asked for the truth, saying, 'I only want to know. I 'm not in the least afraid.' A fortnight after, on the 26th May 1915, he died of his wound—only two months before his younger brother, Lieutenant Gerald William Grenfell, a gracious spirit loving 'whatsoever things are fair' (to apply to himself a phrase from his lines on the death of a friend), was killed in action.
Early in May 1915 Julian Grenfell had sent home to his friends his one great poem, 'Into Battle,' which in character and temperament chimes perfectly with what Charles Lister wrote of him, and with what we learn of him from his letters:
The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze.
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting has increase.
The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth,
Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth,
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fullness after dearth....
