Death
On 20 February 1915 Gough was visiting his old battalion, the 2nd Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, at Fauquissart, about 3 km north of Neuve Chapelle on the front line, about 2 km west of Aubers. His mortal wounding by a sniper there was very unlucky since the single shot that struck him in the abdomen was thought to have been a ricochet fired from approximately 1000 yards distance. He was moved to the 25th Field Ambulance at nearby Estaires, about 7 km behind the front line, where he eventually succumbed to his wound and died in the early morning of 22 February. He was buried that afternoon in Estaires Communal Cemetery, France located 7 miles south west of Armentieres in Plot II. Row A. Grave 7. Gough was also posthumously knighted, being gazetted KCB on 22 April 1915.
Read more about this topic: John Gough (VC)
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“This death was his belief though death is a stone.
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)