BRITISH SAILOR WILLIE VICARAGE, WOUNDED DURING THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND.

British sailor Willie Vicarage, wounded during the Battle of Jutland, prior to his surgery, 1916.

Today 108 years ago, on October 13, 1915, British poet and Captain Charles Sorley was killed in action during the Battle of Loos. Sorley is best remembered for his poem "When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead".

Charles Hamilton Sorley was born on May 19, 1895 in Aberdeen, Scotland as the son of a philosopher. Sorley was described as a precocious and academically gifted child, and in college he began writing and publishing poetry.

In January 1914, his poetry got him a scholarship at Oxford University, but he decided to study abroad in Germany instead, where he spent some 6 months. When the war broke out, Sorley was interned in a prison for a night, but was released and ordered back to Britain the following morning.

Once back in Britain, Sorley immediately enlisted into the British Army, joining the Suffolk Regiment as a 2nd Lieutenant. After going through training, Sorley was promoted to a Lieutenant and arrived on the front on May 30, 1915, being sent to the trenches at Ploegsteert in Flanders. He continued to write poems, now about the war, and was promoted to Captain in August 1915.

On September 25, 1915 the Battle of Loos commenced as the British attacked. During the final stages of the offensive, Sorley was killed by a sniper near Hulluch on October 13, 1915.

Sorley's last poem, "When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead", written shortly before his death, was discovered in his kitbag:

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

"When you see millions of the mouthless dead,

Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

Say not soft things as other men have said,

That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf,

How should they know,

It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?

Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.

Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,

"Yet many a better one has died before."

Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you

Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.

Great death has made all his for evermore".

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