Alan Seeger

Around half a century later, a nephew Alan Seeger never knew appropriated a line from his uncle's verses, 'At midnight in a flaming angry town', and added his own take: 'I saw my country's flag lying torn upon the ground....' He imagines picking up the flag and trying 'to wash the garbage off', before realising the piece of cloth stank because 'it had been used for wrapping lies'.

Alan Seeger, though not from the Midlands, was the poet with the most fascinating war story.

Murphy gives his reader a sense of Rockwell's early life by focusing on the surrounding political events of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the impact of the legacy of the Civil War on a young man from the south, and the idealism of the fighter pilot and likeminded young men (including his brother, Paul Rockwell, and poet, Alan Seeger) who felt compelled by strong moral principle to enlist in the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of war.

Geraghty, an author, reporter and defense correspondent, and veteran of the UKAEs Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, documents the experiences of British and other artists and writers who fought in World War I: George Butterworth, Wilfred Owen, Alan Seeger, Issac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Rupert Brooke, R.C.