a few hours.
Raymond Lodge had been educated at Bedales School and Birmingham University. He had a great aptitude and love for mechanical engineering, and was soon to have become a partner with his elder brothers, who highly valued his services, and desired his return to assist in the Government work which now occupies their firm.
In amplification of this bare record a few members of the family wrote reminiscences of him, and the following memoir is by his eldest brother:—
RAYMOND LODGE
(1889–1915)
By O. W. F. L.
MOST lives have marriages, births of children, productive years; but the lives of the defenders of their Country are short and of majestic simplicity. The obscure records of childhood, the few years of school and university and constructive and inventive work, and then the sudden sacrifice of all the promise of the future, of work, of home, of love; the months of hard living and hard work well carried through, the cheerful humorous letters home making it out all very good fun; and in front, in a strange ruined and desolate land, certain mutilation or death. And now that death has come.
Unto each man his handiwork, to each his crown,
The just Fate gives;
Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own lays down,
He, dying so, lives.[1]
My brother was born at Liverpool on January 25th, 1889, and was at Bedales School for five or six years, and afterwards at Birmingham University, where he studied engineering and was exceptionally competent in the workshop. He went through the usual two years' practical training at the Wolseley Motor Works, and then entered his brothers' works, where he remained until he obtained a commission at the outbreak of war.
His was a mind of rare stamp. It had unusual power, unusual quickness, and patience and understanding of difficulties in my experience unparalleled, so that he was able to make anyone understand really difficult things. I think we were most of us proudest and most hopeful of him. Some of us, I did myself, sometimes took problems technical or intellectual to him, sure of a wise and sound solution.
Though his chief strength lay on the side of mechanical and electrical engineering it was not confined to that. He read widely, and liked good literature of an intellectual and witty but not highly imaginative type, at least I do not know that he read Shelley or much of William Morris, but he was fond of Fielding, Pope, and Jane Austen. Naturally he read Shakespeare, and I particularly associate him with Twelfth Night and Love's Labour's Lost. Among novelists, his favourites, after Fielding and Miss Austen, were I believe Dickens and Reade; and he frequently quoted from the essays and letters of Charles Lamb. [2]
Of the stories of his early childhood, and his overflowing vitality made many, I was too often from home to be able to speak at large. But one I may tell. Once when a small boy at Grove Park, Liverpool, he jumped out of the bath and ran down the stairs with the nurse after him, out of the front door, down one drive along the road and up the other, and was safely back in the bath again before the horrified nursemaid could catch up with him. [body of Memoir incomplete, and omitted here.]
[Close of Memoir]
That death is the end has never been a Christian doctrine, and evidence collected by careful men in our own day has, perhaps needlessly, upheld with weak props of experiment the mighty arch of Faith. Death is real and grievous, and is not to be tempered by the glossing timidities of those who would substitute journalese like "passing-on," "passing-over," etc., for that tremendous word: but it is the end of a stage, not the end of the journey. The road stretches on beyond that inn, and beyond our imagination, "the moonlit endless way."
Let us think of him then, not as lying near Ypres with all his work ended, but rather, after due rest and refreshment, continuing his noble and useful career in more peaceful surroundings, and quietly calling us his family from paralysing grief to resolute and high endeavour.
Indeed, it is not right that we should weep for a death like his. Rather let us pay him our homage in praise and imitation, by growing like him and by holding our lives lightly in our Country's service, so that if need be we may die like him. This is true honour and his best memorial.
Not that I would undervalue those of brass or stone, for if beautiful they are good and worthy things. But fame illuminates memorials, and fame has but a narrow circle in a life of twenty-six years.
Who shall remember him, who climb
His all-unripened fame to wake,
Who dies an age before his time?
But nobly, but for England's sake.
Who will believe us when we cry
He was as great as he was brave?
His name that years had lifted high
Lies buried in that Belgian grave.
O strong and patient, kind and true,
Valiant of heart, and clear of brain—
They cannot know the man we knew,
Our words go down the wind like rain.
O. W. F. L.
Tintern
EPITAPH
ON MEMORIAL TABLET
IN ST. GEORGE'S CHURCH, EDGBASTON
REMEMBER
RAYMOND LODGE
SECOND LIEUTENANT SECOND SOUTH LANCASHIRE REGIMENT
BELOVED SON OF SIR OLIVER AND LADY LODGE OF THIS PARISH
WHO GAVE HIS LIFE FOR HIS COUNTRY
HE WAS BORN JANUARY 25TH 1889
AND WAS KILLED IN ACTION IN FLANDERS
ABOUT NOON SEPTEMBER 14TH
IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1915
AGED 26 YEARS
Whoso bears the whole heaviness of the wronged world's weight
And puts it by,
It is well with him suffering, though he face man's fate;
How should he die?
Swinburne
REMINISCENCES BY O. J. L.
OF all my sons, the youngest, when he was small, was most like myself at the same age. In bodily appearance I could recognise the likeness to my early self, as preserved in old photographs; an old schoolfellow of mine who knew me between the ages of eight and eleven, visiting Mariemont in April 1904, remarked on it forcibly and at once, directly he saw Raymond—then a schoolboy; and innumerable small mental traits in the boy recalled to me my childhood's feelings. Even an absurd difficulty he had as a child in saying the hard letters—the hard G and K—was markedly reminiscent of my own similar difficulty.
Another peculiarity which we shared in childhood