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One other composer who fought in the trenches, a Scot (with a German middle name, Gottlieb) was Cecil Coles (1888-1918). Coles was an exact contemporary of Butterworth and a close friend of Holst (like Dvorák and Janácek, the two went on hill walking holidays together). He was killed in the last year of the war as a consequence of fresh German advances while serving as a sergeant in France with the Ninth London Regiment (Queen Victoria Rifles). A wide collection of Coles's music, which included several orchestral song settings (some has been published by Bardic Music) including the Verlaine cycle Behind the Lines and the semi-operatic scena Fra Giocomo, a setting of an ultimately tragic Boccaccio-like tale (breathing the spirit of Schreker and Puccini) by R W Buchanan, can be heard on another pioneering Hyperion disc, Music from behind the lines (CDA 67293), which includes several orchestral song cycles. Jeremy Dibble's valuable sleevenote can be found on the Hyperion website.

Coles studied in Stuttgart, where his overture The Comedy of Errors (Die Komödie der Irrungen), composed there in 1911, was first performed (it was repeated at the Cologne Conservatoire in June 1913). Before the war he was appointed an assistant conductor at the Wurttemburgisches Staatstheater (the Royal Opera House in Stuttgart, where Weber was once Court Secretary and Hummel Court Kapellmeister). Max von Schillings, composer of Mona Lisa (staged there in 1915), was Stuttgart's opera director from 1908-18, coinciding with Coles's time there.

War painters, who are well represented in the Imperial War Museum exhibition, help to bring the terrible events even closer home : among the most striking are C R W Nevinson's Cubist-inspired The Doctor and Henry Tonks's searing Four Studies of Facial Wounds, 1916, their gashes like a harbinger of Francis Bacon. Here too are Nash, Rogers, Kennington; and Sir George Clausen's 'Youth' 1916, a wan pre-Raphaelite female figure who somehow encapsulates the universal and overriding sense of loss.

David Jones, Eliot-influenced and one of the most enduring of these poets, was (as mentioned) an artist as well : sketches by him (including one of Edward, Prince of Wales, and a more potent Pilate Washing his Hands, with shades of Eric Gill and the German Expressionists) each strike a nerve.

Indeed, one of the most striking pictures in the whole exhibition is a sketch of Jones by Joy Finzi, wife of Farrar's pupil, Gerald Finzi -- a composer deeply affected by the losses of the First World War. It was to Finzi above all, together with his friend Howard Ferguson and fellow-composer Michael Hurd, Gurney's biographer (Hurd's magnificent and unsurpassed biographical portrait, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney, originally published by OUP and now frustratingly out of print, is shortly to be reissued by the Carcanet Press), that we owe the rediscovery and due recognition given to Gurney's songs around the time of his death, and subsequently.

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