1. Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley was a British Army officer and Scottish war poet who fought in the First World War.
12 Facts About Charles Sorley
1. 2.
Charles Sorley was killed in action during the Battle of Loos in October 1915.
3.
Charles Sorley was educated at King's College School, Cambridge, and then like Siegfried Sassoon, at Marlborough College.
4.
In keeping with his strict Protestant upbringing, Charles Sorley had strong views on right and wrong, and on two occasions volunteered to be punished for breaking school rules.
5.
Charles Sorley returned to England and immediately volunteered for military service in the British Army.
6.
Charles Sorley joined the Suffolk Regiment as a second lieutenant and was posted to the 7th Battalion, a Kitchener's Army unit serving as part of the 35th Brigade of the 12th Division.
7.
Charles Sorley arrived on the Western Front in Boulogne, France on 30 May 1915 as a lieutenant, and served near Ploegsteert.
8.
Charles Sorley was killed in action near Hulluch, having been shot in the head by a sniper during the final offensive of the Battle of Loos on 13 October 1915.
9.
Charles Sorley's Collected Letters, edited by his parents, were published in 1919.
10.
Robert Graves, a contemporary of Charles Sorley's, described him in his book Goodbye to All That as "one of the three poets of importance killed during the war".
11.
Charles Sorley is regarded by some, including the Poet Laureate John Masefield, as the greatest loss of all the poets killed during the war.
12.
On 11 November 1985, Charles Sorley was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.