Who wrote "The call was short the shock severe"?
meme OpenBenches poem · 2 comments · 500 words
A few weeks ago, someone uploaded this memorial bench to our site: Photo CC BY-SA from Lewis MacKenzie. It is a perfectly pleasant little memorial poem. I wondered about its origins. A quick search shows that the opening couplet was used on war graves from 1916. But are its origins any earlier than that? One of the problems of trying to search old records - especially newspapers - is that text recognition isn't particularly effective. But the British Newspaper Archive has these examples…
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