A yet more irresistible call to action than Morris's chivalrous love of comrades was the martyrdom of Belgium. Flight Sub-Lieutenant Frank Lewis was a boy of nineteen when he was killed in France in an air battle. The call that drew him out to France is in the second of two sonnets on 'Belgium, 1914' that he wrote in the first months of the war, while he was still at Marlborough:
There came a voice from out the darkness crying—
A pleading voice, the voice of one in thrall:
'Come, ye who pass—oh, heed you not my sighing?
Come and deliver! Hear, oh, hear my call!
For when the invader stood before my gate
Demanding passage through with haughty tone,
A voice cried loud, "Wilt thou endure this fate?
Better have death than live when honour 's flown!"
And so my children now lie slain by him
I had not wronged; with strife my land is riven;
Dishonoured here I lie with fettered limb,
To desecration all my shrines are given,
And nought remains but bondage drear and grim—
God! Is there any justice under heaven?'
This was the cry, too, that Reginald Freston heard and could not but answer:
Suppose, as some have done, I had made excuse,
