Op 1 april - April Fools' Day - 1918 sneuvelde bij Atrecht de Britse dichter en schilder Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918). Deze zoon van joodse emigranten uit het Balticum was soldaat in het King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) en werd, nadat zijn stoffelijke resten in 1926 werden teruggevonden, bijgezet in een massagraf op de CWGC- site Bailleul Road East Cemetery in St. Laurent-Blagny. De bekende Britse dichteres Elaine Feinstein schreef over hem haar gedicht 'April Fools ' Day':
Does anybody know what it was all for ? / Not Private Rosenberg, short as John Keats. / A nudge from Ezra Pound took him to war, / to sleep on boards, in France, with rotting feet, / writing his poetry by candle ends. / His fellow soldiers always found him odd. / Outsiders do not easily make friends / if they are awkward - with a foreign God.
He should have stayed in Cape Town with his sister. / Did he miss Marsh's breakfasts at Gray's Inn, / or Café Royal ? He longed for the centre / though he was Always shy with Oxbridge toffs - / He lacked the sexy eyes of Mark Gertler - / and his Litvak underlip could put them off. / 'From Stepney East !' as Pound wrote / Harriet Monroe, while sending poems to her.
He died on April Fool's Day on patrol, / beyond the corpses lying in the mud, / carrying up the line a barbed wire roll / - useless against gunfire - with the blood / and flesh of Death in the spring air. / Hiswas the life half lived, if even that, / and the remains of it were never found. we remember / the iron honey gold, his cosmopolitan rat. '


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