It was 90 years ago today that Major Robert Gregory, the only son of Lady Gregory, died on the Italian front. One of the less famous poems W.B. Yeats wrote about him suggests he had already shot down 19 German planes. But when his own turn came, he was a victim of the fog of war: attacked mistakenly by an Italian pilot.
By far the best known of Yeats's tributes to his young friend is An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. Among many people, George Hook nominates it as his favourite poem - at least according to the Wesley College anthology Lifelines, in which Hook introduces it with a note about "the incredible bravery of the men who flew [ in the world wars], when so many of them were certain they would never return".
Fatalism is certainly the poem's keynote. And yet the remarkable thing about it is the lack of heroism attributed to the hero. Instead, Yeats suggests that Gregory achieved happiness only through flying and, once in the sky, found everything else meaningless.
A successful artist, Gregory was also a good enough cricketer to have played for Ireland, albeit only once. He failed to score a run in that match, against Scotland in 1912, but his bowling figures were an impressive 8 for 80, helped by his speciality - the "legbreak googly".
In his more formal tribute, In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, Yeats portrays him as a renaissance man ("Soldier, scholar, horseman, he/ And all he did done perfectly"), but again writes of his early demise in fatalistic terms: "What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?" Yet another tribute, Shepherd and Goatherd, imagines Gregory growing younger again by living his life backwards - an Indian idea in which the dead travel back to their source.
But of the four poems Yeats devoted to him, the last and bitterest word was in Reprisals, written, and withheld from publication, in 1921. In this, reflecting the poet's disillusionment with events in Ireland, he invites Gregory to rise from his Italian tomb and fly back to Kiltartan Cross, to witness the horrors: "Half-drunk and whole-mad soldiery/ Are murdering your tenants there." That and two of the other poems are not much read now, however. By contrast, An Irish Airman Foresees his Deathis probably among Yeats's half-dozen best-loved creations. Polished as marble, it is a fitting monument to a dead soldier.
ON A TRIP to Paris last year, I chanced upon one of the city's lesser cultural attraction: the Musée Nissim de Camondo. Named after another first World War pilot, who was shot down a few months before Robert Gregory, the museum recreates an 18th-century townhouse crammed with fittings from the reigns of Louis XV and XVI.
Unless you particularly love antiques, it has limited appeal. But the human story behind it - hinted at by a few relics - makes it one of the saddest places in all of Paris.
The Camondos were Turkish Jews who thrived for centuries in Constantinople, fled to Italy in the 1780s, returned home years later and, in trouble once more, moved again - this time to France - in the 1860s. They were wealthy bankers, the "Rothschilds of the East". And they brought their business to Paris just in time to play a central role in the city's rise from the ruins of the Franco-Prussian War and the slaughter of 1871.
The Camondos floated the huge loans needed to pay the Prussians' war reparations. Thereafter, despite the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus era, they continued to thrive, becoming major figures in Parisian art and culture. By 1914, one of the older generation, Moïse de Camondo, had almost finished building a mansion near the Parc Monceau, and had assembled a huge collection of antiques to go in it.
When his son died in an aerial gunfight three years later, Moïse was shattered. He cashed his shares in the family business, retreated from society, and devoted the rest of his life to his collection, deciding that, upon his death, it would become a museum dedicated to the war hero. When that moment came, in 1935, the task devolved to his daughter Beatrice.
Despite losing her inheritance to it, Beatrice followed her father's wishes faithfully. But after separating from her husband, also Jewish, she converted to Catholicism. And along with her two children, she continued to live in Paris - quietly like her father, but openly - after it was occupied by the Germans.
In his Paris memoir, Edmund White takes up Beatrice's story. "As a Catholic convert and as a Camondo, she must have felt immune. But in the summer of 1942 she and her children, Fanny and Bertrand, were arrested by the authorities and sent to Drancy, a camp just outside Paris, where they were joined by [ her husband]. On the morning of 10 March 1943, Beatrice arrived at Auschwitz. She'd been preceded by the rest of her family. . .They never returned. "The Camondos, who had contributed so much to the cultural life of France, had been entirely extinguished, and the French authorities had done nothing to save them."
Apart from the name, the museum has little to commemorate the family. But, almost incidentally, one small room contains personal memorabilia. Items include an invitation to a Camondo banquet, sent in 1889 to Thomas Edison. There are a few photographs too, one featuring the dashing young pilot in his uniform.
And, on the occasion of his death, there is a small literary tribute: a letter of condolence to the family from Marcel Proust.