Unlike many of his contemporaries, Rupert Brooke was already an established literary figure before he took up arms in World War I. The handsome, sandy-haired writer had traveled the world and published several acclaimed poems, and he counted Virginia Woolf and William Butler Yeats among his friends and acquaintances. After enlisting in Britain’s Royal Naval Division in 1914, Brooke won national attention for a string of sonnets that expressed the patriotic fervor of a young man at war. Most famous of all was “The Soldier,” which included the verse, “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.” The lines proved to be prophetic. When he later shipped out for the Allied invasion of Gallipoli in 1915, Brooke died from blood poisoning caused by a mosquito bite and was buried on a Greek island. His untimely demise was widely reported in England. In an obituary penned by Winston Churchill, the young poet was hailed as having epitomized the sacrifice of “the hardest, the cruelest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought.”
