Just before the outbreak of The First World War, Rupert Brooke volunteered for active service. He was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy volunteer reserves. He was sent to Belgium, where he came under heavy bombardment during the retreat from Antwerp. On his return from Antwerp, toward the end of 1914, he wrote his most famous poem, The Soldier, and the immortal lines:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
In February 1915,. Brooke was ordered to The Dardanelles, a strait between Europe and Turkey, for The Gallipoli Campaign, planned for the spring. However, during the journey. he contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite, and he died on a ship in The Aegean Sea, and was buried in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros.
