Britain
Isaac Rosenberg
1890–1918 Private, King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, 1916–1918; poet and painter
Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol on 25 November 1890 to Jewish immigrants from Dvinsk (now in Latvia) and grew up in poverty in Stepney, London. He left school at 14 to work for an engraver, studied at the Slade School of Art with the help of patrons, and published two pamphlets of verse at his own expense. He enlisted in October 1915, writing that he did not join for patriotic reasons, and because he was short he was placed in a Bantam battalion. A private in the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment from 1916, he wrote Break of Day in the Trenches and Dead Man's Dump. Rosenberg was killed on patrol near Arras on 1 April 1918, and is counted among the finest poets of the war.