck my plate while we were having lunch.’
[8] It is said that Oscar showed the way, and that the task was more ticklish than he suggests.
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