Louis Stokes

A Dear & Noble Boy: the Life and Letters of Louis Stokes, 1897-1916

Louis Stokes was a pupil at Rugby School between 1911 and 1915 before he joined the Royal Marines Light Infantry and met his death on the Somme in November 1916. His letters, published in this volume, offer an insight into this typical transition from cloistered public school to the horrors of trench warfare on the Western Front. Not only do they provide an amusing and intelligent account of life at Rugby, but such are Stokes's sharp eye for detail that his weekly letters home also offer an understanding of some of the influences that shaped the outlook of a public-school pupil on the eve of the Great War. Stokes was forced to justify to his pacifist father his reasons for responding to the call of arms, and during the course of intense family debate much is revealed about the motives and values of one of those who were swept along on the tide of patriotic fervour that characterized the early years of the war. Louis Stokes was not an outstanding scholar, and nor did he meet with a glorious death, but his letters are a memorial to that generation of schoolboys who lost their lives.