Above the shot-blown trench

Lt. Henry Lionel Field

Henry Lionel Field, known to his friends and family as “Harry,” was an aspiring artist who was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, less than two months after his twenty-second birthday. Field joined the 6th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in September of 1914 and was commissioned as a Lieutenant the following month. His commanding officer recalled that the young officer was “always to be depended on, very collected under fire,” and one of the men who served under him wrote, “We respected him and we loved him, and whatever we shall do without him I don’t know, he was good to us.”* 

Harry had written to his sister, “Fancy me writing poetry! Always before I used to laugh at the idea and say, ‘Never, never would I be such a fool!’ But it’s like this, when you can’t draw you must write, when you can’t write you must sing, when you can’t sing you must act. And when you can’t do any of these things you must fall in love! … so you see I can’t help myself.” 

H.L. Field, view of trench 

After his death, his family published a selection of Field’s poems and sketches, Poems and Drawings (1917). A family member (most likely his brother Richard) explained in the volume’s preface, “We print them here, not only for the promise they show, but that people who care for him, and for whom this book is intended, may see and know something of his inner life during the arduous years of learning and training, up to the great attack on 1 July.”

Above the shot-blown trench he stands,
Tall and thin against the sky;
His thin white face, and thin white hands,
Are the signs his people know him by.
His soldier’s coat is silver barred
And on his head the well-known crest.
Above the shot-blown trench he stands,
The bright escutcheon on his breast,
And traced in silver bone for bone
The likeness of a skeleton.
        —Henry Lionel Field

H.L. Field, sketch of a soldier

Field is buried at Serre Road Cemetery No. 2, along with many of his men. Martin Gilbert’s history of the Somme reports that “Of the 836 men who set out with Henry Field in the attack, 520 were killed and 316 wounded.”**

His father chose for the inscription on his son’s headstone “The Everlasting Arms Are Wide,” lines taken from the last stanzas of Harry’s poem “Carol for Christmas, 1914”:

 Lord Thou has been our refuge sure,
     The Everlasting Arms are wide,
Thy words from age to age endure,
     Thy loving care will still provide. 

Vouchsafe that we may see, dear Lord,
     Vouchsafe that we may see,
Thy purpose through the aching days…
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* Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from R.F.’s preface to H.L. Field’s Poems and Drawings, Cornish, 1917.
** The Somme, Macmillan, 2007, p. 60.