2 June 1915

HELLES - Rupert Brooke had died of severe blood poisoning on Friday, 23 April and had been buried by a grieving party of his friends in an olive grove high on the side of the Island of Skyros. They never forgot Brooke. One close friend was the brilliant musician Denis Browne, who had been putting some of Brookes poems to music. As Browne passed the Island of Skyros en route back to Gallipoli on 2 June, he wrote a rather sad little note.


"We passed Rupert's island at sunset. The sea and sky in the east were grey and misty, but it stood out in the west, black and immense, with a crimson glowing halo round it. Every colour had come into the sea and sky to do him honour, and it seemed that the island must ever be shining with this glory that we buried him there." (Sub-Lieutenant Denis Browne, Hood Battalion, 2nd Naval Brigade, RND)

Poor Denis Browne would himself be killed just two days later in a hopeless attack on the Turkish lines. Few of that uniquely talented 'Band of Brothers' from the RND would survive Gallipoli.

 

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SOURCE: D. Browne quoted by M. R. Brooke, The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir ( London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, 1929), p.159