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.