Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/118

86

Be with the dying, be with the dead,

Sore stricken far on alien ground,

Be with the ships on clashing seas

That gird our island kingdom round.

Through barren nights and fruitless days

Of wasting, when our faith grows dim,

Mary, be with the stricken heart,

Thou hast a Son, remember Him....

and in a broken verse at the end he prays that the purpose of all the welter of death into which he is going may be made clear to him.

Racing, polo, the joys of the chase were the main themes of the ringing, virile songs that Captain George Upton Robins wrote before he turned his back on sport and went on the great adventure into France, where he died in action on 5th May 1915. All the company he commanded on Hill 60 were killed, except his orderly, when, fatally gassed, he contrived to crawl down and make his report with his dying breath. Educated at Haileybury and at Magdalen, Captain Robins left Oxford to obtain a commission in the East Yorkshire Regiment during the Boer War, and in 1901 went on service to South