Leonard Ewbank, who in 1911 wrote his name in the book of Byron’s poetry that has now been returned to St Bees school in Cumbria, was my grandfather’s older brother (Book returned to Cumbria school library 113 years overdue, 19 October). The longer online version of your story mentioned that Leonard had very poor eyesight. This was an important factor in his untimely death, shot in the head by a sniper in the trenches at Sanctuary Wood near Ypres on 23 February 1916, just a year after he’d insisted on volunteering.
Willie Fell, one of his fellow soldiers in the Border Regiment, wrote afterwards that there had been four inches of snow on the ground, and it was a moonlit night. Fell had been out in no man’s land on a risky patrol, and when he came back, he recounted: “I went to Ewbank and I says, ‘Now if you don’t keep yourself down…’ – he was a fellow over six foot and you could see the moon shining on his specs – ‘We could see your specs as plain as anything looking back.’ And half an hour after he was killed instantly.” Perhaps the truly brave are indeed, as Byron put it, “soft of heart and eyes”.
NJ Ewbank
Folkestone, Kent
